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This chapter explores the relative importance of economic interdependence and trade expectations on the policies of the European great powers from 1790 to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853–54. Since there are many cases where commerce had little or nothing to do with the outbreak of crisis or war, this chapter covers such cases briefly, highlighting their basic causes only to provide a complete survey of the origins of modern conflict and avoid charges of selection bias. Yet as the chapter shows, economic interdependence and trade expectations played a far more significant role in the dynamics of nineteenth-century geopolitics than has been previously recognized.

This chapter traces how American business relations with the two major industrial powers of Europe developed up to 1914. It shows how American economic ties with Britain had been weakening for several years, but then saw a restrengthening as the political threat of a major war loomed larger and larger on the horizon. The Anglo-American relationship became close and in this sense “special” at the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and Germany in August 1914. Meanwhile German–American economic relations, which, despite many political difficulties, had been intensifying after the turn of the century, became antagonistic in the summer of 1914, even if it took until April 1917 for Washington formally to enter the world conflict on the Allied side against Berlin and Vienna.

This chapter examines the validity of the postcolonial view that liberalism is inherently imperialist and culturally monist. In so doing it examines the claim that classical liberal international thought is committed to individual liberty and human dignity in the domestic realm and anti-imperialism and non-interventionism in the international realm. It points to a schizophrenic set of practices where interdependence, non-intervention, and anti-imperialism apply only to relations between ‘civilized’ states but not to the relations between ‘civilized’ and non-European powers. It suggests that the relationship between liberalism and imperialism is a highly complex one, and that liberalism is neither inherently imperialist nor anti-imperialist, but that classical liberalism was inherently and consistently Eurocentric — and perhaps still is.

Africa's resources, of course, had been partitioned for millennia by dispersal, incorporation, and conquest among regional societies; and there were precedents for foreign empire in Algeria and at the Cape. However, this chapter concentrates on the meanings of ‘partition’ in the variety of techniques used to protect the interests of one power. The partitions in Southern Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and East, West and Central Africa to 1890 are shown. A discussion on control and conquest during 1890–1914 is described as well. Ratification of the 1898 Convention the following year and an agreement by France to stay out of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Darfur had a significance beyond Africa. Everywhere in British Africa partition ‘changed the cultural landscape’ and left boundaries which testify to the results of conflict resolution between European powers and between the British and their successors.

This chapter addresses the questions of continuity or change in the way in which the British began to rule the Indian provinces. In particular, it covers the consequences that were to follow, however slowly and uncertainly, from the establishment of a bridgehead in India by a European power with political ambitions and military and economic capacities that were undergoing rapid change. The confederacy of the Indian princes was carried forward on an under-tide of popular anger. The ‘increasing knowledge of the Regulations’ produced an advance in political philosophy among the Indians sooner than Henry Strachey had anticipated in 1802. The progress of political philosophy and the diffusion of the notions of individual liberty and national self-determination enabled Ram Mohun Roy and his generation to expose the paradox of a despotism professedly based on the rule of the law.

This chapter provides a discussion on trade, economy, the fiscal state, and the expansion of the British Empire from the late 16th century to the early 18th century. In particular, it explores the connections between economic growth and Imperial expansion. It focuses on British domestic resources, latent and evolving, which made possible the acquisition of territory overseas and the enforcement of contracts required for long-term commercial relations with the Americas, Asia, Africa, and eventually, Australasia. It investigates from whom, from what, and from where in the economy the outward thrust to venture outside the realm and beyond Europe originated. It asks what structural and political conditions sustained the momentum of the thrust through major wars and minor conflicts with European powers between 1689 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which marked the final defeat of Iberian, Dutch, and above all French pretensions to contain British imperialism and commerce with Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

The manner in which the war came to an end had very important consequences both for the future of Anglo‐American relations and for the impact which the loss of America would have on Britain and its empire. After the loss of an army at Yorktown, British political opinion was no longer supported a war to conquer America. This did not, however, mean that the war as a whole was thought to have ended in total defeat. In fighting against other European powers Britain had begun to hold her own, while America appeared to be in a parlous state close to disintegration. Generous concessions made to the Americans in the peace were therefore widely resented and in retrospect the war came to be seen as much as a triumph of British endurance as a disaster calling for sweeping reforms at home and in the rest of the empire.

