The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (10 page)

If Austria-Hungary was stable but weak, Russia was strong but unstable. ‘There’s an invisible thread, like a spider’s web, and it comes right out of his Imperial Majesty Alexander the Third’s heart. And there’s another which goes through all the ministers, through His Exellency the Governor and down through the ranks until it reaches me and even the lowest soldier,’ the policeman Nikiforych explained to the young Maxim Gorky. ‘Everything is linked and bound together by this thread… with its invisible power.’ As centralized as Austria-Hungary was decentralized, Russia seemed equal to the task of
maintaining military parity with the West European powers. Moreover, Russia exercised the option of ‘Russification’, aggressively imposing the Russian language on the other ethnic minorities in its vast imperium. This was an ambitious strategy given the numerical predominance of non-Russians, who accounted for around 56 per cent of the total population of the empire. It was Russia’s economy that nevertheless seemed to pose the biggest challenge to the Tsar and his ministers. Despite the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s, the country’s agricultural system remained communal in its organization – closer, it might be said, to India than to Prussia. But the bid to build up a new class of thrifty peasant proprietors – sometimes known as
kulaks,
after their supposedly tight fists – achieved only limited success. From a narrowly economic perspective, the strategy of financing industrialization by boosting agricultural production and exports was a success. Between 1870 and 1913 the Russian economy grew at an average annual rate of around 2.4 per cent, faster than the British, French and Italian and only a little behind the German (2.8 per cent). Between 1898 and 1913, pig iron production more than doubled, raw cotton consumption rose by 80 per cent and the railway network grew by more than 50 per cent. Militarily, too, state-led industrialization seemed to be working; Russia was more than matching the expenditures of the other European empires on their armies and navies. Small wonder the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg worried that ‘Russia’s growing claims and enormous power to advance in a few years, will simply be impossible to fend off’. Nevertheless, the prioritization of grain exports (to service Russia’s rapidly growing external debt) and rapid population growth limited the material benefits felt by ordinary Russians, four-fifths of whom lived in the countryside. The hope that they would gain land as well as freedom aroused among peasants by the abolition of serfdom had been disappointed. Though living standards were almost certainly rising (if the revenues from excise duties are any guide), this was no cure for a pervasive sense of grievance, as any student of the French
ancien régime
could have explained. A disgruntled peasantry, a sclerotic aristocracy, a radicalized but impotent intelligentsia and a capital city with a large and volatile populace: these were precisely the combustible ingredients the historian Alexis de Tocqueville had identified
in 1780s France. A Russian revolution of rising expectations was in the making – a revolution Nikiforych vainly warned Gorky to keep out of.

The West European overseas empires were altogether different in character. The products of three centuries of commerce, conquest and colonization, they were the beneficiaries of a remarkable global division of labour. At the heart of this ‘imperialism’ – the word became a term of abuse as early as the late 1850s
*
– were a few great cities, which generally combined political, commercial and industrial functions. In their own right, these teeming metropolises were monuments to the material progress of mankind, even if the slums of their East Ends revealed how unequally the fruits of that progress were distributed. Outwards from London, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Hamburg there radiated the lines – shipping lines, railway lines, telegraph lines – that were the sinews of Western imperial power. Regular steamships connected the great commercial centres to every corner of the globe. They criss-crossed the oceans; they plied its great lakes; they chugged up and down its navigable rivers. At the ports where they loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargoes, there were railway stations, and from these emanated the second great network of the Victorian age: the iron rails, along which ran rhythmically, in accordance with scrupulously detailed timetables, a clunking cavalcade of steam trains. A third network, of copper and rubber rather than iron, enabled the rapid telegraphic communication of orders of all kinds: orders to be obeyed by imperial functionaries, orders to be filled by overseas merchants – even holy orders could use the telegraph to communicate with the thousands of missionaries earnestly disseminating West European creeds and ancillary beneficial knowledge to the heathen. These networks bound the world together as never before, seeming to ‘annihilate distance’ and thereby creating truly global markets for commodities, manufactures, labour and capital. In turn, it was these markets that peopled the prairies of the American Mid-West and the steppe of Siberia, grew rubber in Malaya and tea in Ceylon,
bred sheep in Queensland and cattle in the pampas, dug diamonds from the pipes of Kimberley and gold from the rich seams of the Rand.

