Although western traders and evangelists had been banished from Japan and China in earlier centuries, the people of East Asia deceived themselves in believing that western expansion in the Orient had been halted. In the eighteenth century western traders continued to demand the right to trade where they wished and on equal terms (an idea inconceivable to the Chinese mind). Britain was determined to obtain commercial access to the Chinese market, come what may. The traditional Chinese view that China was superior to the other nations of the world should no longer be tolerated. China should not be allowed to refuse the civilizing medium of western trade, western diplomacy and western religion. Certainly, it should not be allowed to exclude Britain's manufactures or British opium - one of the leading and most profitable exports of British India. It was purposeless for the Chinese to point out that the use of opium was outlawed in China, and that they needed nothing from the West except to be left alone. In the Opium War1 the British used cannon and gunpowder (Chinese inventions) to impose their will on China.
What staggers the imagination about the British invasion of China is how a country of approximately 20 million people could impose its will upon a far older country of enormous size and numbers. In 1840 China's population was thought to be in the region of 400 million - far more than the whole of Europe, including Russia. The answer is that whereas Britain was technically superior, unified, well-armed, righteous, overwhelmingly aggressive and dominant at sea, China was technologically backward, tradition-bound, disunited, ill-led and ill-armed. The Chinese might have been able to meet the military challenge of the Europeans in the fifteenth century, but not in the nineteenth. What Britain lacked in numbers they made up for with superior weapons and superior tactics. Cannons made of bronze and bamboo were no match for British gunboats. The chaos resulting from severe population
Pressure, endless rebellions, corruption, incompetence and growing poverty made China too weak to resist. China was forced to come to terms.
If Britain chose to use illegal opium as a pretext for invasion, it was because opium was the only commodity it had which might produce a favourable balance of trade with a largely self-sufficient China. Raw cotton from India had been tried and had failed; opium proved better. As ever-increasing opium imports exceeded China's exports of tea, silk, paper and porcelain, what had been a net inflow of silver was converted into a net outflow.2
No sooner had the British gained commercial and legal concessions in China under the humiliating Nanking (Nanjing) Treaty of 18423 than the other westerners, including Russians and Americans, hastened to obtain similar privileges. The Americans were quick to exploit the highly profitable opium trade, bringing supplies from Turkey and the Levant.
Russian expansion in China differed from that of the other western powers. Profits did not interest the Russians as much as territory. Taking advantage of growing Chinese disorder, in 1858, under the Treaty of Aigun, Russia laid claim to all the territory north of the Amur (Map XI). The following year, in 1859, it seized the province of Manchuria. In 1860 Vladivostok was founded. Also in 1860 the Maritime Provinces north of Korea were annexed (territory which Russia still holds and China is determined to recover). In contrast, the first treaty between the United States and China in 1844 aimed not at expanding the American frontier overseas, but at enlarging American commerce.
From 1842 onward intermittent hostilities between China and Britain and France continued. Under the treaties of Tientsin (Tianjin), 1858, between China and Britain, France, the United States and Russia, China was forced to open still more ports to western traders. The opium trade was legalized. Also forced upon China was the establishment of foreign legations at Peking, and the unhindered activity of foreign trade. The establishment of foreign legations was particularly humiliating because it suggested that European nations were equal in stature to China, which was contrary to the Confucian tradition, which held that those who ruled China were the divinely appointed rulers of the world. The unhindered activity of Christian evangelists in China was also conceded. To ensure that the large indemnities demanded by the British would be paid, the English took control of all customs duties levied on foreign goods. In retribution for Chinese intransigence, in 1860 British and French troops occupied Peking and burnt the Summer Palace. The outcome was still further humiliating concessions on the part of China.
An added indignity for China was the recruiting of Chinese coolie labourers to work in European colonial territories. By the 1860s, 100,000 Chinese had been shipped to Peru in conditions not far removed from slavery. Another 150,000 had gone to Cuba. Although some efforts were made from the 1870s to learn something about the basis of western supremacy (by sending students abroad and by establishing overseas diplomatic missions), the Manchu elite never took such efforts seriously. How could an inferior people teach a superior people anything? Most of them scorned western science and technology. The first railway forced upon the Chinese was promptly dismantled and left to rust. Although the 'self-strengthening movement' of the 1860s-1870s led to some improvements in railways, ports, metal and textile mills, and weapons, the Chinese never responded to western incursions as decisively as the Japanese had done. Anyone, including the emperor, who expressed a wish to change was either banished or imprisoned by the reactionary Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. Failing to understand the western challenge, the Manchu court saw no reason to abandon their traditions.