This chapter gives an account of the structure and legal status of Britain's colonial empire in the post war period, and that of other European colonial powers. It considers the pressure for international supervision, and British resistance to it, together with the justifications offered for colonialism. It discusses the relationship between the anti-colonial movement and the human rights movement, traces the evolving practice of the United Nations, and concludes with an account of the less defensible aspects of British colonialism.

This chapter contrasts Imperial China's satisfaction with its identity as the Middle Kingdom ruling over tributary states with Russia's insecurity over its relative economic backwardness and exclusion from the European great power club. Beginning with Peter the Great, Russian rulers sought to supplant first Sweden and Poland, then the Ottoman Empire, as members of the great power club. In the mid-nineteenth century, both China and Russia suffered threats to their international standing. China's defeats by the barbarian powers in the 1839–42 and 1856–60 Opium wars gave rise to an identity crisis. After the industrial revolution, Russia also declined in relative power and status, as revealed by its 1856 defeat in the Crimean War. A succession of Russian diplomatic defeats by Germany and Austria over the Balkans, culminating with the military disaster of World War I, further undermined the legitimacy of the tsarist regime.

War aims bearing some resemblance to those that were to feature in the Second World War may be dated back to the sixteenth century. If religious strife may be regarded as the ancestor of the ideological conflicts that were to influence the Second World War, the split between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and the rising power of the Ottoman Empire as an Islamic superstate was a watershed. This chapter examines the evolution of war aims elucidated by the Kingdom of Great Britain; the urge of establishing Russia as a European power in the early eighteenth century; the greatest power in Europe – France – and the unfolding of its revolution from 1789; and Germany and its junior ally, Austria-Hungary, which was the driving force to war in 1914.

This chapter recounts how Western influences began to penetrate the Middle East in the early eighteenth century. It discusses European ideas that infiltrated the East, which were transmitted by Muslim travellers and diplomats in Europe and by western visitors to the East. It also mentions Egyptian rule that brought the official inauguration of the first foreign consulates in Syria, whose presence fostered contacts between representatives of European Christian powers and the local Damascus population. The chapter reviews the direct link between British Jewry's pre-eminent role on behalf of Middle Eastern Jewry until 1860. It discusses the alliance activity in Syria that had a direct impact on the changed attitude of the French consulates in Damascus and Aleppo towards Jewish residents.

This chapter notes that the contradictions of finance and empire were reaching a critical point when Japan's position was “saved” by the great war between the European powers. During the subsequent boom, Japanese leaders attempted to make Japan the political and financial core of Asia. At the same time, ambitious spending policies inadvertently created the straitened financial circumstances of the 1920s. Not only was a way opened out of the financial deadlock, but for the first time in its history, Japan emerged as a financial power, and embarked directly on a program of financial imperialism in China.

This chapter situates the nineteenth-century European Concert of Great Powers—which was at the political centre of the post-Napoleonic international order—and its congresses and ambassador conferences, in the framework of analysis of an emerging law-based peace system, juxtaposing innovations and paradoxes. It shows that paradoxes abound and characterize the structure, the practice, and many outcomes of the nineteenth-century Concert of Great Powers: defending the rights of smaller states entailed secrecy and privileges for the Great. Solidarity cum rivalry led to cooperation. Humanitarian crises triggered new strategic compromises. The Concert majority imposed peace on recalcitrant parties to disputes, yet the two most conservative powers—the Habsburg monarchy and in some cases Russia—refused mediation by the Concert while regarding it as self-evident that other states had to submit to their deliberations.

