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CHAPTER OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. The Bismarckian System of Alliances, 1871–90

III. The New Imperialism, 1881–1914A. The Scramble for AfricaB. Imperialism in Asia and the ‘Opening of

China’

IV. The Diplomatic Revolution, 1890–1914

V. The Eastern Question and the Road to War

VI. Militarism and the European Arms Race

VII. The Balkan Crisis of July 1914

VIII. World War I: From the Invasion of Belgium to aWorld WarA. Trench Warfare and the Machine GunB. The Home FrontC. Exhaustion and Armistice, 1917–18

IX. The Russian Revolution: The FebruaryRevolutionA. The October Revolution of 1917B. Civil War, 1918–20

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CHAPTER 27IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND REVOLUTION,1881–1920

Chapter 27 looks at three great experiencesthat shaped European (and global) history inthe twentieth century: (1) the new imperial-ism (1881–1914), in which the great Euro-

pean powers seized control of most of Africa and muchof Asia; (2) World War I (1914–18), which destroyedthe last monarchical empires of the Old Regime; and(3) the Russian Revolution (1917–20), which posed anew and powerful form of mass politics to competewith democracy.

The chapter begins with the background to thesegreat events during two generations of peace. It exam-ines the Bismarckian alliance system, which divided Eu-rope into two opposing sides, and the militarism andarms race, which made this division so dangerous. Al-though it was an era of peace among the Europeangreat powers, the same powers fought dozens of imper-ial wars of conquest and annexed empires around theworld. During the new imperialism, they seized controlof nearly 25 percent of the planet. The discussion ofWorld War I shows how it introduced Europe to a cen-tury of “total war”—in both its destructive battles andlife on the home front. The final section focuses on theRussian Revolution of 1917. This wartime revolutionestablished Lenin’s Communist government in Russia, aregime that introduced Europe to twentieth century totalitarianism.

!The Bismarckian System of Alliances,1871–90The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led tothe creation of a unified German Empire so strong,both militarily and economically, that it dominated Eu-rope, yet Chancellor Otto von Bismarck still fearedFrench revenge. After 1871 he aimed to protect Ger-many by negotiating treaties that would guarantee thesupport of the other powers and deny France potential

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Imperialism, War, and Revolution, 1881–1920 529

allies. He achieved both goals through a web of al-liances collectively known as the Bismarckian system,with which he dominated European diplomacy fortwenty years (1871–90). Bismarck’s accomplishmentradically altered European statecraft. Whereas the Met-ternichian system had kept the peace by a delicate bal-ance of power in which none of the great powersbecame too dominant and none felt too threatened, theBismarckian system kept peace through the lopsidedsuperiority of the German alliances and the compara-tive weakness of France.

French nationalists nonetheless dreamt of the dayof revenge—la revanche—on Germany, the day whenthe republic would reclaim “the lost provinces” of Al-sace and Lorraine, whose borders were marked on themaps of French schools in a deep black. Realistic na-tionalists such as the hero of 1870, Léon Gambetta, un-derstood that Germany had become too powerful tofight alone. The French must wait for revanche; in Gam-betta’s words, they should “[t]hink of it always, speak ofit never.” Despite a war scare in 1875 and a tense periodduring the Boulangist nationalism of the late 1880s, noFrench government planned a war of revenge.

The first treaty in Bismarck’s alliance system wasthe Three Emperors’ League (Dreikaiserbund) of 1873, anoutgrowth of state visits exchanged by William I ofGermany, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, andAlexander II of Russia. The Dreikaiserbund represented anamicable understanding (an entente) among recent ri-vals who shared a belief in monarchical solidarity.(France remained the only republic in monarchical Eu-rope.) The king of Italy soon embraced this counterrev-olutionary league, siding with Germany despite thedebt Italians owed to the French from their wars of uni-fication. The British remained outside this league, fa-voring a policy of continental nonalignment that cameto be called splendid isolation.

The development of the Bismarckian system accel-erated as a result of warfare in the Balkans in 1875–78,which convinced Bismarck to seek more formal treaties.The provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (see map27.1) rebelled against Turkish rule in 1875, and thePrincipality of Serbia intervened to support them. The Serbs had won autonomous government in theirrebellion of 1817 and had become the center of Pan-Slavism, an ardent nationalism dedicated to the unity ofthe southern Slavs. The insurrection against the Ot-toman Empire next spread to Bulgaria in 1876, and theTurks responded with violent repression known in theEuropean press as “the Bulgarian horrors.” This enlargedBalkan war forced the European powers to address a

problem that had come to be called the eastern ques-tion. This was the question of the survival of the Ottoman Empire—still known as “the sick man of Eu-rope”—and the fate of territories under the control ofConstantinople. The eastern question posed the dangerof Austro-Russian conflict because both governmentscoveted Ottoman territory in the Balkans. To avoidsuch a confrontation, Bismarck adopted the role of “thehonest broker” of the eastern question and presidedover the Congress of Berlin (1878) to end the fighting.The British endorsed the congress because it servedtheir policy of preserving the Ottoman Empire ratherthan dismantling it. The Berlin settlement placatedTurkish honor by returning some territory lost in thefighting, and it awarded Balkan territory to both theRussians (Bessarabia) and the Austrians (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Bismarck bought French backing withsupport for colonial expansion. The Slavic nationalistmovements of the Balkans—both Serbian and Bulgar-ian—were not satisfied: Serbs won their independence

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but Pan-Slavs saw Bosnia lost to Austria; the Bulgarianswon independence but lost much territory promised tothem in a preliminary treaty, the Treaty of San Stefano.

