The Penguin History of the World

7 Asian Metamorphoses

For a long time most Asians believed that the European presence would be a short-term affair, rather like other empires that had quickly come and gone in that part of the world before. But during the nineteenth century the perspective changed. The first main reason for the change was the domestic impact in terms of technologies, administration and commodities that the foreign presence produced. The other was the ability of one country – Japan – to reinvent itself as a westernized state. Together these changes made it clear that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, even for the most diehard conservative to return to the form of societies that had existed before the impact of Europe became fully felt.

The changes in mentality that took place in some urban centres in Asia during the nineteenth century were of great historical significance. Young people began to think about themselves and their countries in terms that had been borrowed from the Europeans, while merging these ideas with elements from their own cultures. The result was a metamorphosis that would greatly influence history up to our own time. Some young Asians now saw their countries as nations with the right to determine their own future, and they saw themselves as citizens (or at least potential citizens) with individual rights and with duties towards their country. Even though it would take a very long time for these ideas to fully take hold, the combination of nationalism and political radicalism germinated many of the attitudes that would end the colonial empires and create a new Asia in the century that followed.

Some of these changes would first be felt in China, though they developed very slowly. Qing China was still the predominant power in eastern Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even though many domestic critics felt that the empire was badly in need of reform. The Qing had squandered both money and prestige on unnecessary wars within the region, and the sense of decline was furthered by the two hapless emperors who followed Qianlong after his death in 1799. The authority of the imperial court seemed to evaporate fast; Qianlong’s successor was attacked by a mob in the streets of Beijing in 1803, and the attempts by his son to stamp out Christianity and other sects and ban the import of opium were largely ignored. But in spite of these problems, both Chinese and other East Asians seemed to believe that the Qing dynasty would overcome its difficulties and come back more strongly, as the Manchus had done before.

But this time the international environment that the Qing operated in was changing. Having recovered from their wars at the turn of the century, the European powers turned their attention to China. The idea – especially in London – was that if the Qing were forced to open the doors of its empire to free trade, then a huge new market would be created for European products. The Canton trade showed that a potential for Sino-European commerce existed, the British claimed. And by the 1830s it seemed they finally had a product for which there was a demand in China. The only problem was that it was a drug, known both to be illegal (in China) and injurious to health, but which the British East India Company produced great quantities of, namely opium.

Opium was not unknown in China before the British push to sell it there, but the European smuggling operations made it available in much greater quantities and at lower prices than ever before. As opium consumption spread, the Chinese government decided to crack down on the import of the drug. In 1839 the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu was sent to Canton with instructions directly from the emperor to end all illegal imports, and Lin was determined to carry out his mission. After having given due warning to the smugglers and their Chinese associates, he sent his troops to the foreign warehouses and ships, confiscated the opium they found, dissolved it and tipped the remains into the ocean. Lin also demanded that all foreign merchants sign a promise not to attempt to bring opium into China again. Those who refused to sign ended up taking refuge on a rocky island down the Pearl River from Canton, an island they called Hong Kong.

The London government saw Lin’s anti-drug operation in Canton as an attack on free trade and as an insult to British honour. They sent a fleet of forty-five naval vessels from Singapore, which was already established as a British colony, to the Chinese southern coast. The war that followed turned out to be disastrous for the Chinese empire. While Qing élite forces did reasonably well against British troops on shore, Her Majesty’s Fleet devastated Chinese coastal towns and fortifications, and began moving up the great rivers. When the enemy moved the war to China’s northern coasts, the Qing decided to sue for peace. Beijing found that the survival of the dynasty and the stability of the empire were worth the cost of having to sign a humiliating agreement with foreign barbarians.

During the rest of the nineteenth century Britain – joined by other European states, Russia and the United States – kept up a continuous military blackmail of China, threatening military action whenever the Qing court did not accede to their increasing demands. Since China in military terms fell further and further behind the Europeans, the tactic worked. By 1900 the Qing government had agreed to the setting up of foreign trading concessions. In these parts of Chinese cities, explicitly set apart for foreigners, the Europeans had complete political control and full rights of jurisdiction. Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi River, became the largest European settlement east of Suez and a showcase for Europeanization for the rest of China. In many ways the foreign settlements implied a form of colonial rule, even if China as a country was never colonized. A sign saying ‘No Entry for Dogs or Chinese’ at a Shanghai waterfront park may belong in the realm of myth, but many urban Chinese certainly felt that they were treated as second-class people in their own country.

Foreigners did not just come to China to get rich. Some came to save souls. The foreign missionary presence increased rapidly in the late nineteenth century and – even if the missionaries made few converts – their existence in China caused much conflict with locals, especially in the countryside, where the foreigners and their Chinese adherents were suspected of all kinds of wrong-doing. But the Christian missionaries did much more than cause controversy. Some of them mediated the European tradition for the Chinese, translating texts on science, geography and history, and founding schools and universities where ‘western knowledge’ was taught. The rapid progress that the Chinese made in appropriating foreign technology was also mostly due to missionaries; one of them was the main translator for the first European-style arsenal in China (for which he translated no fewer than 129 volumes on science and technology into Chinese).

But the biggest impact of the western missionary presence in China was one that nobody could have predicted and that, when it came, filled Europeans with horror. In 1843 a young man, stumbling out of the imperial examination hall in Canton after having failed his exams, was given a Christian tract by an American Baptist missionary who happened to be passing. The young man returned to his home village and, in a state of great mental anguish, began to read about the New Testament. A few months later Hong Xiuquan announced to his unsuspecting kinsmen that he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ, put on earth to resurrect rectitude and cleanse it of demons. At first they got angry and drove him out; the dirt-poor community that he was born into needed hands to help with the harvest, not self-proclaimed prophets. But after a while he began making adherents, and his little God-Worshipping Society managed to survive.

Hong’s group survived because the mid-nineteenth century was not a normal time in the coastal areas of southern China. The war with Britain had made huge dents in Qing authority, and much of the administration – not to mention tax and supply systems – was in chaos. In some regions bandits and secret societies had begun to prey on the weak and the vulnerable; and Hong’s people were a minority – the Hakka – who had always been victimized by others. By the late 1840s Hong had organized armed groups to defend his community. By the early 1850s the Hakka resistance, led by Hong, had turned into a veritable rebellion against the Qing, with the son of God taking on a secular role as king of the new Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, known to us as the Taiping.

The Taiping rebellion gripped China as a scourge in the mid-nineteenth century, and together with other revolts came very close to toppling the Qing dynasty. Fuelled by religious fervour, the Taiping troops took control of most of China south of the Yangzi and set up their capital in Nanjing, which they ruled up to 1864. With Hong busy revising the Bible, his disciples created a millenarian state based on religious principles, the just division of land and the slaughter of their enemies. Sometimes the Taiping seemed more preoccupied with putting their ideals into practice than in further expansion, and after 1856 the rebellion was on the defensive. Nevertheless, it announced important social changes and although it is by no means clear how widely these were effective, or even appealing, they had real disruptive ideological effects.

