Imperialism, the Perversion of Nationalism
John Hobson’s celebrated Imperialism: A Study begins with striking thoughts about the relationships between nationalism and imperialism.
The novelty of the recent Imperialism regarded as a policy consists chiefly in its adoption by several nations. The notion of a number of competing empires is essentially modern. The root idea of empire in the ancient and medieval world was that of a federation of States, under a hegemony, covering in general terms the entire or recognized world, such as was held by Rome…. Thus empire was identified with internationalism, though not always based on a conception of equality of nations … the triumph of nationalism seems to have crushed the rising hope of internationalism. Yet it would appear that there is no essential antagonism between them. A true strong internationalism in form or spirit would rather imply the existence of powerful self-respecting nationalities which seek union on the basis of common national needs and interests…. Nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism, and if it manifests divergence we may well suspect a perversion of its nature and its purpose. Such a perversion is Imperialism, in which nations trespassing beyond the limits of facile assimilation transform the wholesome stimulative rivalry of varied national types into the cut-throat struggle of competing empires.1
There is much to praise here. The ideal typical empire, especially in premodern circumstances, sought to create a world all of its own, free from competitors.2 Such empires were “multicultural” (perhaps at times even “multinational”) to a fault, bound to diversity by weakness, lacking means to indoctrinate and to homogenize into a single mold. Nationalism and imperialism were separated from each other, making any notion of intimacy between them ridiculous. “Recent” imperialism was indeed different, seeking, in different degrees, to homogenize different peoples into a singular identity. These empires sought to become national states.
The main interpretation of the world in which such attempts took place is simple: namely, that nationalism was too powerful a force to allow this. Stated otherwise, nationalism is seen as the force that destroyed empire.3 It is easy to see why. If nationalism means that a nation needs to be protected by its own state, then both irredentism and secession follow logically. Beyond that stands a vicious dynamic: if a state feels that a minority might become a fifth column calling in the state of its external homeland, then preemptive cleansing is called for, something that makes logical early actions on the part of the external homeland in question to protect that minority—a game of mirrors likely to escalate tension.4 But skepticism is called for here. For one thing, we have already seen that it is at least possible for several nations to live under a political roof, and one can add to this that home rule for Ireland was nearly achieved before 1914, with the Hapsburgs having achieved still more by means of the Moravian Compromise—a development that looked as if it might be applied more generally in the empire. Therefore, secession is not inevitable. For another, recent research has noted the presence of “imperial ethnicities” whose very being focused on loyalty to empire, from varied mixtures of loyalty, belief, and fear—as is obvious once we think of the role of army officers, socialists, and Jews in the Hapsburg empire.5 But the key generalization is simply that no multinational empire was able to turn itself into some sort of nonimperial, modern, liberal political entity. This chapter seeks to explain this failure. Truth to the historical record requires that the answer be complex, involving nationalism and geopolitics, with particular reference to the interaction between these forces.
We can begin by noting that there were two types of empire extant at the end of the nineteenth century: traditional agrarian polities and overseas trading states—that is, empires within Europe itself, as well as the newer ones overseas.6 The empires of the Romanovs and the Hapsburgs clearly belong to the former “composite” type, having benefited from expansion as the result of conquest, colonization, and marriage. If Britain was the prime example of the latter, it contained the Irish, and so had at least one composite element of its own. It is of the essence of the matter that it was impossible to wholly separate these two forms of empire, although some clearheaded attempts were made to do so. The power of overseas empire could make Continental imperial powers feel insignificant.
In the contemporary world, political economy success derives from intensity, from the benign workings of human capital described by Adam Smith. Presently, brains matter more than the possession of extensive territory, but this is not how things appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Size was then held to be the means to power, and hence to security. The awful example that proved the point to the leading powers was the slow decline of the Ottomans. Millions of Muslims had been driven from the Balkans by 1914, the first massive piece of ethnic cleansing in the industrial era, while the state was totally humiliated in a thousand ways—with its fiscal capacity farmed out to foreigners and its Greek trading elite only too willing to call in support from coreligionists abroad. The “sick man of Europe” sought to reinvent himself, but there was no clear indication as to how this could be done. “Ottomanism” never had mass appeal, and the best bet—the creation of a Muslim identity that would draw in the Arab provinces—had little appeal to the Turkish military elite. The prospect of dismemberment loomed large.