The Balkan crisis of 1875–78 drove Bismarck to ne-gotiate a close military alliance with Austria-Hungaryknown as the Dual Alliance (1879), which became thenew cornerstone of his alliance system. The Habsburgprime minister and foreign minister was a Hungarian,Count Julius Andrássy, who held no grudge againstGermany for the war of 1866. Secret terms of the DualAlliance promised each country military assistance ifthey were attacked by Russia and guaranteed neutralityif either were attacked by any other country. Bismarcklabored simultaneously to retain Russian friendship bypreserving and strengthening the Three Emperors’League; he understood that “[i]n a world of five powers,one should strive to be a trois” (on the side with three).Italy, motivated by a growing colonial rivalry withFrance in north Africa, joined the Dual Alliance in1882, converting the pact into the Triple Alliance. Ger-many thus acquired explicit security against France, al-though Bismarck publicly presented the treaty asmerely a bulwark of the monarchical order. To under-score his desire for Russian friendship, Bismarck laternegotiated another Russo-German treaty known as theReinsurance Treaty (1887). This document gave a Ger-man pledge not to support Austrian aggression againstRussia, and it was accompanied by significant Germaninvestment in Russian industrial development. Bothgovernments reiterated their devotion to the status quo.Finally, Bismarck orchestrated a series of secondarytreaties, such as the Mediterranean Agreements (1887),which involved other governments (including Britainand Spain) in the defense of the status quo. The net-work of his treaties became so complex that Bismarckenjoyed the self-bestowed image of being a jugglerwho could keep five balls in the air at once.

!The New Imperialism, 1881–1914The great powers exploited the European peace to an-nex large empires around the world. In 1871 only 10percent of Africa had fallen under European control.Britain held the Cape Colony in South Africa and a fewstrips of West Africa. France had seized Algeria in 1830and had long controlled part of West Africa includingSenegal, while Portugal retained southern colonies dat-ing back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, butmost of the continent remained self-governing. By1914 Europeans claimed virtually the entire continent,

leaving independent only Liberia (under American in-fluence) and Ethiopia (claimed by Italy but uncon-quered) (see map 27.2). The new imperialism had alsoended self-government in the Pacific by 1914. There,the Japanese, who took the Ryuku Islands in 1874 andFormosa in 1895, and Americans, who took Hawaii in1898 and part of Samoa in 1899, joined Europeans inbuilding oceanic empires. Simultaneously, Britain andRussia expanded in southern Asia, Britain and Franceoccupied most of Southeast Asia, and all of the indus-trial powers (including Japan and the United States)menaced China. Empires were growing so fast that aleader of British imperialism, Colonial Secretary JosephChamberlain, gloated, “The day of small nations haslong passed away. The day of empires has come.”

Europeans had been claiming empires around theworld for centuries. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal,Denmark, and the Netherlands all held colonies takenbefore the nineteenth century. According to anestimate made in 1900, the frontiers of Russia had beenadvancing into Asia (much as the United States pushedwestward) at the rate of fifty-five square miles per yearsince the sixteenth century. In the century between the1770s and the 1870s, Russia fought six wars against theOttoman Empire and four wars against Persia, in thecourse of which the czars annexed the Crimea, Geor-gia, and Armenia, then advanced into south Asia andprepared to take Afghanistan. Newly unified Italy andGermany were eager—against Bismarck’s better judg-ment—to join this club. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said in aspeech of 1901, echoing Bülow’s Weltpolitik, Germansalso expected “our place in the sun.”

Europeans had previously built colonial empires,sending colonists to live in distant colonies. The newimperialism of 1881–1914 included little colonialism.Europeans sent soldiers to explore and conquer, offi-cials to organize and administer, missionaries to teachand convert, and merchants to develop and trade, butfew families of colonists. When Germany annexedAfrican colonies in the 1880s, more Germans chose toemigrate to Paris (the capital of their national enemy)than to colonize Africa.

