8

The Wages of Empire

THE EXPLORERS

In 1815 the circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) arrived in Malta, after having toured Spain, Portugal and Italy, ready to engage in another series of feats of physical prowess, lifting heavy weights, bending steel bars, and breaking iron chains. His speciality was carrying twelve smaller men on a steel frame mounted on his shoulders. Born in Padua, the son of a barber, and initially intended for a monastic life, Belzoni had fled Italy on the invasion of his native city by Napoleonic troops in 1798, and had made his living in the Netherlands as a barber before moving to England in 1803. Here he had married Sarah Bane (1783–1870), a native of Bristol. Six feet seven inches tall and powerfully built, Belzoni had begun to eke out a living on the streets of London performing feats of strength before being recruited by a well-known circus at Astley’s Amphitheatre, a popular entertainment venue in the city. Belzoni claimed, with what accuracy is not certain, to have studied hydraulics before leaving Italy, and was fascinated by technology. His shows were often accompanied by magic-lantern displays using back-projection to cast Gothic images of skeletons and ghosts onto a screen. In Malta, encountering an agent of the Egyptian Khedive Muhammad Ali, he offered to show the khedive a machine he had invented to raise the water level of the Nile to assist crop irrigation. They travelled to Egypt for this purpose, but when Belzoni tested the machine it proved unable to move the predicted amount of water, then spun out of control, and the khedive declared it a failure. Facing destitution, Belzoni and his wife went to see the British consul Henry Salt (1780–1827), who as well as being a proficient painter was also a collector of Egyptian antiquities. The two men hit it off, and Salt appointed Belzoni as his agent.

Soon the Italian was in Thebes, the ancient settlement in Luxor. He had been commissioned by Salt to organize the removal of a huge bust of Rameses II (thirteenth century BCE), subsequently known as the Younger Memnon, weighing seven tons, and its shipment to England. Dressed in Arab clothing, but conspicuous by his great height and his huge beard, Belzoni travelled up the Nile with his wife. (‘Mrs. Belzoni,’ he later wrote, ‘had by this time accustomed herself to travel, and was equally indifferent with myself about accommodations’.) Presenting the local Ottoman official with an order from the khedive, a bag of coffee and some gunpowder, Belzoni recruited 130 labourers who took more than two weeks to move the bust on rollers down to the river, sometimes sinking into the sand. He got into a fight with a local official when his labourers temporarily disappeared, and overcame many other obstacles before the bust was put on board ship. Upstream he found many other antiquities that ‘might also easily be removed’. Reaching the great temple ruins of Abu Simbel, he returned laden with more treasures, and transported everything, including the colossal bust of Rameses, downriver to Alexandria and thence by ship to London and the British Museum. Subsequently Belzoni conducted excavations at Karnak, and was the first European to penetrate the second pyramid at Giza. Sarah Belzoni accompanied him on all his travels, lodging with local women and reassuring them about the couple’s presence. ‘As it was my lot to ascend the Nile,’ she wrote, ‘I contrived to see the various modes of living among these half wild people’, and indeed she later published a book about them.

Salt was pleased with Belzoni’s acquisitions, telling his patron the Irish peer Lord Mountnorris (1770–1844) that he was sending ‘a cargo of such things as I believe you have not before seen’. His attempts to ship over a mummy were unsuccessful because superstitious ships’ captains refused to carry it on board. A stuffed crocodile that Salt intended to transport to England was eaten by vultures. Nevertheless Belzoni was now launched on his new career as explorer and Egyptologist. His way with Egyptian antiquities was none too gentle. He found it hard to squeeze his considerable bulk into the narrow entrance passages of tombs, even on all fours, and once got stuck in a pyramid, needing to be pulled out by his assistants. In the Gournou tunnels, near Luxor, Belzoni wrote, he was choked by the dust and nauseated by the smell:

After the exertion of entering into such a place, through a passage of fifty, a hundred, three hundred or perhaps six hundred yards, nearly overcome, I sought a resting place, found one, and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, it crushed like a band-box. I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting till it subsided again. I could not remove from the place, however, without increasing it, and every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other.

Belzoni was blissfully unconcerned by the damage he was causing to the mummies, for, as he explained: ‘The purposes of my researches was to rob the Egyptians of their papyri; of which I found a few hidden in their breasts, under their arms, in the space above the knees, or on the legs, and covered by the numerous folds of cloth that envelop the mummy.’ He carved his name into one stone figure to prevent anyone else from removing it. At the same time he executed numerous coloured drawings and plans of the sites and their contents, including detailed renderings of the wall panels in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, which Belzoni was the first European to enter. On further expeditions he removed many further objects, including a large obelisk that now stands to the south of Kingston Lacy, a Dorset country house owned at the time by Sir William Bankes (1786–1855), who accompanied Belzoni on one of his expeditions up the Nile and boasted the largest collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in private possession.

In all these activities Belzoni had to contend with obstruction from local officials and competition from rivals. While removing the Pilae obelisk, he was confronted by a fellow collector, Bernardino Drovetti (1776–1852), whose way with antiquities was if possible even rougher than his own (when he found a collection of twenty vases, for example, he deliberately smashed half of them to boost the price of the rest). Appointed French Consul-General to Egypt by Napoleon I, Drovetti stayed on to collect artefacts for French museums, and when he found the obelisk on Belzoni’s boat at Luxor he claimed that it belonged to him. Gathering his men, he attacked Belzoni, who was mounted on a donkey. A shot was fired, whereupon Belzoni leapt out of his saddle and felled one of his assailants, ‘seizing his ankles and using him as a club upon the foemen’s heads’. The local Arabs hastily made peace between the Europeans, upon whom they did after all depend for their livelihood. The Belzonis returned to England via Padua in 1819, where Giovanni wrote up an account of his explorations. In 1821–2 he travelled widely on the Continent with an exhibition of his acquisitions, feeling unappreciated in England (‘I scoff at my foes,’ he wrote in a poetic moment, ‘and the Intrigoni/If my friends remember their true Belzoni’). The exhibition was not a financial success. Borrowing a large amount of money, Belzoni travelled to west Africa and joined an expedition to discover whether the river Niger was connected to the river Nile, intending further to locate the legendary desert city of Timbuktu. But he succumbed to a fatal bout of dysentery in Benin. ‘I die at last a beggar,’ he wrote bitterly from Gwato, not far from the coast, in a letter urging his friends to ‘console my dear Sarah’ and care for her when he was gone. He died there on 3 December 1823. Sarah lived on in penury, failing to make an adequate income from either her husband’s books and drawings or from her own, first in Belgium and then in Jersey, where she died in 1870 at the age of eighty-seven.

Belzoni’s activities in Egypt were part of a pattern of European looting and plunder of other parts of the world that continued through the nineteenth century. It had begun already in 1792 with the French invasion of the Rhineland and expanded onto a huge scale with Napoleon I’s removal of vast quantities of paintings and ancient sculptures from Italy in 1797, for transportation to Paris, which he considered to be the true heir of Rome. He took with him 167 ‘learned men’ when he invaded Egypt the following year, and similar quantities of cultural objects were seized on their advice. But after Napoleon’s defeat by the Prussian General von Blücher at the Battle of the Nations in October 1813, things changed. On reaching Paris in March 1814, Blücher took back by force the art that had been looted from Prussia by the French Emperor. The Duke of Wellington, resisting pleas from the Prince Regent to purchase some of the finer pieces for the royal collection, decided to arrange for the rest of the looted artworks to be returned to the ‘countries from which,’ he wrote, ‘contrary to the practice of civilized warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French revolution and the tyranny of Napoleon’. In the event, only about 55 per cent of the looted objects were returned; the rest had already been dispatched to provincial French museums, beyond the ken of the occupying Allied armies. Wellington’s disapproval of military plunder found an increasing number of supporters as the nineteenth century progressed. The duke himself thought that plunder both distracted the troops from the military operations at hand and also alienated the local population, who, as his experience in Spain had shown, it was important to keep on one’s side.

No such reservations applied to European relations with non-European societies. The British had no problem in acquiring much of Napoleon’s Egyptian booty, including the Rosetta Stone, key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics, after Napoleon was defeated by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. Particularly rich pickings were to be had from the decaying Ottoman Empire, where it was easy enough to bribe officials at every level to allow for the purchase at a knock-down price of Classical Greek artefacts such as the Elgin Marbles. They were removed from the Parthenon in Athens by the agents of Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin (1766–1841), between 1801 and 1812, purchased by the British government in 1816, and subsequently passed into the hands of the British Museum. Later in the century some two hundred bronze sculptures were seized from Benin in west Africa by a British military expedition and also taken to the British Museum. The Germans removed ocean-going outrigger canoes from Pacific islands for display in the national ethnographic museum in Berlin; the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), obsessed with the quest to find the site of ancient Troy, discovered a cache of gold objects on one site in 1873, smuggled it out of Turkey and gave the jewellery to his wife to wear.

Such acquisitions reflected Europe’s worldwide hegemony in the nineteenth century. They were made possible by industrial growth, military supremacy, and above all by improved communications, as travel by rail, steamship, river, canal and road made it easier to span the continents and arrive with little difficulty at the starting point for penetration into distant lands. The rapidly growing prestige of science and scientific knowledge fuelled the idea of exploration. Belzoni and his fellow Egyptologists increased European understanding of Ancient Egypt even as they collected and sometimes damaged or destroyed its cultural products, particularly when the French linguist and historian Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) deciphered hieroglyphic script, using bilingual inscriptions on Belzoni’s obelisk. The thirst for scientific knowledge drove the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin to locate the sources of the Brahmaputra and Indus rivers in the Himalayas and uncover parts of the Great Wall of China. In October 1844 the Prussian natural scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (1813–48?) undertook a 3,000-mile journey across north-eastern Australia collecting specimens, emerging at Port Essington on the northern coast in December 1845 after he and his party had been given up for dead. He declared: ‘I have worked for the sake of science, and for nothing else.’ In 1848 he mysteriously disappeared with another expedition, probably in the Great Sandy Desert, in an attempt to cross the continent from east to west.

By this time the search for the source of the Nile was fast becoming a public obsession in England, with the Royal Geographical Society funding a celebrated expedition by Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) and John Hanning Speke (1827–64) in 1856. Burton was as much adventurer as explorer, an irascible man of strong passions. Said to command twenty-nine different languages, he became famous for travelling in disguise to Mecca and publishing an unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights (1886–98) as well as English editions of the erotic classics The Perfumed Garden (1886) and the Kama Sutra (1883). His books scandalized Victorian opinion by including details of the sexual practices of the peoples he encountered (he even included measurements of the size of the men’s sexual organs). With Speke he travelled up the Nile in 1857–8, and was the first to reveal to Europeans the existence of Lake Tanganyika, collecting a livid scar on the way after surviving an attack by a band of Somali warriors in which a spear had penetrated both cheeks. Scarcely less famous were the self-funded Samuel Baker (1821–93) and his wife Florence (1841–1916). Here too was an adventure story tailor-made to inflame the Victorian imagination, for Baker had spotted the young woman, blonde and blue-eyed, while visiting the slave market in Vidin, in the Bulgarian part of the Ottoman Empire; outbid by the local pasha, Baker bribed her keepers and ran away with her, marrying her in Bucharest. After living for a time in Ceylon, he spent the 1860s in African exploration, accompanied everywhere by Florence; in 1869 he was made a major-general in the Egyptian Army and led a force of 1,700 freed convicts on an expedition to suppress the slave trade in the equatorial regions of the upper Nile – his successor in the post was Colonel Charles George Gordon (later Gordon of Khartoum; 1833–85). Baker was knighted for his services to exploration, but Queen Victoria refused to receive him at Court because, as she observed rather severely, he had been ‘intimate with his wife before marriage’.

Exploration offered particular opportunities to the women who possessed the courage and the resources to undertake it. The Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Baltic German aristocratic woman and the Armenian tutor she employed for her older children. Isabelle mastered eight languages; dressed as a man, she converted to Islam and explored the Sahara before being unexpectedly drowned in a flash flood. The Austrian Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858), daughter of a wealthy Viennese merchant, and married to an elderly widower, began her travels after her husband’s death in 1838, travelled to Iceland and northern Scandinavia and then through South America and the Pacific, living for a time among the Dyaks of Borneo and the Bataks of Sumatra. The Englishwoman Isabella Bird (1831–1904) became one of the most celebrated explorers of her day, particularly when she began to take a camera with her; her travels, at first financed by her father and then through an inheritance, included America, Australia, China, Hawaii, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaya, New Zealand, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Gulf. Her fame drew audiences of up to two thousand at her lectures. After one presentation in the Scottish town of Tobermory, on Persia, the audience was said to have been ‘delirious with enthusiasm and delight and the vote of thanks was a wild highland uproar of stamping, clapping, hurraring and waving of hats and handkerchiefs’. Bird’s achievements were recognized by her election as the first female Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, in 1892.

Global exploration was often carried out by people who themselves had a global background. One such was the French-American Paul du Chaillu (1835?–1903), who claimed to be the first European to have seen a live gorilla. He brought a number of skeletons and preserved gorilla corpses back to France to exhibit. Chaillu was also the first European to observe pygmies, as recounted in his book The Country of the Dwarfs (1872). His account of his discoveries became influential in the development of racial classifications of humanity in the late nineteenth century. Born on the island of Réunion, or possibly in Paris or New Orleans, Chaillu was educated by missionaries in Gabon, where his father was a French trader. He kept chimpanzees as pets, and published the African legends he heard featuring gorillas abducting women. His tales were the main inspiration for Tarzan of the Apes (1912) by the American pulp-fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950). Equally cosmopolitan was Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) a Welshman born John Rowlands and brought up in a workhouse. In 1859 he sailed to New Orleans, jumped ship, and found a job with a rich trader called Henry Stanley, who eventually adopted him. Henry Morton Stanley fought on both sides in the American Civil War, then became a journalist, which led to his engagement by the legendary editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1841–1918), to find the missing British missionary David Livingstone (1813–73). ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ – Stanley’s reputed greeting to the missionary when he finally caught up with him in 1871 in a remote part of Africa near Lake Tanganyika – entered legend as a classic example of cool understatement.

In 1874 the Herald commissioned Stanley to trace the course of the river Congo from its source to the sea; starting out with a company of 356, he eventually arrived at the mouth of the river with only 114 left, none of them European. Disease took its toll but so too did Stanley’s brutal discipline, which included frequent floggings of his bearers. Even Richard Burton complained. ‘Stanley shoots negroes as if they were monkeys,’ he said. ‘The savage,’ Stanley remarked for his part, ‘only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.’ Not surprisingly he is said to have been the model for the figure of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Stanley’s knowledge of the Congo led to a commission from King Leopold II of the Belgians, who thought that possession of the Congo basin would yield prestige for his country and profits for his own private exploration company. The explorer opened up lakes, mountains and large tracts of territory to European knowledge, but also laid the foundations for Leopold’s exploitation of the region. These explorations worried the French, who sent another explorer, Pierre de Brazza (1852–1905), to open up parts of the Congo basin to their own influence and limit that of the Belgians.

It was Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone that really made him famous. The older man was already well known and widely admired for his combination of medical and missionary work. Yet he was an ineffective organizer. He quarrelled with his assistants, many of whom resigned or were dismissed, he failed to find a navigable route along the Zambezi, and he did not succeed in discovering the source of the Nile. At the same time Livingstone founded a number of mission schools and wasted few opportunities for religious conversions; many years later some of these schools gave an education to young men who subsequently became leaders of African nationalist movements. The reports Livingstone sent back to England continually stressed the need to combat the slave trade, which still existed in the areas he went through. Yet ironically, as his expeditions steadily got smaller, he came increasingly to depend on the help of Arab slave-traders. In his last expedition he was often ill, and after Livingstone’s death in 1873 his bearers carried his decomposing body for a thousand miles to the coast for return to Britain. This combination of courage and piety, science and faith, and determination in the face of adversity, made his life – and his death – an inspiration for Victorians. Helped by Stanley’s journalism, Livingstone became a legend. His activities laid the foundation for later British territorial expansion.

Livingstone’s unconscious role in stimulating the rise of empire in Africa, in common with that of other explorers, was due not least to the fact that at every point the Europeans’ discovery of parts of the globe previously unknown to them was closely bound up with national prestige and ambition. Explorers publicized their exploits in their home countries as examples of fortitude and daring in a way calculated to bring a glow of national pride to those who read about them. This was the case even where there were no apparent economic or strategic interests involved, most obviously perhaps in the attempt to reach what was then the economically worthless North Pole. The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), the first man to cross the interior of Greenland (in 1888), reached 86˚13.6´N in 1896 after drifting his ship the Fram northwards for many months in the pack ice and then continuing on a dog-sled. In 1897 an expedition sponsored by the Belgian Geographical Society sparked a race for the South Pole, in which German, British, French and Japanese expeditions competed. The first to reach the Pole, on 14 December 1911, was the Norwegian Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), formerly first mate on the Belgian expedition. Amundsen had learned from the Inuit during a crossing of the North-West Passage some years earlier that animal skins were lighter and more waterproof than woollen parkas, and that sled-dogs were the best means of travelling in snow. As the sleds became lighter with the progressive consumption of supplies, Amundsen killed those dogs that were no longer required and used them to feed the others. Eleven of the fifty-two dogs that set out survived. A poorly organized British expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) arrived shortly afterwards on foot, on 17 January 1912. The party of five had tried to use ponies, but these had proved unable to withstand the harsh climate, and the men disdained the use of dogs as ungentlemanly. Wearing unsuitable parkas and suffering from frostbite and scurvy, Scott and his companions perished on the return journey. ‘Had we lived,’ he wrote on 29 March in a journal he left in the tent where he died, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’

To a degree the exploration of other parts of the world was seen as a common European enterprise carried out in the name of science and civilization – the British Royal Geographical Society, for example, awarded its gold medal to Leichhardt, Nansen, Amundsen and Hedin among others – but at the same time men like Livingstone and Scott became national heroes, the race to the source of the Nile or the South Pole a matter of national prestige. In the longer run, exploration became one of the key sources of empire, as it brought distant parts of the world closer to Europe and underlined for Europeans the destiny of these regions to be ‘discovered’ and, eventually, subjugated to Europe’s will. If they were inhabited by human society, that society was invariably regarded as inferior, backward, ripe for subordination or even, as in Australia, effectively non-existent. The attitudes of the Russian explorer Nicholas Mikhailovich Przhevalsky (1839–88) were typical in this respect. Exploring Central Asia and northern Tibet ‘with a carbine in one hand a whip in the other’, he described for the first time the breed of wild horse later named after him. He also called the Chinese ‘the dregs of the human race’ and claimed that ‘a thousand of our soldiers would be enough to subdue all Asia from Lake Baykal to the Himalayas’. Explorers were thus, whether intentionally or not, the harbingers of imperialism, above all in the second half of the century.

THE REVIVAL OF EMPIRE

The global colonial conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, above all between the British and the French, had by the time of the Congress of Vienna been resolved. From this point on and up to almost the very end of the century, British command of the oceans was absolute. By the mid-1870s the Royal Navy consisted of more than 500 ships, with roughly half of these being in active commission at any one time. Sixty-one of these were modern ironclads rather than the old-fashioned wooden vessels. The Royal Navy was far larger and more powerful than its nearest rivals, the French and American navies, and indeed from the 1870s it was official British policy to ensure that its own strength should be greater than that of any other two navies combined. With such massive naval predominance the British were the only power in a position to acquire and maintain a really large-scale empire. More than 80 per cent of the world’s goods were carried in British ships. The British dominated trade with independent Latin America, so there was no obvious reason why they should seek to convert economic power there, or indeed in any other part of the world, into the annexation of territory. They relied on free trade instead. For much of the century there was no specific or explicit ideology of what came to be called ‘imperialism’, asserting the superiority of European civilization over others, or justifying the acquisition of colonies as a matter of policy. In the eighteenth century the transportation of slaves from Africa to the plantations of North and South America and the Caribbean had been a fundamental part of the trading relations of Europe with the Americas. By the 1820s, however, the importance of this trade was beginning to diminish and the mercantilist policies that underpinned it had been torn to shreds by the American Revolution.

Yet despite all this, European overseas empires underwent a marked revival in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The impulses for the new expansion came not from conditions within Europe itself but largely from developing situations in other parts of the world. Local events were often decisive, as in the example of the French annexation of Algeria in 1830. Algeria was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, but the autonomous governor of the province, the Dey Hussein (1765–1838) of Algiers, was in financial trouble because his main sources of wealth – slavery, kidnapping and piracy – were declining. In 1816 the British forced the Dey to surrender Christian slaves and return all the money he had received for ransoming Christian prisoners. Putting up taxes to meet these demands led to popular resistance. In 1827 the Dey asked the French to repay money he had lent them during the Napoleonic Wars. The French consul refused to do this. The Dey summoned him to his court, called him a ‘wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal’ and struck him with a fly whisk. The French press bayed for revenge for this insult. In 1830, after some hesitation, Charles X of France, anxious to win popularity and stave off the prospect of a liberal revolt, decided to invade. The French Army, thirsting to relive the glories of the Napoleonic era, pulled out the emperor’s old invasion plans from a bottom drawer. Eighty-four French ships conveyed 37,000 troops across the Mediterranean and set up a well-defended base camp. Some 35,000 Ottoman troops arrived on 19 June 1830, but the French possessed better guns and routed them. On 5 July the Dey surrendered on the condition that people’s religion was respected, and the French occupied Algiers. Napoleon had triumphed again – this time from beyond the grave.

The French, needless to say, did not keep their promises, and soon began turning mosques into churches, sparking resistance from the deeply Muslim country, led by the Sufi orders who had already rebelled against the taxation demands of the Ottomans. A young holy man, Abd el-Kader al-Dzejairi (1808–83), who claimed descent from the prophet Mohammed, emerged as a leader, proclaimed a jihad, and inflicted repeated reverses on the French. By 1836 the French were facing defeat, so King Louis-Philippe sent in Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud (1784–1849). The marshal pushed the rebels back, razing their villages to the ground (thus introducing the Arab word razzia, scorched earth, to many European languages), and beheading any Muslims taken prisoner. Victory finally came in 1847, when Abd el-Kader gave up and decamped to Damascus. The French at least began to learn the lesson from these events, and started to use Islamic institutions to support their rule. A motley crew of settlers now began to arrive from Europe: French aristocrats, who wanted to recreate a pre-1789 society in Algeria; Cistercian monks, who built a monastery and farm; ex-soldiers granted land in Algeria at the end of their service; socialist disciples of Saint-Simon, who intended to create utopian communities; later on, revolutionaries deported from France after the 1848 June uprising; Italians, Spaniards, Maltese and many others.