The key dilemma that faced the empires of Continental Europe was simple: if size was to be maintained in the circumstances of the time, as it had to be if power was to be preserved, it was necessary to deal with the national question. Homogeneity would lend cohesion and power, not least as it was believed that citizen armies would gain fighting spirit—as seems to have been demonstrated by the Japanese when fighting Russia in 1905. Accordingly, state elites began to interfere with their peoples. There is ambiguity at this point. On occasion, it seems as if the actions of states actually created national movements where none existed before. But I have no desire to deny that some national movements had already been formed, and that “official nationalisms” attempted to control something that they felt might get out of hand.7 But in either case, the desire to homogenize gave nationalist movements a particular character, turning them from cultural affairs of professors toward popular movements all-too-capable of political agency. A classic instance of the way in which actions by the state resulted in a change in the character of a preexisting national movement is provided by the Finns. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Finns had been content within the czarist empire; they were largely left to their own devices, blessed with the liberties that came with the status of an imperial duchy. Rationalization policies, especially as they affected language, led a newly politicized nationalist movement to demand secession by the start of the twentieth century.
From our perspective it might seem as if Great Britain represented the farthest opposite point to the Ottomans on a range measuring state strength. It ruled over large parts of the world; balanced its accounts and paid its military, thanks to the contributions made by India; had at least some hegemonic powers, especially over the sea lanes; and was soon, during both world wars, able to call on reserves of manpower that did a good deal to bring about victory. Nonetheless, the British elite felt under threat in structural terms. The country was, after all, but a small island, yet its possession of so much territory made it something of a freak. The defeat of the French in the great imperial contest of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had allowed Britain to expand, and the maintenance of its empire resulted thereafter from, in turn, exhaustion and then balance among its European rivals.8 Most of its rule was but skin-deep. Fragility also resulted from what is now seen as one of its great achievements: free trade. Food had to be imported, making naval supremacy absolutely vital. It was this that made the German challenge—directed less at the acquisition of colonies than at the capacity to strike at the British fleet—so very alarming, terrifying far beyond Germany’s move toward the second industrial revolution. But even this understates the case. Britain was at one with Germany, and with France, in seeing the future as likely to favor Russia and the United States, powers with their own continents.
One classic response was articulated by Sir John Seeley in his demand for a “Greater Britain.” It might well be the case that not everyone could be included in a larger British entity. This certainly applied to Africans, but quite as much to Indians, even though key early Indian nationalists wanted to “get in,” wanted to be part of a larger Britannic entity. The empire had racial discrimination at its core, at least in its later stages, and Seeley’s dream was thus for a “Greater Britain” based on the white settlers of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. There was certainly, as noted, a measure of shared identity in the white Dominions—and it led millions to fight for Britain in South Africa as well as in the world wars. But these plans did not succeed. For one thing, the settler nations were proud and independent, and not at all keen to respond to calls for imperial defense, given their own needs and their increasing frustration at foreign policy being decided in London. Schemes for a federal empire came to naught, because in the end there was insufficient interest on either side. And in this context one should remember Ireland. The varied plans for home rule stalemated British politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in 1914 Britain faced the possibility of mutiny in its own army, which was reluctant to allow a minority of Protestants to be included in home rule for the entire, largely Catholic island of Ireland and wholly opposed to the setting of a precedent that might lead to a general weakening of the empire.9 Also, the idea of imperial unity often had tariff reform at its core, that is, the creation of a closed imperial trading bloc. There was powerful resistance to this in Britain itself, for it would likely increase the price of food. Empire might be popular in a vague way, but not when it began to affect the living standards of the people.10
Czarist Russia felt equally threatened at the end of the nineteenth century, for all that others felt scared by its sheer size, and especially by its resources of manpower. If German military prowess and industrial power were alarming, so was the alliance with Vienna, since this suggested an alliance between a single people. In these circumstances radical state nationalists sought to enhance Russian power. Industrialization mattered, but so too did the national question. Pure Russian ethnics were, after all, not a majority in the empire. But if Ukrainians could become Russian—that is, if they could be prevented from even creating an identity of their own—then Russia might have the chance to create at least the core of a nation-state. Extreme harshness thus characterized Russian policy. And we have seen that the prospect of diminished voice raised the attractiveness of exit for the Finns.