Earlier empires had also been based on mercantilistcommerce. Colonies might provide such diverse goodsas pepper, tulip bulbs, opium, or slaves, but they wereexpected to strengthen or to enrich the imperial state.Economic interests still drove imperialism, but the mo-tor had changed. Imperialists now sought markets forexported manufactures, especially textiles. Theydreamt, in the imagery of one British prime minister, ofthe fortunes to be made if every Oriental bought awoolen nightcap. The rise of trade unions inspired in-


dustrialists to covet cheaper, more manageable, coloniallabor. Financiers needed to find markets for investingthe capital accumulating from industrial profits. As aleading French imperialist, Jules Ferry, said, “Colonialpolicy is the daughter of industrial policy” (see docu-ment 27.1). The new imperialism, however, cannot beexplained entirely by economics. Colonies cost impe-rial governments sums of money for military, adminis-trative, and developmental expenses that far exceededthe tax revenues they produced. Many private enter-prises also lost money on imperialism. In the earlytwentieth century, the five largest banks in Berlin ap-

pealed to the government to stop acquiring coloniesbecause they were losing ventures. Individual investorsusually lost money in colonial stocks; they frequentlypaid neither dividends nor interest and were sold as pa-triotic investments. Some businesses, and the elites whocontrolled them, did make great profits from captivemarkets; textile towns and port-cities prospered in thisway and championed imperialism. A few individualsmade staggering fortunes overseas, as Cecil Rhodes didin the African diamond fields. Rhodes was a strugglingcotton farmer who bought a diamond claim and hiredAfricans to work it. When he died, he was considered

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the richest man on earth. His power was so enormousthat a colony was named for him (Rhodesia, todayZimbabwe), and his fortune was so immense that it en-dowed the famous Rhodes scholarships to Oxford. Notsurprisingly, Rhodes was an ardent imperialist wholamented that he could not annex the stars. Even thefantasy of striking it as rich as Rhodes, however, cannotfully explain why governments ran deficits to pay forempire.

The new imperialism must also be understood interms of nationalism, militarism, and racism (see illus-tration 27.1). Imperialist politicians insisted that empirewas the measure of a nation’s greatness. Nationalist or-ganizations, such as the Pan-German League, pressedtheir government to take more territory. It would“awaken and foster the sense of racial and cultural kin-ship” of Germans to know that their country occupied acity on the coast of China. Journalists, teachers, andscholars promoted similar attitudes about the greatnessof empire. As a Cambridge historian wrote in 1883,“[T]here is something intrinsically glorious in an empire‘upon which the sun never sets.’ ” Even Cecil Rhodes in-

sisted that his motives began with his nationalism. “Icontend,” he wrote, “that we [the British] are the firstrace in the world, and the more of the world we in-habit, the better it is for the human race. I believe it tobe my duty to God, my Queen, and my Country topaint the whole map of Africa red [the color typicallyused to depict British colonies], red from the Cape toCairo.”

Militarism was also a significant factor in imperial-ism. The conquest of distant lands required largerarmies and bigger budgets. Decoration, promotion, andterritory were more easily won against preindustrialarmies. Lord Kitchener became famous for command-ing the outnumbered army that conquered the Sudan in1896–98. Kitchener’s army of twenty-five thousand de-feated an army of fifty thousand because they wereequipped with Maxim (machine) guns, which enabledthem to kill large numbers of Sudanese with relativeease; at the decisive battle of Omdurman, Kitchener’sforces suffered five hundred casualties and killed morethan fifteen thousand Sudanese—“giving them a gooddusting” in Kitchener’s words. Thus, while the nine-

# DOCUMENT 27.1 #

Jules Ferry: French Imperialism (1885)

Jules Ferry (1832–1893) was a wealthy middle-class lawyerwho served as premier of France in the 1880s. He was a moderaterepublican and one of the founders of the Third Republic. Hisgreatest accomplishments came in the creation of the French educa-tional system, but he also became a leading champion of imperial-ism. The following document is excerpted from one of hisparliamentary speeches.

Our colonial policy . . . rests upon our economic princi-ples and interests, on our humanitarian visions of order,and on political considerations. . . .

[Interruptions by hecklers: “Yes, 20,000 corpses!” and“Ten thousand families in mourning!”]

Why have colonies from an economic standpoint? . . .[C]olonies are, for wealthy countries, an advantageous in-vestment. France, which has exported a great amount ofcapital abroad, must consider this aspect of the colonialquestion. There is, however, another point, even more im-portant: . . . For countries like France, devoted to exportsby the nature of their industry, the colonial question is aquestion of markets. . . .

Gentlemen, there is a second point, a second set ofideas, that I must also raise: the humanitarian and civiliz-ing side of imperialism. The honorable Camille Pelletan[another deputy] scoffs at this point. . . . He asks, “What isthis civilization that one imposes with cannon shells?” . . .One must answer that superior races have rights with re-gard to the inferior races. They have rights because theyhave duties. They have the duty to civilize the inferiorraces. . . . Can anyone deny that it was good fortune forthe people of equatorial Africa to fall under the protectionof France and Britain?