And so, against a background of war (in 1883-5 France fought China over Indo-China), famine4 and internal rebellions - the worst of which was the Taiping Rebellion5 (1850-64), which aimed to free the Chinese from the predations of both the Manchus and the intruding Europeans, and in which it is said millions of Chinese lost their lives - the despoiling of China by the West continued. Territory north of the Amur was lost to Russia; Britain and France removed Burma and Vietnam from Chinese tutelage; Russian and British incursions into Tibet encouraged its claim to independence from China. Because of western intrusion, civil war and famine, the population in China at the end of the century was little more than it had been in the 1830s.
The final humiliation for China in the nineteenth century came not from the West but from the East. In 1894 a war broke out between the Chinese and the Japanese over Korea in which the western-style Japanese Army disastrously routed the Chinese. As a result, Japanese influence became paramount in Korea; Chinese Formosa (Taiwan) was annexed. Beset and exploited by East and
West, with reform blocked by the conservative Manchus who had ruled the country since 1644, with corruption at every level of government, the Chinese state could do nothing else but collapse. Foreign intervention may not have caused the decline of the Manchus, but it certainly accelerated it.
By the end of the nineteenth century, western exploitation of China was rampant. By then the western nations had established claims in thirteen of China's 18 provinces. The United States 'Open Door Policy' in China at the end of the nineteenth century, despite its superior moral tone (it would, it was said, curb the worst effects of European imperial ambitions), ended up serving American business interests. When in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion (18991900), the Chinese laid siege to the foreign legations in Peking, the foreign powers, including Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan and Russia (which seized the opportunity to occupy most of Manchuria), quickly put it down. Still more concessions and a huge indemnity followed. Having failed to master western technology, China was forced to succumb to it. A disunited China remained the prey of all.
In October 1911, with the Manchu dynasty on the point of collapse, a revolution broke out under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen6 (1866-1925). In 1912 the Manchus were overthrown; nothing had brought them down as much as their refusal to change. The last Chinese emperor, the infant Pu Yi, was forced to abdi-cate.7 Without the necessary military, political and financial backing, the new republic soon foundered. Sun Yat-sen was obliged to surrender power of the Kuomintang (Guomindang) Party to General Yuan Shikai who disregarded the aims of the revolutionaries. In 1913, having staged an unsuccessful revolt against Yuan, Sun fled to Japan. After Yuan's death in 1916, political power was fought over by the provincial warlords. Not until Mao came to power in 1949 was China effectively united again under a single administration.
Japanese reaction to the renewed nineteenth-century western activity in east Asia differed markedly from that of the Chinese. Japan's martial samurai traditions, its intense nationalism, its strong sense of self-identity, its deeply ingrained 'work ethic', its remarkable homogeneity, its communal loyalty, its morale and its discipline, its good government, its insularity and its prosperous conditions made it much more difficult to coerce. Of the greatest importance was the Tokugawa Shogunate's (1603-1868) ruthless exclusion of western influence, which spared Japan the fate suffered by the Philippines, India, China and Formosa.
The turning point for Japan came in 1853 with the arrival of four American warships, commanded by Matthew C. Perry. The outcome of Perry's visit was Japan's reluctant agreement to open its ports to US trade, and to establish a consulate. In 1858 a more elaborate agreement was made extending US commercial interests. Other western nations quickly pressed for similar concessions.
Japan met the signing of the shameful 'Unequal Treaties' forced upon it by the Americans and the Europeans in 1858, with a strategy of procrastination. Being the only nation on record to have given up using the gun,8 it could hardly do otherwise. Baffled by the Japanese genius for forestalling, in the 1860s an angered West (including the US) bombarded the Japanese coast. The bombardments, however, only served to undermine the Tokugawa regime which, like the Manchus, had failed to meet the challenge of western technology. The revolt which followed had as its aim the restoration of the emperor.