The basis of Taiping social doctrine was not private property but communal provision for general needs. The land was in theory distributed for working in plots graded by quality to provide just shares. Even more revolutionary was the proclaimed extension of social and educational equality to women. The traditional binding of their feet was forbidden and a measure of sexual austerity marked the movement’s aspirations (though not the conduct of the ‘Heavenly King’ Hong Xiuquan himself). All this reflected the mixture of religious and social elements which lay at the root of the Taiping cult, and which threatened the traditional order. If it had not been for the counter-rebellion of local élites and the grudging support given to the Qing by their western adversaries (who preferred an emperor they could exploit to a messianic madman who was a threat to their commercial interests), the empire would probably have succumbed. But in the mid-1860s Beijing finally got its act together and – helped by Hong Xiuquan’s timely death – was able to defeat the rebels.

The rebellions in mid-nineteenth-century China were massively destructive, claiming more victims than the First World War in Europe and laying waste to some key parts of the country. But they were also transformative. The Qing dynasty after its victory was not quite like the Qing dynasty that had gone before. While the empire had gained a new lease of life, it was now beholden to its regional allies and its foreign patrons. Both set clear demands for their continued support of the Qing – Britain and France had in fact carried out their own mini-war against the empire while it was fighting for its life against the Taiping, leading among other criminalities to the destruction of the emperor’s great summer palace, the Gardens of Perfect Brightness. As the civil war neared its end, the foreign powers demanded (and got) more concessions from the Qing.

There were further territorial losses as the century wore on. China seemed to face an onslaught by all of the so-called ‘West’, including the European offshoots America and Russia. The Russians took control of lands claimed by China east of the Amur River, which became the Maritime Provinces with Vladivostok as the key city. In the 1880s the French established a protectorate in Vietnam. Loosely asserted but ancient Chinese suzerainty was being swept away; the French began to absorb all of Indochina and the British annexed Burma in 1886. England, France and Germany all extracted long leases of ports inside China at the end of the century. Even the Italians were in the market, though they did not actually get anything until 1901. And long before this, concessions, loans and agreements had been exacted by western powers to protect and foster their own economic and financial interests. It is hardly surprising that when a British prime minister spoke at the end of the century of two classes of nation, the ‘living and the dying’, China was regarded as an outstanding example of the second. Statesmen began to envisage her partition.

But if the Taiping leaders had been an utterly new kind of Chinese, so too were the men who defeated them. Mostly coming out of the provinces in central China, after the war they demanded a high degree of provincial autonomy for themselves, which they often used to experiment with educational and infrastructural reforms. And even though they agreed to pledge their allegiance to the empire, they believed that the main reforms they deemed urgently necessary to the whole state could only be initiated in the provinces. These were modern men, who understood that China needed to model its administrative structure and its educational system on those of the West if the country were to survive, and they knew that time was running short.

Given the advances that were made, mainly in the provinces, for a few years in the 1870s and 1880s, some spoke of a Chinese ‘restoration’ similar to that which was happening in Japan. The ‘self-strengthening movement’ – led by one of the heroes of the defeat of the Taiping, Li Hongzhang – emphasized the need to acquire foreign technology in order to defend China and begin to catch up with the West. But the fundament of the state had to be Confucian, Li believed. The slogan ‘Western form – Chinese essence’ was common even among the more radical of the first- generation reformers in China.

A lot was achieved during the first phase of reform. China got its first modern arsenals, a navy, and its first universities that taught both Chinese and foreign knowledge. A foreign ministry was established, with diplomatic missions abroad, and young Chinese were sent to Europe and America to study. All of this happened in spite of the constant opposition of reactionaries at court. By the late 1880s, though, those who resisted change gained the upper hand, mainly through appealing to the conservative instincts of Ci Xi, the empress dowager, who had been predominant at court since the Taiping rebellion, easily holding her sway over the two boy-emperors who succeeded each other in the late nineteenth century. By 1890 the self-strengthening era was over at the central level, even if some of the provinces continued to make progress.

The results of the Qing’s unwillingness to reform became clear in 1894–5, when China fought and lost a war with Japan over influence in Korea. That the empire should give way in hostilities against western barbarians could be explained by the Qing as a temporary weakness against a hitherto unknown enemy. To lose against the eastern barbarians, who had been around in China’s neighbourhood for centuries, was a different calamity altogether. It humiliated the empire and the Qing who ruled it, and made the case for reform so strongly that the boy emperor Guangxu rebelled against the empress dowager, and began a brief but intense period of legal and administrative reform in 1898. Even though Ci Xi reasserted her power after a hundred days, executing or exiling leading reformers and putting the emperor under house-arrest, the episode showed that Qing cohesion – the glue that had held China together since the early seventeenth century – was beginning to give way, even at the centre of power.

Things got worse still two years later, when the empress dowager – in part to avenge herself on modernizers and Christians, and their foreign supporters – threw her weight behind a rag-tag movement of disgruntled peasants who believed that they, through a combination of martial arts and magic, could free China from the scourge of foreign influence. The Boxers, as they were called by the westerners, achieved little apart from the murder of western missionaries and their Chinese converts, but they provoked a European and Japanese intervention so forceful that Beijing was occupied and the Forbidden City taken and plundered in August 1900. Ci Xi fled, and when she returned to Beijing in January 1902 it was to head a Qing regime that was fully under the thumb of foreign powers. It could be said that the foreigners preferred the Qing because they by this point found them easy to exploit. But the Qing also stood for some degree of stability, increasingly important as foreign investments and loans into China increased. Never formally a colony, China was beginning none the less to undergo a measure of colonization.

But the foreign powers did not see that trouble was brewing under the surface of Chinese society. As the Qing empire desperately tried to introduce new plans for reform and modernization in the wake of the Boxer disaster, it also maximized its enemies in China. Nationalists hated the regime because it had sold out to foreigners and was assisted by them. Traditionalists accused it of having sold Confucian principles down the river. Radicals lamented the lack of democracy. And provincial leaders believed that the Qing was preparing to act against their new autonomy. It was the fear that the empire might be making a comeback that provoked many provinces into declaring their independence in the wake of a failed rebellion in 1911.

By early 1912, with many provinces and most of the army in open rebellion, it was obvious to the imperial family that the end had come. The mother of the last emperor, a boy of six, announced his abdication to save his life and declared, by imperial fiat, the creation of a Chinese republic. An old revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen, who missed the revolution itself because he was away collecting money for the cause among Chinese in the western United States, hurried back from Denver and was declared president of the new republic. But Sun’s government did not last long, even though all the provinces announced their allegiance to the new state. His power was soon usurped by military strongmen and provincial leaders, and for its first fifteen years the Republic of China existed mostly in name.