. . . I add that French colonial policy . . . is inspired byanother truth which you must reflect upon: a navy such asours cannot survive with the shelters, defenses, supplybases. Just look at the map of the world. . . . No warship,no matter how perfectly organized, can carry more than afourteen day supply of coal, and a warship short of coal isonly a derelict on the high seas.

Journal officiel de la république française. Debates of July 28, 1885.Trans. Steven C. Hause. Paris: Imprimerie des journaux officiels.


Illustration 27.1

" Imperialism. The German satirical review Simplicissimuspublished this commentary in 1904: German imperialism isseen to be an extension of German militarism, whereas Britishimperialism is seen to be an extension of British capitalism.(The captions read, “This is the way the German colonizes.

This is the way the Englishman colonizes.” The sign on thetree says, “It is forbidden to dump trash or snow here.”) Otherdrawings in the series depicted French soldiers making love tonative women and a Belgian roasting an African over an openfire and preparing to eat him.

534 Chapter 27

teenth century appears to be an age of peace for Britainwhen viewed in a European context, it was an epoch ofconstant warfare when viewed in a global context.

In addition to economic and political explanationsof imperialism, Western cultural attitudes are also im-portant. These range from religion and humanitarian-ism to social Darwinism and racism. Christianmissionaries formed the vanguard of imperialist inter-vention in Africa and Asia. They were successful insome regions: Nigeria and Madagascar, for example, areboth more than 40 percent Christian today. In other re-gions, people resisted Christianity as an imperialist in-tervention; as one Indian put it, “Buddha came into ourworld on an elephant; Christ came into our world on acannonball.” Missionaries also taught Western attitudesand behavior, such as denouncing the depravity ofseminudity in tropical climates. Textile manufacturerswere not alone in concluding that “[b]usiness followsthe Bible.” Europeans also justified imperialism byspeaking of humanitarianism. Some used crude stereo-types about abolishing cannibalism or moralistic argu-ments about ending polygamy; others took pride in thecampaign to end the slave trade, which Europeans haddone so much to develop. More educated argumentscited the abolition of practices such as Suttee in India(the tradition by which a widow threw herself on herhusband’s funeral pyre) or the benefits of Western medicine.

Humanitarian justifications for imperialism were of-ten cloaked in terms such as the French doctrine of lamission civilatrice or the title of Rudyard Kipling’s poem“The White Man’s Burden” (1899). Such terms sug-gested the social Darwinian argument that Western civ-ilization was demonstrably superior to others, and thisled to the simple corollaries that (1) in Jules Ferry’swords, “superior races have rights with regard to infe-rior races” and (2) they had a duty to help “backwards”peoples. Kipling, for example, urged advanced states:“Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sicknesscease.” Even humanitarianism thus contained an ele-ment of the racism common in imperialism. Europeanshad often viewed colonial peoples as heathens or sav-ages. Late nineteenth-century social Darwinism wors-ened such stereotypes with the pseudoscientific notionthat all races were locked in a struggle for survival, astruggle to be won by the fittest. Imperialists cheerfullyconcluded that their own nation would win this strug-gle. A president of the United States spoke of his desireto help his “little brown brothers” (the people of thePhilippines). A czar of Russia joked about going to war with “little yellow monkeys” (the Japanese, whopromptly defeated the Russians). By the early twentieth

century, Western racism was so unchallenged that a major zoo exhibited an African in a cage alongsideapes.

The Scramble for AfricaHistorians often cite the French occupation of Tunis in1881 as the beginning of the new imperialism. Frenchpride had been hurt by the events of 1870–71, and ithad received another blow in 1875 when the Britishpurchased control of the Suez Canal (built by theFrench in the 1860s) from the khedive of Egypt. Bis-marck used the distrust generated by the Suez issue toreawaken Anglo-French rivalry. At the Congress ofBerlin in 1878, he encouraged the French to claim Tu-nis, and the congress approved. Jules Ferry, who be-came premier of France in 1880, used the excuse ofraids by Tunisian tribes into Algeria to proclaim aFrench protectorate over Tunis—an act that promptlybenefited Bismarck by driving the Italians into theTriple Alliance. The British responded by using nation-alist riots as an excuse to extend their control of Egyptin 1882. They bombarded Alexandria, occupied Cairo,and placed Egypt under the thumb of a British consul.Nationalist rebellion moved south to the Sudan in1883. It acquired a religious fervor from an Islamicleader known as the Mahdi (messiah); the mahdists de-feated several British garrisons, notably the forces ofGeneral Gordon at Khartoum (1885), and sustained anautonomous government until Kitchener’s victory atOmdurman a decade later.