Japan's experience during the crucial 1860s demonstrates the complex set of circumstances which determine a nation's destiny. If Japan had not put its own house in order with the political reformation of 1868, if the spread of clan warfare had robbed the nation of all leadership in national affairs, if any further serious provocation of the western powers had been made after the Allied naval demonstration at Osaka in November 1865, if Japan had been unable to alter its social structure - if any of these things had happened (and the 1860s were critical years when anything might have happened), Japan could have suffered the same fate as the rest of Asia. Japan also had extraordinary luck in being able to meet the western threat when it did. Mutiny against the British in India in the 1850s, civil war in the United States in the 1860s, and the struggle between France and Prussia in the 1870s, all helped to deflect the attention of the West from Japan and preserve Japanese independence.
The success of rebel armies in 1868 led to the fall of the Tokugawas and the recovery of imperial power by the 16-year-old Emperor Meiji.9 Realizing that it could no longer be isolated from the world, the Meiji regime began a process of westernization. Instead of shunning western ways, as the Chinese had done, the Japanese eagerly studied western systems of government, western systems of industry (which had produced such material wealth) and western military and naval technology, the backbone of western power. The new Japanese Army was modelled on that of the French, and later the Prussian military; the navy was built on British lines. In 1871 feudalism was abolished. In 1872 a national education system was introduced. In 1873 the samurai, the hereditary warrior class, were replaced by a regular, western-type conscript army. With the aid of this conscript army of commoners, the new government was able to quash the last of the samurai uprisings in 1877. Between the 1870s and the 1890s a modern court and legal system, based first on French and then on German models, was established. Western dress, first adopted by the military, spread to other parts of Japanese society. The beard, military uniform and medals worn by the Meiji Emperor were innovations all borrowed from western royalty. Japanese scholars and travellers were sent to the West in search of knowledge. At great expense to the state, foreign technicians and experts were brought to Japan. Countless western books were imported and translated. Far from spurning the West, without abandoning its own traditions and virtues, Japan sought to adopt western ways. In 1890 it provided itself with a new constitution based upon the German Imperial Constitution of 1871. In 1897 it tied its currency to the European-devised gold standard. Increasingly, the cry became: 'Japanese spirit, western talents'. The Japanese were encouraged in all these efforts by their victory over China in 1895.
Emerging from 250 years of isolation, Japan's task of catching up with the West was immense. Whereas Europe's Industrial Revolution had been a step-by-step organic process, growing naturally out of traditional crafts and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, Japan's ability to meet the West on its own terms depended on its taking giant strides. Possessing the necessary human qualities, as well as the required pre-industrial skills and technology, the western challenge was met. Japan succeeded in developing its economy almost entirely independent of foreign money; even more remarkable, it transformed its society with less social and political disarray than had occurred in the West. The need and the desire for change was felt throughout Japanese society - even among the peasant class. By the First Great War Japan had become one of the world's great powers. Its status as such was confirmed by the role it was accorded by the western powers at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Meanwhile, Japan had launched itself upon a course of territorial expansion. It could not become a great power in the world unless it did so. In the 1870s it attacked Formosa, annexed the Ryukyu Islands (including Okinawa), exchanged part of Sakhalin with Russia for the Kuriles, and with subtle support from the British, who feared Russian more than Chinese expansion, began to contest China's interests in Korea (Map XI). In 1894 it invaded Korea (as it had done unsuccessfully under Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century) and overwhelmed a much larger Chinese army and navy.
Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, China was compelled to open four more ports to international trade and pay an indemnity of $20 million (obtained from the British at 5 per cent). Japanese rule was extended over Korea, Formosa, the Pescadores Islands, the Liaotung Peninsula (which the European powers later persuaded it to give up) and southern Manchuria (Map XI).
Impressed by the Japanese performance, in 1899 the western powers ceded their extra-territorial rights in Japan. In the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 Japan became an ally of the most powerful nation of all: Britain. To meet growing Russian power in East Asia, Britain had increased Japan's power. The move, in so far as it enabled Britain to bring home most of its eastern fleet to guard its shores, strengthened Britain's hand against Germany.