Globalization is sometimes discussed as if it were a spontaneous process brought about by private agents – firms and non-governmental organizations. Economic historians chart with fascination the giddy growth of cross-border flows of goods, people and capital. Trade, migration and international lending all reached levels in relation to global output not seen again until the 1990s. A single monetary system – the gold standard – came to be adopted by nearly every major economy, encouraging later generations to look back on the pre-1914 decades as a literally ‘golden’ age. In economic terms it doubtless was. The world economy grew faster between 1870 and 1913 than in any previous period. It is inconceivable, however, that such high levels of international economic integration would have come about in the absence of empires. We should bear in mind that, taken together, the possessions of all the European empires – the Austrian, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian – covered more than half of the world’s land surface and governed roughly the same proportion of its population. This was a political globalization unseen before or since. When these empires acted in concert, as they did in Africa from the 1870s and in China from the 1890s, they brooked no opposition.

The
ultima ratio
of the Western empires was, of course, force. But they would not have lasted as long as they did if they had relied primarily on coercion. Their strongest foundation was their ability to create multiple scale-models of themselves through colonial settlement and collaboration with indigenous peoples, giving rise to a kind of ‘fractal geometry of empire’. It meant that a respectable English traveller could anticipate with some confidence the availability of afternoon tea or a stiff gin at the local gentleman’s club whether he was in Durban, Darwin or Darjeeling. It meant that a late Victorian British official could be relied on to have a working knowledge of the local languages and law whether he was in St Kitts, Sierra Leone or Singapore. To be sure, each territory struck its own distinctive balance between Europeans and local elites, depending first and foremost on the attractiveness of the local climate and resources to European immigrants. But by 1901 a kind of ornate uniformity had emerged, modelled on that elaborate system of social hierarchy which foreigners mistook for a class system, but which the British themselves understood as an elaborate and partially unwritten taxonomy of inherited status and royally conferred rank.

Table 1.1: Empires in 1913

Note: Population totals rounded as some figures for colonial populations were clearly estimates.

All the established empires of 1901 sought to make virtues out of their necessities. From the Delhi Durbars of 1877 and 1903 to the parades through Vienna that marked the Emperor Francis Joseph’s birthday, they staged colourful festivities that celebrated their ethnic diversity. British theorists of empire like Frederick Lugard began to argue that ‘indirect rule’, which effectively delegated substantial power to local chiefs and maharajas, was preferable to hands-on ‘direct rule’. Even so, the Western empires were, like their Eastern counterparts, manifestly nearing their ends, as Rudyard Kipling divined in ‘Recessional’ (1897), his finest poem. By the end of the nineteenth century, the costs to the British of maintaining control over their distant possessions were perceptibly rising relative to the benefits, which in any case flowed to a relatively few wealthy investors. Guy de Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
(1885) gives a good flavour of the unedifying nexus that had developed between political elites, financial markets and imperial expansion:

She was saying:

‘Oh, they’ve done something very clever. Very clever… It really is a wonderful operation… An expedition against Tangier had been agreed upon between the two of them the day Laroche became Foreign Secretary and gradually they’ve been buying up the whole of the Moroccan loan which had dropped to sixty-four or sixty-five francs. They did their buying very cleverly, using… shady dealers who wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. They even succeeded in fooling the Rothschilds, who were surprised at seeing such a steady demand for Moroccan stock. Their reply was to mention the names of all the dealers involved, all unreliable and on their beam ends. That calmed the big banks’ suspicions. And so now we’re going to send an expedition and as soon as we’ve succeeded, the French government will guarantee the Moroccan debt. Our friends will have made about fifty or sixty million francs. You see how it works?’…

He said: ‘It really is very clever. As for that louse Laroche, I’ll get even with
him for this. The blackguard! He’d better look out… I’ll have his ministerial blood for this!’

Then he began to think. He said more quietly:

‘But we ought to take advantage of it.’

‘You can still buy the loan,’ she said. ‘It’s only at seventy-two.’