By the time of the Second Empire the settlers had lost most of their initial ideals and agitated for the downgrading of the rights of the original inhabitants of the colony. On 24 October 1870 the new republican government in Paris passed a law giving Jews and settlers in Algeria French citizenship. Arabs and Berbers continued to be excluded from full rights. A local Muslim leader, Mohamed el-Mokhrani (1815–71), declared a jihad against the French, outraged that Jews had been placed above Muslims and convinced that the German defeat of the French was a sign of divine justice. In 1868, French rule had been a major factor in a famine in which perhaps a third of a million Algerians died; French propaganda made great play with the famine relief operation mounted by the Church in Algeria, but this too was a bitter cause of resentment. Some 150,000 Muslims rose in support of Mokhrani and began besieging the towns where the French and other settlers had retreated for safety. Within a short time the revolt was defeated. Together with the 1868 famine, the conflict had led to the death of around a million people, a third of the population. The French revenge was harsh. The leaders of the uprising were killed or sent to the Pacific island of New Caledonia. Up to 1,200,000 acres of Arab land were confiscated. Pilgrimages to Mecca were severely restricted in order to cut off Algeria from the rest of the Muslim world. Arabic was even classified as a foreign language. Muslim social and educational institutions thought to encourage resistance to French rule were destroyed. Within a few years the northern part of the country had been turned into three French departments, satisfying settler demands, while the southern part remained under army control.

Algeria was something of an exception to the general nature of European colonialism before 1880. More traditional patterns obtained in the rest of Africa, where three different interests intersected. The first of these was trading. As the slave trade declined then came to an end, European trading bases began to deal in vegetable oils instead of slaves, processing African-grown groundnuts and palms. But this only created an intensified demand for slaves within Africa itself, so that the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century. By around 1880 trading bases, mainly British and French, were dotted all over the west African coast, and rivalry between them was becoming a source of conflict. Their respective governments tried to make them financially useful by charging customs duties, which in turn meant annexing new entry points to the African Continent in order to stop smuggling. In 1850 the British government acquired the remaining Danish forts on the coast, in 1861 Lagos and in 1872 the Dutch base of Elmina. The French acquired new trading posts on the coast of Senegal. The possibility of these trading bases getting into trouble with African rulers and requiring military protection increased as their numbers and influence grew. For the time being, however, trading interests were paramount and the likelihood of formal colonization seemed remote.

Britain’s relative lack of interest in formal colonial acquisitions was illustrated by events in south Africa. London veered between annexing areas settled by the Boers, who were after all British subjects, and allowing them autonomy; the Transvaal was recognized as a free state in 1852, annexed in 1877, and given autonomy again in 1881. This indecision was to have major repercussions at the end of the century. In India, too, expansion was largely unplanned by Britain, but occurred in particular on the initiative of the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie (1812–60), appointed in 1848. Dalhousie thought Indian-controlled states were inefficient and that income for the East India Company – the powerful British trading organization that in the previous decades had come to rule over large areas of the subcontinent with its own private armies and administrators, in order to provide a stable and secure basis for its operations – would be increased if he annexed them. Disorder in the Punjab following the death of its ruler Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) drew the British in. It was annexed after fighting in 1849, alongside neighbouring Sind, captured in 1843 by a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, General Sir Charles Napier (1782–1853). Napier in fact far exceeded his orders, which were merely to quell a rebellion. (His famous punning one-word dispatch, peccavi, ‘I have sinned’, was not actually his at all; it was a joke sent to the satirical magazine Punch by the translator Catherine Winkworth, which the magazine printed as if it came from Napier.) Both the Punjab and Sind controlled access to the emirate of Afghanistan, but the British had failed to subjugate this state with a military expedition in 1842 – all but one of the 16,000 men were annihilated by tribesmen.

This rapid expansion of British India in the 1840s and especially the mid-1850s, when many parts of northern India were taken under British rule, along with lower Burma, where Dalhousie acted in 1852 to protect British trading interests, illustrated the fact that at least in this area of the globe Britain continued to push forward with the extension of imperial rule. It also created massive tensions and resentments. The arrival of missionaries sparked fears of forced conversion to Christianity. British control was precarious. In mid-century the subcontinent had a population of around 200 million. This was not going to be a colony of settlement for the British; it was not going to be converted to Christianity; it was not going to be culturally assimilated into European ways of living. It did, however, yield massive revenues used to sustain a very large private army belonging to the East India Company and recruited from the Indian population – so-called sepoys – 200,000 in 1857, under Indian officers, alongside 16,000 European troops in separate regiments, under British officers. Territorial expansion meant that Indian troops were now expected to serve further away from their homeland without additional pay, even in such remote areas as Burma and China, and many of them objected to being removed from their own region. Military expansion necessitated an unpopular increase of taxation on the population. Resentments boiled over when a new model of rifle was introduced, with pre-greased paper cartridges that had to be bitten open to release the powder; the tallow used to grease them was made from either beef fat, offending Hindus, or pork fat, offending Muslims. Sepoys refused to use the rifles, and attempts to discipline them led to open rebellion. Soon the subcontinent was in a state of war. Some key Indian states, whose rulers hated their loss of power and objected to British interference with Hindu custom, joined the uprising. Others remained loyal. In some areas the revolt took on a distinctly nationalistic character, though the diverse motives of the rebels, and the fact that many areas stayed calm, make it difficult to describe this as a concerted war of independence.

The British were driven back into their forts, where they were besieged. There were numerous massacres of British troops, most notoriously in 1857 at Kanpur, which inflamed public opinion back home and fuelled a wave of revenge as British forces regained the initiative. They began punishing the rebels, shooting and hanging them in huge numbers, or using the traditional Mughal punishment of firing them from the mouths of cannon. Blamed for the uprising, the military and administrative role of the British East India Company was removed in 1858 and replaced by direct government control. This was the beginning of the ‘British Raj’. The number of British troops in India was virtually doubled and sepoy recruitment was confined to more loyal areas in the north, with the army funded by a new and more acceptable taxation system based on Mughal models. British government control was soon extended over the Malayan peninsula, where local states were forced to accept British informal suzerainty in 1873, in an attempt to protect trade with China against piracy – also a major factor in prompting the Dutch to extend their control over Indonesia in the 1850s. Like much else in this period, such expansion was largely piecemeal and unplanned. The same can be said of the activities of the French in Indochina, where Napoleon III sent troops at the end of the 1850s after French missionaries had been persecuted and killed; local French officials argued that further expansion was necessary to protect missions and trading interests, clashes took place with local and regional powers, and by the 1890s France was in full occupation of the entire peninsula, after capturing the key fort of Hung Hóa in 1884.

In almost all of these examples it was local European officials, merchants and missionaries who put pressure on metropolitan governments, and not the other way round. Strongest of all was the pressure coming from European settlers, not only in south Africa but also in Australasia. As the free European population of Australia grew, traders, whalers and sealers began to move eastwards into the Pacific. By the 1830s they were trading guns and liquor with the Maoris in New Zealand, leading to frequent violent clashes and growing disorder, above all in the inter-tribal ‘musket wars’ that went on for several decades. When Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1892), who had carried out the systematic colonization of southern Australia, set sail with a large number of emigrants for New Zealand, the British government declared sovereignty in 1840 so as to provide some kind of protection for them. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed the same year, was supposed to guarantee Maori land rights, but settlers ignored it, and a series of wars and small-scale violent conflicts began, lasting till the early 1870s. The British and the settlers were unable to defeat the Maoris. European settlers outnumbered them by the 1860s, and a kind of uneasy stalemate was the end result, in which Maoris had been pushed out to the edge of European settlement but defended their interests there with some success. From New Zealand, European traders fanned out further into the Pacific, looking for coconut oil and guano. They began to kidnap islanders for forced labour on sugar plantations in Australia – so-called ‘blackbirding’; the British navy tried to stop this trade, but with only limited success. Traders, whalers and missionaries began to arrive on the Pacific islands, and to protect their interests the British annexed Fiji in 1874, though Hawaii and Tonga managed to resist being taken over by European powers. In North and South America a similar process of European expansion took place, though without the accompaniment of formal colonial acquisition, as millions of migrants pushed into the interior, displacing and drastically reducing in numbers the indigenous inhabitants of the areas they settled.

Increasingly, therefore, European governments felt obliged to intervene when trading interests came under threat. China provided a classic example. The Chinese Empire restricted entry to European goods, while exporting large quantities to the West themselves, above all tea. To redress the balance, the East India Company smuggled Indian-produced opium into China. In 1838, not for the first time, the Chinese Empire intervened to stop the trade. British ships were boarded in international waters and their cargoes of opium seized and destroyed, while British merchants were blockaded in their factories and starved of food till they agreed to hand over their supplies. In retaliation, the British sent a military force from India in what became known as the First Opium War. It seized Canton, and in 1842 the British acquired Hong Kong and opened four other ports for trade; the United States and France soon got their treaty ports too. The Chinese Empire was unhappy with the treaty ports and conflict broke out again, leading to an Anglo-French force of 18,000 marching on Beijing in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Members of a delegation sent to negotiate with the Chinese were arrested and tortured to death. In retaliation the Europeans destroyed the old imperial Summer Palace and forced the Chinese to open ten new treaty ports, pay a large indemnity, and agree to the opium trade so long as they could regulate it. By 1900, domestic opium production in China was bringing the trade to an end.

Expansion into Asia provided an outlet for tsarist ambitions after the Crimean War. As settlers and traders moved eastwards, local or regional officials began acting on their own initiative to conclude treaties with local states or neighbouring powers. By the 1870s the Russians were moving into what is now Turkmenistan. A key role was played by the fact that Russian settlers on the central Asian steppe were threatened by the unstable but powerful Muslim states of Khiva, Bokhara and Kokand, and so government forces gradually subdued these areas, turning the first two of these states into protectorates and incorporating the third into a new province. The Russian Empire moved gradually eastwards, conquering Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868. By the end of the 1870s the tsar controlled all of Central Asia, much to the alarm of the British government, which perceived this as a direct threat to its power over India: the jockeying for position in the region became known in London as ‘the Great Game’. Of more direct interest to St Petersburg, however, was the securing of access to the Pacific. The province of Amur was seized from the Chinese and in 1858 China accepted this as a fait accompli. Sakhalin Island was occupied, bringing Russia up against Japan. Eastward expansion even brought Russians across the Bering Straits into North America. In the eighteenth century, Russian fur traders had hunted and traded in Alaska in increasing numbers. By the early 1800s the Russian-American company had taken control of most of this trade. By the middle of the century, however, otters, beavers and other fur-bearing animals in the region had been hunted to near-extinction, competition from the Hudson’s Bay Company was proving increasingly intrusive, and the costs of communication across thousands of miles to European Russia were proving prohibitive. There were never more than seven or eight hundred Russians in Alaska, almost all of them in the two main coastal towns. In 1867, recognizing the intractability of these problems, the Russian government sold the province to the United States for two cents an acre. History might have turned out very differently had it not done so.

THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM

The 1870s ushered in the age of imperialism – a word that first entered the English language around this time and was soon, as noted by the English economist John A. Hobson (1858–1940), ‘on everybody’s lips . . . used to denote the most powerful movement in the current politics of the western world’. Imperialism was propagated by governments keen to gain popular support for the principle of maintaining, usually at some cost, their overseas possessions. The cult of empire began in Britain in 1877 with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Within a few years British royal ceremonies, including Victoria’s golden jubilee were featuring maharajas and colonial troops. Huge publicity was given to the ‘durbar’ held in India to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India. The celebration of empire was relatively slow to take on, but gradually it took hold, above all in the new popular press, and by the 1890s imperial propaganda could be found everywhere, on railway bookstalls, in political meetings, in novels, magazines and history books. The elevation of the monarchy from a national to an imperial status provided an opportunity for the British to celebrate, as a contemporary put it, ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’. Already by about 1880, however, nationalist and patriotic politicians in many European countries were beginning to dream of the conquest of other parts of the world.

Map 14. The Age of Imperialism, 1815–1914

International expositions, a tradition inaugurated by Britain’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, began to include ‘colonial pavilions’ –  eighteen of them at the Paris exposition of 1889, clustering around the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the occasion. Colonial museums opened in most European countries to display looted artefacts. Zoos began to include ‘native villages’ among their exhibits. In Belgium in the 1880s and 1890s exhibitions were held including a typical Congolese village, where imported Africans were told to do what they normally did at home, which was mostly not much, since at home they would not have been sitting in a village but out hunting or in the fields. A pool was provided and stocked with fish, and spectators threw coins in for the Congolese to dive for. Sometimes they threw in bottles of gin and brandy too, to make them drunk. Stages were set up for the men to re-enact battles with spears and shields. The Congolese had to go around half-naked in a display of ‘authenticity’, and in cold weather many of them became ill. There was no interest in getting the villagers to make or display artworks or put on musical events. The assumption of European superiority over ‘savages’ was even more powerful or influential than in the colonies themselves. It underpinned the dramatic expansion of European empires that took place during these decades.

Between 1878 and 1914, Europe added more than 8,600,000 square miles to the territory it controlled. Taken together, the colonial possessions of Europe and the United States included 57 per cent of the world’s population on the eve of the First World War. A variety of different, rival explanations were offered for this dramatic and precipitate imperial expansion. Writers like Hobson, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg sought to ascribe economic causes to the expansion of Europe. They argued variously that colonies were needed, as they had not been previously, to provide raw materials for European industry, or markets for its products, or new areas in which to invest its surplus capital in an era when monopolies and cartels were ossifying European capitalist economies and reducing profit margins. Social Democrats in Germany suggested that the acquisition of colonies was used by conservative governments as a way of diverting rising working-class discontent – expressed in the growth of mass socialist parties demanding revolution and the overthrow of capitalism – into nationalist and colonialist enthusiasm. All of these developments were in this view products of the transition to maturity of industrial capitalism in Europe. But while industry did indeed expand rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s, capitalism in Europe did not reach the stage of monopolies and cartels until the 1890s or perhaps even later. There is no convincing evidence that profit margins were declining in the 1880s; on the contrary, European economies were recovering from the sharp downturn of the early-to-mid-1870s precisely at the time when imperialism reached its apogee. The extension of the vote did not lead to the rise of popular pressure groups eager for imperial acquisitions until after the turn of the century, when most new territories had already been acquired. Domestic political considerations were still important, but in the 1880s European powers still thought they could defeat socialism through repression; in Bismarck’s Germany the socialist movement was banned from 1878 to 1890, and in the early Third Republic, during the 1870s and 1880s, politics were still conducted in the aftermath of the ferocious and bloody repression of the Paris Commune in 1871. Key players in the imperial game such as Italy only had a very limited electorate, and before the 1890s the extension of the franchise in Germany was not accompanied by the rise of mass politics.

The age of imperialism was accompanied by a change in the international atmosphere in the late 1870s, when the German government ended the era of free trade by introducing import duties into Germany to protect domestic grain producers. International rivalries intensified, as the slow but steady expansion of European possessions overseas began to create collisions between rival European powers, for example in west Africa between the British, the French and the Belgians. The growing penetration of indigenous economies by European traders and merchants increasingly produced crises to which European powers now felt they had to respond by annexing territory. Politicians saw a chance for glory in the growth of empire: Disraeli orchestrated the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1877, while the French Republican Prime Minister, Jules Ferry, regarded overseas acquisitions as a means of diverting his countrymen from their obsession with the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. France, he declared, had to ‘carry everywhere its language, its customs, its flag, its genius’. In Italy, Francesco Crispi promoted the idea of an Italian Empire in the Mediterranean. Yet European powers were initially reluctant to embark on a costly policy of annexation. Bismarck, for example, was adamant that Germany did not need formal colonies for their own sake. They would, he declared, mean unnecessary trouble and expense. ‘I am no man for colonies,’ he once said. But Bismarck did think that the declaration of interests in particular potential colonies could be a useful bargaining point in the European power-game. As he said to an explorer in 1888: ‘Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here . . . is France, and we’re in the middle – that’s my map of Africa.’

Yet by this time it was already too late to stop the forward rush of imperial annexations. The chain of events that undermined Bismarck’s position had begun back in 1857, when the British and French consuls, joined later by the Italians, had gained the power of supervising the bankrupt administration of the Ottoman ruler, or Bey, of Tunis. Control had then passed in 1869 to an international financial commission, on which the French increasingly gained the leading role. The Bey’s government was unable to collect even a small proportion of the taxes imposed on the population, while European powers made the situation worse by forcing down Tunisia’s import tariffs until they were no more than 3 per cent, undermining the economy by allowing a mass influx of cheap European goods. In 1881, when the Italians, annoyed by the growing French hegemony, announced their intention of annexing Tunisia wholesale, the French sent a military expedition into the country. This led to a Muslim rebellion, which in turn prompted the declaration of a French protectorate after the Bey Muhammad III (1813–82) was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother Ali III (1817–1902). The decay of Ottoman power in north Africa opened up further sources of conflict between European powers. With relatively few resources, the desert province of Libya remained under Ottoman control throughout the century. But Egypt, far richer in resources, especially cotton, was a different matter. Since the early nineteenth century it had been effectively autonomous, a condition formalized in 1867 by an agreement between the Ottoman Sultan and Muhammad Ali’s grandson Isma’il (1830–95), by which time the government had long been fully committed to economic modernization, importing European specialists to help it in the project. In 1854, as part of this programme, the Egyptian authorities had commissioned the former French consul Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–94) to set up a company to build a canal across the Suez isthmus. Employing over one and a half million workers, the construction project lasted fifteen years. The canal opened in 1869, though it was not fully completed until 1871. Crucially, it made very little money to start with, while Isma’il had invested so much in it that he was effectively bankrupt by 1878. The inevitable Debt Commission, dominated by the French and British, was set up to sort things out, and when Isma’il caused problems it persuaded the Ottoman government to depose him and replace him with his eldest son Tewfik Pasha (1852–92).

This in turn, in what by now had become a familiar pattern, sparked a widespread revolt, led by a senior officer in the Egyptian Army, Colonel Ahmed Orabi (1841–1911, known in England as Arabi Pasha). The revolt was put down at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir in 1882 by a purely British force, since the French Chamber of Deputies had refused to grant credits for an expedition. The British were effectively drawn in to occupying Egypt on their own, and stayed not least in order to guard it against a jihad launched by the sheikh Muhammad Ahmad (1844–85), who took the title of ‘Mahdi’ or Redeemer, in neighbouring Sudan. This was the uprising that led in 1885 to the famous incident of the death of General Gordon, whom Isma’il Pasha had appointed Governor of the Sudan, at the Sudanese capital Khartoum. The British expeditionary force sent to rescue Gordon came too late; after his death it withdrew, and Sudan was left alone for the time being. Egypt did not become a British colony, but remained under the control of the Debt Commission. This now became the site of Anglo-French rivalry, encouraged by the Germans, who also sat on the commission.

Anglo-French clashes over these issues were exploited in 1884 by Bismarck, who backed the French to try and draw them away from thoughts of taking revenge over Germany for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. At the same time, he also wanted to show to the British the desirability of being nice to the Germans by annoying or threatening them in colonial matters (this is what he meant by his map of Africa being located in Europe). There were elections to the Reichstag coming up, and Bismarck needed the support of the powerful National Liberal Party, closely allied to mercantile interests in Hamburg and elsewhere. So he began declaring German protectorates in key areas: Angra Pequena in south-west Africa, where the German flag was raised in May 1884; Togoland and Cameroon (Kamerun) in July 1884; New Guinea (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland) in December 1884; and German East Africa, including present-day Tanzania (without Zanzibar), in February 1885. He also signed a treaty with the King of Samoa giving Germany preferential rights over other European powers – the king thought it prudent to sign for his part when he glimpsed a German warship at anchor off the island. Typically, the moving forces on the ground were German explorers – Gustav Nachtigal (1834–85) in west Africa, Carl Peters (1856–1918) in east Africa – and traders and planters, particularly in New Guinea. But they were all there was: they were not followed by any significant involvement on the ground by the German state.

Bismarck’s actions created something like a panic as European states rushed to annex their own territories before somebody else got there first. To underline his friendship with France and his new colonial policy, Bismarck agreed with the French government to call a conference in Berlin, which met from November 1884 to February 1885. It focused almost exclusively on the Congo, where it recognized the claim of Leopold II of the Belgians to annex it as his personal property, as well as ratifying the French claim to the northern bank of the Congo river. Apart from this, however, the conference achieved nothing. Its declaration that a claim to a colony required ‘effective occupation’ was a dead letter, since such a claim really applied only to coastal areas, and the conference’s insistence on free trade along major rivers like the Congo and the Niger was more or less ignored. But by laying down ground rules for annexation, the conference effectively declared that the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – a British term coined in 1884 – had begun, so it stimulated further annexations. In 1885 the British declared their protectorate over the Nigerian coast and authorized the Royal Niger Company, founded in 1879, to go inland, conclude treaties with local rulers, and exercise British rule, rather like the East India Company of former times. France’s rivalry with Britain, stimulated by the quarrels over Egypt, led its local administrators in west Africa to push forward with the idea of an empire stretching from Algeria to the Congo River, and in 1889–90 treaties were signed with the British defining the boundaries of the two empires. All of this was effectively on paper only, since the hinterland was actually controlled by a series of large and powerful Islamic states.

The Germans by contrast were stuck with Togo and Cameroon, and with south-west Africa, since neither Bismarck nor German merchant firms had much interest in going any further. In East Africa, however, Carl Peters, who had founded a Society for German Colonization and concluded treaties in its name with a variety of local rulers in 1884, blackmailed Bismarck into granting a charter for his new East Africa Company by threatening to sell his acquisitions to King Leopold of the Belgians. Needing the support of the National Liberals, who backed Peters, the Chancellor gave in, and soon Peters, returning to Africa in 1885, annexed even more territory until he was expelled from Uganda by the British. Peters got into even more trouble when the activities of his company led in 1889 to a revolt by Arab planters, which the German government – supported by the British – reluctantly sent troops to suppress. This led to the declaration in 1891 of German East Africa as a full colony under German state control, while in 1890 Zanzibar was handed over to the British in exchange for the small but strategically significant British-owned North Sea island of Heligoland, off the German coast. Meanwhile, stories of Peters’ scandalous behaviour had begun to reach Berlin. In 1892 it became known that he had had one of his African mistresses hanged when he discovered she was having an affair with his manservant; Peters hanged him too, and both their home villages were razed to the ground. This led to a local revolt, which German troops were brought in to suppress. Peters was recalled and in 1897 dishonourably discharged from government service with the loss of his pension rights; he escaped criminal prosecution only by fleeing to London.

