Era Of High Imperialism Research Articles

Global Monarchy: Royal Encounters in the Age of Empire

AbstractMonarchy is one of the oldest truly global social structures. On the eve of the imperial age, most of the world was governed by monarchs. But as the European empires expanded, this order was radically transformed. During the long nineteenth century, most non-European monarchies were conquered by imperial powers. Often, European imperial powers abolished them, imprisoning, killing, or exiling local rulers; in other cases, the imperial powers incorporated the conquered monarchies into new imperial orders of indirect rule. Yet, there were some monarchies that survived Europe’s imperial expansion. In fact, every country that retained its independence in the era of high imperialism was ruled by a monarch: Ethiopia, China, Japan, the Ottoman empire, Persia (Iran), and Siam (Thailand). To some extent, these monarchs lived in the same social worlds as their European counterparts, forming a global, status-based community. This article offers some observations on the relationship between the world’s monarchs in the age of empire by focusing on encounters between European monarchs and those of the few non-European countries that retained their independence.

Inside the History Lab

For more than two hundred years the Elgin Marbles, pictured on the cover of the March 2023 issue of the American Historical Review, have been the subject of one of the longest transnational cultural disputes in the world. Named after the British aristocrat who oversaw their removal from the Parthenon in what was then Ottoman-controlled Athens, they have been in the collection of the British Museum in London since the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s, the Greek government asked the British to return the marbles. Those Greek demands have continued to the present day, but the British have been steadfast in their insistence that the marbles were legally acquired and have refused to return them. Very recently, however, a new set of high-profile negotiations between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin Marbles may finally bring this impasse to an end.1 If the parties do reach a settlement, it would come in the wake of a transformative set of campaigns beginning in the 1970s for the cultural restitution of objects brought to Europe and the United States in and after the era of high imperialism. In Germany, Belgium, France, and the United States, several museums have returned more than a thousand looted artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. French and American museums are beginning to return stolen Khmer antiquities under pressure from the Cambodian government. Protocols have emerged in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and at the United Nations for the return of Indigenous cultural property and remains to tribes and First Nations.2

Lâle Can, Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire

Reviewed by: Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire by Lâle Can Eren Tasar Lâle Can. Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Xiv + 257 pp. Paper, $25.00. ISBN: 978-1503611160 This elegant monograph marks a welcome addition to an increasingly sophisticated literature on the hajj during the era of high imperialism, that includes recent contributions by Eileen Kane, Christopher Low, John Slight, and Umar Ryad. Spiritual Subjects shares with these important works a focus on the hajj’s [End Page 358] instrumentalization by empires: Can highlights Ottoman participation in this expanding sphere of geopolitics, with a focus on the Porte’s encounter with the British and the Russians. She opens entirely new avenues of inquiry, however, by shifting our gaze toward everyday life and religion. The author fulfills her stated objective of writing a book about “ordinary people” (p. 31) that brings religion “back into analysis of hajj,” (p. 33) in large part by devoting substantial attention to reconstructing the lived reality of pilgrimage for Bukharans, Kashgaris, and other Central Asian Muslims: “Although networks are often invoked in studies of transimperial mobility and pilgrimage, historians seldom elaborate on just how they work.” One of the book’s achievements is that it offers a window into “the nature of the webs of connection and circulation, the people who animated them, [and] how they operated on a day-to-day level.” (p. 77) At the outset, the author presents hajjis as living, breathing people, by qualifying the imagery of a “decadent” fin-de-siècle Constantinople that served as a kind of Islamic analogue to Silver Age Petersburg, later popularized in novels such as Murder on the Orient Express and Kurt Seyt & Murka: a European metropolis of high-end boutiques and chamber music recitals. The author introduces the reader to a Turkestani hajji named Mirim Khan stating, “The Istanbul that Mirim Khan describes was one that many contemporary travelers and flaneurs of the upper classes would not recognize.” Instead, “in his telling it was a fundamentally Sunni Muslim space” (p. 37). Taking a cue from Mozart, Can dissects Mirim’s memoir with a view to what is being left out: “Some of the work Mirim Khan did to Islamicize Istanbul was achieved via silences” (p. 51). While happy to provide detail on the boorishness of other Central Asian pilgrims, he had little or nothing to say about the city’s large foreign and Christian populations, let alone its over-the-top cosmopolitanism. Instead, Mirim’s Istanbul presents “a point of reentry into a shared world of mosques, pan-Islamic power, shrine visitation, and relics from the Prophet” (p. 51). The upshot is that “despite being a Russian national and legal subject, he felt that he was a foreigner in most of Russia but described feeling at home and among equals in Ottoman Mecca” (p. 63). In the figure of Mirim Khan, Can illustrates the agency pilgrims enjoyed in seeing the world of the hajj on their own terms. Pilgrims such as Mirim had axes to grind, yet the results rarely inspire. Like the era’s empires, many found in the hajj more worldly opportunities. In Chapter 3, we meet a crafty Bukharan named Celal bin Hekim. After leaving his homeland in the 1860s, he settled in Jeddah and made a living helping clients avoid conscription. Perhaps sensing trouble on the horizon, Can suggests, he traveled to Istanbul in 1890 to register at the Russian Consulate. When he was arrested “for a matter involving a slave” the following year, [End Page 359] Celal claimed exemption from Ottoman law as a Russian subject. This was patent nonsense, since the Bukharan Emirate was at the time a protectorate of the Russian Empire, and its inhabitants were not Russian citizens—that Tsarist officials were “loath to recognize Bukharans as Russian nationals in the metropole-did not deter them from ignoring these differences when the subjects in question were in Ottoman lands” (p. 101). Thus, the British and Russian Empires increasingly viewed non-Ottoman hajjis as “unlikely agents of expanding European jurisdiction” (p...