In 1904 Japan decided to end the growing impasse between itself and Russia over Korea and Manchuria by force.10 Backed by Britain, it struck suddenly at the Russian fleet stationed in the ports of Chemulpo (Inchon) in Korea and Port Arthur (Lushun) on the Liaotung Peninsula. Landings were made; the Russian Army was pursued and eventually overwhelmed at Mukden in February 1905. The annihilation of Russia's northern battle fleet at the Tsushima Straits off Japan in May 1905 (32 Russian warships were sunk) completed the Russian disaster (Map IX). The destruction of Russia's sea power in the East made it feasible for Britain to transfer still more of its eastern fleet to stations in the North Sea.
Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 is a landmark in modern history. It was the first time that an Asian people had defeated a European power both on land and sea simultaneously. With Russia's defeat, the myth of western omnipotence was exploded. Japan became the spearhead of Asian nationalism. Nationalism in India, Persia, China and Turkey was given a tremendous stimulus. The Russian Revolution of 1905 provided added impetus, especially in India. The return of Asia to the forefront of world history had begun.
Japan's victory dramatically altered the balance of power on the Asian landmass, as well as in the Pacific. Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 Russia acknowledged Japan's paramount interest in Korea. It also renewed Japan's lease of the Liaotung Peninsula (including Port Arthur and the existing mining and railway privileges there), and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin. Manchuria was divided into spheres of Russian and Japanese influence. Not surprisingly, in 1905 Britain expressed its willingness to renew the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 for another ten years. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea and called it Chosun. Despite uprisings in Korea, the United States recognized Japan's annexation in return for its recognition of US authority in the Philippines.
The First Great War brought further wealth and glory to Japan. With the US it was one of the war's principal victors. Quite apart from new trade opportunities, the war resulted in Japan's occupation of the Shantung (Shandong) Province of China, and of Germany's colonies in the Pacific. From the 'twenty-one demands' made of China by Japan in 1915 to the occupation of the Shantung Province in 1919, China was treated by the Japanese as little more than a protectorate. To countries in the East, Japan had become less the spearhead of Asia's freedom and more like a western colonial power. Thus were sown the seeds of Asia's love-hate relation with Japan. While few realized it, a new and deadly threat to the United States and Australia had appeared above the horizon.
Korea's history goes back into a legendary past. Harassed from the earliest times by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Manchus and the Japanese, few nations have fought so hard and so long for independence. In 1392, following the Korean defeat of the Mongols, the Yi dynasty (which was to last until 1910) was established. During the first 150 years of its life, the dynasty flourished intellectually and culturally. In 1403, about 50 years before Johannes Gutenberg, the Koreans invented a moveable printing type. In 1420 a royal college of literature was established. In 1443 a phonetic alphabet was developed. Important advances were also made in medicine, astronomy, geology and agriculture. Buddhism, which had become politically powerful, was replaced in the court and upper classes by the Confucian ethical system.
In 1592 Japan invaded Korea and occupied parts of it for seven years. In 1627 the Manchus invaded, withdrawing only after their suzerainty over Korea had been acceded to. When the Manchus came to power in China in 1644, Korea still remained a vassal state. In the Confucian tradition as the 'younger brother' it emulated China's policy of isolation. The first contact with the western world occurred in 1653 when a Dutch ship was wrecked off its shores and the survivors were brought to Seoul. The narrative written by one of the survivors who escaped from Korea brought the country to the attention of the western world - which until then had been almost totally ignorant of the 'Hermit Kingdom'.
Korea11 continued its policy of isolation until Europeans, Americans and Japanese broke down its defences in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1876 the Japanese forced the Koreans to grant them diplomatic recognition. In 1882 the United States (the first western country to make incursions into Korea) pressured the Koreans to conclude a similar treaty. By the 1880s Korea had been compelled to establish diplomatic relations with all those who had interests in northeastern Asia.
In 1884 a Japanese-inspired revolt against the Korean court caused the Chinese to intervene. In 1885 China and Japan agreed to remove their troops from Korea. The accord lasted until 1894 when Japan, opposed by both Korea and China, invaded Korea again and declared war on China.