The world of Austria-Hungary at once resembled and differed from the Russian situation. Defeat by Germany had led to the granting of autonomy for the Magyars. They were not a majority in their own territory, and so imposed very harsh assimilation conditions—close to success by 1914—on the Slovaks. The Austrian half of the empire, Cisleithenia, was very different. For many years German had simply seemed a world language to which other communities would accede. When this did not happen, when the Czechs started to gain political consciousness, the German community reacted as an ethnic group. But German ethnics were not a majority within Cisleithenia, and certainly nothing like that in the empire as a whole.11 In these circumstances, the empire moved very slowly to a system of accommodation. This was a world of “bearable dissatisfaction” in the words of Count Taaffe. It is important to remember that no leader of the Czech national movement, to give but one example, sought actual independence during the nineteenth century—with key leaders such as Palacký arguing strongly against such a move, as they were fearful of becoming a petty state that was all too exposed to German and Russian depredations. The Moravian Compromise looked set to secure loyalty through the granting of cultural rights, and something like this was being planned for the Czechs. But herein lay a major difficulty. The empire really needed a period of peace to consolidate such reforms, all of which were anyway undermining the powers of the central government. But the Hapsburgs wished to continue to play the great game of power politics and were therefore suffering from what can only be termed political schizophrenia; they were forced to accommodate, but in their heart of hearts they were attracted by homogenizing policies that would enhance their geopolitical strength.
Perhaps the best way to characterize what was going on in general terms is by turning to Max Weber, less as a sociologist than as a political actor in his own era. Three points need to be made about the German thinker, two immediately and a third a little later. The first is to recall that Weber’s ultimate value was nationalist. The most obvious way in which this can be seen is in his early obsession with the Polish workers in the East Elbian estates of the aristocratic Junker class. National strength would come from homogeneity and cohesion, something that Bismarck had also felt, albeit opportunistically, when opening the cultural wars against the Catholics. Weber recognized that a measure of unity had been achieved through war, but he wished to further German strength in his own time, to achieve something equivalent to the previous generation, which had created the Reich. Any doubt about Weber’s nationalist leanings can be seen in his attitude during the First World War, above all, in his concern to extend German power to the East, at the expense of Poland.
The second element of Weber’s own politics of concern here is his membership in the Navy League. Weber was representative of many of the statist middle class who believed that Germany deserved and needed its own “place in the sun.” Interestingly, his views were criticized by the Austrian marginalists in 1907 when he gave a speech in Vienna on the immediately accurate grounds that the German economy was developing rapidly—able to overtake Great Britain in 1913, according to recent economic historians, without the benefit of much in the way of imperial possessions. However, what matters about economics in the end is, of course, not reality but rather what people believe to be the case. And in this matter there was a measure of rationality to Weber’s view. The British turn to free trade and interdependence was, in fact, no such thing: food supplies might come from abroad, but the power of the Royal Navy in effect made Britain autonomous. If a Continental power took the same course, it would be much more dangerous. This is exactly what happened to Germany in the last years of the First World War, when the British blockade bit seriously. As it happens, we now know that this had been planned in London at exactly the time that Weber was being criticized in Vienna.12
It is as well to highlight what is involved. By the end of the nineteenth century, European territory was, so to speak, filled, allowing no further expansion on the Continent. In these circumstances war would necessarily be a disaster. But the intensity of geopolitical competition, the enormous insecurities of the great powers, meant that the desire for complete autonomy was rampant. One cause of international tensions at the end of the nineteenth century lay in international trade rivalries resulting from dumping practices—themselves the result of every state determining to be autonomous in the production of steel, the base for military independence.13 But the picture as a whole is best characterized as the marriage of nationalism and imperialism. Each state sought secure sources of supply and secure markets for goods produced. At any particular moment in time this might seem silly, given that the British empire traded openly before 1914. But that could change, as was obvious to those on the Continent who were looking at British politicians from both parties talking about the need for imperial union.