The exchange of Zanzibar for Heligoland reflected a major British concern that the new route to India via the Suez Canal should be properly protected by a string of British possessions and coaling stations along the east African coast. In 1886 and 1890 the exchange was underpinned by British recognition of German East Africa in exchange for German recognition of British control over Uganda and in effect the rest of east Africa north of Mozambique (in Portuguese hands since the early sixteenth century). But the British too had to deal with an awkward imperial adventurer, in the shape of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902). Sent from England to south Africa as a child to improve his health, Rhodes became a businessman who by the end of the 1880s had bought up all the diamond mines there and acquired an effective monopoly on the world’s diamond supplies. He began pushing northwards from south Africa, obtaining mining concessions from local potentates. But his ambitions were not just economic. Rhodes believed in the superiority of what he called the Anglo-Saxon race – among whom he included the Germans – over all others, and he wanted Anglo-Saxon rule over east and central Africa to stretch from Cairo to the Cape. These colonies were, however, to have a large measure of self-government. Rhodes wanted them to escape what he saw as excessive interference from London. These views helped him become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, gaining the support of Boer settlers by passing legislation to force Africans off their land. The British government was happy enough to allow his British South Africa Company to occupy and control major areas of central Africa, where missionaries were getting into difficulties, and by 1894 protectorates had been declared over much of the region.

The other European power with an interest in Africa was Italy. Backed by Germany, the Italians acquired territory in the horn of Africa to provide them with ports where Italian ships could refuel before or after negotiating the Suez Canal. There were also scattered Spanish and Portuguese possessions deriving mostly from trading or coaling stations. Large areas of the Sahara and equatorial west and central Africa were claimed by France. Eastern and southern Africa belonged mostly to the British and the Germans. Only Abyssinia and the free state of Liberia, founded by returning freed slaves from the United States, remained independent. Minor adjustments remained: between the French and British in northern Nigeria and in particular on the Upper Nile at Fashoda in 1898, where a military clash between the two powers threatened until the French, feeling very much the inferior power, prudently withdrew in the face of a larger British force. In northern Africa, Italy and France settled claims in Tripoli (Libya) and Morocco in 1900. To all intents and purposes the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was over by the middle of the 1890s.

It was paralleled by a similar rush for influence and control in Asia and the Pacific, also sparked by Bismarck, who claimed New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Pomerania, the northern Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and Nauru. In 1885–6 the British and French recognized these claims, allotting north-eastern New Guinea to Germany in return for German acceptance of British rule over south-eastern New Guinea and the southern Pacific, and French suzerainty in parts of the eastern Pacific. European commercial penetration of Indochina brought in French troops to combat nascent nationalist uprisings in 1885–6, uniting Annam, Tongking, Laos and Cambodia and the existing colony of Cochin-China in a single French possession ruled by a governor-general. This sparked the British occupation of Upper Burma in 1885, with the independent kingdom of Siam (Thailand) being retained as a buffer zone between the British and the French colonies. Similarly, the French and British were rivals in the island of Madagascar, where growing clashes produced a stand-off only resolved in 1890 by British recognition of a French protectorate.

There were some parts of the world that never came under direct European rule at any time in history, including Abyssinia, Anatolia, Arabia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Morocco, Siam and Tibet. The largest and most significant of them was China. The Chinese Empire was rich, populous, and promising in terms of economic exploitation and investment. From 1850 to 1864 it had been convulsed by the Taiping Rebellion, which caused the deaths of up to 20 million people, the largest armed conflict anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century. The Chinese Empire had recovered, but not before losing control over Manchuria to the Russians in 1860. From 1875, China was ruled by the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), through her nephew the Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908), whom she had placed under house arrest when he began supporting the reform of the empire along Western lines. As this suggests, she was deeply conservative; contrasting strongly with her Japanese equivalent, Emperor Meiji (1852–1912), who was ‘restored’ by reformers between 1866 and 1870. After the reformist victory, Japanese emissaries were sent forth across the world to learn and import Western industrial, educational and political ways, while European experts were summoned to the islands to help the task of modernization. In an astonishingly short period of time Japan was well on the way to becoming a major economic and above all military power, not only capable of defending itself against foreign incursions but also increasingly keen to join in the imperial scramble for territory itself. The first opportunity presented itself in Korea, described by a German military adviser to the Japanese government as a ‘dagger pointing at the heart of Japan’. Nominally independent, Korea had for a long time been under Chinese control, and when disturbances broke out in 1894 the Chinese sent an army to put them down; this was considered an affront as well as a threat by Japan, which then sent an invasion force that quickly defeated the inferior, poorly equipped and badly organized Chinese forces. The Koreans and Chinese were forced to recognize the transfer of Korea to the Japanese sphere of influence, leading eventually to its annexation in 1910.

These events made European powers view China as ripe for exploitation. What they wanted above all was free access to Chinese markets, and the best way to do this in their view was by taking out ninety-nine-year leases on ‘treaty ports’ – ports opened to foreign trade and residence due to pressure from the Great Powers. After 1895 there was a massive expansion of this system until the number of treaty ports reached more than eighty. In addition to ports held by the British, there were ports leased to the French, the Russians, the Germans and the Italians. Concessions were taken out by the Japanese, the United States, Portugal, Belgium and even Leopold II’s Congo Free State. The rapid penetration of China by European powers inevitably led to a violent reaction. A nationalist movement quickly emerged, known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, or Boxers for short, dedicated to reversing the unequal treaties, curbing the activities of missionaries and opium traders, and reducing the activities of the Europeans or even eliminating them altogether. After initial hesitation the Dowager Empress threw the weight of her regime behind them, and they laid siege to the Legation Quarter of Beijing. More than two thousand Chinese Christians were put to death across China in 1900, and a number of European missionaries, merchants and officials were killed. The eight foreign nations involved in the conflict sent a heavily armed force of 20,000 to Beijing to recapture the city. The victorious troops of all armies looted and pillaged on a massive scale, and there were said to have been mass rapes of Chinese women in the occupied city. Boxers or men thought to be Boxers were summarily executed, especially if they fell into the hands of the Japanese. The Germans arrived too late to take part in the fighting, but did their share of the looting all the same. As they embarked at Bremerhaven for the long journey, Kaiser Wilhelm II told them:

No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! . . . Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look askance at a German.

The speech, especially the comparison with the Hun, was to come back to haunt him in the First World War.

The Allies imposed on the Chinese government financial reparations that would have taken until the end of the 1920s to repay. But the long-predicted carve-up of China never happened. The European powers had received a severe shock from the uprising. If this was the reaction provoked by the existence of mere treaty ports, what might happen if they tried to take over the whole country? Any further territorial advances seemed ill advised in the circumstances. In addition, two of the powers involved, Russia and Japan, were serious rivals for territorial gains in Manchuria, where more than a quarter of foreign investments were held, and a peaceful agreement between the two of them over partition was out of the question: indeed the two states went to war over the issue in 1904. Ultimately, the Chinese government had held together, and it was more profitable to continue lending it money at high interest rates than to invest large sums in trying to defeat it and take over its business. The imperial tax collection service seemed a cheaper and more acceptable vehicle for assembling the debt repayments than a European tax collection service such as had been run by the old British East India Company. So the United States proposed an open-door policy, which everyone apart from the Russians accepted, and in the meantime the powers concluded a series of bilateral treaties promising not to acquire any further territory in China. In 1902 the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which committed Britain to remaining neutral if Japan was attacked by another power or to joining with the Japanese if two other powers were involved, was widely celebrated in the United Kingdom and presented to the electorate as a classic example of the wisdom of Conservative foreign policy. For the Chinese the humiliation of all this was too much to bear; in 1911 the Qing dynasty was overthrown in a revolution and on 1 January 1912 a Chinese Republic was declared.

China was in the end, therefore, something of a stand-off between European powers and a potential object of colonization. In some other parts of the world, European powers were even forced to retreat. Unrest in Cuba, the rise of a nationalist movement, and reports of atrocities committed by the Spanish trying to retain control over their country’s most valuable overseas possession, brought the United States into a war with Spain in 1898 that resulted not only in Cuba being ceded – if only temporarily – to the Americans but also to a US takeover of Puerto Rico, and, in the Pacific, the Philippines and Guam. This marked the end of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific at least: and indeed Spain now actually sold the Caroline, Mariana and Palau to Germany, though Germany had initially wanted to acquire the Philippines. This shakeup was completed by the division of Samoa by Germany and America in return for British disengagement and acquisition of Tonga, some small German islands in the Solomons, and disputed areas in west Africa: all that was left of the once huge Spanish Empire was Spanish Morocco, west Africa and Guinea, the Spanish Sahara and the Canary Islands. The virtual demise of the Spanish Empire administered a tremendous shock to the Spanish political system, despite economic gains in the form of the repatriation of investments from Cuba; the consequences were to work themselves through in the following decades up to the 1930s.

Undoubtedly the greatest humiliation suffered by a European state in the quest for empire, however, was experienced by the Italians in Ethiopia. Italy had already taken control of parts of the horn of Africa and in the 1890s sought to extend its influence over Ethiopia. Here the warlord Menelik II (1844–1913), after conquering the provinces of Tigre and Amhara, had declared himself negus, or emperor, in 1889 and concluded a treaty of friendship with the Italians. Unfortunately the treaty said different things in Italian and Amharic. While the Italians’ version gave them control of Eritrea and rights of protectorate over Ethiopia, the Amharic version merely said that Menelik could use Italian diplomats as a proxy in his foreign policy if he wanted to. After this discrepancy came to light, disputes over the treaty intensified until Menelik formally repudiated it in 1893. He began stockpiling modern European weaponry, some of it bought from the Italians themselves, and sent a delegation to St Petersburg, resulting in the attachment of Russian military advisers to the Ethiopian Army. In 1894 the Italians duly began military action, which escalated until on 1 March 1896 a major battle was fought at Adowa in the mountainous area of Tigre.

In this encounter 15,000 Italian troops, many of them raw conscripts, equipped with outdated guns and footwear that broke up on the rough rocky terrain, advanced in three columns that became separated because the Italians did not possess proper maps. They were met by nearly 100,000 Ethiopian troops, raised under the country’s feudal system, supplied with modern rifles, and aided by forty-two Russian field guns specially adapted for mountainous terrain. One of the Italian columns retreated in the wrong direction and became trapped in a ravine, where the Ethiopian cavalry slaughtered them in their thousands, egged on by cries of ‘reap, reap!’ from their commander. At a crucial moment Menelik brought in 25,000 fresh reserves and surrounded the other two columns, forcing them to retreat with heavy losses. Altogether 7,000 Italian troops and askaris – Eritrean auxiliaries – were killed. Some 3,000 soldiers in the Italian expedition were taken prisoner by the Ethiopians, and the rest abandoned the field of battle, along with 11,000 rifles, all their artillery, and most of their supplies. The Italian prisoners were treated well, but 800 of the Eritrean askaris were condemned as traitors by the Ethiopians, who chopped off their right hands and left feet. The Italians were forced to recognize Ethiopian independence; Menelik was satisfied, and preferred cautiously not to follow up his victory or provoke retaliation by advancing into Eritrea. In Italy people ripped up railway lines in case the government drafted reinforcements. Outraged patriots pelted Prime Minister Crispi’s house with rocks until he was forced to resign.

Yet overall the imbalance of forces between European and non-European powers outside the Americas was starkly illustrated in 1898 by the Battle of Omdurman, where an Anglo-Egyptian army led by Major-General Sir Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916) defeated a Sudanese Mahdist force, in what was little more than a massacre: 23,000 Sudanese were killed or wounded, whereas the dead and injured on the British side numbered no more than 430. As the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) put it: ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.’ If a non-European state wanted to defeat a European invasion it had to follow the example of Ethiopia or Japan and acquire European weaponry and military hardware itself. Modern weaponry was in turn the product of the great leap forward of European prosperity and industry, science and technology in comparison to other parts of the world. Yet far from being inevitable after 1500, as some historians have claimed, this global imbalance did not really take hold until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It was the product not just of technological superiority but also of European peace. Things might have been very different had the European nations carried on fighting each other and exporting their conflicts to other parts of the globe, as they had done before 1815. Peace, underpinned by British naval hegemony, allowed the spread of communications networks, telegraph cables, sea lanes and trade routes, and intercontinental railways, leading to further economic development and a dense network of rapid imperial communications. Global trade expanded almost exponentially under these conditions, in a way that would have been impossible had the major industrializing states been fighting one another. Mass European migration to the Americas and other parts of the world helped build a globalized economy of which Europe and the United States were the main beneficiaries. In this sense, Europe’s borders had become porous as never before. European states were also politically better organized and more effective in mobilizing their resources. Colonization had its limits, but overall Europe gained a dominance over the rest of the world in the second half of the nineteenth century that it enjoyed neither before nor subsequently.

EXPLOITATION AND RESISTANCE

In 1884–5 the Berlin Conference that set off the scramble for colonies in Africa and other parts of the world laid down the basic principle that in order to establish the formal right of rule over a colony, a European power had to establish ‘effective occupation’. The primary of trading interests meant that only coastal areas were occupied to begin with, though explores soon began to penetrate inland. The hinterland of continental Africa was a different matter. Here European states drew straight lines across the map with a cavalier disregard for geographical features, delimiting the territories they claimed from one another but leaving them still to be brought under real control. In many ways the story of colonization in the 1890s and 1900s is the story of how European empires tried to convert paper colonies into real ones. In some colonies, in the age of high imperialism, European settlers began arriving in ever increasing numbers and, with or without the approval of the colonial state, seizing land from indigenous peoples for cattle farming or rubber or palm oil plantations. The clashes such actions sparked were among the most violent in the history of European imperialism, and they almost invariably drew in more or less reluctant European powers to back up settler aggression with state military action. Nowhere were these clashes more dramatic than in German South-West Africa (Namibia). Initially a protectorate run by a limited company in the classic hands-off manner favoured by Bismarck, the colony was taken over by the state as early as 1888, when the company failed. Much of the land was desert or semi-arid and was inhabited by nomadic cattle herders of the Herero and Nama tribes. During the 1890s, German settlers moved in and began setting up cattle ranches, fencing off the land from the nomads, whose livelihood was also being undermined by an outbreak of a fatal cattle disease, Rinderpest, at the end of the 1890s. The nomads retaliated with attacks on German farmers, causing around 150 settler deaths in 1904. Kaiser Wilhelm II took this as a provocation, even a personal insult. Germany was not going to be humiliated as Italy had been in Ethiopia in 1896. Some 14,000 German troops were dispatched from Berlin under General Lothar von Trotha (1848–1920), a hard-line Prussian army officer with previous colonial experience. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that African tribes yield only to violence. To exercise this violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy.’ Herero men were shot, while the women and children were driven into the desert and left to starve. Popular commemorative books were printed celebrating the triumph of German arms in the conflict. Not all Germans agreed with this policy. Social Democratic papers condemned ‘the way our national honour is preserved in Africa’. Supporters of the government urged the electorate to ‘vote for the honour of the Fatherland against its destroyers!’

The civilian governor of the colony, Theodor Leutwein (1849–1921), elbowed aside by the military because of his policy of compromise with the Herero, declared the policy of extermination a ‘grave mistake’. His view – that the Herero should be recruited as labourers instead of being exterminated – won sufficient adherents to bring about the arrest of the remainder of the tribe – mostly women and children – along with the members of the Nama tribe, and their incarceration in ‘concentration camps’ (the first official German use of this term). Here, however, their fate was no better. At the worst of the camps, on the rocky terrain of Shark Island, off the Namibian coast, the prisoners were used as forced labourers, fed on minimal rations, exposed to bitter winds without adequate clothing, and beaten with leather whips if they failed to work hard enough. Every day bodies were taken to the beach and left for the tide to wash out into the shark-infested waters. The camps also became sites of scientific investigation, as the anthropologist Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), later to become a leading ‘racial hygienist’ under the Third Reich, descended on the town of Rehoboth to study its mixed-race inhabitants (whom he called, unflatteringly, the ‘Reheboth Bastards’). In 1905 ‘racial mixing’ was banned by the colony’s German authorities, and in 1909 interracial marriage and cohabitation were made punishable by the loss of civil rights. These measures introduced the term Rassenschande, ‘racial defilement’, into German legal terminology; it was to resurface thirty years later, in the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws outlawing intermarriage between Jews and ‘Aryans’. A superior legal status was ascribed to the German settlers and other white Europeans and Boers in the colony, allowing Herero men to be conscripted for forced labour and compelling them to wear identification tags (another measure later applied by the Nazis to the Jews, though it also had a longer pedigree in Europe). The Herero population, estimated at 85,000 before the war, was reduced to 15,000 by the end, while up to 10,000 out of a total of 20,000 Nama were exterminated. Of some 17,000 Africans incarcerated in the concentration camps, only half survived.

Violence was a constant feature of German rule in many different colonies. In German East Africa, continual military clashes forced the imperial government in Berlin to take over the colony’s administration in 1891; but armed conflict continued, with no fewer than sixty-one major ‘penal expeditions’ launched by the German military in the following six years. In 1905 conflicts over land seizures, taxation rises and forced-labour requirements led to the Maji-Maji uprising, in which some 80,000 Africans were killed. The devastation was immense, with more than 200,000 Africans perishing from the famine caused by the destruction of rebel fields and villages by the Germans. Violence was not just confined to major conflicts such as these. It was a fixed part of everyday life in the German colonies. The officially recorded number of formally ordered public beatings of Africans, certainly an underestimate, rose in Cameroon from 315 in 1900 to 4,800 in 1913. Such acts reflected not least the continuing fragility of German control, with only a small number of colonists attempting to assert themselves over a numerous indigenous population. Colonies like Cameroon were colonies of occupation, where the climate and the terrain were only suitable for low levels of emigration and settlement. They contrasted with colonies of settlement, where large numbers of Europeans emigrated to establish themselves in a climate and under conditions favourable to a European style of life, such as German South-West Africa, which attracted relatively large numbers of settler ranchers.

The relative strength, degree of organization and military preparedness of indigenous societies also played a role in determining the levels of violence and the outcome of conflicts with settlers. Loosely organized nomadic herdsmen like the Herero were in the end far easier to defeat than elaborately structured political systems such as those of the Islamic states that stretched across northern Cameroon and over into British colonies like Nigeria. In German East Africa, 415 colonial officers and administrators were supposedly controlling nearly 10 million Africans and Arab traders, but they were not able to extend their remit into the interior. There were just thirty German military stations across the colony, and they depended for their effectiveness on the co-operation of local African leaders. The colonizers could of course choose whom to co-opt; during his twenty-year term of office in Togo, one regional official dismissed all 544 chiefs in his district and replaced them with others, as well as importing black graduates of the Tuskegee Institute founded in Alabama by the African-American Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), so that ‘negroes’ could teach ‘negroes’ to grow cotton, although in reality the two groups had little in common. In the end, however, there was no alternative to relying on the local power-holders. In northern Cameroon the Islamic Fulbe aristocracy, brought under German control by a series of military expeditions, actually used German military forces to extend their own area of influence, so that an effective co-rule between the two was the result. Given their small numbers in comparison to those of the Africans, the Germans could only hope to establish islands of power in colonies like Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa.

How did this compare with the experience of other colonial powers? The largest of the European empires, the British, was run on decentralized lines. Westminster law was supreme, but there was no attempt to impose a uniform system of rule from London. The insistence on free trade across the empire made central control even less necessary. Power therefore devolved onto the colonial state on the ground. Major parts of the empire had been in British possession long before the ‘Scramble for Africa’. These included first of all colonies of settlement, notably Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the Cape Colony on the southernmost tip of Africa. While there was European settlement on some scale in some non-British colonies, notably Algeria and German South-West Africa, these British colonies were unique in being mainly intended as goals for emigration. Many emigrants went of course to the United States, but in Australia, New Zealand and Canada private settlement companies encouraged emigration from the British Isles and smoothed the way for migrants by colonizing land and selling it cheaply to them. The main proponent of this idea was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who founded a number of colonizing companies, notably in New Zealand. With his followers he persuaded the British government that these colonies could support themselves economically and were creating a new British society abroad. In the late 1830s armed uprisings in Canada, largely caused by the resentments of a French minority that considered itself disfranchised, prompted a report by Lord Durham (1792–1840) that laid the ground rules for colonial administration. Its recommendation of colonial self-government, with colonial parliaments and ministries, became the basis for British imperial administration of colonies with a majority of European and especially British settlers. This disqualified colonies where settlers were in a minority, like the West Indies and India, but by the late nineteenth century self-administration had been extended not only to Canada and Australia, but also to New Zealand and the Cape Colony, where the British government did not want to bear the cost of wars against indigenous peoples. Voting rights were confined to the white minority.

To what extent was violence employed in the establishment of the settler colonies? To a large degree in Canada, as previously in the Americas, the settlers’ work was done for them by disease. When Scottish settlers led by Lord Selkirk (1771–1820) arrived at Assiniboia in Manitoba in 1816, they were confronted by local ‘Indians’ who feared the inroads the settlers might make into their fur trading. They killed the governor and twenty-two Europeans in the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Selkirk returned in 1817 with a group of fully armed ex-soldiers as settlers, who succeeded in re-establishing the colony. Their success was due not just to their preparedness but also to their introduction, no doubt involuntary, of smallpox. A German traveller in the area in the 1830s recorded it as ‘covered with unburied corpses’; the local ‘Indians’, 9,000 strong, were ‘nearly exterminated’, he noted: ‘They, as well as the Crows and the Blackfeet, endeavoured to flee in all directions, but the diseased everywhere pursued them.’ As in the German colonies, so too in British settler colonies, there was constant low-level, small-scale but often deadly violence, meted out, however, more often by settlers than by colonial troops. As the colonists fenced off land in Australia, claiming the country as a vacant possession, nomadic Aborigines began to retaliate for the loss of their traditional areas of hunting and gathering. Aboriginal attacks on sheep stations in the Bathurst area and the Hunter Valley, west of Sydney, in 1824 led the Governor of New South Wales, General Sir Thomas Brisbane (1773–1860), to impose martial law, allowing ranchers to shoot Aborigines on sight. A missionary, Lancelot Threlkeld (1788–1859), reported that ‘a large number were driven into a swamp, and mounted police rode round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until they were all . . . destroyed, men, women and children!’ The squad collected forty-five skulls from the corpses, macerated them, and sent them back to England as trophies.