Japan emerged from the short-lived Sino-Japanese war victorious. Under the treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895, China was forced to withdraw from Korea. Its recognition of Korea's independence and autonomy confirmed Japanese predominance. In October 1895 the Japanese forced upon Korea a pro-Japanese cabinet. In February 1896 the Korean king took refuge in the Russian legation, from where he continued a running fight with the Japanese invaders. From the turn of the century Korea was a pawn in the much wider conflict of interest involving China, Russia, the United States, Britain and Japan.
Between 1896 and 1904 several futile attempts were made to resolve the Russo-Japanese differences in Korea. Both sides were determined not to allow the other to get the upper hand. In February 1904, without warning, Japan attacked Russian forces in Korea and Manchuria. By the time the war ended in 1905 Korea was completely under Japanese control. Despite Korean appeals for help, the United States and Britain supported the Japanese. In 1907 the Korean emperor was replaced by his son. Formal annexation of the country by Japan took place in 1910.
Until the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Koreans fought an unending battle for independence. In these years scores of clashes took place between Korean insurgents and the Japanese authorities in which thousands of lives were lost. Massive demonstrations by Korean patriots were brutally repressed.
Regardless of British pretensions that they had conquered India in a fit of absentmindedness, it took a century of sustained if cautious and measured effort to establish British rule. Only after the Mutiny12 (1857) had been suppressed and the private East India Company had been taken over by the British government, did England feel safe to turn from commerce and conquest to its more civilizing contributions.
Though some British government servants in India may have wondered about their permanent role, they gradually saw themselves as masters in India by right. Without this self-confidence, the British could never have held India together; it was a necessary condition, not in their role as traders, but as conquerors, administrators and governors. After 1857 the British felt called to a new stewardship in the subcontinent. The idea of India being saved through Christianity, the English language and western science gained prominence in British policy.
Nothing that the British did in India was to have such widespread repercussions as the attempt to introduce a system of unified law. To have tried to impose western bourgeois law upon semifeudal eastern customs and conditions may have been wrong, but it did bring respect for the rule of law - perhaps Britain's most enduring contribution. British law helped to banish slavery, female infanticide and suttee from many parts of India. Thuggee (organizations of assassins and cut-throats) and some of the worst abuses of Indian land control and tenure were also removed through efforts of British administrators. The Indian Civil Service, which Britain created, was a vital prerequisite of Indian independence.
Equally important was Britain's economic contribution to India. In the second half of the nineteenth century, widespread improvements were made in transport and communication, in irrigation, in agriculture and in industry. Although India's railways were built in anticipation of the country's needs, and continuously extended out of Indian taxes, they opened the interior of India, connected the main ports with important agricultural regions, stimulated foreign trade (which experienced a sevenfold increase between 1869-1929), combated famine and helped to spread the knowledge and application of engineering techniques.
In 1892, the father of Indian unrest - the radical nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) - conceded that some benefits had been obtained under British rule, but that Britain had gained most. British loans had been spent on importing British goods and developing British-owned industries; they also had encouraged the exports to Britain of colonial produce. As India became a market for British products and a source of raw materials, the productive strength of India, which hitherto had served to meet its own needs, was undermined. In the 1850s, India, having lost its world markets in fine textiles, was forced to import cheaper products from England. India's expanding trade with Britain contributed substantially to Britain's balance of payments; it played a vital role in helping to finance Britain's Industrial Revolution. British intrusion had not led to the development but to the distortion of the Indian economy. It cannot have been a coincidence that the worst famines in the nineteenth century were in those areas most westernized. Under British rule famines got worse, not better.
India had also provided the east wing of Britain's imperial army. After the Mutiny, this highly trained and disciplined army was the main factor in the balance of power in Asia. Between 1858 and 1920, from Abyssinia to Hong Kong, it was used to safeguard British interests outside India 19 times. After 1858, Europeans were about one in two in the army; but India paid for the lot. In fact, the army took almost half the total revenue of India for almost a hundred years.
As for Britain's cultural contribution, it was the unusual degree of tolerance shown by Hinduism to other religions that permitted western culture to make the inroads it did. India did not assimilate western culture so much as enrich it. It created a romantic revival in nineteenth-century Britain and Germany; Indian studies were taken up throughout the western world.