The period 1911–12 was still a great watershed in Chinese history. For the first time in 2,000 years there no longer was a Chinese empire, and the state that replaced it used distinctly European ideas to define its role, democracy, nationalism and modernity being key among them. Even more importantly, the change in politics marked significant changes in Chinese society. In the fast-growing cities capitalist markets had been established in which foreigners and Chinese alike took part. Through trade, money and travel some parts of China were becoming increasingly linked into a globalizing economy, and new products, ideas and patterns of behaviour were spreading around the country. Some Chinese resented this development, while others welcomed it and profited from it. During the twentieth century the hybrid forms that were created in the encounter between China and the West would fuel a new dynamism, especially in economic terms, while also giving rise to inequality, resentment and conflict that would lead to some of the darkest moments in the history of modern China and the modern world.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was little to show a superficial observer that Japan might adapt more successfully than China to challenges from the West. She was to all appearances deeply conservative. Yet much had already changed since the establishment of the shogunate and there were signs that the changes would cut deeper and faster as the years went by. It was a paradox that this was in part attributable to the success of the Tokugawa era itself. It had brought peace. An obvious result was that Japan’s military system became old-fashioned and inefficient. The samurai themselves were evidently a parasitic class; warriors, there was nothing for them to do except to cluster in the castle-towns of their lords, consumers without employment, a social and economic problem. The prolonged peace also led to the surge of growth which was the most profound consequence of the Tokugawa era. Japan was already a semi-developed, diversifying society, with a money economy, the beginnings of a quasi-capitalist structure in agriculture which eroded the old feudal relationships, and a growing urban population. Osaka, the greatest mercantile centre, had 300,000–400,000 inhabitants in the last years of the shogunate. Edo may have had a million. These great centres of consumption were sustained by financial and mercantile arrangements which had grown enormously in scale and complication since the seventeenth century. They made a mockery of the old notion of the inferiority of the merchant order. Even their techniques of salesmanship were modern; the eighteenth-century house of Mitsui (two centuries later still a pillar of Japanese capitalism) gave free umbrellas decorated with their trademark to customers caught in their shops by the rain.

Many of these changes registered the creation of new wealth from which the shogunate had not itself benefited, largely because it was unable to tap it at a rate which kept pace with its own growing needs. The main revenue was the rice tax which flowed through the lords, and the rate at which the tax was levied remained fixed at the level of a seventeenth-century assessment. Taxation therefore did not take away the new wealth arising from better cultivation and land reclamation and, because this remained in the hands of the better-off peasants and village leaders, this led to sharpening contrasts in the countryside. The poorer peasantry was often driven to the labour markets of the towns. This was another sign of disintegration in the feudal society. In the towns, which suffered from an inflation made worse by the shogunate’s debasement of the coinage, only the merchants seemed to prosper. A last effort of economic reform failed in the 1840s. The lords grew poorer and their retainers lost confidence; before the end of the Tokugawa, some samurai were beginning to dabble in trade. Their share of their lord’s tax yield was still only that of their seventeenth-century predecessors; everywhere could be found impoverished, politically discontented swordsmen – and some aggrieved families of great lords who recalled the days when their kin had stood on equal terms with the Tokugawa.

The obvious danger of this potential instability was all the greater because insulation against foreign ideas had long since ceased to be complete. A few learned men had interested themselves in books which entered Japan through the narrow aperture of the Dutch trade. Japan was very different from China in its technical receptivity. ‘The Japanese are sharp-witted and quickly learn anything they see,’ said a sixteenth-century Dutchman. They had soon grasped and exploited, as the Chinese never did, the advantages of European firearms, and began to make them in quantity. They copied the European clocks, which the Chinese treated as toys. They were eager to learn from Europeans, as unhampered by their traditions as the Chinese seemed bogged down in theirs. On the great fiefs there were notable schools or research centres of ‘Dutch studies’. The shogunate itself had authorized the translation of foreign books, an important step in so literate a society, for education in Tokugawa Japan had been almost too successful: even young samurai were beginning to enquire about European ideas. The islands were relatively small and communications good, so that new ideas got about easily. Thus, Japan’s position when she suddenly had to face a new and unprecedented challenge from the West was less disadvantageous than that of China.

The first period of European contact with Japan had ended in the seventeenth century with the exclusion of all but a few Dutchmen allowed to conduct trade from an island at Nagasaki. Europeans had not then been able to challenge this outcome. That this was not likely to continue to be the case was shown in the 1840s by the fate of China, which some of Japan’s rulers observed with increasing alarm. The Europeans and North Americans seemed to have both a new interest in breaking into Asian trade and new and irresistible strength to do it. The Dutch king warned the shōgun that exclusion was no longer a realistic policy. But there was no agreement among Japan’s rulers about whether resistance or concession was the better course. Finally, in 1851 the president of the United States sent a naval officer, Commodore Perry, to force Japan to open relations with the Americans. Under Perry, the first foreign squadron to sail into Japanese waters entered Edo Bay uninvited in 1853, marking the naval power of the West. In the following year it returned and the first of a series of treaties with foreign powers was made by the reluctant shogunate.

Perry’s arrival could be seen in Confucian terms as an omen that the end of the shogunate was near. No doubt some Japanese saw it in that way. Yet this did not at once follow and there were a few years of somewhat muddled response to the outside threat. Japan’s rulers did not straightaway come around to a wholehearted policy of concession (there was one further attempt to expel foreigners by force) and Japan’s future course was not set until well into the 1860s. Within a few years the success of the West was none the less embodied in and symbolized by a series of so-called ‘unequal treaties’. Commercial privileges, extra-territoriality for foreign residents and the presence of diplomatic representatives were the main concessions won by the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands. Soon afterwards the shogunate came to an end; its inability to resist the foreigners was one contributing factor and another was the threat from two great aggregations of feudal power which had already begun to adopt European military techniques in order to replace the Tokugawa by a more effective and centralized system under their control. There was fighting between the Tokugawa and their opponents, but it was followed not by a relapse into disorder and anarchy but by a resumption of power by the imperial court and administration in 1868 in the so-called ‘Meiji Restoration’.

The re-emergence of the emperor from centuries of ceremonial seclusion, and the widespread acceptance of the revolutionary renewal which followed, was attributable above all to the passionate desire of most literate Japanese to escape from a ‘shameful inferiority’ to the West which might have led them to share the fate of the Chinese and Indians. In the 1860s both the shōgun’s government and some individual clans had already sent several missions to Europe. Anti-foreign agitation was dropped in order to learn from the West the secrets of its strength. There was a paradox in this. As in some European countries, a nationalism rooted in a conservative view of society was to dissolve much of the tradition it was developed to defend.

