The 1919 Peace Settlement: A Subaltern View

Abstract

As every schoolboy knows, or used to know before the rise of multiculturalism, in the early twentieth century and North America dominated the world. A recent president of the American Historical Association reports that, with postcolonial studies firmly anchored in the curriculum, our students now learn that Europe that funny little peninsula jutting off the edge of Asia is not the center of history.1 So much for history wie es eigentlich gewesen. No one thought that way ninety years ago. Europe, the United States, and other Western offshoots encompassed 33.9 percent of world population and produced 67.7 percent of world GNP at the time. Taking account of the productivity of the fifty million Europeans who had emigrated abroad and revolutionized agriculture and trade in such places as Latin America's Southern Cone, North Africa, and Asian city-states, people of European stock generated three-quarters of world income. The United States and Britain alone came close to producing half of global manufactured goods.2 One analyst estimates that between 1400 and 1900 the four principal West European civilizations contributed roughly 80 percent of humankind's achievements in the realms of science and technology, art and music, and literature and culture.3 The European civil war of 1914-1918 thus constituted a tragedy of immense proportions. The statesmen who, in the midst of unprecedented economic travail and an influenza pandemic, struggled to craft the Versailles treaty in 1919 had their hands full. They had to reconstruct Europe, contain Germany, clean up the detritus left by three collapsed empires, and found the League of Nations.4 Could they, and should they, also have made time to address the stirrings of anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt, India, China, and Korea, the subject of Professor Erez Manela's much-praised book? If one reads history within its unfolding context rather than backward from the present, the notion seems less than reasonable.