Wherever the balance lay, India's values remained different from those of the West. While Indians could grasp the theoretical knowledge and the philosophy of the West, their spiritual orientation made it difficult for them to accept the western sense of progress and the need for improved technology. A faith in education has never been at the heart of Indian culture. India's earliest universities - Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Allahabad - were established by the British in the 1850s.
While Persia was never colonized as India was, its location was too important for it to escape becoming a puppet of the leading European powers. It retained nominal independence because of the rivalry of British and Russian interests. French interests, except during the Napoleonic wars (when Persia was thought of as a possible route to British India), were minimal before 1914. Germany's interests only developed in the 1890s with its drive to the East.
Persia was especially important to Russia. It not only blocked the path of Russian expansion in central and eastern Asia, it also thwarted its ambition to break out into the world through the Persian Gulf. The annexation by Russia of two provinces of Persian Georgia in 1800 set the stage for the Russian-Persian War of 1804-13. Having been defeated, Persia was forced to yield the provinces of Daghestan and Shemakha. In 1826, while the Russians were preoccupied in the Balkans, the Persians, backed by the British, seized the opportunity to attack Russian positions in the Caucasus. Again, Persia was defeated. By the Treaty of Turk-manchai in 1828, it was forced to cede more territory and give up claims to Georgia. The Russians obtained important commercial privileges, as well as the exclusive right to have a navy in the Caspian.
In the 1830s, it was Britain's turn to intervene. Pressed by the Russians in the north, the Persians decided to recoup their losses to Russia by regaining Persian territories lost to Afghanistan. As Persia's weaknesses had attracted Russians, so Afghanistan's weaknesses attracted the Persians. In 1837 they invaded Afghanistan as far as Herat, where they were defeated by a combined Afghan and British force. For the next two decades Herat remained the primary objective of Persian eastern expansion. Expecting a Russian victory in the Crimean War of the mid-1850s, Persia invaded Afghanistan again. This time, Britain took strong measures. An expeditionary force was sent from India to the Persian Gulf. By early 1857 Persia conceded defeat. Under the terms of the subsequent settlement between them, Persia undertook to evacuate Herat, recognize Afghanistan as an independent kingdom (although Afghanistan's boundaries were not defined until 1872) and grant to Britain the same commercial concessions given earlier to the Russians.
During the reign of Muzaffar ud-Din (1896-1907), Anglo-Russian rivalry in Persia reached its most critical stage.13 In the early 1900s, Britain did everything it could to block a Russian proposal to build a railway across Persia to the Gulf. England, said Lord Lansdowne (1845-1927) on 15 May 1903, would 'regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.' The Russians did not feel the proposal was worth a war. Meanwhile, each power tried to undermine the other's interests. In time, Persia's importance to the great powers would be transformed by its rich oil deposits, first detected in 1899.
The events that caused Britain and Russia to take a common stand on Persian affairs were the Persian Revolution of 1905, the abortive revolution in Russia in the same year, and German intrusion in southwest Asia. Though politically free, Persia continued as a classic semi-colonial state, economically and diplomatically dependent upon the European powers. In 1909 revolution broke out again in Persia. The Shah, Mohammed Ali, who had forcibly dissolved the parliament (first established in 1907), sought exile in Russia. In 1911 the Russians made an abortive attempt to reinstate the deposed Shah on the Persian throne. The gathering war clouds in the West, however, drew both Russia's and Britain's attention elsewhere.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Persia openly became the spoil of British and Russian interests. On the pretext that the new regime of Sultan Ahmad Shah was pro-German, Persia's declaration of neutrality in 1914 was ignored. The Turks having violated Persian territory in order to attack Russia, Russia and Britain forcibly occupied those parts of Persia agreed upon between them in 1907.
Because the Ottomans were the immediate neighbours of the Russians and constantly blocked Russian ambitions, war between them from the end of the eighteenth century until the 1870s was endemic. The Turks threatened Russian orthodoxy, denied Russia access through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and persecuted Slav minorities in Ottoman lands. In June 1788 the Russian Black Sea fleet had overwhelmed a superior Turkish force, and in December of that year had captured the fortress town of Ochakov, on an estuary of the Black Sea between the Bug and the Dniester rivers.