The transference of the court to Edo, which soon was renamed Tokyo (‘Eastern Capital’), was the symbolic opening of the Meiji Restoration and the regeneration of Japan; its indispensable first stage was the abolition of feudalism. What might have been a difficult and bloody business was made simple by the voluntary surrender to the emperor of their lands by the four greatest clans, who set out their motives in a memorial they addressed to the emperor. They were returning to the emperor what had originally been his, they said, ‘so that a uniform rule may prevail throughout the empire. Thus the country will be able to rank equally with the other nations of the world.’ This was a concise expression of the patriotic ethic which was to inspire Japan’s leaders for the next half a century and was widely spread in a country with a large degree of literacy, where local leaders could make possible the acceptance of national goals to a degree impossible elsewhere. True, such expressions were not uncommon in other countries. What was peculiar to Japan was the urgency which observation of the fate of China lent to the programme, the emotional support given to the idea by Japanese social and moral tradition, and the fact that in the imperial throne there was available within the established structure a source of moral authority not committed merely to maintaining the past. These conditions made possible a Japanese 1688: a conservative revolution opening the way to radical change.

Rapidly, Japan adopted many of the institutions of European government and society. A prefectorial system of administration, a postal system, a daily newspaper, a ministry of education, military conscription, the first railway, religious toleration and the Gregorian calendar all arrived within the first five years. A representative system of local government was inaugurated in 1879, and ten years later a new constitution set up a bicameral parliament (a peerage had already been created in preparation for the organization of the upper house). In fact, this was less revolutionary than it might appear, given the strong authoritarian strain in the document. At about the same time, too, the innovatory passion was beginning to show signs of flagging. The period when things foreign were a craze was over; no such enthusiasm was to be seen again until the second half of the twentieth century. In 1890 an imperial Rescript on Education, subsequently to be read on great days to generations of Japanese schoolchildren, enjoined the observation of the traditional Confucian duties of filial piety and obedience and the sacrifice of self to the state if need be.

Some – perhaps the most important part – of old Japan was to survive the Meiji revolution and was to do so very obviously; this is in part the secret of modern Japan. But much had gone. Feudalism could never be restored, generously compensated with government stock though the lords might be. Another striking expression of the new direction was the abolition of the old ordered class system. Care was shown in removing the privileges of the samurai; some of them could find compensation in the opportunities offered to them by the new bureaucracy, in business – no longer to be a demeaning activity – and in the modernized army and navy. For these foreign instruction was sought, because the Japanese sought proven excellence. Gradually they dropped their French military advisers and took to employing Germans after the Franco-Prussian War; the British provided instructors for the navy. Young Japanese were sent abroad to learn at first hand other secrets of the wonderful and threatening prowess of the West. It is still hard not to be moved by the ardour of many of these young men and of their elders, and impossible not to be impressed by their achievement, which went far beyond Japan and their own time. The shishi (as some of the most passionate and dedicated activists of reform were called) later inspired national leaders right across Asia, from India to China.

The crudest indexes of the success of the reformers are economic, but they are very striking. They built on the economic benefits of the Tokugawa peace. It was not only the borrowing of European technology and expertise which ensured the release in Japan of a current of growth achieved by no other non-Western state. The country was lucky in being already well-supplied with entrepreneurs who took for granted the profit motive and it was undoubtedly richer than, say, China. Some of the explanation of the great leap forward by Japan lay also in the overcoming of inflation and the liquidation of feudal restraints, which had made it hard to tap Japan’s full potential. The first sign of change was a further increase in agricultural production, little though the peasants, who made up four-fifths of the population in 1868, benefited from it. Japan managed to feed a growing population in the nineteenth century by bringing more land under cultivation for rice and by cultivating existing fields more intensively.

Though the dependence on the land tax lessened as a bigger portion of revenue could be found from other sources, it was still upon the peasant that the cost of the new Japan fell most heavily. As late as 1941, Japanese farmers saw few of the gains from modernization. Relatively they had fallen behind; their ancestors only a century earlier had a life expectancy and income approximating to that of their British equivalents, but even by 1900 this was far from true of their successors. There were few non-agricultural resources. It was the increasingly productive tax on land which paid for investment. Consumption remained low, though there was not the suffering of, say, the later industrialization process of Stalin’s Russia. A high rate of saving (12 per cent in 1900) spared Japan dependence on foreign loans but, again, restricted consumption. This was the other side of the balance sheet of expansion, whose credit entries were clear enough: the infrastructure of a modern state, an indigenous arms industry, a usually high credit rating in the eyes of foreign investors and a big expansion of cotton-spinning and other textile industries by 1914.

In the end a heavy spiritual cost had to be paid for these successes. Even while seeking to learn from the West, Japan turned inward. The ‘foreign’ religious influences of Confucianism and even, at first, Buddhism were attacked by the upholders of the state Shintoist cult, which, even under the shogunate, had begun to stress and enhance the role of the emperor as the embodiment of the divine. The demands of loyalty to the emperor as the focus of the nation came to override the principles embodied in the new constitution which might have been developed in liberal directions in a different cultural setting. The character of the regime at times expressed itself less in its liberal institutions than in the repressive actions of the imperial police. Most Meiji statesmen believed that their two great tasks demanded great government authority. The modernization of the economy meant not planning in the modern sense, but a strong governmental initiative and harsh fiscal policies. The other problem was order. The imperial power had once before gone into eclipse because of its failure to meet the threat on this front and now there were new dangers, because not all conservatives could be reconciled to the new model Japan. Discontented ronin – rootless samurai without masters – were one source of trouble. Another was peasant misery; there were scores of agrarian revolts in the first decade of the Meiji era. In the Satsuma rebellion of 1877 the government’s new conscript forces showed that they could handle conservative resistance. It was the last of several rebellions against the Restoration and the last great challenge from conservatism.

The energies of the discontented samurai were gradually to be siphoned off into the service of the new state, but this did not mean that the implications for Japan were all beneficial; they intensified in certain key sectors of the national life an assertive nationalism, which was to lead eventually to aggression abroad. Immediately, this was likely to find expression not only in resentment of the West but also in imperial ambitions directed towards the nearby Asian mainland. Modernization at home and adventure abroad were often in tension in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, but in the long run they pulled in the same direction. The popular and democratic movements especially felt the tug of imperialism.

China was the predestined victim and was to be served much more harshly by her fellow-Asians than by any of the western states. At first she was threatened only indirectly by Japan. Just as China’s supremacy over the dependencies on her borders was challenged in Tibet, Burma and Indochina by Europeans, so the Japanese menaced it in the ancient empire of Korea, long a tributary of Beijing. Japanese interests there went back a long way. In part they were strategic; the Tsushima strait was the place where the mainland was nearest. But the Japanese were also concerned over the possible East Asian ambitions of Russia, particularly in Manchuria, and over China’s inability to resist them.

