Informal Imperialism in Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Consolidation of the Mythical Roots of the West

Abstract

‘Informal colonialism’ and ‘informal imperialism’ are relatively common terms in the specialized literature. The term ‘informal colonialism’ was coined—or at least sanctioned—by C. R. Fay (1940: (vol. 2) 399) meaning a situation in which a powerful nation manages to establish dominant control in a territory over which it does not have sovereignty. The term was popularized by the economic historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953), who applied it to study informal British imperial expansion over portions of Africa. The difference between informal and formal colonialism is easy to establish: in the first instance, complete effective control is unfeasible, mainly due to the impossibility of applying direct military and political force in countries that, in fact, are politically independent. They have their own laws, make decisions on when and where to open museums and how to educate their own citizens. Yet, in order to survive in the international world they need to build alliances with the main powers, and that comes at a price. Many countries in the world were in this situation in the middle and last decades of the nineteenth century: Mediterranean Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and independent states in the Far East and in Central and South America. A simple classification of countries into imperial powers, informal empires and formal colonies is, however, only a helpful analytical tool that shows its flaws at closer look. Some of those that are being included as informal colonies in Part II of this book were empires in themselves, like the Ottoman Empire and, from the last years of the century, Italy (La Rosa 1986), and therefore had their own informal and formal colonies. The reason why they have been placed together here is that in all of them there was an acknowledgement of a need for modernization following Western-dominated models. They all had the (northern) European presence in their lands—at first primarily British and French, followed by Germans and individuals of other European states, mainly from other empires either alive such as that of Austria- Hungary or in decline like Sweden and Denmark.