This chapter is concerned with the islands, and parts of the mainland, which were colonised by the British from the early seventeenth century and named as the British West Indies. The British West Indian colonies formed a link between North and South America and were strategically vital to the European powers. The task of the West India interest was to lobby the government and counter the abolitionists. The naming of black regiments as West Indian fractured the prevailing image of West Indian as signifying an exclusively white identity. Emancipation marked a critical break in ideas about the West Indian. James Anthony Froude's return to an insistence on white West Indians as ‘part of ourselves’ provides an endpoint to the preliminary charting of the shifting meanings of West Indian. Furthermore, the idea of West Indian is part of an older tradition of both colonial and anti-colonial thought.

This chapter is predominantly an analysis of high politics and the role of key individual politicians, who directed and influenced British foreign policy decisions from the period of 1846 to 1859. The chapter mainly focuses on these key politicians, their ideas and policies, and the relationships between them and deals with the mid-Victorian political world as revealed by the available evidence. The ‘politics of foreign policy’ constitutes a helpful shorthand description for three different but fundamentally interlinked aspects of diplomatic and political history: the ministerial direction of foreign policy; intra-party debate about foreign policy; and the place of foreign policy in wider political debates. Thus, this chapter examines Britain as a European power and its primary role until the late 1860s.

This chapter looks at the interaction of Yemenis with states/empires from a political perspective. It documents the processes of exclusion and inclusion that Yemenis have encountered since the arrival of European powers in the region. As well, the chapter illustrates how Yemenis tried to move past their subordinate positions and change their political situations during both the early colonial period and onward into the postwar era. The chapter focuses on how Yemeni interactions with states/empires developed in the context of dynastic changes; the introduction of citizenship rights; the formation of political parties; and the emergence of independence politics, socialism, and neoliberal democracy.

This chapter is an inquiry into the series of events that named and configured Peru as a subject of empire and history and, in particular, into Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's (1539–1616) founding exegesis of “the origin and principle of the name of Peru.” “Peru” is a proper name or signature of history, but before 1500 there was nothing in the world named “Peru.” By the early 1600s, however, “Peru” was one of the most famous names in the world, thanks in part to the words and things engendered by the long reach of the Spanish empire, and to the keen interest of rival European powers and readers in that empire. This chapter tells why Peru's meteoric rise to fame was not a calm affair. Indeed, Peru's violent and resonant founding as a subject of history is of unusual interest precisely because it heralded the sudden birth of globality and its new, universal history.

How did conflicts between European powers impact the lives and health of native communities? This chapter integrates several studies that demonstrate that conflict often results in famine, migration, and other conditions that facilitate disease. During the earliest colonial years, when Europeans pressed into the unknown wilderness of the Americas, conflicts were largely waged between those who had lived there for centuries and those who had not. Skirmishes were fought by natives to protect their kin, their provisions, and their territories. Europeans fought to gain entry to new lands and to acquire new resources. But through time the yardarms of ships from distant lands more frequently advanced.

This concluding chapter further maps the activities of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, their losses and successes, as they attempted to navigate and negotiate with Asian power structures. Overall, the Dutch experience in Japan shows that European footholds in Asia did not invariably morph from isolated trading posts into fortified bases before finally becoming full colonies. Rather, the presence of formidable Asian states meant that even the most forceful of European organizations could be confined to enclaves from which they never escaped. Therefore, it behooves historians to better chart the integration of Europeans into Asian orders, as the old colonial narratives of European powers besting Asian states are only one aspect of the complex web of interactions taking place between the East and the West during the early modern period.

This chapter reflects more generally on the Western perspective against which the examples in this book have been analyzed. It discusses how the West, or rather the forces that shaped European power elites, silenced or dismissed other modalities of thought by rendering them unintelligible. The identity of the West has been framed by the accumulated memory of such processes and mechanisms of cultural expansion.