Morbid Subjects: Forensic medicine and sovereignty in Siam

AbstractThis article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.

On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘age of migration’*

Immobility raises awkward questions for theorists of migration. From their standpoint, migration is unusual behaviour that requires explanation. Its obverse—staying in place—is seen as an ‘obvious’ state of affairs that calls for no explanation. Yet assumptions about the ordinariness of immobility are insecure. For one thing, we know a great deal more about the mobile societies of early modern Asia; for another, Asian mobility in the era of high imperialism is much better understood. Yet despite these cumulative gains in our understanding of the scale of mobility in early-modern and modern Asia, and its acceleration in ‘the age of migration’, immobility continues to be seen as the ‘obvious’ state of affairs. This article suggests some preliminary answers to ‘the immobility paradox’, based on a study of the greater Bengal region. By analysing the impact of the intensifying links, in the late colonial era, between Bengal and the global economy, it shows that this varied widely for different people, in ways that had a profound bearing on their capacity to move. The article develops the notion of ‘deficits’ which worked to inhibit the mobility of particular groups and individuals. Physical frailty and obligations of care, it shows, were crucial factors in shaping immobility. Relations of gender and generation, and the inequalities embedded in these relations, produced ‘overabundances’—of obligations to people and places—that tied certain people down. Finally, it hints at the reasons why, and the ways in which, stayers-on have grown poorer.

Stephen R. Halsey. Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft.

The idea that the period 1839–1949 was the “era of humiliation” in which China, the “sick man of Asia,” struggled against successive waves of foreign imperialism is a powerful one with remarkable staying power. Stephen R. Halsey’s Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft joins a growing chorus of works that question this broad characterization. Where others saw dissolution and decline, particularly in the last decades of the Qing Empire (r. 1644–1912), Halsey highlights dynamism, transformation, and resilience. Even proponents of the narrative of weakness and decline have had to acknowledge that China (or at least some parts of it) managed to avoid the direct colonization and annexation that was the fate of nearly 85 percent of the world’s land surface during the era of high imperialism. But while previous explanations may have focused largely on external factors that led to this outcome, Halsey highlights the internal changes that gave rise to a growing capacity of the Chinese state to attain what he labels “the minimal threshold to retain its independence” (147).