It is time to analyze the manner in which the dilemmas noted played out in practice. Two points will be made, the first a caution, the second drawing a distinction between the character of the two world wars. The caution is simple. It is not the case that the struggle for possessions overseas led immediately to the First World War. Lenin was wrong. Timing disproves his theory: the division of Africa took place in the 1880s. What always mattered most to these great powers was their security within the European heartland—and, more particularly, the determination not to let matters so escalate that anything like the strains and stresses of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period be repeated.14 It was this background condition that made it relatively easy to settle imperial disputes, especially over the partition of Africa. After all, imperial possessions paid little—with the exception of India, which, as noted, mattered enormously for Britain. The balance within Europe is the factor that allowed Britain to gain a huge empire in the first place; equally, geopolitical factors do most to explain its longevity—French resentments were never likely to lead to war, given the increasing power of Germany, while Germany itself for a long time did not wish to increase French and Russian power at the expense of Britain, since that would weaken its own position.15 Besides, the British empire was, until the interwar period, open to trade from its rivals. In summary, imperial disputes before 1914 were always kept within bounds; they certainly did not actually cause the onset of disaster. Nonetheless, Germany clearly felt left out, as noted, and received the merest trifles despite an activist foreign policy under Kaiser Wilhelm II.
While full agreement as to the origins of the First World War will never be achieved, some comments relating to the argument can be made. Nationalism most certainly played some part in the origin of the war. Most immediately, the occasion for war were the shots fired by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, an irredentist nationalist keen to establish a Greater Serbia. More generally, there were traces of the marriage of nationalism and imperialism, not just in an intellectual like Max Weber but also in the mind of Bethmann-Hollweg. Still more important were the feelings in Vienna. The stiff note sent to Serbia, and backed by Germany, was in part caused by the fear that the empire would not be able to compete in a world in which size and national homogeneity mattered so much if it could not control its own territory—that is, if secession by the southern Slavs meant that its power would be undermined, as had been true of that of the Ottomans. Still, the war also had the character of a normal interstate conflict within a multipolar system. As Darwin noted, “the July Crisis revealed that the Achilles’ heel of Europe’s global primacy was the underdevelopment of the European states system.”16 This draws our attention to the two basic factors, already noted, that tend to explain escalation to the extremes in a system of states. The first is that of heterogeneity in the system as a whole, the presence of different values making mutual understanding difficult. This was certainly present by 1914 in a way that it had not been when Bismarck and Lord Salisbury were conducting the foreign policies of their respective countries. The second is that of the character of the states involved, that is, establishing whether they had the capacity—so often presumed by realism to exist—to calculate rationally. There were clear deficiencies at the time. While the British state had brilliantly retrenched so as to face Germany, domestic politics made it impossible to give Germany the clear warning, by means of an open alliance, that might have prevented conflict. The Hapsburg case was made endlessly difficult by Hungarian autonomy. But the key variable involved was the inability of the German state to calculate rationally. Middle-class nationalists such as Weber were pressing their state for a more activist policy. But the crucial factor was that the state was really a court, with policy determined by whoever had last gained the ear of the kaiser, and with no priority set between a world policy directed against England and the traditional Eastern policy directed against Russia.17 The famous 1907 Foreign Office “Memorandum of the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany” written by Eyre Crowe admitted that this explained German behavior as well as any purportedly conscious, aggressive policy:
It might be suggested that the great German design is in reality no more than the expression of a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift. A charitable critic might add, by way of explanation, that the well-known qualities of mind and temperament distinguishing for good or for evil the present Ruler of Germany may not improbably be largely responsible for the erratic, domineering, and often frankly aggressive spirit which is recognizable at present in every branch of German public life … and that this spirit has called forth those manifestations of discontent and alarm both at home and abroad with which the world is becoming familiar; that, in fact, Germany does not really know what she is driving at, and that all her excursions and alarums, all her underhand intrigues do not contribute to the steady working out of a well-conceived and relentlessly followed system of policy, because they do not really form part of any such system.18
And this is where the third point about Weber can be made: he realized precisely this during the war as the result of the idiotic decision to let loose submarines on American shipping. Without this, Germany might have been able to establish hegemony on the Continent.