The encounter that unintentionally reduced the Turks to powerlessness at sea was the naval battle of Navarino Bay (in the southern Greek Peloponnese), fought in October 1827 (Map X). Diplomatically, Navarino was a success for the Russians and a disaster for the British, whose main object had been neither to defeat the Turks nor liberate the Greeks, but to check Russian power in the eastern Mediterranean. The war between Russia and Turkey ended in 1829 with the Treaty of Adrianople. Despite the loss of much of its fleet, the Ottomans showed no sign of collapse. In 1833, with the help of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, it survived Egyptian attacks. In 1841 an international Straits Convention closed the Bosphorus to Russian warships. In 1853 Turkey committed France and Britain to the Crimean War, the one major conflict since 1815. Russia honoured the policy of maintaining the status quo in the Ottoman Empire - particularly in the Balkans - until April 1877, when its army penetrated Turkish territory as far as Adrianople.
In 1908 Russian (and Austrian) fears about Turkey were aroused once more. The victory of the 'Young Turks' in that year - who were concerned to revive their own traditions and who resented western subjugation - had led to the restoration of the constitution of 1876 and widespread disorder in Turkey. In 1908 Russia informally agreed that it would not oppose the formal annexation by Austria of Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the fact that the latter areas were also claimed by the Slavs of Serbia and Montenegro. In return, Austria agreed to work for the opening of the Dardanelles to Russian warships; Austria also conceded that Bulgaria should become a Russian sphere of influence, provided Austrian rights were extended in Macedonia and Serbia.
Accordingly, in October 1908, Austria proceeded to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina. To its surprise, the Russians then protested Austria's action and came out as the champions of Serbia's claims. What the Russians had not foreseen was that Germany would now forcefully intervene on Austria's behalf. Eventually, the Russians were faced with the choice of either abandoning Serbia or going to war. On this occasion, they chose to abandon Serbia. The only satisfaction the Turks got was that they were paid compensation for the annexed provinces. Realizing how close to war they had been, in 1910 Russia and Austria both pledged their support of the status quo.
The Ottoman Empire survived as long as it did because Britain, France and Russia had more to lose from its collapse than from its survival. Divided, feudal in outlook, corrupt, decaying, beset by inter-clan warfare, rejected by other parts of Islam - especially by the Arab world - rarely free from racial strife and the demands of its many subject peoples for independence, until 1914 the Ottoman Empire constantly threatened to disrupt the European balance of power. The First World War marked the final act of its dissolution.
At the time of western incursion in southeast Asia14 an enduring pattern of politics and culture under a series of kingdoms had begun to emerge. Buddhism superimposed on Hinduism dominated Burma, Siam (Thailand), Laos and Cambodia. Confucian-Tao values also prevailed. Diffused by Muslim traders from Malacca, the centre of a strong maritime commercial empire, Islam was adopted in Indonesia, the Spice Islands, North Borneo, the southern Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. The Burmese migrating southward from the highlands of Tibet adopted chiefly Indian political institutions and culture. Their eastern neighbours, the more homogeneous Thais, who had migrated from China in the thirteenth century and with whom the Burmese fought incessantly, drew upon both the Chinese and the Indian cultures. In occupying Siam they destroyed the remnants of the Angkor kingdom. Cambodians were largely descendants of the great Khmer Empire which in the eighth-ninth centuries had flourished at Angkor Wat. In the 1500s Laos was a group of petty princedoms fought over by their neighbours, the Thais, Cambodians and Vietnamese.
The only southeast Asian nation uniquely subject to Chinese cultural and political domination was Vietnam, whose people had migrated from central China. By the 1470s they had subdued the rival state of Champa, and the Khmers of the Mekong Delta. Spending over a thousand years under Chinese rule (111 BC-939 AD), and much longer under its influence, as a Confucian state on the Chinese model, Vietnam was called the 'lesser dragon'. For much of its history, an amalgam of Confucianism and Buddhism prevailed. Acutely conscious of their own separate cultural identity, for thousands of years the Vietnamese have struggled to maintain their independence and integrity.
The Portuguese were the first westerners to reach southeast Asia by sea. Using Indian ports and fortified trading posts, within a decade of da Gama's arrival at Calicut in 1498, they had won control of the trade routes passing through the Indian Ocean. In 1511, having challenged Islamic interests, they seized the allimportant strait of Malacca, and proceeded to occupy the spice-rich Molucca and Banda Islands. Conquest did not come easily. In the sixteenth century Portugal's strategic base for eastern-bound trade - Malacca - was fought over with the Indonesians six times. In 1519 Spain sent Magellan to find a strait to the Moluccas. In 1565 it threatened Portugal's position in the spice trade by occupying the Philippines.