One of the relatively few occasions on which concerted government action was taken against Aborigines was in Tasmania. Initially, the governor attempted to show the Aborigines that they would receive equal justice to the settlers. But clashes erupted and continued until 1830, when Governor George Arthur (1784–1854) gathered 3,000 Europeans, including 1,000 soldiers and 700 convicts on parole, paid for by the British Treasury, to form a ‘Black Line’ across the country to drive the Aborigines onto the Tasman peninsula south-east of Hobart. By this time the original population of 7,000 in 1800 had been reduced to a few hundred through sporadic private violence and above all disease. This remainder, Governor Arthur claimed, would ‘murder every white inhabitant, if they could do so with safety to themselves’. The British Colonial Secretary, General Sir George Murray (1772–1846), refused to send out troops to help in the enterprise, commenting that ‘the extinction of the native race’ would leave ‘an indelible stain on the character of the British government’. Except for one small group of five who were caught napping and shot, however, the Black Line failed to find any Aborigines; they had all slipped through it under cover of the dense bush. In 1834 the remaining 200, when told they would be given their lands back and reunited with their families, surrendered. The promises were lies; they were transported instead to Flinders Island, 34 miles north of Tasmania, where most of them perished, leaving only a sad remnant behind.

The killings of Aborigines were part of the disorderly early history of modern Australia. Frequently they were carried out by freed convicts. The state was keen to impose order, and indeed after a massacre of thirty Aborigines by a gang of former convicts at Myall Creek in central New South Wales in 1838, seven of the perpetrators were convicted and hanged, though ‘they all stated that they thought it extremely hard that white men should be put to death for killing blacks’. The massacre prompted the government of the state to reject the idea that it should ‘abandon all control over these distant regions – and leave the occupiers of them unrestrained in their lawless aggressions upon each other and upon the Aborigines’. It created a Border Police Force, whose aim, however, was not least to protect ranchers against attacks by Aborigines. Small-scale, often individual killings continued, but government control was more or less established by mid-century. The main damage to the indigenous population was done, as elsewhere, by disease. From an estimated half to three-quarters of a million in 1788, the Aboriginal population of Australia had declined to 72,000 by 1921.

Where the British confronted not nomadic hunter-gatherers in a sparsely populated country but settled farmers on rich agricultural land, the situation was more complex. When Xhosa land to the east of the Cape Colony was impounded by the governor to distribute to former slaves, a Xhosa army invaded on 21 December 1834 and claimed it back, killing British and Boer settlers alike. The governor, Lieutenant-General Sir Benjamin D’Urban (1777–1849), declared that the Xhosa had to be ‘exterminated’, an emotive word that earned him considerable criticism in Britain. The Xhosa chief was shot and his ears were removed by soldiers as trophies. But Xhosa resistance was fierce and after several months a compromise was reached, brokered by a new Whig government in London under Lord Melbourne (1779–1848) that was appalled by D’Urban’s actions and terrified of the massive cost of continuous warfare in the Cape. The British withdrew and left the Xhosa with their land. This did not go down well, especially with the Dutch-descended Boer farmers, who bitterly resented the abolition of slavery by the British government in 1834 and were outraged by the minimal scale of the compensation paid to them. Some 5,000 Boer farmers expressed their lack of confidence in the British Empire by migrating northwards between 1835 and 1837 in the ‘Great Trek’. Violent clashes with the Zulus and Ndebele ensued, with 135 trekkers reportedly massacring a force of 9,000 Ndebele warriors in 1837. In February 1838, Zulus killed Dutch settlers who had moved onto their land; in December the Boers retaliated by slaughtering 3,000 Zulu warriors at the Battle of Blood River. In 1843 the British annexed the Republic of Natalia, founded by the Boers who had migrated northwards in the Great Trek. Clashes between the British and Boers on the one hand, and the Zulus on the other, continued for several decades. At the Battle of Isandlwana in January 1879 a British force was heavily defeated by Zulu warriors, and though at the same time an outpost at Rorke’s Drift held off another Zulu force, the British army had to retreat, suffering further losses. A second, stronger invasion force finally defeated the Zulus in July and established British control, leading to the decision by the British to annex Zululand in 1887.

This did not bring the three-sided conflict to an end. In 1881, shortly after the outbreak of what became known as the First Anglo-Boer War, a Boer force had defeated the British at the Battle of Majuba Hill and re-established the Republic of the Transvaal, founded as a result of the Great Trek and annexed by the British in 1876. The situation was transformed, however, by the discovery of rich gold deposits in the Transvaal in 1884, leading to a massive gold rush two years later. By the 1890s the huge wealth of the mines was proving an irresistible temptation to the British, and when the Boers rejected a demand for voting rights to be extended to the non-Boer white inhabitants of the Transvaal in 1899, the British invaded, beginning the so-called Second Anglo-Boer War. An early Boer counter-offensive against Natal and the Cape was defeated by a British army under Lord Roberts (1832–1914), which relieved besieged towns, notably Mafeking, and in 1900 occupied the main Boer centres including the capital of the Transvaal, Pretoria. For another two years the Boers continued the war in a series of guerrilla campaigns, leading the new British commander Lord Kitchener systematically to destroy Boer farms and set up forty-five concentration camps for Boers, mainly women and children. Some 25,000 Boer soldiers were deported overseas as prisoners of war. Both sides used large numbers of black soldiers, and the British established sixty-four concentration camps for black families as well. About 28,000 Boers, mainly children, died of disease, exposure and malnutrition in the tented camps, a death rate of around one in four. Of the 107,000 black Africans held in the camps, at least 14,000 perished. Conditions in these concentration camps were not part of a deliberate policy of genocide, as their counterparts were to be in German South-West Africa a short while afterwards, but they were murderous enough nonetheless. When, in 1909–10, the Union of South Africa was created as a self-governing Dominion, neither black Africans nor immigrant Indian workers had equal rights with the whites.

The other major territories acquired by the British Empire in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ were very different. They did not have any formal self-government, legislative assemblies or voting rights. They were not colonies of settlement; by and large there were few white settlers in them, except in British East Africa. Palm-oil, hardwood, ivory, cocoa, ground-nut and cotton production began to make the new west African colonies economically important, whereas east African colonies from Egypt southwards were mainly of significance in protecting the route to India through the Suez Canal. Apart from a small number of states like Zanzibar, Brunei, Tonga, Malaya or most importantly Egypt, they did not retain indigenous rulers but were directly controlled from the Colonial Office. Land seizures by colonists were of limited importance given their small numbers in areas sometimes called ‘the white man’s grave’. Economic motives remained paramount in the establishment of empire. As the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said in 1897 in a speech on British colonization in tropical Africa: ‘The objects we have in our view are strictly business objects.’ Like Bismarck, Salisbury wanted colonization to be carried out by chartered companies rather than by the state. It was, for example, the Royal Niger Company that led the way in colonizing what later became known as Nigeria, signing 237 separate treaties with local rulers between December 1884 and October 1886 alone. The chiefs made over their land and legal authority to the Company in return for being allowed to mine and farm and maintain their own laws. The Company for its part declared that it had no ‘desire to interfere more than is absolutely necessary with the internal arrangements of the Chiefs of Central Africa’.

Such arrangements proved no more permanent in the British than they had been in the German case. Joseph Chamberlain, the Liberal Unionist who became Colonial Secretary in 1895, was a far more thoroughgoing imperialist than his Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. He was not satisfied with the loose, treaty-based arrangements by which the new African parts of the empire were ruled. British interests had to be asserted more powerfully. In west Africa the Ashanti fought a long series of wars against the encroachments of the British that only ended in the mid-1890s with the British occupation of the Ashanti capital. There was resistance elsewhere too. At the beginning of 1897 an expedition of 250 African soldiers sent by the Acting Consul-General of the Niger Coast Protectorate made its way towards the west African kingdom of Benin. The expedition had purported to be peaceful, but the King of Benin had got wind from a trader that its true aim was to depose him and take over his territory. His forces surprised the column and massacred almost everyone in it; only two survived. A punitive expedition later in the year sacked Benin and looted numerous bronze and other artefacts. The powerful slave-owning Muslim emirs of northern Nigeria also needed bringing to heel, in Chamberlain’s view, and in 1900 a West African Frontier Force was created that waged a series of military campaigns against them until the emirs gave in to British demands. The previous year a Royal Navy force bombarded and machine-gunned the port at Zanzibar, killing or wounding 500 people, to express British disapproval of the fact that the sultan’s nephew had declared himself ruler on his uncle’s death without first seeking the permission of the British consul. Violence therefore lay at the heart of the British as well as the German Empire in Africa.

‘THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN’

In 1889 a world anti-slavery conference gave King Leopold of the Belgians permission to levy import duties in the Belgian Congo, in order to pay for the elaborate infrastructure of roads, railways, steamboats and military posts that he claimed was needed to bring slavery and the slave trade to an end in his private possession. Seduced by the promise of acquiring the territory on his death, and by the prospect of profits from economic enterprises there, the Belgian Parliament advanced him a huge loan with which to begin the work. Leopold saw in the Congo the opportunity for quick returns and big profits. He tried producing cotton, importing American planters to start up cultivation, but conditions were unsuitable so he moved on to ivory. His agents sallied forth into the territory, shooting elephants and buying up or seizing ivory from traders. A Belgian senator travelling through the Congo in 1896 reported constantly encountering files of African porters:

black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load – box, bale, ivory tusk . . . most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food . . . They come and go like this by the thousands . . . requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their wages.

Discipline on local populations was enforced by beatings with a hippopotamus-hide whip, the chicotte. One Belgian magistrate in Leopoldville came across thirty small children being mercilessly flogged because some of them had laughed on seeing a white man. To enforce control, Leopold used a private army, the Force Publique, which by the turn of the century numbered 19,000 men and consumed half his entire budget for the colony. The pattern of conquest was similar to that observable elsewhere, with local and regional African chiefs and rulers resisting the encroachments of Leopold’s men. In Katanga, a clash with members of the Sanga people led to their chief taking refuge in a large cave, outside which the Force Publique then lit fires, asphyxiating 178 men inside. By the end of the 1890s, Leopold’s forces had conquered the remaining centres of resistance.

It was not the conquest of the Congo that marked out the Belgian colony from others, however, but the way it was then run. A worldwide boom in rubber, stimulated by the spread of the pneumatic tyre, insulations for electrical, telephone and telegraph wires, and much more besides, prompted Leopold to devote frantic efforts to harvest the wild rubber that grew in profusion in the Congo before cultivated rubber trees in Latin America and Asia could reach maturity and undercut the prices he got for the wild variety. Profits for Leopold’s Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company and other concessionaries reached more than 700 per cent and Congo rubber earnings increased nearly a hundredfold between 1890 and 1904 alone. Workers were sent ever deeper into the forest to cut the rubber vines that grew up into the canopy, collecting the sap but destroying the plants. The work was difficult and dangerous and Belgian officers forced the men to undertake it by taking their families hostage until the required amount of rubber was delivered. The men then carried the solidified sap to collecting depots under the close supervision of the Force Publique. If the quantity was too small, the hostages were shot and the women raped before being killed.

If a village resisted, Leopold’s men, African troops under white command, shot everyone in it, and then to prove to their officers that their bullets had not been wasted on hunting for food, they severed the right hands of the victims, smoking them to preserve them on the way back to the depot. One traveller, reaching a village in an area where resistance was strong, noted eighty-one hands being smoked on a slow fire. ‘See!’ he was told: ‘Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the state how many we have killed.’ If the number of hands was insufficient to match the number of spent cartridges, soldiers simply cut off the hands of the living. Trade carried diseases such as smallpox and sleeping sickness to areas from which they had previously been absent. The birth rate plummeted as women refused to have children and men were taken away to work in the rubber forest or on the 241-mile railway that Leopold had built to transport his booty. By 1924 the Belgian authorities were so concerned about a shortage of labour in the Congo that they ordered a census. When compared with late nineteenth-century estimates, it found that the population had fallen by 50 per cent, from 20 millon to 10 million.

These atrocities soon reached the notice of critics of colonialism in Europe and the United States, fed with information by the young Edmund Dene Morel (1873–1924), a clerk in a shipping company trading with the Congo, who had forged contacts with missionaries in the area who were horrified by Leopold’s cruelties. More detail was added by Roger Casement (1864–1916), a British consular official in the Congo. Their cause was taken up by the writers Mark Twain (1835–1910) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. King Leopold was forced to hand over control of the Congo to the Belgian government not long before his death in 1909. The state administrators began to replace wild-rubber collecting with the planting of rubber trees. However, the campaign against the atrocities in the Congo did not touch the French Congo, where similar outrages took place. A study of one French trading post showed that the fluctuations in rubber production correlated statistically with the number of bullets used by company police between 1904 and 1907, and one estimate puts the population loss in the French Congolese rainforest area at 50 per cent as well. Inequality was built into the French colonies, where the rights of citizens were denied to the majority of the colonized, with rare exceptions. Apart from Algeria, where European settlement was on a large scale in the north, this meant that the colonies were run in an authoritarian fashion by local administrators. Earlier in the century the French had still believed in the ‘civilizing mission’, or in other words spreading the benefits of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, across the globe, but despite the continuing power of this ideology, the experience of colonization forced a partial retreat from this lofty principle. When indigenous kingdoms like Dahomey, whose female soldiers and customs of mass human sacrifice fascinated and horrified Europeans, were taken over, it was thought that their inhabitants could not be turned into French men and women; it would simply cost too much in money and lives. As a book by the French doctor and explorer Jules Harmand (1845–1921), Domination and Colonization, concluded in 1910, it was necessary to ‘better the lot of the aborigine in all ways, but only in directions that are profitable to him – by letting him evolve in his own way . . . by indirect rule, with a conservation . . . of the institutions of the subject people . . .’.

The principle of indirect rule derived above all from the long history of British control over India. India was different from all other colonies in the British Empire; in fact there was no other colony like it in any European empire. It was very large, with a population of around 200 million in the 1860s, and it had previously been ruled by another great power, the Mughal Empire, which in some respects provided a ready-made infrastructure of rule and to which the British claimed to be the successor. India was not suitable for emigration and settlement. Christian missions did not achieve very much in a land dominated by great religions such as Islam and Hinduism. The assimilation of Indians into British culture was an impossible ideal. After the 1857 rebellion (the ‘Indian Mutiny’) the subcontinent was ruled autocratically by an appointed governor-general whose power was limited only by a small council of civil servants. Over time this was expanded, and in 1909 it was enlarged to include elected members, but the council had no power to introduce laws or stop whatever the governor-general was doing. Until the First World War, therefore, India was a kind of ancien régime autocracy.

British rule in India rested on two key institutions. First of these was the civil service, a central, elite organization operating across the entire country, and staffed by British men, with only 5 per cent of the posts occupied by Indians as late as 1915. The Indian Civil Service was well paid and after the corruption scandals of the late eighteenth century it had become reasonably honest and conscientious. It collected the taxes already levied by the Mughals, above all the land tax, which under the Mughals had been administered by officials known as zamindars, often indistinguishable from high aristocrats. It administered justice under a codified system begun in 1861 that mixed British and Hindu principles and customs, and it provided political advisers to the 600 or so mostly small princely states that survived the uprising of 1857 (not least because the move to assimilate them into British rule was thought to have been one of its causes). The princely states collected their own taxes and ran their own affairs, but under the advice of British officials who encouraged reform. Over time the growing habit of educating the younger generation of princes at British schools and universities, as well as the intensification of communications through better transport, telegraph and so on, and the increasing employment of British or British-trained civil servants to administer them, the princely states developed an amalgam of Indian traditions and European modernity that struck many as an ideal example of what could be achieved by indirect rule. Not just in the princely states, however, but also in the areas under direct rule, British control depended effectively on the passive co-operation of Indians, both elites and masses. This was achieved above all by the retention of Indian customs, institutions and basic structures of administration, along with an attempt to provide good and honest government. Thus the full panoply of modern Victorian administration was applied to India, with the founding of educational institutions such as the University of Madras (1857), and the adoption of the principle put forward in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 report on Indian education that schools and colleges teaching in English should be used to create a new Indian administrative elite to act as an intermediary between British and Indian society. Police forces were created from the 1860s and unified in 1905. Free trade was used to destroy autonomous industries such as textiles in the early part of the century, but India’s incorporation into a rapidly globalizing world economy stimulated new industries and an increasing rate of urbanization, helped by the construction of roads, railways and canals. The shock of the 1857 rebellion had stimulated the British to be both cautious and conservative in their handling of Indian society and traditions, and to engage in a sustained policy of improvement and development to convince Indians of the benefits of British rule.

Yet underpinning all this was the application, or threat, of force, in the form of the second great institution of British rule in India, namely the Indian Army. The British regular army numbered around 250,000 men and had to defend and garrison colonies all over the world. The Indian Army was almost as large, and it could quickly be expanded by calling up reserves. It was paid for by taxes levied in India and indeed consumed around a third of all Indian tax revenues. In the key area of the 1857 rebellion, Bengal, the proportion of European to Indian troops was fixed at one to one; in Madras and Bombay one to two. Altogether there were 73,000 British and 154,000 Indian troops in the charge of British senior officers in 1885. British regiments served in India in rotation, with ‘sepoy’ regiments remaining separate. Recruits were taken from so-called ‘martial’ areas like the North-West Frontier, Nepal, or the Punjab, which had largely stayed loyal in 1857, as well as from the poorest and most illiterate social groups, who were seen as less likely to get ideas of rebellion and revolt. The Indian Army was an asset not only in ruling the subcontinent but also in establishing British supremacy more generally, among other things in providing backing for the British acquisition of colonies in east Africa.

In major respects, however, British rule in India brought disaster for the population. The intensive land taxes levied by the Raj, and collected with considerably greater efficiency than their equivalents had been under the Mughals, caused changes in land use and turned bad harvests into famines, with two million people dying of starvation in northern India in 1860–1, six million across India in the 1870s, and another five million with a monsoon failure in 1896–7, when the situation was made worse by an outbreak of plague. Communications were still not good enough for effective relief operations to be mounted, and as late as 1921 only 3 per cent of Indians had any formal education, making disease prevention difficult; reading and writing were the prerogative of only a small elite. These catastrophes were not new – the Bengal famine of 1770 is estimated to have killed nearly 10 million people, and famines were also recorded in pre-colonial times – but there is little doubt that they increased in frequency and intensity under British rule, nor did the authorities of the Raj undertake adequate measures to deal with them and mitigate their effects. India also became the major global reservoir of indentured labour, a kind of quasi-slavery where workers were paid but had neither freedom nor any significant rights. Some 60,000 South Asians were sent to Fiji to work between 1879 and 1920, 25,000 to Mauritius, and 30,000 to build Kenya’s railways in the 1890s, more than a third of them suffering death or serious injury during the construction. The total number of South Asians, almost all of them Indian, working across the British Empire by 1900 totalled more than a million. Sometimes they were sent across vast distances to replace the slave labour that had now become illegal: nearly 75,000 Indians arrived in Trinidad between 1874 and 1915 in this way. The spread of Indian labour across the British Empire indicated its global nature, but it also caused disruption to Indian communities on the subcontinent, and led to racial tensions in some colonies, notably Fiji.

Despite these problems and the failure of the British administration to deal with them adequately, in India and increasingly after 1918 in other parts of the British Empire reform was seen as the best means of bringing stability and order to colonial societies. Conquest was followed in the end by Victorian ‘improvement’. A case in point was the Kingdom of Upper Burma. Fear of growing French power in Indochina prompted British concern when the death of the Burmese king, Mindon Min (1808–78), sparked a struggle for the succession in the course of which the majority of his 110 children were strangled then trampled by elephants (it was taboo to spill royal blood). The victor, King Thibaw Min (1859–1916), was not disposed to yield to the British. Indeed it was not so much disapproval of this violence as concern that the new king had begun to open negotiations with the French, who agreed to build a railway and set up a bank, which led the British Conservative government of Lord Salisbury to send in 10,000 troops in 1885. The Burmese forces were defeated and the territory was annexed in 1886 at the end of what became known as the Third Anglo-Burmese War. This was denounced by Liberal MPs as ‘an act of high-handed violence . . . an act of flagrant folly’, through which the Burmese political system had been destroyed, leaving chaos behind. Guerrilla resistance proliferated, led by some of the remaining royal princes, and soon the British had 40,000 troops in the country, engaging in a ‘pacification’ campaign that involved the execution of alleged ‘dacoits’, or rebels, and the burning of their villages.

By 1890 peace had descended on Burma. It would last up to the 1940s. The ‘Burman’, remarked one British civil servant in the governor’s office, was ‘a happy-go-lucky sort of chap, the Irishman of the East’. He needed keeping in order. As another commentator declared: ‘If riches and personal comfort, protection of property, just laws, incorruptible judges and rulers, are blessings as a set-off against Utopian dreams of freedom, then Jack Burman has a happy future.’ What this meant in practice was the wholesale conversion of the countryside to commercial rice production, with vast tracts of forest being felled and British firms bringing in thousands of indentured labourers from India to do the work. This in turn meant roads, railways, seaports, urban and commercial development. Burma became a vitally important source of rice for large parts of the British Empire, notably eastern Africa and above all India, where it supplied 15 per cent of the rice consumed. Meanwhile the habit of British soldiers and administrators of taking Burmese women as their wives or more usually concubines, much complained of in the 1890s, led to the emergence of a new Anglo-Burmese elite that came to dominate the administration of the country in the interwar years, in a comparable development to the creation of the social stratum of ‘Anglo-Indians’ who fulfilled a similar role on the subcontinent in the same period.

Imperialism thus continued an ideology of improvement, summed up in 1899 in a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling urging colonizers to:

Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need.

To administer the colonies, educated clerks and administrators were required, and given the numbers that were necessary, this meant educating a select number of the colonized. This in turn, whether it involved local education or education in Britain or other European countries, began to create new indigenous elites that imbibed European notions of nationalism, democracy and liberal values. In some colonies, including Burma, a sense of national identity pre-dated colonization. In others national identity required the language of European liberalism to find its articulation, and the model of European political parties in the age of mass democracy in the late nineteenth century to find institutional expression.

As these developments took hold on the subcontinent, 1885 saw the formation of the Indian National Congress, based at first on the ideas of the Theosophical movement, a quasi-religious organization dedicated to world brotherhood, and involving English people as well as Indians. The aim of the Indian National Congress at first was to exert pressure for educated Indians to take a greater part in government and administration, but soon it gained widespread support among Indian elites and began to exert pressure on the government. In 1892 the Raj conceded the Indian Councils Act, allowing corporations to nominate educated Indians to legislative councils, and in 1909 it permitted them to stand for election. The British had been able to take advantage of the break-up of the Mughal Empire and the ensuing disunity to take over one Indian state after another, or play them off against each other. But by uniting India themselves and binding it together with a unitary system of administration and communications, the British had created the potential for a new united nationalist movement. The Raj had on the other hand fastened onto traditional Indian institutions from the land tax to the maharajas and princely states, and to the new educated elite these were beginning to seem like an obstacle to progress. It was indeed possible to take an altogether different view of the ‘white man’s burden’, one in which the imperialist was imposing a burden on the colonized, not the other way round.