Industry applied to war, together with the need of a conscription war to have grand aims (“a war to end all wars,” “a war for democracy,” the promise of “a land fit for heroes”), meant that conflict escalated so as to make it savagely destructive and, with the benefit of hindsight, no longer a rational policy for the states concerned.19 As institutions were destroyed, everything changed. One crucial consequence was the creation of a whole slew of new nation-states in Central Europe, most of them feeble and in conflict with one another, and many of them with nationalities problems of their own. It is worth highlighting what is involved here. I began by noting a challenge to traditional theory—namely, the insistence that nationalism was a major cause of war in modern times. This is not quite right.20 The cause of the war was, as argued, in part traditional. But two other factors need to be stressed. First, it took defeat in war to allow nation-states to emerge. The caging of nations becomes impossible, at this and other times, only when states are thrown into disarray, characteristically by defeat in war. Second, the nationalist movements that then took over had gained political consciousness because of the way in which states had treated them—with Masaryk becoming certain of the need for full independence only very late, and in part in response to the new emperor’s plan to “Germanify” Cisleithenia after all. In a nutshell, nationalism mattered, of course, but it has largely been created by the actions of states that were driven to unify their territories in the belief that this was the only way to protect their power. In other words, but for the intensity of geopolitical competition, it is at least possible that the nationalities problem in some places, above all in Cisleithenia, might have been solved in such a way as to allow for several nations to live under a single but necessarily more liberal political roof.
Central Europe then became a power vacuum into which larger states were always likely to be drawn. Crucially, the states involved suffered from social revolutions. The empire to the East had been recreated under new management, a significant part of it Jewish in background, as figures of this sort found that national liberation meant their eventual exclusion, so turning them into left-wing empire savers—another example of the impact of nationalism, caused in turn by prior state actions.21 The Nazi revolution came later, but its foreign policy proved to be still more radical. All this made it impossible to create a sustainable geopolitical settlement in the interwar period. These conditions further played their part in the onset of the Great Depression, and the consequent increasing salience of the politics of economic autarchy. But if protectionism increased international disorder, as Cordell Hull believed, it is as well to remember that it was itself caused by a failure to create order in the world polity.
It was in these circumstances that the marriage of nationalism and imperialism became increasingly important. One element that went into the mix in Germany by 1918 was the experience of food shortages because of the British blockade. Hitler certainly insisted that the possession of territory was a logical necessity. His policy was aggressive and imperial, and it made the Second World War utterly different in character from the First—an interimperial war rather than a traditional conflict in which, at the start, every state claimed war was necessary for defense and protection rather than for expansion. But one cannot leave the matter at this point, for to do so would be to miss the novelty involved. The uniqueness of the German situation was the desire for lebensraum, for an expansion within Europe that would not create, as had traditionally been the case, a multinational polity but rather kill and cleanse so that new territories would be inhabited only by Aryans in the end. The ultimate perversion of nationalism was the polity envisaged by Hitler, in which extermination of difference would allow extension of a single “race.”22
Some final reflections about the contemporary world polity may help highlight the case that has been made. Two background conditions need to be borne in mind. The first is completely clear. The nuclear revolution is a true global change whose logic—the impossibility in rational terms of using this revolutionary means of destruction—has so far been generally observed. The second change is as important. The Second World War ended European empires. Nationalist (or, better, anti-imperial) militancy made empire too expensive to maintain, especially as European states slowly discovered that they could prosper without overseas territorial control. The crucial argument was made with characteristic lucidity by Raymond Aron.23 If metropolitan France wished to live up to its promise to make real citizens in all its territorial possessions—blessed by high standards of education, health, and welfare—it would have to face a severe decline in its own living standards. It was not surprising to see that Paris let Algeria go so as to enjoy the standard of living to which it had become accustomed. The logic here has already been noted: power no longer comes from the possession of territory. Of course, not every leader, not least those in Moscow and Beijing, recognizes this.
Two political developments are based on these background conditions. Europeans have, in ways that have been stressed, found ways to reconstruct civilities within their world, at least in part due to the manner in which their security problems have been solved by the American presence. Far more impressive than Europe is the wonderful fact that crucial parts of the world have found a route to the modern world that does not involve copying the disasters of the European past. One can at least hope that the strict version of the nation-state—each state with its own culture, each culture with its own state—may be avoided. Design may help. Much more important is the diminution in the intensity of great power rivalry, and especially of its involvement in much of the rest of the world. Relative geopolitical calm may allow states to manage their nations in a less unitary and homogeneous manner. None of this is to deny that many millions have been killed in the putatively peaceful postwar world in civil wars that are very often fueled by ethnic strife—the end result in large part of European colonialism. But there are reasons to hope here, reasons to think that links between nationalism and war may weaken—and this beyond the current diminution in the numbers of such conflicts.