Anglo-French imperialism in North Africa pro-voked a race among European governments, known as“the scramble for Africa,” to claim colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. In the five years between 1882 and1887, Europeans claimed more than two million squaremiles of Africa. (The United States today totals lessthan 3.7 million square miles.) In 1884 alone, Germanytook more than 500,000 square miles as German South-west Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon, and Togo;two years later, they added nearly 400,000 square milesas German East Africa (today Tanzania). The largestsingle claim, nearly a million square miles of centralAfrica known as the Congo, was taken by KingLeopold II of Belgium in 1885. Leopold then founded acompany that brutally exploited the Congo as a gigan-tic rubber plantation, under the ironic name of theCongo Free State. But even land grabs that huge couldnot compete with the British and French empires; by1914 Great Britain and France each controlled approxi-mately five million square miles of Africa.


The scramble for Africa had repercussions in Euro-pean diplomacy, chiefly the reopening of the colonialrivalry between Britain and France. After GeneralKitchener’s victory at Omdurman, his troops con-fronted a small French exploratory mission, the Mar-chand mission, which had camped on the upper Nile atthe Sudanese town of Fashoda. Kitchener and Mar-chand both claimed Fashoda, but the size of Kitchener’sforces obliged the French to leave. The Fashoda crisisshowed that France remained vulnerable in 1898.

In the following months, however, the vulnerabilityof British diplomatic isolation was exposed by Britain’sinvolvement in the Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers,white settlers of mixed Dutch and Huguenot descent,had created a republic, the Transvaal, in Bantu territorynorth of the Britain’s Cape Colony in South Africa. TheBritish annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but a revolt in1880–81 earned the Boers autonomy under the strongleadership of President Paul Kruger. Tensions remainedhigh, however, especially after the discovery of vast de-posits of gold in the Transvaal. An Anglo-Boer warbroke out in 1899. The Boers won initial victories, be-sieged the British at Mafeking and Ladysmith, andearned international sympathy, especially after theBritish placed 120,000 Boer women and children inconcentration camps (the first use of this term) to limitsupport for Boer guerrillas and twenty thousand died,chiefly from disease. Massive British reinforcements un-der General Kitchener reversed the course of the war in1900, lifting the siege of Mafeking, capturing the Boercapital of Pretoria, and again annexing the Transvaal.The Boer leaders continued resistance in two years ofguerrilla fighting before accepting the British victory inthe Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902.

The Boer War was the largest imperial war inAfrica, but it should not distract attention from thewars of African resistance to imperialism. The Britishannexation of the Transvaal, for example, led them intothe Zulu War of 1879, which showed that a poorlyequipped African army could defeat Europeans. TheAshanti tribes of West Africa, in what is now Ghana,resisted the British in four wars during the nineteenthcentury, three of them fought between 1873 and 1896.The Ashanti, too, won battles against the British. TheFrench likewise experienced defeats in fighting two Da-homeyan wars (in today’s Benin); the Mandingo tribes(in today’s Ivory Coast) resisted French occupation ofthe interior for thirteen years (1885–98) making a greathero of their chief, Samory. The Hereros (Bantu tribesof southwest Africa) and the Hottentots withstood theGerman army for nearly six years (1903–08). They did

not capitulate until the Germans had reduced theHerero population from eighty thousand to fifteenthousand. The Ethiopians threw out European invaders;Emperor Menelik II resisted an Italian occupation in1896, and his forces annihilated an Italian army in themassive battle (more than 100,000 combatants) of Adowa.

Europeans eventually won most imperial wars. Theadvantage of modern armament is sufficient explana-tion, as Kitchener demonstrated in the bloody engage-ment on the plains of Omdurman. In the blunt words ofone poet, “Whatever happens we have got/The MaximGun, and they have not.” Europeans also held a numeri-cal advantage whenever they chose to use it; defeatsusually summoned reinforcements that Africans couldnot match, as the Bantus, the Zulus, and the Boerslearned. The Italian army was outnumbered by eightythousand to twenty thousand at Adowa. If Italy hadwanted Ethiopia badly enough to obtain a four-to-oneadvantage (the Italian army and militia of the 1890snumbered nearly three million men), they, too, mighthave won. Europeans also succeeded in imperial con-quests because of biological and medical advantages.Westerners had an advantage in nutrition that trans-lated into larger, healthier armies, and invaders carryingsmallpox, whooping cough, or the measles sometimescarried a biological weapon better than gunpowder.Conversely, African diseases (especially malaria) hadlong blocked European penetration of the continent.When the French occupied Tunis in 1881, malaria tooktwenty-five times as many soldiers as combat did. Euro-peans knew that quinine, derived from the bark of thecinchona tree, prevented malaria, and scientists isolatedthe chemical in 1820, but not until the late nineteenthcentury did they synthesize quinine in adequate quanti-ties to provide an inexpensive daily dose for largearmies. Such scientific conquests made possible the mil-itary conquest of Africa.