THE ‘EASTERN QUESTION’

In the second half of the nineteenth century the major European powers still managed to settle colonial questions by peaceful negotiation. But once the process of colonization reached its limits, as it did shortly after the turn of the century, almost the only way a European power could acquire fresh territory was by seizing it from another European power. One area within Europe that dangled low-hanging fruit before the eyes of greedy imperialist politicians was the Ottoman Empire, which at the turn of the century still governed a huge swathe of south-eastern Europe. The empire was catastrophically incompetent at managing its economy. It was not until 1845 that the first bank was opened in Constantinople; the first banknotes were not numbered and they were thus extremely easy to forge. There was no state budget until the 1840s; the Ministry of Finance was only set up in 1839. Although things had improved a little by the mid-1850s, the finances of the empire were utterly unable to cope with the huge costs of the Crimean War. So Ottoman administrators arranged a large loan from the British and French, and soon they became accustomed to asking for more in order to cover the expenses of running the empire. With a return of 10 per cent, private banks in western Europe were only too happy to lend. At the same time the Ottoman government tried to raise money by imposing internal trade tariffs and levying an export tax of 12 per cent. International agreements negotiated to facilitate the loans prevented the empire from levying more than 5 per cent on imports, so it was flooded with European industrial goods.

All of this provided rich pickings for crooked Ottoman administrators. ‘Corruption,’ a British observer smugly though far from inaccurately noted, ‘is the rule from the highest to the lowest . . . The first thought of modern Turkish statesmen is to amass money. They know their tenure of office is insecure and they seize the opportunity.’ By the early 1870s the state finances were in a condition of acute crisis; by 1875 interest payments on the state debt were eating up 44 per cent of total government revenues. To be sure, the creation of a state bank, budgets and a Finance Ministry had been part of the Tanzimat, the wide-ranging series of reforms that went on through the 1850s and 1860s. They included the guarantee of basic civil rights, the reform of the army, the introduction of civil and criminal law codes, the establishment of Western-style universities, the construction of railways, the opening of a stock exchange, and much more. Central to these was the introduction of equal rights for all religious groups, and the creation of an Ottoman national identity, bolstered by the invention of a national flag and a national anthem.

But these reforms were undermined by a massive influx of more than a million Muslim refugees, who were fleeing first from the chaos of the Crimean War and then from the Russians as they invaded the Caucasus. Many of these refugees found their way into Christian areas in the Balkans, where religious tensions grew rapidly. In many cases the Ottoman regime forcibly evicted Christians from their homes to make room for them. Then in 1873 a major financial and economic collapse across Europe, following the boom of the early 1870s, brought disaster. The loans stopped coming. A drought in 1872 had led to massive harvest failures across the empire. Locust swarms denuded Cyprus of crops. A harsh winter resulted in widespread starvation. Dead bodies were seen on the streets of Constantinople and packs of wolves were observed attacking people in the suburbs. Flooding caused by the spring thaw made matters worse. By early 1874, an estimated 90 per cent of the livestock in Anatolia and the southern Balkans had been slaughtered for food. The local and regional administration was completely unable to cope. The transport infrastructure was inadequate to ferry supplies to stricken areas. And crucially, the Ottoman government, rather than cutting expenditure, urged tax-collecting agencies – mostly tax farmers, independent entrepreneurs who had bought the right to collect taxes – on to ever greater efforts in an attempt to meet the state’s overwhelming tax obligations. As the peasants fled to the towns or took to the hills to escape their depredations, the collectors and the gendarmes who accompanied them looted the villages and took away contributions in kind. Resistance quickly spread, above all within Christian areas in the Balkans.

The Russians were quick to take advantage of the rapidly developing situation. Having completed their conquest of the Caucasus, they exploited Prussia’s defeat of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–1 to repudiate the neutrality of the Black Sea laid down in the settlement concluded after the Crimean War in 1856. The British objected but had no support from the other powers, and a conference in London in January 1871 allowed the Russians to send warships into the Black Sea once more. One of the constants of Russian foreign policy through the century had been the drive to secure an ice-free port in the Mediterranean. This drive had been in abeyance in the years after their defeat of 1856. Now it was under way again. Russia’s chances of achieving this aim grew as the Ottoman Empire declined. And a new factor now entered the mix: Pan-Slavism, which emerged in Russia in the 1870s with the opening up of public debate following the reforms of Alexander II. It spread to the Balkans, as Orthodox Christian intellectuals and students began to argue that the smaller Slav nationalities belonged to a large family of nations headed by Russia. Such ideas were increasingly influential in areas still nominally under Ottoman rule but strongly sympathetic to the Christian rebels who were rising up against Ottoman tax demands in the Balkans. Serbian radicals infiltrated Bosnia to support a peasant uprising there, while in Bulgaria in April–May 1876 a poorly prepared revolt led by nationalist revolutionaries was put down by the Ottoman Army within a few weeks.

Map 15. The Balkans, 1832–1912

The consequences of the short-lived Bulgarian revolt, however, were momentous. After the insurgents had massacred a number of Muslim civilians, the irregulars who accompanied the Ottoman forces, the bashi-bazouks, engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Bulgarians as they suppressed the rebellion. Arriving in the town of Batak some weeks after the bashi-bazouks had retaken it, the American correspondent of the London Daily News, Januarius MacGahan (1844–78), reported: ‘We . . . all suddenly drew rein with an exclamation of horror, for right before us, almost beneath our horses’ feet, was a sight that made us shudder. It was a heap of skulls, intermingled with bones from all parts of the human body, skeletons, nearly entire, rotting, clothing, human hair, and putrid flesh lying there in one foul heap.’ He estimated that 8,000 people had been killed by the irregulars altogether, though others put the number at nearer 30,000. The Bulgarians’ plight aroused widespread public sympathy in western Europe. Governments, like that of Disraeli in England, were reluctant to intervene, since any further weakening of the Ottoman Empire would open the way to advances by the Russians. However, popular sentiment, led in England by Gladstone, who made his political comeback on the strength of a huge public campaign against what he called the ‘Bulgarian horrors’, demanded action. ‘Let the Turks,’ he thundered, ‘now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.’

Nationalist sentiment was also boiling up in Serbia. Austria, Russia and Germany tried to intervene in Bulgaria in May 1876 with a general plan of reform for the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans, but they were rebuffed by the sultan. Following this, the Serbs declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 30 June. Tsar Alexander II had to yield to Pan-Slav pressure to allow volunteers to go and fight with the Serbs. On 11 November, indeed, he praised ‘our volunteers, many of whom have paid with their blood for the cause of Slavdom’. But the Serbs did not do well. They had failed to train their forces, and they only had 460 officers, augmented by 700 Russian volunteer officers, to command a rabble of 125,000 peasants. They were poorly armed, with weapons that were either obsolete or homemade, and relied on numbers rather than equipment. Recent Ottoman Army reforms, by contrast, had created an effective force, armed with Martini-Henry and Snider-Enfield rifles and Krupp field artillery. Led by a Russian general, 68,000 Serbs attacked the Ottoman fortress of Niš and were soundly defeated in August 1876, with 5,000 dead and 9,500 wounded. At this point the Russians stepped in and threatened war on the Ottomans unless peace was concluded on the basis of the status quo ante, which it was on 17 February 1877.

These events had major repercussions in Constantinople. Sultan Abdülaziz (1830–76) was deposed in a military coup led by the so-called Young Ottomans, most of whom had been educated in western European universities, on 30 May 1876, and murdered a few days later. His successor and nephew, Murad V (1840–1904), was not a strong character; on hearing the news of his uncle’s death, he fainted, and on coming round is said to have vomited continuously for a day and a half. The Young Ottomans had wanted Murad to grant a constitution, but he failed to do anything, so they deposed him on grounds of insanity on 31 August 1876 in favour of his brother Abdülhamid II (1842–1918). Realizing the need to keep in with the Young Ottomans, Abdülhamid granted a constitution almost immediately. Together with the defeat of the Serbian Army, this made him for the moment extremely popular. He thus felt strong enough to reject another attempt at international mediation in the so-called London Protocol, agreed by all the major powers on 31 March 1877, which contained a demand for further reforms in the Balkan provinces. The inevitable result was that on 24 April, yielding finally to Pan-Slav pressure, Alexander II of Russia declared war on the Ottomans, having previously secured the support of the Austrians by promising them Bosnia, and the Romanians by promising to defend their territorial integrity if they allowed Russian armies safe passage.

During the spring of 1877, Russian forces moved southwards and crossed the Danube. In July they arrived at the well-defended Bulgarian town of Plevna, which had been reinforced by a large Ottoman army under Osman Nuri Pasha (1832–1900). As the Russians failed twice to take the city, the tsar agreed to accept Romanian support, but a third major assault failed as well, with the loss of 18,000 Russian and Romanian lives. In desperation the tsar brought in the Baltic German military engineer General Totleben who had organized the defence of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. Increasing the Russian and Romanian armies’ strength to 100,000, Totleben successfully cut off Plevna, captured outlying positions, and repulsed an enemy attempt to break out. On 9 December 1877, Osman Pasha surrendered, taking 2,000 officers and 44,000 men with him into Russian captivity. Elsewhere, in the Caucasus, fierce fighting in a series of battles ended with the capture of the town of Kars by the Russians on 17 November, leading to a headlong Turkish retreat in which 17,000 of the fleeing troops were taken prisoner. It was in the Balkans, however, that the decisive actions took place. A force of 71,000 Russian troops took the Bulgarian city of Sofia on 3 January 1878 and then defeated a Turkish army at the Battle of Plovdiv two weeks later. Another Russian force of 50,000 led by the dashing General Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev (1843–82) destroyed a Turkish army in a three-day battle between 5 and 9 January 1878, at the Shipka Pass, forcing the surrender of 22,000 Turkish troops. This was the last straw for the Ottomans. Shortly after the Russians entered Adrianople, opening the way to Constantinople itself, an armistice was signed on 31 January 1878.

The Russians lost no time in signing a formal treaty, at the town of San Stefano, where negotiations were completed on 3 March. The treaty created an independent and large Bulgaria, which included the whole of Macedonia except Salonika, and, crucially, gave it access to the Aegean via western Thrace, cutting off the Ottomans’ overland access to their possessions in the Balkans. This was clearly going to be a Russian client state. The treaty thoroughly alarmed the British, who had already sent a fleet to the Sea of Marmara on 13 February 1878. It also ignored the Austrians by leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina in Ottoman hands. Together with Russian gains in the Caucasus, it looked as if the Ottoman Empire was going to be broken up, and the main beneficiary would be the tsar. And indeed, things looked very black for the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. Unable to finance its military operations in view of the massive public debt with which it was burdened, amounting by this time to more than half the state’s revenue every year, the Ottoman government had declared bankruptcy in 1875. In 1881 an international agreement created the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which soon had a staff of more than 5,000 officials. It was run by the empire’s creditors, effectively on behalf of the British and French banks to which most of the money was owed, and it had the right to collect taxes and customs dues and finance profitable ventures such as railway construction. This humiliating situation continued until after the First World War.

With the outbreak of war in 1877, Sultan Abdülhamid II saw no need to continue with the Constitution he had granted on his accession, and suspended it indefinitely. Mindful of the fate of his two immediate predecessors, the sultan locked himself away in his palace and kept the Ottoman battle fleet inside the Golden Horn, because he thought that the navy officers were liberals who would conspire against him if they were allowed out of his sight. This made it difficult for the empire to do anything to stop the further loss of territory in the longer run, most notably Egypt and the Sudan. In 1897, Ottoman forces defeated a Greek invasion of Crete, but the Great Powers intervened and gave the island to Greece anyway. In the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of San Stefano, however, with the British and Austrians in the lead, the Concert of Europe was revived, and the Russians were forced to agree to an international Congress, to be held in Berlin in June 1878. After frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Russians managed to get most of what they wanted. Although Bulgaria was cut down to size at the Congress of Berlin, depriving it of access to the Aegean, and the province of Eastern Rumelia was returned to the Ottoman Empire, Russia annexed Bessarabia, in the north-east corner of Romania, which received some territorial compensation in northern Dobrudja. In the Caucasus, Russia occupied Batum and Kars. The Congress recognized Serbian independence along with that of Romania and Montenegro, and all three states gained territory from the Ottoman Empire in addition. Bosnia, Herzegovina and Novi Bazar were left nominally under Ottoman rule by the Congress but were from now on to be administered by Austria.

Map 16. The Russo-Turkish War, 1877–8

In effect the Treaty of Berlin created two spheres of influence in the Balkans: the Austrian in the west, including Serbia – much to the annoyance of the Serbs – and the Russian in the east. Russian public opinion was outraged, since the comparison it made was not with the situation before the war of 1877–8 but with the situation created by the Treaty of San Stefano. Pan-Slavism grew in vehemence as a result, and its obvious hostility to Germany, the host of the conference, led Bismarck to conclude an alliance with Austria the following year, expanding it with the inclusion of Italy in 1882 into the Triple Alliance. In 1881 he renewed, this time secretly, the League of the Three Emperors, between Austria, Russia and Germany, that had been publicly announced in 1872 and came into effect the following year. In the long run this attempt to square the diplomatic circle was bound to fall apart because of growing Austro-Russian antagonism in the Balkans. But for the moment it papered over the cracks more or less successfully. As a by-product of the negotiations, the British occupied Cyprus, another Ottoman possession, in exchange for agreeing to defend Turkish territories in Asia against further Russian aggression. For the rest of the century, indeed, the British were in a continual state of anxiety about Russian ambitions in Afghanistan, in Persia and Turkey, and on the north-west frontier of India, the focus of the intrigues and conspiracies that constituted the ‘Great Game’.

The effect of dividing the Balkans into Austrian and Russian spheres of influence was to prove disastrous in the long run. It tied the unstable Balkan states and territories to the interests and prestige of two Great Powers, and at the same time fomented resentments and ambitions among these states that would eventually create major conflicts. None of them was satisfied with the territorial settlement it received. All of them resented the Congress of Berlin’s insistence in 1878 that they insert into their Constitutions the guarantee of freedom of religion – mainly for Muslims in Serbia and Montenegro, and for Jews in Romania. Montenegro was given access to the sea but told it was not allowed to have armed vessels and that all its merchant ships had to fly the Habsburg flag, a provision that was hardly going to be accepted by the Montenegrins in the longer term. As the British consul in Constantinople remarked following the Treaty of Berlin: ‘Those who think themselves strong enough to support their aspirations by arms will be ready to rebel against the authority under which they believe they have been placed in violation of justice and of the principle of “nationality”. Those who cannot recur to force will have recourse to intrigue and conspiracy. Both processes have already begun.’

Conflicts began almost immediately with an ethnic Albanian rebellion against Montenegro, and a Macedonian uprising against the Ottomans. Muslims in Bosnia, as in Albania, rebelled against the Christian rule imposed by the Treaty of Berlin. There was a peasant revolt in Serbia. In 1885 a mass uprising backed by Alexander of Battenberg (1857–93), a minor German royal who had been appointed Prince of Bulgaria by popular acclaim, brought Eastern Rumelia back under Bulgarian control despite a Serbian invasion, which was easily defeated by the regular Bulgarian Army. However, the Russians ousted him in favour of Ferdinand of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, who was appointed regent the following year. European opinion was taken aback. Ferdinand was thought to be more pliant than his predecessor. ‘He is totally unfit,’ declared Queen Victoria, referring discreetly to rumours that Ferdinand was homosexual, ‘ . . . delicate, eccentric and effeminate  . . . Should be stopped at once.’ In fact, he proved a survivor, lasting until the end of the First World War and gaining the sobriquet ‘Foxy Ferdinand’ for his skill at political intrigue. The Russians did not get what they wanted from him. His appointment delivered the country into the hands of the ruthless Stefan Stambolov (1854–95). The son of an innkeeper, Stambolov was a leading figure in the 1875–6 uprisings, an architect of the coup that brought Ferdinand to the throne, and regent until the new prince’s formal election. Stambolov tried to deal with continuing Russian interference, and the chronic economic problems that plagued the country, by establishing what in effect became a police state, arresting and imprisoning his opponents, muzzling the press, and billeting troops in villages that refused to pay their taxes.

When the Minister of Finance was assassinated in 1891, Stambolov, convinced that Russian agents were responsible, threw more than 300 leading Russophiles into prison. His authoritarian stance as Prime Minister after 1887 brought repeated clashes with Ferdinand. In the mid-1890s the conflict came to a head. In 1893, Macedonians based in Salonika formed a secretive terrorist group eventually called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO, dedicated to using violence to free Macedonia from Ottoman rule. It was soon dominated by Bulgarians, many of whom had fled Macedonia in the face of Ottoman oppression and taken up residence in Sofia. Stambolov’s foreign policy was based on the attempt to counter Russian influence by a rapprochement with the Ottomans (who were still nominally suzerains over Bulgaria). This aroused the violent hatred of the Macedonian refugees, and his position became increasingly precarious. In 1894, King Ferdinand judged the time right to dismiss him. Stambolov did not long survive his fall from power. On 15 July 1895 an assassin fired a gun at him as he was riding in his carriage through the streets of Sofia. Stambolov leapt from the carriage and returned fire with the revolver he always carried with him, but three more assassins jumped on him, threw him to the ground, and, knowing he always wore a bullet-proof vest, stabbed him repeatedly in the head. He tried to protect himself with his hands, but the assassins severed these at the wrists with their knives in the frenzy of their assault. Fatally wounded, Stambolov was taken home by his bodyguards after they had chased the assassins away. ‘Bulgaria’s people will forgive me everything’, he is said to have remarked on his deathbed, ‘but they will not forgive that it was I who brought Ferdinand here.’ It was rumoured that the assassination had been orchestrated by the king himself, but it was more likely that the IMRO was responsible for the attack. Macedonian jeers at Stambolov’s public funeral a few days later were only stopped when his widow held up two jars containing his pickled hands. His grave was destroyed by a bomb less than a year later.

While this grisly pantomime was in progress, Romania enjoyed a period of relative calm after the ousting in 1866 of Prince Alexandru Cuza (1820–73), who had made the mistake of trying to reform the complex and oppressive agrarian structures of the two Principalities of Modavia and Wallachia, united to form Romania in 1859. The leading figure in the coup, Ion Brătianu (1821–91), a large landowner and, like the others in his group, a veteran of 1848, quickly found the inevitable German princeling to occupy the throne, in this case Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1839–1914), known as Carol I in Romania. The prince quickly adapted to his new political environment, taking advantage of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 to declare his country independent of the Ottomans, and raising it to the level of a kingdom in 1881. The extensive powers of the monarchy, combined with the very restricted franchise of the Constitution of 1866 (modelled on the Belgian Constitution of 1831), provided a measure of political stability, based on government coalitions between varying shades of liberal and conservatives. This was coupled with a policy of cultivating good relations with the Great Powers. Trade treaties were signed with both Austria-Hungary and Russia, and Romania remained neutral during the Bulgarian uprising of 1875. Disillusioned with their rough treatment by the Russians in the Treaty of San Stefano, the Romanians initially turned to Germany and Austria-Hungary, building an alliance that lasted in formal terms at least until the First World War. But a Hungarian crackdown on Romanian nationalists in Transylvania created growing tensions, and the Austrians’ backing for Bulgaria in resisting Romanian claims on Dobrudja drove the Romanian government, now led by Brătianu’s son Ionel (1864–1927), to align itself with France and Russia instead, driven not least by fear of a massive arms build-up across the border with Bulgaria. Torn between the two camps into which Europe was dividing itself, Romania was eventually to opt for neutrality when the First World War broke out.

Map 17. The Creation of Romania, 1815–1913

RACISM AND NATIONALISM

The increasing depth of nationalist passions in the Balkans reflected not only a sense that the days of the Ottomans were numbered, but also the rapid spread of racist concepts of identity, deriving from the expansion of Europe’s overseas empires. For much of the nineteenth century, dominant European notions of racial and cultural superiority over the rest of the world were mostly relative rather than absolute, and they had a strong moral and religious content. British geography textbooks pointed out that the Egypt of the pharaohs had been ‘full of ancient learning when Britain was inhabited by savages’. However, Britain had eventually emerged from the Dark Ages, and there was hope therefore that Africa would one day cease to be the Dark Continent. Backwardness in other cultures was a product not of lack of intelligence but of lack of progress and religion. As the British Juvenile Missionary Magazine told its ‘young friends’ in 1866: ‘you see that man, through all his varieties, has a common parentage’ and thus any human being of any race could ‘acquire the knowledge of reading and writing almost as speedily as Europeans’. Underlying these views was the strong commitment to human equality embodied in the anti-slavery movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Victorian Christianity held that all human beings were capable of salvation, and indeed offered the prospect of the ultimate conversion of the whole of humankind. The major British missionary societies were all founded in the 1790s to work among settlers, but their role in the anti-slavery campaign encouraged them to extend their efforts into indigenous societies. Throughout the century missionaries were the main vehicle of the spread of European-style education and – as in Livingstone’s case – medical care in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Oceania. Justifications for imperialism were not only religious but also political and historical. The history of England had been one of the steady growth of freedom, in the dominant view of the day, and even towards the end of the Victorian era, intervention in other parts of the globe was justified in terms of liberation and progress. Time and again, British school textbooks informed children that Britain had been forced to intervene against oppression: ‘The Kingdom of Oude, which was under the rule of its own princes’, one schoolbook declared in 1883, ‘was so badly governed that it was found necessary, in 1856, to add it to our possessions.’ Everywhere, then, the ‘white man’s burden’ was imposed on Europeans by the universality of liberal principles and the impossibility of ignoring them if they were flouted, wherever in the world that might be.

The 1850s and 1860s administered a series of shocks to Britain’s confidence in its international superiority and civilizing mission. The shortcomings of the British military administration in the Crimean War, the ‘Indian Mutiny’, the failure of British forces to defeat the Maori in the New Zealand land wars, and the stalemate of the second Ashanti War in west Africa, were bad enough, but they all paled into insignificance in comparison to the upheavals generated by Bismarck’s wars of German unification, culminating in the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. In the light of this fundamental change in the balance of power, Britain needed in Disraeli’s view to assert herself more vigorously on the world stage. Already in 1872, pursuing his mission of rallying the working classes, many of whom had been enfranchised on his initiative in the Reform Act of 1867, to the Conservative cause, Disraeli declared that they were ‘proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their empire’. Once he became Prime Minister for the second time, in 1874, Disraeli did all he could to bolster the British Empire at home and abroad. In 1875 he secured for Britain a controlling interest in the French-built Suez Canal, vital for communications with India. By the time his premiership came to an end in 1880, he had mobilized British forces in Afghanistan and south Africa, and played a leading role in the 1878 Congress of Berlin. Above all, as we have seen, Disraeli persuaded Queen Victoria to assume the title ‘Empress of India’, bringing the concept of empire to the centre of British national identity.