In 1876 an overt move was made; under the threat of military and naval action (like those deployed by Europeans against China, and by Perry against Japan), the Koreans agreed to open three of their ports to the Japanese and to exchange diplomatic representatives. This was an affront to China. Japan was treating Korea as an independent country and negotiating with it over the head of the imperial court in Beijing which claimed sovereignty over Korea. Some Japanese wanted even more. They remembered earlier Japanese invasions of Korea and successful piracy on its coasts, and coveted the mineral and natural wealth of the country. The statesmen of the Restoration did not at once give way to such pressure, but in a sense they were only making haste slowly. In the 1890s another step forward was taken which led Japan into her first major war since the Restoration, against China. It was sweepingly successful, but was followed by national humiliation when in 1895 a group of western powers forced Japan to accept a peace treaty much less advantageous than the one she had imposed on the Chinese (which had included a declaration of Korea’s independence).

At this point resentment of the West fused with enthusiasm for expansion in Asia. Popular dislike of the ‘unequal treaties’ had been running high and the 1895 disappointment brought it to a head. The Japanese government had its own interests in backing Chinese revolutionary movements and now it had a slogan to offer them: ‘Asia for the Asians’. It was becoming clear, too, to the western powers that dealing with Japan was a very different matter from bullying China. Japan was increasingly recognized to be a ‘civilized’ state, not to be treated like other non-European nations. One symbol of the change was the ending in 1899 of one humiliating sign of European predominance, extra-territoriality. Then, in 1902, came the clearest acknowledgement of Japan’s acceptance as an equal by the West: an Anglo-Japanese alliance. Japan, it was said, had joined Europe.

Besides Britain, Russia was at that moment the leading European power in East Asia. In 1895 her role had been decisive; her subsequent territorial advance made it clear to the Japanese that the longed-for prize of Korea might elude them if they delayed. Railway-building in Manchuria, the development of Vladivostok, and Russian commercial activity in Korea – where politics was little more than a struggle between pro-Russian and pro-Japanese factions – were alarming. Most serious of all, the Russians had leased the naval base of Port Arthur from the enfeebled Chinese. In 1904 the Japanese struck. The result, after a year of war in Manchuria, was a humiliating defeat for the Russians. It was the end of tsarist pretensions in Korea and south Manchuria, where Japanese influence was henceforth dominant, and other territories passed into Japanese possession to remain there until 1945. But there was more to the Japanese victory than that. For the first time since the Middle Ages, non-Europeans had defeated a European power in a major war. The reverberations and repercussions were colossal.

The formal annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, together with the Chinese revolution of the following year and the end of Qing rule, can now be seen as a milestone, the end of the first phase of Asia’s response to the West, and as a turning-point. Asians had shown very differing reactions to western challenges. One of the two states which were to be the great Asian powers of the second half of the new century was Japan, and she had inoculated herself against the threat from the West by accepting the virus of modernization. The other, China, had long striven not to do so.

In each case, the West provided both direct and indirect stimulus to upheaval, though in one case it was successfully contained and in the other it was not. In each case, too, the fate of the Asian power was shaped not only by its own response but by the relations of the western powers among themselves. Their rivalries had generated the scramble in China which had so alarmed and tempted the Japanese, while the Anglo-Japanese alliance assured them that they could strike at their great enemy, Russia, and find her unsupported. A few years more and Japan and China would both be participants as formal equals with other powers in the First World War.

Meanwhile, Japan’s example and, above all, its victory over Russia were an inspiration to other Asians, the greatest single reason for them to ponder whether European rule was bound to be their lot. In 1905 an American scholar could already speak of the Japanese as the ‘peers of Western peoples’. What they had done, by turning Europe’s skills and ideas against her, might not other Asians do in their turn?

Everywhere in Asia European agencies launched or helped to launch changes which speeded up the crumbling of Europe’s political hegemony. They had brought with them ideas about nationalism and humanitarianism, about democracy, the Christian missionary’s dislocation of local society and belief, and a new exploitation not sanctioned by local customs; all of which helped to ignite political, economic and social change. Instinctive responses like the Indian Mutiny or Boxer rebellion were the first and obvious outcomes, but there were others which had a much more important future ahead. In particular, this was true in India, the biggest and most important of all colonial territories.

In 1877 Parliament had bestowed the title of ‘Empress of India’ upon Queen Victoria; some Englishmen laughed and a few disapproved, but it does not seem that there were many who thought it mattered much. Most took the British supremacy there to be permanent or near-permanent and were not much concerned about names. They would have agreed with their compatriot who said ‘we are not in India to be pleasant’ and held that only a severe and firm government could be sure to prevent another Mutiny. Others would also have agreed with the British viceroy who declared as the twentieth century began that ‘As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straightaway to a third-rate power.’ Two important truths underlay this assertion. One was that the Indian tax-payer paid for the defence of much of the British empire; Indian troops had been used to sustain it from Malta to China and in the subcontinent there was always a strategic reserve. The second was that Indian tariff policy was subordinated to British commercial and industrial realities.

These were the harsh facts, whose weight was harder and harder to ignore. Yet they were not the whole story of the Raj. There was more to the government of a fifth of mankind than just fear, greed, cynicism or the love of power. Human beings do not find it easy to pursue collective purposes without some sort of myth to justify them, nor did the British in India. Some of them saw themselves as the heirs of the Romans, whom a classical education had taught them to admire, stoically bearing the burden of a lonely life in an alien land to bring peace to the warring and law to peoples without it. Others saw in Christianity a precious gift with which they must destroy idols and cleanse evil customs. Some never formulated such clear views but were simply convinced that what they brought was better than what they found and therefore that what they were doing was good.

At the base of all these views there was a conviction of superiority and there was nothing surprising about this; it had always animated some imperialists. But in the later nineteenth century it was especially reinforced by fashionable racist ideas and a muddled reflection of what was thought to be taught by current biological science about the survival of the fittest. Such ideas provided another rationale for the much greater social separation of the British in India from native Indians after the shock of the Mutiny. Although there was a modest intake of nominated Indian landlords and native rulers into the legislative branch of government, it was not until the very end of the century that these were joined by elected Indians. Moreover, though Indians could compete to enter the civil service, there were important practical obstacles in the way of their entry to the ranks of the decision-makers. In the army, too, Indians were kept out of the senior commissioned ranks.

The largest single part of the British army was always stationed in India, where its reliability and monopoly of artillery combined with the officering of the Indian regiments by Europeans to ensure that there would be no repetition of the Mutiny. The coming of railways, telegraphs and more advanced weapons in any case told in favour of the government in India as much as in any European country. But armed force was not the explanation of the self-assuredness of British rule, any more than was a conviction of racial superiority. The Census Report of 1901 recorded that there were just under 300 million Indians. These were governed by about 900 British civil servants. Usually there was about one British soldier for every 4,000 Indians. As an Englishman once put it, picturesquely, had all the Indians chosen to spit at the same moment, his countrymen would have been drowned.