Imperialism in Asia and the ‘Opening of China’Europeans began their conquests in Asia in the earlysixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century (seemap 27.3), Britain dominated most of south Asia (to-day’s India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) andAustralasia (Australia and New Zealand). They had be-gun to expand into Southeast Asia, annexing much ofBurma (now Myanmar) in 1853. This led them intocompetition with the French who landed troops in An-nam (Vietnam) in 1858. Most of the East Indies hadbeen claimed by the Dutch (the Dutch East Indies,

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today Indonesia) or the Spanish (the Philippines) forcenturies. China and Japan had largely resisted Westernpenetration, except for toeholds such as Hong Kong,which the British leased in 1841.

The new imperialism refreshed the European ap-petite for Asia. Between 1882 and 1884 the French sub-jugated the region of modern Vietnam, and their

expedition continued until Cambodia (1887) and Laos(1893) were combined with Annam to form FrenchIndo-China. This prompted the British to completetheir annexation of Burma (1886) and to reach southfor the Malay States (today Malaysia), which became aBritish-run federation in 1896. By the turn of the cen-tury, only Siam (Thailand) remained independent in

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MAP 27.3" Asia in 1914 "


the entire subcontinent, and Siamese freedom de-pended upon Anglo-French inability to compromise.Most of Southeast Asia had been under the loosesuzerainty of the Manchu dynasty of China, and theEuropean conquests of 1882–96 exposed the vulnera-bility of that regime. Japan’s easy military victory in theSino-Japanese War of 1894–95—the result of a decadeof rivalry over Korea, which Japan seized in 1894—un-derscored that lesson. The Treaty of Shimonosekiended that war, with China granting independence toKorea and ceding the province of Kwantung (west ofKorea) and the island of Formosa (Taiwan) to Japan.

Europeans could not resist exploiting the infirmityof the Chinese Empire. Their initial intervention, how-ever, was against the Japanese, who were obliged to re-turn Kwantung to China. Then, in 1896, the Russiansextracted a treaty allowing them to build the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Chinese province ofManchuria to the port of Vladivostok. Shortly there-after, the Russians simply occupied Manchuria. In early1897 the Germans followed the Japanese and Russiansinto China by occupying the northern port city ofKiaochow after two German missionaries had beenkilled in that region. These events launched anotherimperialist scramble, this time known as “the openingof China.” Unlike their outright annexation of land inAfrica, European governments used the genteel deviceof pressing the Manchu government to sign ninety-nine-year “leases” to “treaty ports” along the coast ofChina. During 1898 the Germans extracted a lease toKiaochow, the Russians to the Liaodong peninsula andPort Arthur, the French to Kwangchow in the south(near to Indo-China), and the British to both Wei-Hai-Wei in the north and Kowloon (near Hong Kong) inthe south.

While Europeans were extracting leases to Chineseterritory, another war shifted imperialist attention fur-ther east, to the islands of the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish-American War of 1898—chiefly fought in theCaribbean, following a Cuban insurrection againstSpanish rule in 1895—completed the collapse of theSpanish colonial empire. The victorious United States,which had won an important naval victory against theSpanish at Manila, claimed the Philippine archipelago(the largest Spanish colony) and fought a three-yearwar (1899–1901) to subdue Filipino nationalists. TheUnited States chose to follow European imperialismand established an American government for the is-lands. This stimulated a race to claim the remaining is-lands of the Pacific. Germany and the United States,both eager for bases to support global fleets, led thisrush. Between 1899 and 1914 Germany claimed dozens

of north Pacific islands (such as the Mariana Islands,the Caroline Islands, and the Marshall Islands, whichwould become famous battlegrounds of World War II).The United States took Hawaii (1898), Guam (1898),and Wake Island (1900), while joining Germany andBritain in dividing the Samoan Islands (1899). By 1914no self-governing atoll survived in the Pacific.

The Asian resistance to Western imperialism, likethe African resistance, was repeatedly expressed witharms. The opening of China in 1898 precipitated a tur-bulent period in Chinese history that included an uprising against foreigners, the Boxer Rebellion(1900–01). The Boxers, the European name for a para-military organization of Chinese nationalists whohoped to expel all foreigners from China, began the up-rising by attacking Christian missionaries and theirconverts. Violence spread to Beijing, culminating in themurder of the German ambassador and a siege of West-ern legations. A multinational expedition put down theBoxer Rebellion and conducted punitive missions intoprovincial China.

Japan provided the most successful opposition toEuropean imperialism in Asia. European interventionagainst the Japanese in 1895, followed by provocationssuch as the Russian occupation of Manchuria, lease toPort Arthur, and penetration of Korea led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The Japanese attackedPort Arthur in February 1904, trapping the entire Russ-ian Pacific fleet except for the ships icebound at Vladi-vostok. A few weeks later, the Japanese army landed inKorea, advanced into Manchuria, and defeated theRussian army. In the spring of 1905, a Russian Europeanfleet reached the Orient only to be destroyed (thirty-three of forty-five ships were sunk) in the battle ofTsushima Strait between Japan and Korea.