Empire, the African colonizer and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes thought, would bring concrete economic benefits to Britain that would improve the lot of the masses. But it was also an instrument of patriotic propaganda. As the Daily Express proclaimed in 1900: ‘Our policy is patriotic; our faith is the British Empire.’ By this time, jingoistic enthusiasm for the Boer War was rife in London, and the empire was being celebrated in popular stories by authors like George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), magazines like the Boys’ Own Paper, and even in early films, one of which portrayed to an enthralled public the bombardment of Mafeking, though it was actually shot on a Home Counties golf course. ‘To inculcate patriotism in my books,’ Henty claimed, ‘has been one of my main objects.’ Along with all this went cheap, mass-produced prints and reproductions of imperial scenes. British schools began to celebrate ‘Empire Day’, marked by a parade through the centre of London, as indeed in almost all other towns and cities across the United Kingdom, while organizations like the Boy Scouts (1908) were formed to raise a new generation for military service in the colonies. By the eve of the First World War, the empire was a central part of British national identity in a way that it had not been in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The new attitude to empire contained a strong element of racism and the denigration of other cultures and civilizations. British schoolbooks now dismissed oriental culture as ornamental rather than useful, and told their readers, of monuments like the Taj Mahal, that ‘it might be supposed that they had originally been erected to commemorate the virtues of some great benefactor of our species, instead of being the whim of some prince who dawdled away his years in indolence or pleasure’. Different races were no longer depicted as equal in the sight of God, sharing a common humanity, if at an earlier stage of historical development than that of the Victorian Englishman. Instead, textbooks now emphasized racial difference and the alleged racial inferiority of subject peoples: ‘The Australian natives are an ugly, unprepossessing people, with degrading and filthy habits’, as one geography textbook put it: ‘Like beasts of prey . . . the Malays are always on the watch, to assuage their thirst of blood and plunder’; ‘The tribes [of Nigeria] . . . are extremely savage, practising horrible forms of religion, accompanied by human sacrifices.’ In such circumstances, it now seemed to be agreed, rule by the British was morally justifiable as well as politically necessary.

The British, indeed, were, in the view of the imperialists of the 1880s and 1890s, destined not only to rule inferior races but also to lead the entire world into the future. As Joseph Chamberlain declared in 1895: ‘I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilization.’ Belief in racial hierarchies based on descent had become more widespread once it had become possible to lend it scientific legitimacy. This was not least a product of the growing influence of Darwinism in the second half of the century. In the hands of the biologist and anthropologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’, Darwinism became a harsh creed of competition, and phrases such as ‘the struggle for existence’ and ‘the strongest prevail’ soon became part of what has been termed ‘social Darwinism’, the application of Darwin’s ideas, or a version of them, to human society.

Social Darwinism’s influence spread across Europe in the late nineteenth century. It had a progressive version, which laid on the state the duty to improve the race by better housing, hygiene and nutrition. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) popularized Darwin’s ideas in his best-selling book The Riddle of the Universe (1901), though he gave them a twist by arguing that human characteristics could be acquired by adaptation to the environment as well as being inherited. He divided humanity into ten, or, including their subdivisions, thirty-two races, of which the ‘Caucasian’ was in his view the most advanced. Africans he considered close to the apes, and he concluded that no ‘woolly-haired’ person had ever contributed anything to human civilization. Haeckel believed that criminals were racially degenerate and should be executed to prevent them passing on their criminal characteristics to the next generation: ‘rendering incorrigible offenders harmless’ would have ‘a directly beneficial effect as a selection process’. The same would be desirable for the mentally ill and handicapped. Children’s diseases, he thought, should be left untreated so that the weak could be weeded out from the chain of heredity by natural causes, leaving only the strong to propagate the race. Haeckel also believed, however, that war was eugenically counter-productive since it eliminated the best and bravest young men of every generation, so his self-styled Monist League (1906) campaigned vigorously in the cause of pacifism, leading the German military authorities to keep it under close surveillance during the First World War.

In the world view of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), who was already beginning to apply Darwinian principles to human society in the 1860s, genius was the product of heredity, and by breeding the clever with the clever it would be possible to improve the intelligence of humankind. The prime example of course was his own family and its various connections, in which brilliance and scientific ability occurred in successive generations with notable regularity. Galton, wavering between designating himself as scientifically able or generally brilliant, opted in the end for the latter. Of course, like other eugenicists, he did not pause to consider whether wealth, education and circumstances played a role as well. Conversely, Galton thought that inferior peoples were threatening the future of the race by producing too many sub-standard children. What he termed ‘eugenics’, the idea of degeneracy or reverse evolution, began to be discussed in educated circles. The reductio ad absurdum of this view could be found in H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine, where the time traveller discovers in the distant future that the working classes have degenerated into the ‘Morlocks’, a race of subterranean savages, while the middle and upper classes, the ‘Eloi’, have lost almost all their sense of self-preservation and competitiveness. On the other hand, a Social Darwinist like Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) could argue that the lower classes were closer to the apes, and so inherited savage, criminal instincts that were absent in the law-abiding sectors of the population.

Social Darwinism became even more pessimistic in the hands of Galton’s disciple and biographer Karl Pearson (1857–1936). The remedy for eugenicists such as Pearson was to encourage the breeding of superior humans, and discourage the increase of inferiors. While this might be possible within British society, the same principles were much less encouraging when applied to the world as a whole. Here Pearson was influenced by the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), whose ideas were first developed in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–5). Gobineau, a pro-German whose enthusiasm for the aristocracy was so great that he awarded himself the title of ‘Count’ to stake his own claim to noble status, argued that interbreeding could only dilute the characteristics of superior races, rather than improve those of inferior ones. Gobineau did not win many adherents in France for his claim that the French aristocracy was mostly German or, as he put it – borrowing from earlier theorists such as Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Ernest Renan (1823–92) – ‘Aryan’ in origin, until after France’s defeat by Germany in the war of 1870–1, which soon sparked a debate about the extent to which the victory of the Germans had proved them to be racially superior. Not surprisingly, Gobineau’s ideas were most popular of all in Germany itself, where a Gobineau Society was founded in 1894. Taken to fresh extremes by the composer Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, the Germanophile Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, these ideas became the vehicle for a racialized antisemitism, in which the Jew was portrayed as the eternal enemy of the pure-bred Aryan, and Jesus Christ was portrayed as an Aryan and not a Jew.

Scientific racism arranged racial types on an evolutionary scale and implied that mixing them together would pull what were now increasingly known as the ‘higher races’ down to the level of the ‘lower’ ones. Contemplating the British Empire and its history, Pearson declared:

History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.

In this pessimistic view, education and improvement were futile when applied to inferior races. Conquest, assimilation or even extermination were the only possible ways forward. The nations with ‘the greatest physical, mental, moral, material and political power’ would win in the struggle for survival, or supremacy, and they would be justified in doing so, declared the German general Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930): ‘Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.’ ‘Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally inherent in relations between peoples,’ wrote a close adviser to the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, the journalist and Foreign Office press agent Kurt Riezler (1882–1955).

In the early and mid-nineteenth century there was a widespread view, and not only in Britain, that the progress of human society was linear in nature, with Britain in the lead in terms of industrialization and democratization, and other European nations following. But while liberals regarded the nation state as a universal phenomenon, and nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century was linked closely to the implementation of liberal values such as the freedom of the press, trial by jury, and the sovereignty of elected assemblies, things began to change in the decades leading up to the First World War. Where British commentators, for example, had once condescendingly regarded Germans as hopelessly impractical, backward, and mired in Gothic medievalism, they started well before the end of the nineteenth century to express admiration for German industrial and scientific progress, and give vent to anxieties about being overtaken by German economic growth. For their part, German nationalists started to think of the French as racially degenerate, not least because of the slow pace of French population growth. The German sense of superiority was rudely challenged in 1912 when an official report revealed that the German birth rate had started to decline as well. German newspapers and politicians pointed in anxiety to the continued growth of Russia, where the population was booming, with potentially major effects for the future strength of the armed forces. Austro-Hungarian politicians and generals looked with alarm on the spread of Slav nationalism across the border with Serbia into parts of the empire itself. French opinion treated Germany as an enlarged version of Prussia, rigid, militaristic, unimaginative and threatening. Increasingly such anxieties were expressed in racial terms, with ‘Slavs’ pitted against ‘Teutons’, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ against ‘Latins’, in the inevitable struggle for survival and supremacy.

Such views did not go unchallenged. In colonial administration, race could often take second place to the need to reward the native elites whose collaboration was essential to the maintenance of imperial control. British royal honours, knighthoods and orders were doled out liberally to maharajas and sultans across the colonies. Critics of empire like Hobson, Lenin and Luxemburg emerged to excoriate the economic exploitation they thought underpinned the colonial enterprise. Colonial atrocities, particularly in German South-West Africa, aroused criticism from Catholic politicians, and Social Democratic parties across Europe agreed that the next war would be fought in the interests of capitalism, resolving to prevent it by staging a Europe-wide general strike should war seem imminent. The Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) published her best-selling novel Lay Down Your Arms! in 1889 and lobbied ceaselessly for peace. She persuaded the Swedish manufacturer of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, to endow a Peace Prize, which she herself duly won in 1905. In 1899 and 1907 two peace conferences held at The Hague on the instigation of the Russians laid down an important series of ground rules for limiting the damage caused by war. They banned the killing of prisoners and civilians, and declared that an occupying force was the guardian of the cultural heritage of the areas it conquered, and should not loot or destroy cultural artefacts. But an attempt to establish a binding system of arbitration for international disputes failed because of the opposition of the Germans. Some thought that war would not happen anyway. The British pacifist Norman Angell (1872–1967), in his book The Great Illusion (first published in 1909 as Europe’s Optical Illusion), argued that Europe’s economies had become so closely integrated that war was futile and counter-productive. It was an illusion to imagine therefore that any country would gain by attacking another. Even so, he observed, the gathering arms race was making such a war more likely. Already, in the Balkans, indeed, armed conflict was becoming increasingly violent and uncontrollable, the expression of ethnic and religious hatreds that were beyond the power of any larger nation to contain.

THE BALKAN WARS

The initial crucible of Balkan violence was to be found in the disputed territory of Macedonia, home to a complex mixture of Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Jews and Vlachs. It had been ceded to Bulgaria by the Treaty of San Stefano but restored to the Ottoman Empire by the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The area was also riven by religious rivalry between Orthodox Christians and Muslims. The Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians all demanded the cession of the region from the Ottomans. Bulgarians were the most radical. IMRO agents within Ottoman Macedonia attacked and killed Ottoman officials and confiscated their funds as a matter of routine. Their violence degenerated into simple criminality as they increasingly relied on extortion and intimidation to raise money to buy arms. In 1897 the Ottoman authorities seized huge quantities of weapons and ammunition from an IMRO cache. This only increased the radicalism of the revolutionaries, and in 1903 they took over twenty-eight villages near the Bulgarian border, killing more than 500 Turkish troops. As the Turkish Army poured in reinforcements, terrorist murders and bomb attacks spread, until they merged into a general uprising, which was eventually put down by regular Turkish troops and bashi-bazouks. They burned 119 villages to the ground, razed 8,400 houses and drove 50,000 refugees into the mountains. This effectively crushed the revolutionary movement. But it seriously alienated international opinion. The Austrians and Russians, acting in a rare moment of unity, sent in an international police force, which was reluctantly accepted by the sultan.

Behind the scenes Abdülhamid II turned in desperation to Germany for help. Soon German officers were training Ottoman troops, and German engineers were building a new railway to Baghdad, financed by German banks. All of this, however, undermined the sultan’s authority within the empire, as foreign intervention, repression, and his refusal to reintroduce the 1876 Constitution led to the emergence of conspiracies to try and oust him. Shortly after his accession, Abdülhamid had abandoned the policy of trying to create an Ottoman national identity. Perhaps reacting to the loss of a very large proportion of the empire’s Christian population in the Balkans, and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Caucasus and from the new Balkan states to Anatolia, he had substituted the policy with a new ideology of pan-Islamism. From now on the sultan’s religious status as the Caliph was emphasized in Ottoman propaganda as the basis for the allegiance of his people. Increasingly, Abdülhamid put his empire’s troubles down to an international conspiracy of the Christian world, and in particular to the Christian Armenian minority in Anatolia, mostly well-off traders and merchants, whom the Treaty of Berlin had obliged him to protect. In 1892–3, Muslim crowds, egged on by officials who claimed the Armenians were trying to destroy Islam, began massacring the area’s Armenian population. When Armenian nationalist groups retaliated, they were crushed by the Ottoman Army, after which local and regional officials encouraged further violence against them, aided by Kurdish irregulars sent in by the sultan.

The worst atrocity occurred with the burning alive of more than 3,000 Armenians in the cathedral of Urfa in December 1895. A protest demonstration of Armenians in Constantinople was suppressed and was followed by widespread killings of Armenians in the capital. Foreign intervention, again urged by Gladstone, never became a reality. The massacres continued until 1897, by which time between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians had been killed. Another 30,000 died in the town of Adana in 1909 when a reactionary movement to suppress calls for the return of the 1876 Constitution degenerated into a series of pogroms. Already by the end of the 1890s the Armenian massacres had lost Abdülhamid any sympathy he still enjoyed in the international community. Domestically, too, his days were numbered. Suspicious of the younger officers, many of whom had visited western Europe and imbibed western ideas, the sultan starved the army of funds. Corruption meant that often officers did not get paid. In 1907–8 conspirators organized in a self-styled clandestine Committee for Union and Progress assassinated many of the police agents who had infiltrated the army, then moved into action. Garrison after garrison now openly declared its support for the Committee. Abdülhamid, afraid for his life, hurriedly agreed to reintroduce the 1876 Constitution. But it was too late. This was the Young Turk Revolution. Remarkably, in declaring its support for freedom and democracy, it had the support of minority nationalist groups, including even IMRO. But the Young Turks had little idea of how to put their ideas into action beyond getting rid of Abdülhamid, which they did by deposing him the following year and putting one of his many relatives on the throne as Mehmed V (1844–1918).

Meanwhile, in the period since the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, all the Balkan powers had been arming themselves to the teeth, buying up the latest weaponry from Europe’s leading arms manufacturers with loans supplied by the British, French and German governments, who were keen to boost exports. Urged on by Macedonian officers in its army, Bulgaria bought arms so lavishly that by the mid-1890s a third of the state budget was being spent on the army and in 1902, unable to pay the interest due on all the loans, the country had to declare state bankruptcy. It was not alone in its national insolvency. The Serbs also devoted massive resources to building up their army, resulting in a state bankruptcy in 1893, when the government declared itself unable to pay the interest on loans it had taken out. The debts were consolidated, the currency issue was reduced, and an autonomous financial control authority was put in place. In Greece things were even worse. By 1893 state indebtedness amounted to ten times the national income and here too the government declared national insolvency. Nothing was done to resolve the situation, however, until 1897, when Greece launched a war against Turkey over disputes between Christians and Muslims on the island of Crete after furious crowds in Athens had accused King George I (1845–1913) of betraying the national cause by trying to come to a peaceful settlement over the issue. The war was fought on a number of fronts, but in the decisive action, at Domokos, in Thessaly, where around 45,000 troops were assembled on each side, the Ottoman forces drove the Greeks into retreat. The ‘Black 97’ or the ‘Unfortunate War’ led to a series of minor territorial losses and obliged Greece to pay massive financial reparations to the Ottomans. Realizing that Greece was unable to pay, an International Financial Control Commission now stepped in to ensure payment of the reparations to the Ottoman government by cutting back on the issue of currency to stabilize the drachma, and also by collecting indirect taxes on behalf of the Greek government.

The problem for all these countries was that they were inhabited mainly by subsistence farmers and so had low export volumes, while the tax-collecting administration was largely ineffective. None of these financial difficulties, however, proved an obstacle in the end to military expansion, fuelled by growing nationalist passions. In Greece young army officers, fired up by the example of the Young Turks, overthrew the government in a coup d’état in August 1909, eventually handing over power to a skilled nationalist politician, Eleftherios Venizelos, who immediately reformed the state finances but combined this with a programme of renewed rearmament. In Serbia the change came earlier, and in a more violent way. When King Alexander Obrenovíc (1876–1903) attempted to purge the Serbian Army in 1903 in order to reduce its power and save money, a group of young officers led by Dragutin Dimitrijević (1876–1917), known as Colonel Apis, decided to get rid of him. They had the implicit support of many leading figures who objected strongly to the king’s rapprochement with Austria-Hungary, fearing it would turn Serbia into a Habsburg client state. Alexander was already unpopular because he ruled in an authoritarian manner, closed newspapers, disregarded election results, and alienated senior politicians. These last included the influential Minister of the Interior, Djordje Genčić (1861–1938). Like many ministers and officials, Genčić objected to the king’s marriage to Draga Mašin (1864–1903), whose reputation in society was so bad that the entire Cabinet resigned when the couple became engaged. ‘Sire,’ Genčić told the king, ‘You cannot marry her. She has been everybody’s mistress – mine included.’ The king’s response – a slap in the face – was enough to drive Genčić into the arms of Apis’s conspiracy.

After careful preparation, twenty-eight Serbian officers led by Apis burst into the royal palace late in the evening of 28 May 1903. In the ensuing exchange of fire Apis was shot three times; he survived, but carried the bullets in his body for the rest of his life. His fellow conspirators rushed up the stairs, then found a concealed entrance to the small dressing room where the king and queen were hiding. After swearing that they would remain loyal to their oath to the monarch as officers, the insurgents shot King Alexander and Queen Draga as they emerged into their bedroom, and hacked their corpses to pieces before throwing them out of the window. One of the conspirators cut off a piece of the queen’s skin and carried it about with him subsequently as a trophy. Elsewhere in Belgrade other members of the conspiracy shot dead members of the Cabinet including the Prime Minister. Installing a leading member of the rival Karadjordjević family as King Peter (1844–1921), the army now had free rein to order whatever weaponry it wanted. It built up a huge state debt to the French, from whom it purchased its military hardware. The apparatus of Alexander’s authoritarian state was dismantled, and a degree of popular sovereignty restored.

This gave power to a profoundly nationalist electorate, to the benefit of the liberal politician Nikola Pašić (1845–1926), whose popular Radical Party had been a principal victim of Alexander’s clampdown. The main international loser in this revolution was Austria-Hungary. From now on, Serbia remained profoundly hostile to the Habsburg state and aimed to undermine its hold on Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1908 the advent of the Young Turk regime was taken in Serbia and the rest of the region as a further sign of Ottoman weakness and a signal for action. Austria-Hungary, worried about Serb irredentism, and taking advantage of the chaos in Constantinople, annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, nominally an Ottoman province but under Habsburg control since the Congress of Berlin thirty years before. At the same time, and certainly not coincidentally, Ferdinand of Bulgaria declared his country an independent sovereign nation free from Ottoman control, and appointed himself king. The Russians had to agree to the amendment of the Treaty of Berlin in recognition of these events, but were left determined not to tolerate a repeat of the situation. They encouraged the creation of a series of mutual alliances in the Balkans and supported a campaign of subversion within the annexed provinces, which were inhabited by a mix of Serbs, Croats and Muslims. The disorder spread to Montenegro, which had achieved independence at the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 following a series of armed clashes, most notably a Montenegrin victory at the Battle of Grahovac in 1858. Following the Treaty of Berlin, Prince Nikola I (1841–1921) had consolidated independence with skill, marrying off two daughters to Russian archdukes and signalling his alliance with Russia by the purely symbolic gesture of declaring war on Japan in 1904. Nikola took advantage of Ottoman weakness to declare himself king of his impoverished country in 1910. Parallel to this action, the neighbouring Albanians, subjected to military conscription, denied the use of their language and deprived of any kind of education system by the Young Turks, even though they too were Muslims, rose up in a confused but violent rebellion in the same year.

What actually lit the Balkan tinderbox, however, was a series of events that began in north Africa. When, in 1911, the Sultan of Morocco appealed for French military assistance in putting down a rebellion, the German Kaiser sent a gunboat to Agadir in order to force a climb-down. But the British intervened on the French side and forced Germany to accept a French protectorate over Morocco in return for a transfer of territory from the French Congo to the German colony of Cameroon. It was at this point that the Italian government saw its chance to revive its ambition of an empire in north Africa and invaded Libya, declaring war on the territory’s nominal sovereign power, the Ottoman Empire. The war was notable for the first example of aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment, by the Italians, who also for the first time in history deployed armoured cars on the ground. Initial setbacks prompted the Italian Army to send reinforcements until their forces numbered 150,000. The Ottomans recruited Arab auxiliaries but, unable to reinforce their army except by sea, failed to muster more than around 30,000 men. Gradually superior Italian numbers and weaponry drove the Turks back. Meanwhile an Italian fleet annihilated the Ottoman navy off Beirut, and the Italians occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea.

The Ottoman government, already in serious difficulties at home, sued for peace, and the Treaty of Ouchy, signed in October 1912, gave Italy control over Libya in return for the islands’ return. However, this part of the agreement was not honoured by the Italians and in fact was not implemented until the end of the Second World War. The final dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire now seemed to be under way. Already in August 1912, 20,000 poorly organized but well-armed Albanian tribesmen had occupied the Macedonian town of Skopje, forcing the Ottomans to concede autonomy to its surrounding province, where there were large numbers of Albanian speakers. Together with the Italian victories, this convinced Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia that the moment had come to attack. In October 1912 the region rapidly descended into chaos as the Bulgarians invaded Thrace, the Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs Macedonia, the Montenegrins and Serbs northern Albania and Kosovo, and the Greeks southern Albania. A war on so many fronts proved impossible for the already demoralized and disorganized Ottoman forces to cope with. Within days the Serbs defeated a Turkish army at Kumanovo and entered Skopje. An eyewitness in the town of Kumanovo reported how the ‘Turk divisions ran amok through the town in chaotic retreat . . . maimed, blood-soaked and barefoot . . . Serbian shrapnel began falling on the station, and the railway personnel scattered as if being shot at like sparrows.’ Serb forces moved through the area, largely populated by Albanian Muslims, setting light to villages and massacring their inhabitants. A Serbian socialist in the army reported how the people of Skopje woke up ‘every morning to the sight . . . in the very centre of the town . . . of heaps of Albanian corpses with severed heads . . . [It was] clear that these headless men had not been killed in battle.’