The Raj rested also on carefully administered policies. One assumption underlying them after the Mutiny was that Indian society should be interfered with as little as possible. Female infanticide, since it was murder, was forbidden, but there was to be no attempt to prohibit polygamy or child marriage (though after 1891 it was not legal for a marriage to be consummated until the wife was twelve years old). The line of the law was to run outside what was sanctioned by Hindu religion. This conservatism was reflected in a new attitude towards the native Indian rulers. The Mutiny had shown that they were usually loyal; those who turned against the government had been provoked by resentment against British annexation of their lands. Their rights were therefore scrupulously respected after the Mutiny; the princes ruled their own states independently and virtually irresponsibly, checked only by their awe of the British political officers resident at their courts. The native states included over a fifth of the population. Elsewhere, the British cultivated the native aristocracy and the landlords. This was part of a search for support from key groups of Indians, but it often led the British to lean on those whose own leadership powers were already being undermined by social change. Enlightened despotism at their expense, but in the interests of the peasantry (such as had been shown earlier in the century), none the less now disappeared. These were all some of the unhappy consequences of the Mutiny.

Yet no more than any other imperial government was the Raj able permanently to insure itself against change. Its very success told against it. The suppression of warfare favoured the growth of population – and one consequence was more frequent famine. But the provision of ways of earning a living other than by agriculture (which was a possible outlet from the problem of an over-populated countryside) was made very difficult by the obstacles in the way of Indian industrialization. These arose in large measure from a tariff policy in the interest of British manufactures. A slowly emerging class of Indian industrialists did not, therefore, feel warmly towards government, but were increasingly antagonized by it. The alienated also came to include many of the growing number of Indians who had received an education along English lines and had subsequently been irritated to compare its precepts with the practice of the British community in India. Others, who had gone to England to study at Oxford, Cambridge or the Inns of Court, found the contrast especially galling: in late nineteenth-century England there were even Indian members of parliament, while an Indian graduate in India might be slighted by a British private soldier, and there had been uproar among British residents when, in the 1880s, a viceroy wished to remove the ‘invidious distinction’ which prevented a European from being brought before an Indian magistrate. Some, too, had pondered what they read at their mentors’ behest; John Stuart Mill and Mazzini were thus to have a huge influence in India and, through its leaders, in the rest of Asia.

Resentment was especially felt among the Hindus of Bengal, the historic centre of British power: Calcutta was the capital of India. In 1905 this province was divided in two. This partition for the first time brought the Raj into serious conflict with something which had not existed in 1857, an Indian nationalist movement.

The growth of a sense of nationality was slow, fitful and patchy. It was part of a complex set of processes which formed modern Indian politics, though by no means the most important in different localities and at many levels. Moreover, at every stage, national feeling was itself strongly influenced by non-Indian forces. British orientalists at the beginning of the nineteenth century had begun the rediscovery of classical Indian culture, which was essential both to the self-respect of Hindu nationalism and the overcoming of the subcontinent’s huge divisions. Indian scholars then began to bring to light, under European guidance, the culture and religion embedded in the neglected Sanskrit scriptures; through these they could formulate a conception of a Hinduism far removed from the rich and fantastic, but also superstitious, accretions of its popular form. By the end of the nineteenth century this recovery of the Aryan and Vedic past – Islamic India was virtually disregarded – had gone far enough for Hindus to meet with confidence the reproaches of Christian missionaries and offer a cultural counter-attack. A Hindu emissary to a ‘Parliament of Religions’ in Chicago in 1893 not only awoke great personal esteem and obtained serious attention for his assertion that Hinduism was a great religion capable of revivifying the spiritual life of other cultures, he actually made converts.

National consciousness, like the political activity it was to reinforce, was for a long time confined to a few. The proposal that Hindi should be India’s language seemed wildly unrealistic when hundreds of languages and dialects fragmented Indian society and Hindi could only appeal to a small élite seeking to strengthen its links across a subcontinent. The definition of its membership was education rather than wealth: its backbone was provided by those Hindus, often Bengali, who felt especially disappointed at the failure of their educational attainments to win them an appropriate share in the running of India; by 1887 only a dozen Indians had entered the Indian Civil Service through the competitive examination. The Raj seemed determined to maintain the racial predominance of Europeans and to rely upon such conservative interests as the princes and landlords, to the exclusion and, possibly even more important, the humiliation of the babu, the educated, middle-class, urban Hindu.

A new cultural self-respect and a growing sense of grievance over rewards and slights were the background to the formation of the Indian National Congress. The immediate prelude was a flurry of excitement over the failure of government proposals – because of the outcry of European residents – to equalize the treatment of Indians and Europeans in the courts. Disappointment caused an Englishman, a former civil servant, to take the steps which led to the first conference of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in December 1885. Vice-regal initiatives, too, had played a part in this, and Europeans were long to be prominent in the administration of Congress. And they would patronize it for even longer with protection and advice in London. It was an appropriate symbol of the complexity of the European impact on India that some Indian delegates attended in European dress, improbably attired in morning-suits and top-hats of comical unsuitability to the climate of their country, but the formal attire of its rulers.

Congress was soon committed by its declaration of principles to national unity and regeneration: as in Japan already and China and many other countries later, this was the classical product of the impact of European ideas. But it did not at first aspire to self-government. Congress sought, rather, to provide a means of communicating Indian views to the viceroy and proclaimed its ‘unswerving loyalty’ to the British Crown. Only after twenty years, in which time much more extreme nationalist views had won adherents among Hindus, did it begin to discuss the possibility of independence. During this period its attitude had been soured and stiffened by the vilification it received from British residents who declared it unrepresentative, and the unresponsiveness of an administration which endorsed this view and preferred to work through more traditional and conservative social forces. Extremists became more insistent. In 1904 came the inspiring victories of Japan over Russia. The issue for a clash was provided the following year by the partition of Bengal.

Its purpose was twofold: it was administratively convenient, and it would undermine nationalism in Bengal by producing a West Bengal where there was a Hindu majority and an East Bengal with a Muslim majority. This detonated a mass of explosive situations that had long been accumulating. Immediately, there was a struggle for power in Congress. At first a split was avoided by agreement on the aim of swaraj, which in practice might mean independent self-government such as that enjoyed by the white dominions: their example was suggestive. The extremists were heartened by anti-partition riots. A new weapon was deployed against the British, a boycott of goods, which, it was hoped, might be extended to other forms of passive resistance such as non-payment of taxes and the refusal of soldiers to obey orders. By 1908 the extremists were excluded from Congress. By this time, a second consequence was apparent: extremism was producing terrorism. Again, foreign models were important. Russian revolutionary terrorism now joined the works of Mazzini and the biography of Garibaldi, the guerrilla leader-hero of Italian independence, as formative influences on an emerging India. The extremists argued that political murder was not ordinary murder. Assassination and bombing were met by the government with special repressive measures.