Resistance to European imperialism went beyondthe Indo-Chinese wars of the 1880s, the Boxer uprisingof 1900, and the Japanese victory of 1904–05. Well-organized nationalist movements appeared in the earlytwentieth century. In 1908, for example, a group ofmoderate nationalists wrote a constitution for the Indian National Congress (later, the Congress Party),calmly stating their objective of winning self-government by constitutional means. The African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa originated ata similar meeting in 1912. Many of the nationalists who would lead the twentieth-century resistance toWestern imperialism emigrated to Europe where theyreceived formal and informal educations in dealing withEuropean governments. Ho Chi Minh, the leader ofVietnamese armed resistance to French, Japanese, andAmerican imperialism, lived in France as a young man;

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there he joined in the foundation of the French Com-munist Party. Perhaps the most impressive resistance toimperialism was begun by an Indian lawyer, MohandasGandhi. Gandhi began his career as a lawyer defendingIndian laborers in South Africa in 1889. There he de-veloped a policy of nonviolent resistance known by theSanskrit word Satyagraha. Despite harassment, beatings,and imprisonment, Gandhi stood with the moral forceof Satyagraha and gained a global reputation. When thefrustrated British deported him to India, Gandhibrought passive resistance to Indian nationalism.

!The Diplomatic Revolution,1890–1914Imperial rivalries strained the Bismarckian system in Eu-rope, but his network of alliances survived until KaiserWilhelm II sent Bismarck into retirement in 1890. Theyoung emperor followed the advice of one of Bismarck’srivals, Baron Fritz von Holstein, to revise the Bismarck-ian system because Bismarck’s promises to Russia riskedlosing the close alliance with Austria. Despite repeatedRussian requests, the kaiser therefore decided not to re-new the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, and it lapsed threemonths after the dismissal of Bismarck. Instead, Wil-helm expanded the Triple Alliance in 1891, givinglarger promises of support to Austria-Hungary andItaly. The consequence of the lapsing of ReinsuranceTreaty was Franco-Russian friendship. One year afterBismarck’s departure, a French fleet paid a symbolicvisit to the Russian port of Kronstadt (near St. Peters-burg) and Franco-Russian negotiations began; Frenchpledges of loans to help industrialize Russia quickly ledto the August Convention of 1891, an informal guaran-tee of cooperation. Avid French diplomacy expandedthis into a military treaty, the Franco-Russian Allianceof 1894. Through this pact, the czar pledged to use thefull Russian army against Germany, if Germany invadedFrance; the reciprocal French promise gave Russia secu-rity against Austria and Germany. To be ready for war,both sides also pledged to mobilize their armies as soon as any member of the Triple Alliance began mobilization.

The 1890s witnessed a further weakening of theGerman position as a result of deteriorating Anglo-German relations. The rise of Germany as an industrialpower caused a rivalry for markets and aroused hostilepublic opinion in both countries. The jingoistic presscontributed significantly to the worsening relations.The trade rivalry made the British question their tradi-

tion of free trade, and newspapers were soon denounc-ing goods “Made in Germany.” German imperialismand German sympathy for the Boers (the kaiser sent anotorious telegram of encouragement to PresidentKruger in 1896) worsened relations further. Germancolonies contributed to the emergence of a larger prob-lem: the German decision to build a great navy.Through the efforts of Admiral von Tirpitz, Germanyadopted an ambitious Naval Law in 1898 and expandedthat construction program with a second Naval Law in1900. The British, who had long counted upon “rulingthe waves” as their insurance against invasion, hadadopted a vigorous naval building policy in 1889known as “the two-power standard”; that is, they wouldbuild a navy equal to the combined forces of any tworivals. This policy, in combination with the Germannaval laws, led Europe to a dangerous arms race.

When the Fashoda crisis rekindled Anglo-Frenchcolonial disputes in 1898, some British statesmen, ledby Joseph Chamberlain, argued that the governmentmust abandon splendid isolation and enter the Euro-pean alliance system. Chamberlain suggested resolvingAnglo-German differences and negotiating an Anglo-German alliance, but his unofficial talks with minordiplomats in 1898–1901 failed to persuade either PrimeMinister Salisbury or Chancellor von Bülow, and theywere flatly rejected by the kaiser. The French foreignminister who yielded to Britain in the Fashoda crisis,Théophile Delcassé, responded by seizing the opportu-nity to open Anglo-French negotiations over their gen-erations of colonial differences. By skillfully expandingcolonial negotiations, Delcassé became the architect ofa diplomatic revolution that ended British isolation andthe hegemony of the Triple Alliance. His greatest ac-complishment was an Anglo-French agreement of 1904known as the Entente Cordiale (cordial understanding).The entente was not a military treaty comparable to theTriple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance. It simplyresolved colonial disputes: France recognized Britishpreeminence in Egypt, and Britain accepted the Frenchposition in Morocco. Starting with this quid pro quo, thetwo governments were able to end squabbles aroundthe globe.