The lead in the massacres was taken by Colonel Apis, founder of ‘National Defence’, a nationalist organization set up in 1908 following the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. When the Austrians forced the Serbian government to ban the organization, Apis set up another, secret terrorist organization, ‘Unification or Death’, also known as the ‘Black Hand’. Its aim was to create a Greater Serbia, including Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia. Before long it was controlling the Serb-occupied areas of Macedonia. Following the defeat of a Greek army at Monastir between 16 and 19 November 1912, the Serb forces, 110,000 strong, attacked 90,000 Turkish troops in a three-day battle that left 12,000 Serbs and 17,000 Turkish soldiers dead. The general in charge of the Ottoman troops finally surrendered, leading 45,000 of his troops into captivity while another 30,000 fled to the nearby hills. Meanwhile a Greek force raced to Salonika, occupying the city just before the Bulgarians arrived. Relations between the two small states soon deteriorated sharply as a result. Elsewhere, however, the Bulgarians had more luck, taking possession on 24 October of the key fortress of Lozengrad in Thrace and driving the Ottoman forces out of the region in disorder. While the retreating Turks massacred civilians on their way out, the incoming Bulgarians burned down every mosque they found on their way in. At the fortress of Çatalca the Bulgarians unleashed a massive bombardment from 900 field guns. The noise could be heard in Constantinople more than 20 miles away. The Turks dug in, casualties began to mount, and the two armies fought each other to a standstill. The conflict was largely over by the end of 1912, but Bulgarian-Turkish hostilities resumed in February 1913 at Adrianople, sparked by the Turkish refusal to cede the town to the Bulgarians as agreed in the peace negotiations. When the administration in Constantinople agreed to the cession, it was overthrown by the Young Turk Committee for Union and Progress, accompanied by demonstrations of religious students in the streets shouting ‘Death rather than dishonourable peace!’ Eventually Adrianople fell on 26 March 1913, leaving nearly 60,000 dead, many of them from cholera. On entering the city, the Bulgarians found the streets littered with decomposing corpses.

Map 18. The First Balkan War, July 1912–May 1913 Map 19. The Second Balkan War, June–October 1913

When further assaults on Çatalca and Gallipoli failed to achieve their aims, however, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria finally gave up for the time being his ambition of restoring and even exceeding the ‘big Bulgaria’ created temporarily at the Treaty of San Stefano, and on 30 May 1913 he signed the Treaty of London, brokered by the Great Powers. The agreement ratified the removal of the Ottomans from the entire region, indeed almost from Europe altogether, and sealed the creation of an independent Albania, a move backed by the Austrians in the hope that it would become a client state and cut off Serbia from the Mediterranean. Instinctively the Great Powers reached for the customary German princeling, this time Wilhelm of Wied (1876–1945), who was proclaimed head of state as Prince Vidi I, but his reign lasted less than six months; the Muslim peasants who had risen up against the Ottomans now turned against the international settlement, which they believed was imposed by Christian powers in the interests of the larger Albanian landowners. Their anger was increased by the fact that Vidi relied heavily on the military support of Catholic troops from Mirdita in the north. As the rebels entered Tirana, Vidi fled in September 1914 to join the German Army on the Western Front, though never to renounce his claim to the Albanian throne. The country fell apart, to be invaded, successively and sometimes jointly, by Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria in the following years.

The First Balkan War was quickly followed by a second. It was obvious to all that Bulgaria had been seriously weakened by the conflict. The Serbs concluded a secret alliance with the Greeks, and threatened to annex the Macedonian territories they occupied, on which Bulgaria had a claim. The Romanians demanded the cession of north-eastern Bulgaria (the south-eastern Dobrudja) and the Greeks began to menace the area around Salonika. Disastrously, the Bulgarian general Mihail Savov (1857–1928), instructed by the king but without sanction by the government, launched a pre-emptive attack on the Serbs on 28 June 1913. Mutinies, disease and desertions among his battle-weary troops turned the attack into a fiasco. The Serbs repulsed the Bulgarian attack, the Greeks launched a successful attack on the main Bulgarian army, and the Romanians, who had remained neutral in the First Balkan War, took the opportunity of the Bulgarian setbacks to march into southern Dobrudja. Even the Ottomans managed to reoccupy part of eastern Thrace, retaking Adrianople in the process. When the Romanian forces were within seven miles of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the Bulgarians reluctantly brought the month-long conflict to an end.

Some of the combatants had lost a good deal of what they had gained in the First Balkan War, but nevertheless in the Treaties of Bucharest and Constantinople, signed respectively in August and September 1913, Bulgaria enlarged its territory by 16 per cent compared to what it was before the First Balkan War, and increased its population from 4.3 to 4.7 million people. Romania enlarged its territory by 5 per cent and Montenegro by a massive 62 per cent. Greece increased its population from 2.7 to 4.4 million and its territory by no less than 68 per cent. Serbia almost doubled its territory and expanded its population from 2.9 to 4.5 million. The Ottomans had successfully defended their toehold in Europe. For Russia, however, the Balkan Wars were a catastrophe. Its carefully constructed system of Balkan alliances had collapsed in the most spectacular possible way. The most powerful state in the region, Bulgaria, was angry at the Russians’ failure to support it, and now looked to Germany as an ally. Russia’s only remaining friend was Serbia, and this gave the Serbs enormous leverage, which they were to use to the full in 1914. The Russian aim of gaining access to the Mediterranean had been completely frustrated. Serbia now looked to Bosnia-Herzegovina to increase its territory, having gained more or less what it wanted in other directions from the two Balkan Wars.

The Balkan Wars were remarkable for the sheer scale of troop mobilization within the combatant nations. Serbia had a population of less than three million but put into the field an army larger than any the first Napoleon had mustered. Bulgaria mobilized half a million men, a good quarter of its entire male population. Armies dug trenches and subjected their enemy to ruthless bombardment by artillery. Troops were now dressed in camouflaged khaki or field-grey uniforms instead of the traditional identifying bright colours. Cavalry only played a subordinate part. All those involved except Romania and Montenegro put combat planes into the air and used them for bombing. Searchlights bore down on the enemy lines, allowing twenty-four-hour combat. The territorial ambitions of the combatants went well beyond annexing areas that could be argued to belong to their respective nation states by culture, language or history. The invasion of Albania by the Montenegrins, for example, or the Greater Serbia programme of the Black Hand, or King Ferdinand’s desire to see himself crowned in Constantinople as ruler of a Bulgarian Empire stretching across the whole of Macedonia, were effectively examples of imperialism, now turned in towards Europe. The massacres of civilians prefigured the genocides that were to occur later in the twentieth century, as people who were seen as alien were killed in the supposed interests of the racial or religious integrity of an expanding nation state; Bulgarians burnt mosques as they advanced, and in Macedonia the occupying powers, notably Serbia, began a ruthless programme of assimilation to their own language and culture, attempting to obliterate minority cultures in the process. In November 1913 a British vice-consul in the region reported that the Muslim population in the annexed areas was ‘in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands’. This was far from being the last time a warning of this kind was to be issued in the twentieth century.

The Balkan Wars led directly to the deaths of 200,000 troops on all sides, and the chaos they spread caused many thousands of civilians to die from disease, especially cholera and typhus. In many ways these wars were a portent of things to come. And yet they were brief conflicts, in which all the combatant nations had clearly defined and limited aims and achieved them to a sufficient degree to allow them to agree to a ceasefire. It was not the purpose of any of the combatants to achieve regime change among their opponents. At the same time it was clear that the Great Powers were becoming increasingly drawn in to such conflicts. In the First Balkan War, when Montenegro in alliance with Serbia attacked northern Albania, where the inhabitants were mostly neither Serbs nor Montenegrins, Italy and Austria-Hungary demanded their withdrawal, Russia began to mobilize in support of the Serbs, and France declared its support for the Russians. The situation was only defused by a British intervention resulting in the international conference that guaranteed independence for Albania. The Montenegrins captured Skutari while the Russians and Austro-Hungarians squabbled about the precise borders of the new state. The refusal of the Montenegrins to withdraw threatened to escalate the situation again, until the Powers paid a huge bribe to the Montenegrin monarch King Nikola that persuaded him to remove his troops. In August 1914 defusing a renewed flare-up of these conflicts was not to be so easy.

‘THE GREAT WAR WE ALL HOPE FOR’

In 1815 and for a long time afterwards, European statesmen and politicians had concluded that international co-operation was the way to prevent a recurrence of social and political revolution. The massive destruction and loss of life that the armies of the French Revolution and its successor Napoleon had visited upon Europe had to be avoided by re-establishing social hierarchy and political order. British world hegemony had prevented colonial and imperial conflicts from disturbing the European peace. European states had fought only a limited number of wars, for limited goals, and with limited means. Bismarck’s concern to build a system of alliances that would allow the German Reich created in 1871 the space it needed to consolidate itself had prompted a series of arrangements designed to ward off the threat of France finding allies in its search to regain Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. In 1872 he succeeded in forming the League of the Three Emperors, through which he managed to detach Russia from France and bring in Austria-Hungary, all in the interests of controlling the nationalist ambitions of the Poles, whose territory was divided between the three states. In 1882 he bolstered this system of treaties by concluding a Triple Alliance with Italy and Austria-Hungary. Five years later he signed a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, in an attempt to keep it within the German fold. In the Balkans, Bismarck persuaded Austria-Hungary and Russia to accept a division of influence in which the former took the western half and the latter the eastern. Acutely aware of the risk that the turbulent politics of the Balkans could spark a European conflict, he warned repeatedly of the danger that Germany might have to fight a war on two fronts, and told the Reichstag in 1876 that Balkan conflicts were not ‘worth our risking – excuse my plain speaking – the healthy bones of one of our Pomeranian musketeers’.

Bismarck was attempting to square the circle of European diplomacy. Russian and Austro-Hungarian interests, especially in the Balkans, could not in the long run be reconciled. Moreover, after his departure from office in 1890, a younger generation of German politicians and statesmen came to power imbued with a self-confidence in Germany’s destiny and a disdain for the elaborate system of diplomatic alignments that Bismarck had erected to shield the young empire from its enemies. Germany, they thought, could look after itself. Without consulting the Kaiser, Bismarck’s successor as Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse. Soon the German Empire was involving itself in countries outside Europe, bringing colonial issues back into European politics. The Concert of Europe began to crumble. Up to the early years of the new century Britain regarded above all Russia as its most serious potential enemy, largely because of the ‘Great Game’ in Asia and the continual push of the Russians towards the Mediterranean and the Middle East. France was the subject of similar suspicions, and indeed novels warning the British public about its government’s lack of preparedness for a future war still saw France as the main threat well after 1900. The point was illustrated with lurid depictions of the perfidious French flying an invading army across the Channel in giant balloons, or surreptitiously digging a tunnel under the Straits of Dover to allow troops to be smuggled in under the sea without detection. This was not all fantasy. On 28 February 1900 the French Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé (1852–1923), reported to his Cabinet that in discussions about countering the British challenge to French colonial ambitions, ‘some suggest a landing in England, others an expedition to Egypt; yet others advocate an attack on Burma by troops from Indo-China which would coincide with a Russian march on India.’ The old enmity was clearly not dead.

Rebuffed by the Germans in his attempt to gain their support for these bizarre ideas, Delcassé came round to thinking that colonial questions were best solved in collaboration with the British rather than in opposition to them. In 1904, Britain and France engaged in the famous entente cordiale, signing a series of agreements designed to avoid the two countries being dragged into the looming Russo-Japanese war on the sides of their respective allies (the British had previously concluded an alliance with Japan as part of their efforts to prevent Russian expansion in China). This involved settling the two nations’ remaining colonial difficulties, and included an understanding that Morocco belonged to the French sphere of influence. In March 1905, however, Kaiser Wilhelm II landed at Tangier, promised the sultan to help him against the French, and told the French consul he knew how to defend German interests there (phrases such as this counted as extremely bellicose in the language of diplomacy). By doing so, he was trying to undermine French interests in Morocco at a time when France’s ally Russia was in trouble with Japan. He may have thought that this would persuade Britain that a strong Germany would make a better ally than a weak France, and that the entente cordiale should accordingly be abandoned.

But as so often with the Kaiser’s interventions, the move backfired. The British responded by supporting the French, and the German government was forced to back down. The resulting Treaty of Algeçiras in April 1906 gave the French largely what they wanted. But the most significant aspect of the crisis was arguably a public statement by Lloyd George: ‘If Britain is treated badly where her interests are vitally affected, as if she is of no account in the cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.’ From this point onwards at the latest, the British government, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey included, regarded Germany, not Russia or France, as the main threat to British interests. This view had already been adopted by British Foreign Office officials, notably Sir Eyre Crowe (1864–1925), who in January 1907 penned a celebrated memorandum arguing that either Germany was ‘consciously aiming at the establishment of a German hegemony at first in Europe and eventually in the world’ or that ‘the great German design is in reality no more than the expression of a vague, confused and unpractical statesmanship not realising its own drift’. Either way, he concluded, the result was the same. Germany had to be opposed.

The decisive factor here was the massive build-up of German naval power in the wake of the Navy Law of 1898 and its successors. Previously there had been no effective German navy at all. But Kaiser Wilhelm and the new State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, were determined to build one that would boost Germany’s prestige. At the same time there was an increasing feeling among Germany’s ruling elite, bolstered by pressure from newly emerging nationalist associations, that the ragbag of small and insignificant colonies possessed by the German Empire was in no way appropriate for a Great Power. As the Foreign Minister, later Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow stated, Germany needed its ‘place in the sun’ (a phrase later repeated by his successor Bethmann Hollweg to the French ambassador). In order to achieve it, he inaugurated a so-called ‘world policy’, or Weltpolitik. The German government and with or without its permission the Kaiser began to intervene loudly in world affairs, notably the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion. Tirpitz’s Navy Laws inaugurated a massive naval building programme that aimed to produce a fleet not of fast-moving light cruisers to defend or extend Germany’s imperial interests, but of huge battleships. Their aim was to inflict such damage on the Royal Navy through a confrontation in the North Sea that the British would be forced to agree to allow an expansion of the German overseas empire by one means or another. As Tirpitz declared: ‘For Germany the most dangerous naval enemy at present is England.’ But Tirpitz and the Kaiser myopically failed to realize that the British would respond to this growing threat. First the British boosted their own naval construction programme, and then, in 1906, partly in response to the defeat of the Russian navy by the better-built and better-equipped Japanese navy, they launched a new type of battleship, heavily armoured, fast-moving, and armed with a much larger number of long-range guns and torpedoes than the existing models. The first one was named HMS Dreadnought.

By 1914 the British had twenty-nine of these battleships, many of them so much improved that they were known as ‘super-dreadnoughts’, whereas the Germans only had seventeen. Moreover, the whole modus operandi of the Royal Navy had been revolutionized in the process. In 1897 the British navy, the largest in the world, was described as ‘a drowsy, inefficient, moth-eaten organism’ manned by men trained to sail ships in a peaceful world. Admirals and captains took pride in the appearance of their ships, often paying for their adornment out of their own pockets. Sailors spent long hours polishing the brasswork and captains avoided gunnery practice because it dirtied the ships’ paint. Captain Percy Scott (1853–1924), who invented modern naval gunnery techniques, was greatly frowned on when his ship scored 80 per cent hits in practice when 30 per cent was the fleet average. It was small wonder that Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher (1841–1920), the dynamic reformer appointed in 1902 to modernize the navy, asked two years later the plainly rhetorical question: ‘How many of our Admirals have minds?’ Fisher immediately stopped training in masts and yards, and in 1905 he made Scott’s gunnery methods compulsory. As a result, for the first time the navy began recording more hits than misses. Yet despite opposition from what he called the ‘gouty admirals’ of the conservative school, Fisher was not really a modern thinker either. In 1914 the Royal Navy still thought all that counted would be a single decisive encounter in the North Sea, between rows of Dreadnoughts, of boarding parties, of a quick, total victory: a modern Battle of Trafalgar. Tirpitz thought along similar lines. Such an event never materialized. Instead naval conflict became a war of attrition in which the whip hand was held by the power that used individual submarines to sink the merchant ships of its rival and so throttle its line of supply, and battleships proved fatally vulnerable to attack from the air.

Even though they won the naval arms race, the British did not lessen their suspicions and fears of German naval ambitions. The damage, in other words, had been done and was not easily to be undone. Anxieties on both sides were reinforced by the massive publicity surrounding the launching of each new battleship. By 1914, therefore, the governments of both Britain and Germany, however divided they might have been about diplomatic tactics in the crisis, considered the other to be the major potential enemy in any broad European conflict. British anxiety was reinforced by Germany’s decision in 1913 to expand its army, after a long period of focusing on the navy. This was not without consequences. In 1907, British Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman told the French ‘he did not think English public opinion would allow for British troops being employed on the Continent of Europe’. Grey and the Cabinet thought that if they sent military help to the French, it would only be in the form of a token force of two or three divisions. In any case they felt the details of military planning should be left to the professionals. They thus surrendered some of their freedom of action to the generals. Unknown to the Cabinet, Sir Henry Wilson (1864–1922), Chief of the General Staff, prepared as thoroughly as he could for a full-scale continental war. He spent his summers on cycling tours of the northern French border with Germany and in the Low Countries, where he thought the next war would take place. Without informing the Cabinet, be conducted secret negotiations with the French Army leadership, which resulted in firm plans to send over a strong British Expeditionary Force in case of a German invasion, and to put the troops wherever the French wanted them. Wilson despised democratic politicians; he knew that once the divisions were sent, more would follow; this implication of the plan was never discussed in Cabinet. Britain gained a continental commitment entirely without consideration of the consequences.

Just as admirals thought that the war at sea would be a rerun of the great naval engagements of the past, so the generals thought the war on land would be something like the conflicts of the 1860s, opening with rapid, railway-borne advances to the front, followed by a decisive encounter in which the other side would meet with a shattering defeat along the lines of Sadowa (1866) or Sedan (1870). Peace would then be concluded after a few weeks or at most a couple of months. Had they studied the Balkan Wars, the American Civil War or the Crimean War, in which the opposing sides had been relatively evenly matched, they might have thought differently. Since those days, too, barbed wire and machine guns had become standard defensive equipment, and as yet, internal combustion engines and armour-plating were not advanced enough to produce machines that could effectively overcome these obstacles and restore movement to warfare. A few recognized these inconvenient facts. In Modern Weapons and Modern War (1900) the Polish banker Jan Bloch (1836–1902) argued that in the next major war ‘the spade will be as important as the rifle’. He predicted that the war of the future would be a stalemate. Cavalry charges would be obsolete. Entrenched men armed with machine guns would have at least a fourfold advantage over men coming towards them across open ground. Combatant nations would have to mobilize men in their millions, and the resultant stresses and strains would lead to ‘the break-up of the whole social organization’. ‘The steadfastness with which the military caste clings to the memory of a state of things which has already died,’ he warned, ‘is . . . costly and dangerous.’

Nobody heeded his warnings, any more than they did those of the pacifist views of Wilhelm Lamszus (1881–1965), a Social Democratic teacher in Hamburg, which led him in 1912 to publish The Human Slaughterhouse: A Picture of the Coming War. Written as if by a participating soldier, the book described ‘fields saturated with the dead’, ‘corpses after corpses’. ‘It is as if death has thrown down his scythe [and] has now become a mechanic . . . this is what sticks in my gullet. That we will be ordered to death by technicians and mechanics. Just as buttons and needles are mass-produced, now cripples and corpses are produced by machines.’ Whereas the soldiers would die in their thousands, ‘the machines live on’. Conservatives described Lamszus as a ‘sick person . . . who would like to suck the patriotic marrow from the bones of the German people’. But the book sold 100,000 copies in the first three months of its publication. And he was not alone. The Baltic nobleman Baron Nicholas Alexandrovich von Wrangell (1869–1927) told an acquaintance in Paris in 1914:

We are on the verge of events the like of which the world has not seen since the time of the barbarian invasions. Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it will last for decades.

By 1910 at the latest the idea that a war was coming was shared by many. Admiral Fisher wrote of the atmosphere he created in the Royal Navy after 1902: ‘We prepared for war in professional hours, talked war, thought war, and hoped for war.’ Helmuth von Moltke (1848–1916), Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914, known generally as ‘Moltke the Younger’ in deference to his more famous uncle, declared in 1912 that war must come ‘and the sooner the better!’ However, when real war actually did come two years later, he had a nervous breakdown and had to be relieved of his duties.

It was not just generals and admirals who regarded war as inevitable. As early as 1891, Émile Driant (1855–1916), the son-in-law of the political French general Boulanger, wrote to his regiment: ‘I have always desired to fight with you the great war we all hope for.’ British writers enthused about the opportunity that war would present. As Horace Vachell (1861–1955) put it in his idealized novel about life at Harrow public school, The Hill (1905): ‘To die young, clean, ardent; to die swiftly, in perfect health; to die saving others from death, or worse – disgrace – . . . to die and carry with you into the fuller, ampler life beyond, untainted hopes and aspirations, unembittered memories, all the freshness and gladness of May – is that not a cause for joy rather than sorrow?’ ‘How I long for the Great War!’ wrote the Catholic conservative Hilaire Belloc. ‘It will sweep Europe like a broom.’ Speaking to Cambridge undergraduates in 1912, Viscount Esher (1852–1930), an influential figure in army reform, said that to underestimate the ‘poetic and romantic aspects of the clash of arms’ would be to ‘display enfeebled spirit and an impoverished imagination’. War appeared to increasing numbers of men in the political elites of European nations as a release, a liberation of manly energies long pent up, a resolution to all the doubts and uncertainties, all the unresolved and insoluble problems that had plagued European politics and society in increasing measure since the late nineteenth century: a chance to do something glorious in a prosaic age. Well before August 1914 the outbreak of a general war was widely anticipated across Europe, hoped for by some, feared by others.