The third consequence of partition was perhaps the most momentous. It brought out into the open the division of Muslim and Hindu. For reasons which went back to the percolation of Muslim India before the Mutiny by an Islamic reform movement, the Arabian Wahhabi sect, Indian Muslims had for a century felt themselves more and more distinct from Hindus. Distrusted by the British because of attempts to revivify the Mughal empire in 1857, they had little success in winning posts in government or on the judicial bench. Hindus had responded more eagerly than Muslims to the educational opportunities offered by the Raj; they were of more commercial weight and had more influence on government. But Muslims, too, had found their British helpers, who had established a new, Islamic college, providing the English education they needed to compete with Hindus, and had helped to set up Muslim political organizations. Some English civil servants began to grasp the potential for balancing Hindu pressure which this could give the Raj. Intensification of Hindu ritual practice, such as a cow protection movement, was not likely to do anything but increase the separation of the two communities.

Nevertheless, it was only in 1905 that the split became, as it remained, one of the fundamentals of the subcontinent’s politics. The anti-partitionists campaigned with a strident display of Hindu symbols and slogans. The British governor of eastern Bengal favoured Muslims against Hindus and strove to give them a vested interest in the new province. He was dismissed, but his inoculation had taken: Bengal Muslims deplored his removal. An Anglo-Muslim entente seemed in the making, which further inflamed Hindu terrorists. To make things worse, all this was taking place during five years (from 1906 to 1910) in which prices rose faster than at any time since the Mutiny.

An important set of political reforms conceded in 1909 did not do more than change somewhat the forms with which to operate the political forces which were henceforth to dominate the history of India until the Raj came to an end nearly forty years later. Indians were for the first time appointed to the council which advised the British minister responsible for India and, more importantly, further elected places were provided for Indians in the legislative councils. But the elections were to be made by electorates which had a communal basis; the division of Hindu and Muslim India, that is to say, was institutionalized.

In 1911, for the first and only time, a reigning British monarch visited India. A great imperial durbar was held at Delhi, the old centre of Mughal rule, to which the capital of British India was now transferred from Calcutta. The princes of India came to do homage; Congress did not question its duty to the monarch. The accession to the throne of George V that year had been marked by the conferring of real and symbolic benefits, of which the most notable and politically significant was the reuniting of Bengal. If there was a moment at which the Raj was at its apogee, this was it.

Yet British rule in India was eroding from below, both in India and in Britain. The policy of favouring the Muslims had made Hindus more resentful, while Muslims now felt that the government had gone back on its understandings with them in withdrawing the partition of Bengal. They feared the resumption of a Hindu ascendancy in the province. Hindus, on the other hand, took the concession as evidence that resistance had worked and began to press for the abolition of the communal electoral arrangements which the Muslims prized. The British had therefore done much to alienate Muslim support even before the first decades of the twentieth century, when Indian Muslim élites came under increasing pressure from more middle-class Muslims susceptible to the appeal of a pan-Islamic movement. By 1914 more and more British attention was turned towards Europe. At the same time not two but three forces were making the running in Indian politics: the British, Hindus and Muslims. Here was the origin of the future partition of the only complete political unity the subcontinent had ever known and, like that unity, it was as much the result of the play of non-Indian as of Indian forces.

India was the largest single mass of non-European population and territory under European rule in Asia, but to the south-east and in Indonesia, once part of an Indian cultural sphere, lay further imperial possessions. With the exception of Siam, which held on to a flimsy independence, all this vast region of almost 100 million inhabitants in 1900 was colonized: Burma was occupied by Britain in 1886 and governed as a province of British India. Peninsular Malaya and parts of Borneo consisted of princely states under British overlordship, with their commercial centre in the British colony of Singapore. The rest of the Malay world – the 13,000 islands to the south, centred on Java – had been gradually colonized by the Dutch East India Company from the early seventeenth century, and by 1800 had emerged as a nationalized colony of the Netherlands, known as the Dutch East Indies. In the east France had taken possession of Vietnam (between 1862 and 1884), Cambodia (1867) and, eventually, Laos, from 1893.

European colonization had rewritten the rules for a region that for centuries had been growing its own strong cultures, while interacting with India and China. The Qing continued to believe that it could keep its tributary relations with South-East Asian states well into the nineteenth century, but by mid-century these were slipping fast, even if some of China’s influence was retained through the significant Chinese minority populations in the region. Instead, in some parts of the region (as in Korea further north) concepts of nation and nationhood started to emerge among parts of the élite roughly at the same time as these countries were colonized by European powers. Different from regions in Africa, for instance, most South-East Asian countries had strong élites that survived the colonization process and who soon embraced at least parts of the nationalist agenda. This was particularly true in Vietnam, where the conflict between nationalists and foreigners would lead to almost fifty years of war.

The most populous region – and the most culturally complex – was the Malay island realm off the southern Asian coast. Here Islam had taken hold from the fourteenth century on, replacing earlier Hindu or Buddhist kingdoms. With less direct Chinese influence than further north, a series of sultanates dominated the scene, centred on Java and Sumatra, with only Bali retaining its Hinduism until our time. The sultanate of Mataram on Java dominated in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it had to contend with a new power: the Dutch East India Company was expanding its trade holdings on the islands and – not unlike its British counterpart – began colonizing parts of the region in order to provide security for the profitable spice trade. In 1619 it had founded Batavia (today’s Jakarta), and by 1800 the company ‘capital’ was a thriving urban centre with a mostly Chinese population and Dutch traders and administrators, but very few Javanese or Malay.

The revolutionary era at the end of the eighteenth century hit the Dutch company hard, and after it went bankrupt during the Napoleonic Wars the Dutch state took over its possessions in 1816. The new colony was expanded to include almost all of what is today Indonesia, and its economy redirected towards European-run plantations manned by indentured labourers, producing tea, rubber, tobacco and spices for the European and North American markets and for inner-Asian trade. After a series of rebellions, especially on Java, the Dutch attempted a more ‘liberal’ imperialism after 1870, emphasizing local education and limited political reform. But the colony remained what it was intended to be from the beginning: a boon for Dutch finances, held against local opposition, which by the early twentieth century was becoming increasingly nationalist after a European pattern.

The first Indonesian nationalists, some of them inspired by Indians, objected as much to the new Dutch programme, which they saw as paternalistic and interventionist, as they had done to the rampant exploitation of the past. In 1908 they formed an organization to promote national education. Three years later an Islamic association appeared whose early activities were directed as much against Chinese traders as against the Dutch. By 1916 it had gone so far as to ask for self-government while remaining in union with the Netherlands. Before this, however, a true independence party had been founded in 1912. It opposed Dutch authority in the name of native-born Indonesians of all ethnic groups; a Dutchman was among its three founders and others followed him. In 1916 the Dutch took the first step towards meeting the demands of these groups by authorizing a parliament with limited powers for Indonesia.