On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘age of migration’

AbstractImmobility raises awkward questions for theorists of migration. From their standpoint, migration is unusual behaviour that requires explanation. Its obverse—staying in place—is seen as an ‘obvious’ state of affairs that calls for no explanation. Yet assumptions about the ordinariness of immobility are insecure. For one thing, we know a great deal more about the mobile societies of early modern Asia; for another, Asian mobility in the era of high imperialism is much better understood. Yet despite these cumulative gains in our understanding of the scale of mobility in early-modern and modern Asia, and its acceleration in ‘the age of migration’, immobility continues to be seen as the ‘obvious’ state of affairs. This article suggests some preliminary answers to ‘the immobility paradox’, based on a study of the greater Bengal region. By analysing the impact of the intensifying links, in the late colonial era, between Bengal and the global economy, it shows that this varied widely for different people, in ways that had a profound bearing on their capacity to move. The article develops the notion of ‘deficits’ which worked to inhibit the mobility of particular groups and individuals. Physical frailty and obligations of care, it shows, were crucial factors in shaping immobility. Relations of gender and generation, and the inequalities embedded in these relations, produced ‘overabundances’—of obligations to people and places—that tied certain people down. Finally, it hints at the reasons why, and the ways in which, stayers-on have grown poorer.

The Dialectic of Recognition and the Rediscovery of China: After Orientalism

The cultural relationship between China and the West, including the hypothesis of a rediscovery, does not fit neatly into the binary pattern implied by the model of Orientalism associated with post-colonial theory. Even in the era of high imperialism, the Sino-Western relationship involved complexities for which the paradigm of colonizer and colonized is too simplistic and therefore requires a theorization of a post-Orientalism. As evidence, the narrative fragment ‘The Boxer Rebellion’, by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, published posthumously in 1957, explores the psychological dynamic between a European soldier and a Chinese prisoner in order to demonstrate the immanent ambivalence of imperialism and its Orientalist categories.

The colonial city in the postcolonial era

The Black Hole of Calcutta was once known throughout the English-speaking world as a dark dungeon in which many European prisoners were suffocated to death by an Indian ruler. A monument was built in Calcutta in 1760 to commemorate this event, but it was pulled down in 1821. It was rebuilt by the viceroy Curzon in 1902 in the era of high imperialism. But Indian nationalists had the monument removed in 1940. This essay looks at the ideological history of empire in the last 250 years by tracing the travels of this monument in a postcolonial city. It shows that academic history and popular memory have a strong influence on each other.

Cross-Boundary Traders in the Era of High Imperialism: Changing Structures and Strategies in the Sierra Leone-Guinea Region

This article examines exchange across the Sierra Leone-Guinea boundary line in three different periods during the era of high imperialism. My main arguments can be summarized as follows. First, boundary crossings are best understood through a spatial analysis that combines action and structure and that emphasizes network building, power, and struggle, all shaping dynamic functional regions. Second, a multi-level analysis is needed, one that moves back and forth between the local, regional, and global, looking at how the larger forces are expressed locally in ways that influence traders’ cross-boundary strategies and at how traders helped shape structures. Third, comparing traders’ boundary crossing strategies in different time periods helps to locate the structural forces that have enhanced or reduced their adaptability - giving rise to new opportunities, or curtailing businesses. These arguments, in sum, raise questions about the relationships of traders’ actions to boundaries and to functional regions. I conclude by looking at the value of historical studies for interpreting contemporary cross-boundary trade.

Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy's African Wars in the Era of Nation-Building, 1870-1900 (review)