The conquest of Portugal by Spain in Europe in 1580 left the British, the Dutch and the French with no option but to trade with Spain, or find their own way to the East. Determined to obtain their share of the trade in pepper and spices, Indian cottons, Chinese silks, porcelain and tea, and Japanese silver, England (1600), Holland (1602) and France (1604) founded their own East India companies. Increasingly, the contest to colonize southeast Asia was not between western Christians and eastern Muslims, but between the western powers themselves.
The Dutch soon ousted the Portuguese and the British from Indonesia. In 1605 they defeated Portuguese forces at Amboina in the Moluccas; in 1613 they broke the British hold on part of Timor; in 1619 they took Jakarta which they renamed Batavia; in 1641 they captured Malacca; in 1666 they triumphed in the Celebes, and secured a trading post on the east coast of Sumatra. By 1750 they had secured Java. By 1800, as an imperial power in the east, Portugal no longer mattered.
For most of the nineteenth century Dutch imperial rule was largely confined to the islands of Sumatra and Java. From the 1820s to the 1880s native uprisings forced them to extend their control to the interior of both islands. In 1824 the British ceded the port of Bencoolen on Sumatra to the Dutch, who reciprocated by giving up Malacca. Not until the 1840s did the Dutch extend their rule to southern Borneo, Bali and the Celebes. In 1859 they divided Timor and the neighbouring islands with the
Portuguese. Only in the early years of the twentieth century did they finally subdue the outer islands of Indonesia; only then was Indonesia united under one rule for the first time.
Coming on the heels of the Dutch were the French and the British. In 1795 the British occupied Malacca and other Dutch settlements. In the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824, British influence, already extensive in China and India, was extended to Malacca and Singapore. To protect the eastern flank of India, in 1824 the First Anglo-Burmese War broke out. It was followed by the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852. In the 1850s the British conquered Assam and lower Burma; Siam (Thailand) was opened. After much fighting (the Third Anglo-Burmese War began in 1885) upper Burma was annexed in the 1880s; ruled as part of India and the British Empire, its centuries-old monarchy was ended. New boundaries were established, the rich natural resources of the country were developed and large numbers of Indians and Chinese were introduced. Brunei15 and Sarawak were claimed by the British in 1888.
Influential in determining French incursions into southeast Asia were the Catholic missionaries. It was due to them that a treaty was signed in 1787 between the King of Cochin China and Louis XVI of France. By the mid-nineteenth century the French and their missionaries had fallen out of favour with the Annamite court. Attacks upon the French having caused the death of several missionaries, including the Spanish bishop of Tonkin, the French responded with armed intervention. Touraine on the Vietnam coast was bombarded by the French in 1858; Saigon was occupied in 1859. In 1862 by the Treaty of Saigon, France obtained the three eastern provinces of Vietnam and greater freedom for French traders and missionaries. Gradually, by the use of 'gunboat diplomacy', common to the western powers at the time, France extended its control from Vietnam to Cambodia (1863), Annam and Tonkin. Fierce native resistance was put down. In 1885 by the treaty of Tientsin a defeated China was compelled to recognize French control of Tonkin. In 1887 the whole of this territory was administered as the Union Indochinoise. Six years later in 1893 France acquired a protectorate over Laos.
By 1890 only Siam in southeast Asia remained outside western dominance. In 1893, encouraged by the British, it began forcibly to reject French claims. To avoid a rupture in British-French relations, in 1896 Britain and France formally guaranteed the independence of Siam. In 1907 Siamese territory to the east of the Nan river was placed under French control, that west of the river, closer to British Burma, was declared a sphere of British action. Thailand became a buffer state separating the western powers' spheres of influence.
Although day-to-day life in mainland and island southeast Asia had been little affected by the early western presence, by 1914, because of the introduction by the West of a plantation economy, the independence of southeast Asian states and their trade relations with the rest of the world had been changed dramatically.
World History