The Malays who lived on the mainland had been colonized by the British, who had established a similar planter economy as seemed to thrive on the islands. The big advantage the British had was the strength of Singapore as a depot and trading centre, which in the nineteenth century increasingly served the whole region. Politically the northern Malay areas remained a hodgepodge of small sultanates, all of which had some form of political tie to the British crown. The Straits Settlements became a British colony, and through them and through Singapore large numbers of Chinese and Indian labourers were brought in to work on the plantations and in the mines owned by Europeans. In the early twentieth century there was a slow process of centralization, which also included the British-held areas of northern Borneo, but the process was made more complicated by the fact that by 1920 half the population was of Chinese or Indian origin.

In Indochina the tide of foreign influence also changed. For more than a thousand years, Cambodia and Laos had been shaped by religious and artistic influences flowing from India, but one of the countries of Indochina had been much more closely linked to China by its culture. This was Vietnam. It had three parts: Tonkin in the north, Annam, its central area, and Cochin in the south. Vietnam had a long tradition of national identity and a history of national revolt against Chinese imperial influence. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was here that resistance to Europeanization was most marked.

Europe’s connections with Indochina had begun with seventeenth-century Christian missionaries from France (one of them devised the first romanization of the Vietnamese language) and it was the persecution of Christians which provided the excuse for a French expedition to be sent there in the 1850s. There followed diplomatic conflict with China, which claimed sovereignty over the country. In 1863 the emperor of Annam ceded part of Cochin under duress to the French. Cambodia, too, accepted a French protectorate. This was followed by further French advance and the arousing of Indochinese resistance. In the 1870s the French occupied the Red River delta; soon, other quarrels led to a war with China, the paramount power, which confirmed the French grip on Indochina. In 1887 they set up an Indochinese Union, which disguised a centralized regime behind a system of protectorates. Though this meant the preservation of native rulers (the emperor of Annam and the kings of Cambodia and Laos), the aim of French colonial policy was always assimilation. French culture was to be brought to new French subjects whose élites were to be gallicized as the best way to promote modernization and civilization.

The centralizing tendencies of French administration soon made it clear that the formal structure of native government was a sham. Unwittingly, the French thus sapped local institutions without replacing them with others enjoying the loyalty of the people. This was a dangerous course. There were also other important by-products of the French presence. It brought with it, for example, French tariff policy, which was to slow down industrialization. This eventually led Indochinese businessmen, like their Indian equivalents, to wonder in whose interests their country was run. Moreover, the conception of an Indochina which was integrally a part of France, and whose inhabitants should be turned into Frenchmen, also brought problems. The French administration had to grapple with the paradox that access to French education could lead to reflection on the inspiring motto to be found on official buildings and documents of the Third Republic: ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Finally, French law and notions of property broke down the structure of village landholding and threw power into the hands of money-lenders and landlords. With a growing population in the rice-growing areas, this was to build up a revolutionary potential for the future.

Siam, called Thailand after 1939, was the only South-East Asian country that was able to hold on to its independence. The reason for this was in part the strength of the Thai monarchy and in part rivalries between the British and French, who came to see the benefit of a ‘neutral’ zone between their colonial possessions. Even so, Siam had to give territories in the west (to British Burma), the south (to British Malaya) and in the east (to French Indochina) in order to stave off conflict with the Europeans. This gave the country time to carry out limited domestic reform, train young people in European ways, and import weapons for the training of an army. The Buddhist religion that united Thais also helped to keep the country together through the period of South-East Asian colonization by Europeans.

The strangest case of colonialism in South-East Asia was in the Philippines, where the United States – an avowedly anti-colonial power – ruled the country after defeating the Spanish in 1898. Part of American reasoning was what has been called modernist imperialism: arguing that the Filipinos could not govern themselves, it was felt to be a duty for the United States to bring them up to a level of civilization where self-rule was possible. Bringing the population the benefits of modern development was part of this duty (and the reason why some Filipinos today complain that their country’s colonial past consisted of 500 years in a convent and 50 years in Disneyland). The problem was that many Filipinos thought themselves more than ready for independence, and it was only after a bloody colonial war that ended in 1913 that the Americans had control of the country. Inside the United States the colonial presence was highly controversial as well, even after the Filipinos were promised full self-government. How could a democratic republic, many asked, also be a power that ruled others? It was a question that would resonate through American history in the century to come.

The nineteenth century had turned out to be the European age par excellence. Even though there is no doubt that some European societies by the mid-seventeenth century or thereabouts had already become profoundly different from what they had been before and from other societies elsewhere, most of the concepts of modernity came as results and not causes of the industrial revolutions. During the nineteenth century minds were being changed due to new kinds of practices introduced by mechanization and through new forms of energy production. Consumption patterns changed, and global markets evolved rapidly. The world, as a German historian puts it, was being transformed by communication and interaction. The exchange of ideas stood at the centre of these processes, and a key idea, crucial to the century to come, was that of nationalism.

Even in the early 1800s the concept of political authority was commonly linked to princes rather than peoples – few people found it strange that the Swiss canton of Neufchâtel belonged to Prussia, for instance. But throughout the century the idea spread that ultimate authority belonged to the people within a nation, and with it the concept of national states within contiguous borders – the nation, as it were, as a family in one house. This was a very powerful concept, not just in Europe, where it first emerged, but also in Asia, where it developed not so much later.

Though ideas of nationalism were by the early years of the twentieth century at work in almost all Asian countries, they took their different expressions from different possibilities. Not all colonial regimes behaved in the same way. The British encouraged nationalists in Burma, while the Americans doggedly pursued a benevolent paternalism in the Philippines after violently suppressing insurrection. In the Philippines, too, the Spanish had vigorously promoted Christian conversion, while the British Raj was very cautious about interference with native religion. What shaped all Asian forms of nationalism, though, was the idea that Asians themselves could govern, produce and trade as well as Europeans could, and that they could do so through a blend of Asian and European political, social and economic models. Even Communist anti-colonialists, who were more reliant on imported concepts of the state than anyone else, acknowledged the huge residue of customary thought and practice that remained in Asia after generations of European predominance.

The European age is therefore very limited in time. Europe’s difference may have been important before 1800, but most of the world was still untouched by it; China, Africa and much of the Muslim world were not much affected by what went on in Europe in the first part of the nineteenth century, and the resurgence of Asia, often in the form of a new nationalism, can be seen already in the early twentieth. But as late as 1914 it was very difficult to foresee how quickly the European domination of Asia would come to an end. In spite of rising Asian nationalism and increasing opposition to colonialism in some European countries, especially in the new workers’ movements that the industrial revolution created, the colonial empires themselves seemed to be in very good shape. It was hard to anticipate how two cataclysmic wars would sap European confidence and capability, and how quickly Asian nationalists would be able to mobilize, based – at least in part – on their populations’ astonished observation of the European civil wars. The European presence had set Asia off on its modern metamorphosis. But the twentieth century would show how fickle Europe’s domination was and how easily it could self-destruct.