In contrast, there is much to be said for worrying about the situation in China, where the alternative route is being taken—of homogenization through forcible assimilation and the diluting of minority populations by the traditional method of moving in large numbers of the majority population. One worry is that this route may breed violent response, the desire for secession that was present in key parts of Europe in modern times, above all in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. One can note in this regard that the situation in China is in fact rather different from some of the cases noted above. Han Chinese are a massive majority, and it may well be that over time they will have their way; homogenization may yet work. A second worry is greater. There is a sense in which contemporary China resembles Wilhelmine Germany. The regime lacks legitimacy, and it may yet seek it by playing the nationalist card. Certainly new middle-class elements exist; above all, the massive student population that wishes for a more aggressive policy on the part of their state and believe in its right to a central place in world affairs. Eyre Crowe’s famous memorandum suggested that Germany, for whatever reasons, wished to break up the British empire so as to supplant it. Interestingly, this view was opposed by Thomas Sanderson on February 21, 1907, in a memorandum in which he saw Germany as “a helpful, though somewhat exacting friend,” adding that “it is altogether contrary to reason that Germany should wish to quarrel with us.” Sir Charles Hardinge sent this memorandum to the foreign secretary a few days later on February 25, noting that “somewhat to my surprise he has taken up the cudgels for Germany.”24 It is absolutely true that Germany was prospering in 1914 within the rules of the world order of the time, and looked set to prosper much more. The same is true of China today. One hopes that the result of developments in the two countries will differ, with Chinese behavior to this point justifying worry rather than fear.
1 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), 6–7, 8. The importance of these pages has been brought to general attention by K. Kumar, “Nation-states as Empires, Empires as Nation-states: Two Principles, One Practice?,” Theory and Society 39 (2010).
2 At particular times the universalism of both Chinese and Mughal empires was diluted in practice by the recognition of rivals.
3 K. J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); S. Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security 18 (1994); B. Miller, States, Nations and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); A. Wimmer and B. Min, “From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816–2001,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006); and W. Hiers and A. Wimmer, “Is Nationalism the Cause or Consequence of the End of Empire?,” in Nationalism and War, ed. J. A. Hall and S. Malešević (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). I am indebted to Andreas Wimmer (whose work subtly differs from that of the other scholars mentioned here) for comments, and remain in debate with his important work.
4 M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5 J. Darwin, “Empire and Ethnicity,” Nations and Nationalism 16 (2010).
6 D. Lieven, “Dilemmas of Empire, 1850–1918: Power, Territory, Identity,” Journal of Contemporary History 34 (1999) and Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000). I am deeply indebted to Lieven’s work.
7 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), chapter 6.
8 J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007) and The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
9 Lieven nicely notes that democratic pressures made it hard to create federal solutions. Franz Joseph had given great autonomy to the Hungarians in 1867 without consulting anyone; this route was barred in Britain (“Dilemmas of Empire,” 197–99).
10 F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
11 German was the language of social mobility, and census returns—always political acts—sought to enhance the number of “Germans” by considering ethnicity in terms of the language in daily use. But even this method—bitterly contested by the Czechs who wanted to enhance their numbers by measuring the “mother tongue”—only produced 38 percent of “Germans” in Cisleithenia, itself, of course, a much smaller percentage for the empire as a whole.
12 A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
13 G. Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialization and International Trade Rivalry (London: Frances Pinter, 1984).
14 Darwin, After Tamerlane, 225–26.
15 P. Kennedy, “Why Did the British Empire Last So Long?,” in his Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983).
16 Darwin, After Tamerlane, 373.
17 I. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 21.
18 E. Crowe, “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany” (January 1, 1907), in British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, vol. 3, The Testing of the Entente, 1904–6, ed. G. P. Gooch and H. Temperley (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1928), 415.
19 It is important to note this here. Sometimes nationalism is blamed for the viciousness of modern wars. There is truth to that, but one needs to remember that increased killing was also the result of technological advance.
20 The key theorist involved now admits this. A. Wimmer and Y. Feinstein, “The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816–2001,” American Sociological Review 75 (2010).
21 L. Riga, “The Ethnic Roots of Class Universalism: Rethinking the ‘Russian’ Revolution,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (2008).
22 M. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008); S. Baranowksi, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
23 R. Aron, La tragédie Algeriénne (Paris: Plon, 1957).
24 T. Sanderson, “Memorandum,” in British Documents, ed. Gooch and Temperley, 430, 431, and 420, and 420–33 passim.