The German reaction to the Entente Cordiale wasto provoke an international crisis over Morocco in1905. Germany, which had a growing commercial in-terest in Morocco, had been excluded from talks on thesubject, although Delcassé had conducted subsequentnegotiations on Morocco to acquire the support ofSpain (by giving up the Moroccan coast oppositeSpain) and of Italy (by backing an Italian claim toTripoli). The Moroccan Crisis (later called the first Mo-


roccan Crisis) resulted from a state visit by Kaiser Wil-helm II to Tangier, Morocco, where he made a strongspeech in defense of Moroccan independence. WhenDelcassé proposed that some territorial concession bemade to Germany to recognize the French position inMorocco, the kaiser refused. This confrontation led, atthe invitation of the sultan of Morocco, to an interna-tional conference at Algeciras (Spain) in 1906, whereDelcassé’s diplomacy succeeded again, although he wasdriven from office in France by fears that he was dan-gerously provoking Germany. The crisis strengthenedthe Entente Cordiale and prompted closer Anglo-French military conversations; and when a vote wastaken at Algeciras, only Austria supported Germany.The survival of the entente cordiale convinced the Re-ichstag to adopt a third Naval Law in 1906, but that inturn frightened the British enough to negotiate theirterritorial disputes with Russia in south Asia (Persia andAfghanistan). The Russians recognized the need forthis in the aftermath of their defeat in 1905; the resul-tant Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 divided Persia intospheres of influence and exchanged a Russian agree-ment to stay out of Afghanistan in return for Britishsupport for Russian naval access to the Mediterranean.This entente combined with the Entente Cordiale tocreate the Triple Entente. The Triple Entente did notinclude the explicit military provisions of the Triple Al-liance, but Britain, France, and Russia soon entered intotalks to plan military cooperation. Whereas Frenchdiplomats once worried about their isolation by Bis-marck, the diplomatic revolution made Germans speakangrily of their Einkreisung (encirclement) by hostilecompetitors.

!The Eastern Question and the Road to WarThis division of Europe into two competing alliancesmeant that virtually any local crisis could precipitate ageneral war. Europe held several grave local problems,but the worst remained the eastern question. Bismarck’sCongress of Berlin in 1878 had not settled this issue, ithad merely temporized by placating the great powers;it did nothing to resolve Balkan nationalist claims or tosettle the internal problems of the Ottoman Empire.Fighting resumed in the Balkans in the 1880s and hadbecome severe in 1885 when Bulgarian nationalists inEast Rumelia sought unity with Bulgaria, and Serbiawent to war to prevent the creation of a large Bulgariaon its frontier. Fighting broke out twice in the 1890s,

then two more times in the early twentieth century be-fore the next major crisis, known as the Balkan crisis of1908. The crisis began with a long-simmering rebellionof westernizers inside the Ottoman Empire, known asthe Young Turk rebellion; the victorious Young Turkswon numerous concessions from the Sultan and ex-posed the weakness of the government in Constantino-ple to resist changes.

Almost constant crises wracked the Balkans from1908 to 1914. Austria-Hungary, which had establisheda claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, took ad-vantage of the Ottoman crisis to annex the twoprovinces in 1908. This act outraged Pan-Slav national-ists in Serbia who had long seen Serbia as “the Pied-mont of the Balkans” and anticipated a merger withBosnia in a union of the southern Slavs (the Yugo Slavsin the Serbian language). After the annexation, Slavicnationalists turned increasingly to revolutionary soci-eties, such as the Black Hand, to achieve unity. The1911 statutes of the Black Hand stated the dangerbluntly: “This organization prefers terrorist action to in-tellectual propaganda.” The Habsburg monarchy wassoon to discover that this was not an idle threat. Noneof the European powers was pleased by the annexationof Bosnia, but none intervened to prevent it.

The continuing weakness of the Ottoman Empire,militancy of Balkan nationalism, and reluctance of thegreat powers to intervene led to a succession of crises.In 1911 a second Moroccan crisis occurred, in whichGermany sent the gunboat Panther to Morocco to pro-tect German interests and the French conceded terri-tory in central Africa to resolve the dispute. In 1912 awar broke out in North Africa, in which Italy invadedTripoli to acquire their compensation for French gainsin Morocco. Later that year, open warfare began in theBalkans when Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, andGreece joined to attack the Ottoman Empire and de-tach some of the few remaining Turkish provinces inEurope; the Italians soon joined this First Balkan War(1912–13) by invading the Dodecanese Islands off thecoast of Turkey. After the Turks had conceded territoryto all of the belligerents, they quarreled among them-selves; several states fought Bulgaria in the SecondBalkan War (1913) to redivide the spoils, but nationalistambitions were still unsatisfied.

!Militarism and the European Arms RaceImperial competition, alliance system rivalries, and theBalkan crises were all happening in an age of militarism.

chapter imperialism, war, and revolution, 1881–1920 c€¦ · iii. the new imperialism,...

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