Reviewed by: Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy's African Wars in the Era of Nation-Building, 1870-1900 Richard Reid (bio) Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy's African Wars in the Era of Nation-Building, 1870-1900, by Giuseppe Maria Finaldi Bern: Peter Lang, 2009; pp. 354. $100.95 paper. Outside Italy, even among seasoned historians of modern northeast Africa, comprehension of the nature and meaning of Italian colonialism is often, at best, sketchy; at worst, this subject is largely unknown territory. This is a reflection, no doubt, of the language limitations of scholars working on the region, who rely heavily on the relatively small number of Italian historians writing in English; it is also, perhaps, a reflection of prevailing research interests—although the resultant lacuna is all the more curious, given the obsession with the colonial era in other parts of Africa. It is certainly the case that an understanding of the culture of colonialism in late-nineteenth-century Italy, again at least among non-Italian scholars, is almost completely lacking, beyond a vague appreciation of the complex machinations of post-Risorgimento Italian politics and the role of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, the would-be imperial hero who presided over the catastrophic Italian defeat at the battle of Adwa in March 1896. By [End Page 123] contrast, John MacKenzie's voluminous scholarship on British imperial culture and propaganda—evidently a source of inspiration to the author under review—has worked its way onto university reading lists the length and breadth of Britain and beyond. Here at last, however, is an accessible and exhaustive study of Italian colonial culture between the 1870s and the immediate aftermath of Adwa in 1896—a refreshingly unpretentious, wide-ranging contribution to both northeast African and European imperial historiography. Giuseppe Maria Finaldi has drawn on a truly impressive range of sources in order to make the case for the existence of a deeply rooted and pervasive colonial culture in Italy during the era of high imperialism. He persuasively critiques the tendency of postwar left-wing intellectuals in Italy to exonerate "the masses" from involvement in or even knowledge of past misdeeds, with these intellectuals denying that there ever was such a thing as a "popular colonial culture." Certainly, the existence of an Italian "colonial culture" has been routinely ignored in the major studies of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism, and the predominant argument among Italian scholars has been that only in the decade prior to World War I did Italy develop a nation-state that was sufficiently articulate and self-assured to impose such a culture: the war in Libya (from 1911) has been assigned much greater significance, as it represented the confident expansionism of a "mature" nation. Yet Finaldi demonstrates that during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the ideas around nation-building and patriotism have external as well as internal dimensions, and that "empire"—with all its related issues with regard to Italian military heroism, Italy's civilizing mission, and the country's grand destiny—sat at the very heart of what "Italy" represented, at the most popular cultural levels. The prevailing interpretation of Italian high culture in the late nineteenth century has rested upon the notion of deprecatio temporum—a tendency toward gloominess about the current age, juxtaposed against a supposedly glorious ancient past—and, indeed, many appear to have bewailed the inability of Italy to impose itself on the world stage, to compete among the great nations of Europe—chiefly Britain and France—and, more specifically, to win any significant battles, whoever the enemy might be (and it was military glory that postunification nationalists craved above all). But Finaldi argues, in fact, for the presence of a pervasive culture of martial and imperial celebration, of heroes, militarism, and empire. [End Page 124] The core of the author's thesis is to be found in part 2 of the book, in which Finaldi explores the various media through which this imperial culture was expressed—and through which, indeed, popular colonial mentalities were shaped. Popular newspapers were replete with colonial reportage, focusing on Eritrea, and with an obsessive gaze fixed on Ethiopia, especially...

Nature and culture in french guiana

Nature and culture in french guiana Redfield, ( 2000 ) Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana . University of California Press , Berkeley, CA . xvi + 345 pp, 21 black & white photographs, 4 maps, 4 tables, index. Hardback: Price £35.00, US $55.00. ISBN 0-520-21984-8 . Paperback: Price £14.50. ISBN 0-520-21985-6. Redfield, P. (2000) Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. xvi + 345 pp, 21 black & white photographs, 4 maps, 4 tables, index. Hardback: Price £35.00, US $55.00.ISBN 0-520-21984-8. Paperback: Price £14.50. ISBN 0-520-21985-6. Space in the tropics sets itself an ambitious mission: to explore the changes in ‘our experience of nature between an era of high imperialism and one of global technology’ through re-telling the story of two European projects in French Guiana — the penal colony of the colonial period, and the space centre of the postcolonial period. The topic is tantalizing: as noted on the jacket, French Guiana is the place where ‘rockets roar into space — bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites — from the same South American coastal rain forest where convicts once did time on Devil's Island.’ An anthropologist by training, Peter Redfield eschews ethnography. This is not a story about the tribe of space-centre workers or the penal colony administrators that preceded them, but rather an attempt to weave together — via clever cultural history and rather offhand political economy — ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. The result, as promised on the jacket, is ‘anthropology for a new millennium’. This ‘new’ anthropology actively seeks to disrupt conventional academic modes of writing and analysis, positing the book as the work of a ‘bricoleur’ (amateur handyman). As a result, Redfield's analysis is poetically disjointed and theoretically elusive. The first chapter opens with a musing soliloquy on Robinson Crusoe as a means of introducing the central themes of the work: ‘technology, nature and development, amid the human experience of space and place’ (p. 8). Redfield then presents us with a brief (less than four pages) explanation of a series of concepts — space, colonialism, nature, tropics, technology, modernity, place and people — that are meant to serve as a do-it-yourself theoretical toolkit for the reader. These concepts lie dormant throughout much of the rest of the analysis, and herein lies one shortcoming of the book, in which these critical concepts become reduced to a series of unarticulated, condensed code words. The book then presents case studies of the (French) penal colony and the space centre, before finishing with a comparison of the two, with the goal of analysing the ‘ecology of modern expertise’, arguing that ‘modern categories of nature and technology can only be understood in relation to each other, and that neither can be adequately understood without recourse to spatial terms’. An exciting claim — yet one that is not always borne out in the substantive analysis, in part because of rather thin empirical material, and a rather anaemic comparison between the penal colony and space centre in the final section. Space in the Tropics is an inventive, carefully crafted and wonderfully written book, delightful to read but — given the weaknesses of the empirical analysis — ultimately unsatisfying.