COUNTDOWN TO CATASTROPHE

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the Habsburg throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was carrying out a military inspection and public visit in Sarajevo, in the province of Bosnia, annexed by Austria-Hungary six years earlier. It was one of the few places under Habsburg control where he could appear at an official event with his wife, Sophie, Countess Chotek, since their marriage was a ‘morganatic’ one. For Serb nationalists the visit was a provocation, given Serbian claims to Bosnia and the large number of ethnic Serbs within its borders. A group of them decided to take action and prepared to assassinate the archduke. The conspirators of 28 June were as bungling and incompetent as might be expected from their age and inexperience – all of them were teenagers. Several of them were so petrified at the magnitude of their enterprise that they failed to make use of their weapons when the archduke passed them on the street in his motor car. One of them did manage to throw a bomb but it bounced off the boot and exploded under the following vehicle, injuring a number of its occupants. Instead of calling off his visit, however, Franz Ferdinand insisted on continuing with it. His Czech chauffeur did not know Sarajevo and took a wrong turning. Realizing he had made a mistake, he stopped in order to reverse, coming to a halt right in front of one of the conspirators, the nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist student. With great presence of mind, Princip let off two shots, killing the archduke and fatally wounding his wife (though in fact he had meant the second shot for the military governor of Sarajevo). To avoid capture and interrogation, Princip swallowed a cyanide capsule, but vomited it back up again. He then tried to shoot himself, but the pistol was wrested from him. Within a few years, horrified and depressed at the consequences of his act, and weakened by disease and malnutrition, he died of tuberculosis in prison in Terezín. The Emperor Franz Josef, who disapproved of Franz Ferdinand’s marriage, is said on hearing the news of the assassination to have commented ‘A Higher Power has restored the order I could not uphold’, and ordered a third-class funeral.

In the internal debates of the Austro-Hungarian leadership during the years before his assassination, Franz Ferdinand had been a force for moderation. He realized the weakness of the empire, and consistently urged restraint in its dealings, especially with the Serbs. He sought to reform the monarchy by reducing the power of the Hungarians and making concessions to the South Slavs and the Czechs by turning the empire into a ‘United States of Great Austria’. The Germans of course would have remained dominant, not least given his strong belief in their racial superiority. Franz Ferdinand’s forcible removal made it easier for the war party in Vienna, led by army chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (1852–1925), to follow its aggressive instincts. Conrad had already urged a war against Serbia during the Bosnian crisis of 1908–9 and again no fewer than twenty-five times between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914. Serbia, he declared as early as 1907, was a ‘constant breeding ground for those aspirations and machinations that aim at the separation of the South Slav areas’. Now his moment had come. It was clear that the assassins had not acted entirely on their own. The Austrians rightly suspected that they had connections with Colonel Apis and the Black Hand organization, which over the previous few years had gained wide influence in the Serbian armed forces, the police and the intelligence service. Apis had recruited a number of young Bosnian Serbs, some of whom, like Princip, had taken advantage of scholarships offered by the Serbian government to study in Belgrade. Their choice of assassination as a political tactic was neither particularly new nor particularly exceptional. Assassination seemed the obvious form of protest to Princip and his comrades when the archduke’s visit to Sarajevo was announced. Colonel Apis seems to have approved of the project, and although he was not acting on behalf of the Serbian government, it was aware that an attempt might be made and even advised the archduke privately to call off his visit.

The government in Vienna decided that action had to be taken not only to punish the Serbs but also to prevent similar outrages occurring again, which was more than likely given the epidemic of assassinations that had spread across Europe over the previous few years. It also acted with an aggression that came from its knowledge that Austria-Hungary’s status as a Great Power was undergoing an alarming decline. The same consciousness of weakness prompted the Austro-Hungarian government to consult the German leadership before taking any action, saying that Serbia, which it regarded as responsible for the outrage, had to be ‘neutralized as a power factor in the Balkans’; otherwise, as its behaviour in the two Balkan Wars suggested, it would ‘stop short of nothing’ to secure a ‘Greater Serbia’ at the expense, among others, of the Habsburgs. Interrupting their holidays, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and other members of the leadership of the German Reich agreed at a meeting held on 6 July 1914 on unconditional support for whatever action the Austrians chose to take against Serbia. This was the famous ‘blank cheque’, without which the government in Vienna might possibly have had second thoughts about punishing the Serbs. Nobody at the meeting seems to have thought that the Russians would actually intervene if the Austrians took action against the Serbs. The Russian Army was not ready, and the tsar would surely wait until it was, which was not likely to be before a planned reorganization and expansion of the army was completed, in 1917. The Russians had backed down in the previous Balkan crisis. They would be deterred by the Germans. Tsar Nicholas II would not condone a regicide. Such were the considerations behind the ‘blank cheque’: despite many allegations by later historians, there is no evidence for the claim that the Germans were using the crisis as an excuse for war with the Russians, still less with the British.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, international opinion was firmly on the Austrians’ side. But, fatally, even though it was armed with German support, the Austrian government now let the matter rest because the French President, Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934), was on a state visit to Russia and it did not want to take any action until he was safely back home. In addition, it took time to secure agreement between the Austrian and Hungarian governments on a policy. It was only on 23 July 1914, therefore, nearly a month after the assassination, that Austria-Hungary issued the Serbian government with an ultimatum, demanding action against not only the assassins but also the men and the conditions that it alleged had encouraged them. The delay inevitably aroused suspicion. Immediate action at the end of June would probably have won widespread international approval, but a month later the shock of the murder was no longer so present, and international sympathies for the Austrians had cooled. The ultimatum, therefore, no longer somehow seemed sincere. And indeed, it was not. It was intended by the Austro-Hungarian government not as a genuine set of conditions but as an excuse for war, which had already been determined on in Vienna at the outset of the crisis.

The Serbs were shocked by the ultimatum because they had believed that Germany would have restrained the Austrians. Nikola Pašić, the Serbian Prime Minister, consulted the Russians, telling them Serbia would give in if that was what they advised. But the Russians told them to hold firm. Moreover, there was an election on in Serbia, and Pašić, like most Serb politicians, was unwilling to yield to the Austrians all along the line. In the weeks since the assassination the Serbian government had done little to investigate it and bring the culprits to justice along with those who had backed them. The government insisted that it required evidence from the Austrians before it took action. It did agree to ban the Black Hand, to suppress publications and speeches attacking Austria-Hungary and remove such criticism from the school curriculum, and to cashier officers guilty of actions against the Dual Monarchy. While the Serbian government conceded most of the points in the ultimatum, though often hedging its willingness to meet them with various conditions and equivocations, it firmly rejected Point 6, which demanded the participation of Austrian officials in the investigation of the murder, a requirement that the Serbian government declared incompatible with the country’s Constitution. In effect, it suspected, this would amount to a takeover of the Serbian law-enforcement agencies by a foreign power. Declaring the ultimatum to have been rejected, and spurning any further chance of negotiation, the Austro-Hungarian government declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Within twenty-four hours Austrian shells were falling on Belgrade.

Up to this point the international crisis had not been taken very seriously by the British government, preoccupied as it was with strikes and suffragette outrages and the looming threat of an armed rebellion by Ulster Protestants. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey did his best to localize the conflict, pressing the Germans, French and Russians to restrain the Austrians and Serbs. All this gave the Germans the impression that Britain would remain neutral if the conflict widened. Behind the scenes, however, Grey, concerned to uphold the integrity of the ‘Triple Entente’, which he himself had created, was reassuring the French and Russians that they could count on British support if matters came to a head. Before the ultimatum, British public opinion was preponderantly pro-Austrian, blaming the Serbs for the assassination and saying they had to arrest the culprits. The press considered it would be ridiculous to get involved in this obscure quarrel: the Daily News (in a leading article headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’) declared that there was no conflict of interest between Germany and the United Kingdom. A defeat for Germany would lead to Russian dictatorship over Europe. The journalist and Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley (1860–1933), later a super-patriot, said that Serbia had to be wiped out. Only The Times supported British intervention. Prime Minister Asquith, preoccupied with Ulster, still thought as late as 24 July 1914 that Britain would not be involved. But Grey now attempted to get the Cabinet to intervene in the crisis with a firm declaration of support for France, in the hope that this would deter the Germans. His move was rejected by the Cabinet on 27 July. He proposed four-power mediation but did not press this idea with very much vigour or determination, and he rejected Bethmann Hollweg’s offer to desist from annexations in France if Britain agreed to remain neutral. The British stance was still unclear, therefore, as the crisis moved towards its climax.

The German Kaiser Wilhelm II has often been viewed as a force for war, but in fact he was as inconsistent on this issue as he was on most others. On 6 July he wrote to Franz Joseph: ‘The situation will be cleared up within a week because of Serbia’s backing down’, an eventuality he thus expected even before the ultimatum was issued. For his part, Moltke on 13 July expressed the view that Austria should strike against the Serbs immediately, then ‘make peace quickly’. But the Austrians did not act immediately. No wonder the Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg felt frustrated. The German leadership continued to believe France and Russia were too unprepared to intervene, however, and did not think the war would widen. On 21 July, Bethmann Hollweg informed his ambassadors: ‘We urgently desire a localization of the conflict.’ On 27 July, when the Kaiser learned of the Serb response to the ultimatum, he remarked: ‘This does away with any need for war.’ He evidently thought that the ultimatum was a genuine diplomatic document, not a pretext for war. Counsels in Berlin were divided, the civilian leadership urging caution, the military urging continued unconditional support for the Austrians. ‘Who rules in Berlin?’ was Conrad von Hötzendorf’s question when he received two contradictory dispatches from the German leadership in the middle of the crisis. The answer was never really forthcoming, as confusion continued in the German leadership.

Military planning played a key role in the crisis. Moltke had made no attempt to amend the war plan devised by his predecessor Alfred von Schlieffen (1833–1913). The elder Moltke, victor in the wars of German unification, had thought that in the event of a general European conflict, Germany should hold the Western Front while first undertaking what he considered to be the easier task of crushing the Russians. This view had been shared by his successor Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904). However, Schlieffen was impressed by improvements in Russian fortifications during the 1890s, by the vastness of Russia’s territory, and by the growing size of the Russian Army. So he reversed the plan. A strong German army would invade Belgium. Passing round Paris, it would pin the French forces against their own fortifications on the border with Germany from the rear. Thus a war with Russia would begin with an attack on France. After the war was over when some argued that it would have been impossible to have changed mobilization plans and transfer the bulk of the German forces to the east to deal with the Russians, the German general in charge of railway operations in 1914, Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939), indignantly wrote a book, complete with maps, plans and timetables, to demonstrate that he could have performed this task in under three days had he been asked to do so. He was not. As for the Russians, military planning contained no provisions for a separate conflict with the Austrians; the mobilization plans were based on a war against Austria-Hungary and Germany combined. In addition, the partial mobilization that constituted the first stage in the process of getting an army to the front was so comprehensive that few outside Russia would be able to tell the difference from a full mobilization. Moreover, it contained manoeuvres that would impede a full mobilization, and so provided an incentive to make the transition as quickly as possible.

The opinion of the Russian press was pro-Serb, naturally enough given the influence of feelings of Pan-Slav and Orthodox solidarity. Few in St Petersburg believed that the Serbian government had really been involved in the assassination. In this view Austria had no right to take any counter-measures: the ultimatum was an act of pure aggression, like the annexation of Bosnia in 1908. The Russian government attributed this to German ‘connivance’. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov (1860–1927), issued a press statement immediately after the publication of the Austrian ultimatum, stating that Russia would not ‘remain inactive’ if the ‘dignity and integrity of the Serb people, brothers in blood, were under threat’. ‘You are setting fire to Europe,’ he told the Austrian ambassador. The French government delegation that found itself in Russia at the height of the crisis was keen above all to cement the Franco-Russian alliance in the face of Austrian provocation. As the French pressed the Russians to stand firm behind Serbia, the two Montenegrin princesses married to two Grand Dukes in Nicholas II’s entourage told the Frenchmen encouragingly during a formal dinner, both speaking at the same time: ‘There’s going to be a war . . . There’ll be nothing left of Austria . . . You’re going to get back Alsace-Lorraine . . . Our armies will meet in Berlin . . . Germany will be destroyed.’ On 23 July 1914, therefore, the governments of Russia and France, to whom the Austrian plan for an ultimatum had been leaked, formally agreed to defend Serbia in the face of the Austrian threat.

Following the Austrian ultimatum, issued the same day, the Russian Council of Ministers met on 24 and 25 July, concluding that the Germans were using the Austrians as their tool in the latest in a long line of provocations. As a consequence the Russian government set in motion a process of military ‘pre-mobilization’ on 26 July, followed by partial mobilization, announced on 29 July. This was a clear signal of solidarity with the Serbs, and there was now no chance, if there had ever been any, that the Serbs would back down. Sazonov had supported the Serbs unconditionally from the outset, and he knew since 23 July that he had the backing of the French in doing so. For their part the French were faced with the prospect of going to war to support Russian aggression in the Balkans. The two governments still hoped that a clear British declaration of approval for their actions, and those of Serbia, would deter the Germans and bring them round to restraining Austria. But the British Cabinet, which contained a number of liberals whose views bordered on pacifism, would not allow such a declaration to be issued. In addition, many felt that the United Kingdom, where imperial interests were paramount, had no real interest in a quarrel over the Balkans. Three-quarters of the Cabinet opposed entering a war unless Britain itself was attacked. Many British politicians and diplomats still thought that France and Russia, not Germany, constituted the major threats to British global interests. In 1912, Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), then a junior Foreign Office mandarin, noted: ‘It would be far more disadvantageous to have an unfriendly France and Russia than an unfriendly Germany. [Germany can] give us plenty of annoyance, but it cannot really threaten any of our more important interests.’ On 25 July 1914, Sir Eyre Crowe wrote: ‘Should the war come, and England stand aside, one of two things must happen. (1) Either Germany and Austria win, crush France, and humiliate Russia. What will be the position of a friendless England? (b) Or France and Russia win. What would then be their attitude towards England? What about India and the Mediterranean?’ British policy was still directed more by imperial considerations than by European ones.

In Germany, as the crisis became more urgent, the attitude of the Social Democratic Party, the country’s largest political movement, with more seats in the Reichstag than any other, became a central consideration for Bethmann Hollweg. The German Chancellor had to secure more or less unanimous support in the legislature not only to vote the necessary credits should war break out but also to legitimize military action by the appearance of popular approval. Like other member parties of the Socialist International, the Social Democrats were formally committed to declaring a general strike in the event of war. They staged massive peace demonstrations in the major German towns and cities on 27 and 28 July 1914, involving around three-quarters of a million people. In Bielefeld the socialist editor Carl Severing (1875–1952) warned a crowd of 7,000 demonstrators that millions of workers would be led to the slaughterhouse if war broke out. International socialist solidarity seemed on the cards as the leader of the French Socialists, Jean Jaurès, issued calls for a general strike and summoned a conference of the Second International for 9 August. But on 31 July a young French nationalist, Raoul Villain (1885–1936), approached an open window in the Le Croissant restaurant on the corner of the rue Montmartre and the rue de Croissant, where Jaurès was dining with friends, pulled out a revolver, and shot him twice in the head. (The assassin was subsequently acquitted by a jury that was convinced of the necessity of war.) The killing threw the French and the international socialist movement into disarray. Crucially, when Russia had launched a partial mobilization on 29 July, the German leadership had panicked. The Kaiser had previously declared an official ‘State of Imminent Danger of War’. Now he countermanded the order. Thus at the moment when Jaurès was shot, the German forces had still not been mobilized.

But the Russians, responding to a German threat to mobilize if they did not stand down their troops, declared a general mobilization on 31 July 1914. The delay in German mobilization convinced the leadership of the German socialist movement that the Russians were the aggressors. For the Social Democrats, Russia was a backward, uncivilized country ruled by a ruthless, antisemitic and obscurantist despotism that would crush socialism everywhere should it succeed. The war was being waged against ‘Russian barbarism, for the defence of German cultural heritage, in order to protect German women and children,’ wrote the young liberal officer Otto Braun (1897–1918) in his diary on 5 August. The anti-war demonstrations were abandoned. Within a few days the Social Democrats were to vote unanimously in the Reichstag in favour of war credits. Meanwhile, Bethmann Hollweg succeeded in persuading the military leadership of Germany that a formal declaration of war had to be issued against the Russians, ‘otherwise I cannot pull the Socialists along’. It came on 1 August, setting the Schlieffen Plan in motion. It was now the German government’s turn to issue an ultimatum, in this case to Belgium, to show no resistance to a German invasion. The ultimatum was a huge blunder. Belgium had no choice but to reject it, putting the Germans in the wrong and giving the British a reason for intervening. Asquith and Grey were now able to swing Cabinet opinion behind them. Only two ministers resigned. On 4 August 1914, Britain issued a formal declaration of hostilities against Germany. As ambassadors took leave of their hosts in foreign ministries across Europe, many of them in tears, the vacillations and tergiversations of international diplomacy came to an end. Europe was officially at war.

Map 20. Europe in 1914

In the complex chain of events that led up to the outbreak of the war, it was noticeable that few, if any, of those involved thought of compromise. Ironically, the two states initially most hesitant about starting the conflict were Austria-Hungary, whose leaders asked the Germans for their support, and Serbia, whose leaders issued a similar request to the Russians. In the entire crisis the crucial moment was most probably when Germany issued the ‘blank cheque’ to the Austrians to do with the Serbs what they wanted. It is impossible to know whether a serious German attempt to restrain the Austrians, and a similar Russian attempt to restrain the Serbs, would have deterred the two antagonists from taking military action. The emotions running high in Vienna and Belgrade tell against this hypothesis. The rapid collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe had hugely raised the stakes even in comparison to the situation just over a year before, when British intervention had stopped the escalation of the Balkan Wars into a general European war. To many, including some in Vienna, the Habsburg Empire seemed next in line. From the very outset the Austrians were determined on military action, and the Serbs were determined to resist. The German, Russian and French governments never really took the idea of mediation seriously: they stood firm because they feared the consequences for their prestige and power in Europe. No serious proposal ever came anyway; the Great Power best placed to intervene, as had happened over the Balkan Wars the previous year, was Britain, but Britain did not take the crisis seriously enough until it was too late. Flexibility and cunning, the calculated instrumentalization of war in the service of policy, had been the hallmarks of an earlier generation of statesmen, the generation of Bismarck and Cavour; by 1914 they had been replaced by a generation of leaders taught by a quarter of a century of imperialist annexations, wars and conquests that only force mattered, and that the people on the other side were members of an inferior race that would be easy to defeat. Their intransigence was fortified by the belligerence of military leaders and the determination of men on all sides to display the kind of coolness and courage required of men engaging in a duel.

The statesmen who took these fateful decisions had not been carried into conflict on a wave of popular enthusiasm. Anti-war rallies, called by the leaders of the socialist movement, continued in some parts of Britain well into the second week of August 1914. The mass protests organized by the German Social Democrats in the last days of July told their own story. The huge pro-war demonstrations that followed them on the main squares of Germany’s major cities, and those staged by right-wing patriotic societies on the squares of Europe’s major cities a few days later, were overwhelmingly middle class in character, as attested by the seas of straw boaters discernible in contemporary photographs. In all of them there was hardly a cloth cap or a man in working clothes to be seen in the huge crowds. The first volunteers, captured on camera smiling and cheering as they set off by train to the front, were similarly drawn from the younger generation of the European bourgeoisie. Most of the vastly greater numbers of troops who followed fought because they believed their country was being attacked, their empire threatened, their way of life faced with extinction by a ruthless enemy. A good number fought only reluctantly, or because they saw no alternative.

In the pubs and bars of Hamburg, policemen disguised as workers listened to rank-and-file Social Democrats debating the issues during the last days of peace. ‘What business is it of ours?’ asked one worker on 29 July 1914, ‘if the heir to the Austrian throne is murdered? For that we have to lay down our lives? It’ll never come to it!’ ‘For sure, I’m married and have children too,’ said another, ‘but when my Fatherland is in danger, then the State will feed my family. I tell you, I don’t care whether I die at work or for the Fatherland, and you’ll come along like me, I tell you.’ Another lamented the fact that the ‘Hurrah-patriots . . . are blocking the streets as they wish, and the police don’t care whether they are causing traffic jams or not. We’re warned against demonstrations, and they can do what they want, just because they’re for the war and sing the “Watch on the Rhine” [a patriotic German song].’ For the majority of Europeans, living on a Continent that was still predominantly rural in character, war remained a distant and barely comprehensible occurrence. Peasants everywhere were worried that their harvest would be disrupted. In one village in south-eastern France the news of the war, announced by the tocsin, caused ‘alarm and consternation’, with everyone, men, women and children, weeping and clinging to one another. Reactions in one Cossack settlement in Russia recorded by an English traveller were equally confused: proud of their military tradition, the men were keen to fight, but the announcement of the outbreak of war had omitted to say against whom; some thought the enemy was China, others England. Nobody believed it was Germany.

The outbreak of the First World War brought to an end a century of European hegemony over the rest of the world. Of course, this was not a sudden or unheralded development. Already before 1914, America had been starting to outstrip Britain and Germany in economic terms. In the colonial empires, above all in India, the first stirrings were visible of the movements for freedom and independence that would reach fruition within a few decades. But by inaugurating a vast, global struggle lasting more than four years, the declarations of war issued in 1914 brought ruin upon Europe, destroying the sublime self-confidence that had sustained it for the better part of a century, hastening and strengthening the challenges issued to European dominance in other parts of the world. Four and more years of war shattered the European economy, which after massive inflation, a deep depression and another lengthy period of war, was not to recover for more than forty years, further undermining and finally destroying Europe’s global hegemony. The United States of America entered the world stage, tilting the balance of two world wars decisively towards the Allied Powers. By 1945 the USA had become a global superpower. American culture swept across the world. The great empires of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary were destroyed little over four years after the beginning of the conflict; the Ottoman Empire was abolished not long after, in 1922; the Tsar of Russia was murdered with his family by revolutionaries, while the Emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary were driven into exile, respectively in the Netherlands and in Madeira, along with the regiments of minor German princes whose fecundity had proved so useful to European diplomacy in the nineteenth century. The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI (1861–1926), departed to spend the autumn of his days on the Italian Riviera.

Europe’s slow and uneven march towards democracy was reversed after the First World War. New political movements, notably Communism, Nazism and Fascism, came onto the scene, prepared to use extreme violence to implement extreme policies involving the revolutionary transformation of society; ‘red’ and ‘white’ terror, with its executions and massacres, its tortures and its camps, became a feature of the post-war years. Before long, genocide was put into action on a scale that dwarfed the ethnic violence of the Balkan Wars or the Armenian massacres of the 1890s; unprecedented destruction rained down on many of Europe’s greatest cities, leaving many cultural monuments in ruins. Millions more, this time civilians as well as combatants, would be killed in a Second World War whose global destructiveness was to eclipse even that of the First. The more perceptive of Europe’s statesmen already suspected the magnitude of the changes the declaration of war in 1914 would bring about, if not the depths of barbarism into which Europe was about to descend. Standing at the window of his room in the Foreign Office overlooking the Mall on the evening of 3 August 1914, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey turned to the friend who was visiting him. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ he said, ‘we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’