Military Mortality in Tropical Asia: British Troops in Tenasserim, 1827–36

The demographic history of Southeast Asia remains largely uncharted. This is particularly true of mainland Southeast Asia prior to the commencement of the era of high imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, in recent years scholars have begun to explore certain aspects of the mainland's demographic history during the precolonial and early colonial periods. Nonetheless, we still lack basic information on fertility, mortality, and migration — the three fundamental categories in demographic analysis — for most populations on most parts of the mainland prior to 1850.

Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945

Japanese eugenic discourse and institution building contrast sharply with comparable movements elsewhere. As a social-intellectual phenomenon, Anglo-American eugenics considered the Japanese racially inferior to Western peoples; yet eugenic ideals and policies achieved a remarkable popularity in Japan. Most of mainstream Japanese genetics was derived from orthodox Mendelian roots in Germany and (to a lesser degree) the United States. But French-style Lamarckian notions of the inheritability of acquired characters held surprising popularity among enthusiasts of eugenics. Japanese eugenicists could condemn the actions of foreign eugenicists like Charles Davenport in the United States for their efforts to forbid Japanese immigration in the 1920s, yet appeal to these same eugenicists as a source of legitimacy in Japan. These paradoxes can partly be explained against a background of relative isolation in a period of profound social change. Few Japanese eugenicists had close personal contact with foreign eugenicists, and most of their knowledge was acquired through reading rather than direct exposure. The eugenic ideal of ethnic purity was attractive to a society long accustomed to monoracial self-imagery. The need to defend national independence in an era of high imperialism seemed to require the most up-to-date policies and ideas. And Japan's own acquisition of an overseas empire seemed to demand a population management philosophy ostensibly based on scientific principles. These and other forces supported the implementation of eugenic policies and prescriptions among the Japanese people in the first half of the twentieth century.

Zionism, Colonialism and Technocracy: Otto Warburg and the Commission for the Exploration of Palestine, 1903-7

The requirements for the realization of the Zionist idea did not exist before the era of high imperialism (ca. 1880-1914). These requirements were both technological and managerial. Like imperialist expansion itself, Zionist settlement was made feasible by late nineteenth-century innovations in transportation, communications and agriculture.1 Similarly, during Zionist settlement's first quarter century (18821907), the planning of the economic development of a Jewish commonwealth modelled itself along the statist and technocratic lines of Europe's colonial administrations. Existing accounts of the relationship between Zionism and European globalism focus on the diplomatic relations, cultivated by Zionist leaders from Theodore Herzl to Chaim Weizmann, between the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and the Great Powers.2 Although there is an abundant literature on the formation of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), little attention has been paid to Zionism's technocratic elite and its use of European colonial models in formulating strategies for Jewish nation-building in Palestine. This article provides a case-study of one member of this elite: Otto Warburg (1859-1938), a veteran scientific advisor in the German colonial service.