Day 156: Book Excerpt: Age Of Empire

If the rise of working-class parties was one major by-product of the politics of democratization, the rise of nationalism in politics was another. In itself it was plainly not new (see The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital). Yet in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed. Its very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word ‘nationalism’ itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals and socialists and in favour of that aggressive expansion of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ (Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. Though it originally described only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word ‘nationalism’ proved to be more convenient than the clumsy ‘principle of nationality’ which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830, and so it came to be used also for all movements to whom the ‘national cause’ was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demanding the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group. For the number of such movements, or at least of leaders claiming to speak for such movements, and their political significance, increased strikingly in our period.
The basis of ‘nationalism’ of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves emotionally with ‘their’ nation’ and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it ‘patriotism’, and the essence of the original ‘right-wing’ nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with the tradition of the French Revolution. But elsewhere nationalism had no necessary identification with any colour in the political spectrum. Among the national movements still lacking their own states we shall encounter those identifying with the right or the left, or indifferent to either. And indeed, as we have suggested, there were movements, and not the least powerful, which mobilized men and women on a national basis, but, as it were, by accident, since their primary appeal was for social liberation. For while in this period national identification clearly was or became a major factor in the politics of states, it is quite mistaken to see the national appeal as incompatible with any other. Nationalist politicians and their opponents naturally liked to suggest that one kind of appeal excluded the other, as wearing one hat excludes wearing another at the same time. But, as a matter of history, and observation, this is not so. In our period it was perfectly possible to become simultaneously a class-conscious Marxian revolutionary and an Irish patriot, like James Connolly, who was to be executed in 1916 for leading the Easter Rising in Dublin.
But of course, insofar as parties in the countries of mass politics competed for the same body of supporters, these had to make mutually exclusive choices.
The new working-class movements, appealing to their potential constituency on grounds of class identification, soon realized this, insofar as they found themselves competing, as was usually the case in multinational regions, against parties which asked proletarians and potential socialists to support them as Czechs, Poles or Slovenes. Hence their preoccupation as soon as they actually became mass movements, with ‘the national question’. That virtually every Marxist theorist of importance, from Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, via the Austro-Marxists, to Lenin and the young Stalin, took part in the impassioned debates on this subject during this period, suggests the urgency and centrality of this problem.
Where national identification became a political force, it therefore formed a sort of general substratum of politics. This makes its multifarious expressions extremely difficult to define, even when they claimed to be specifically nationalist or patriotic. As we shall see, national identification almost certainly became more widespread in our period, and the significance of the national appeal in politics grew. However, what was almost certainly more important was a major set of mutations within political nationalism, which was to have profound consequences for the twentieth century.

~~Age Of Empire -by- Eric Hobsbawm

Day 143: Book Excerpt: The Empire Trap

Formal imperialism was off the table after 1900, but the property rights of Americans continued to come under threat from a combination of feckless foreign governments and political instability. Governments in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic confiscated American direct investments, while other Latin American governments defaulted on their debts to American creditors. After the 1893 intervention in Hawaii, the 1895 resolution of the Venezuela-Guyana boundary dispute, the 1898 Spanish-American War, and the 1903 machinations that cleaved Panama from Colombia, it would be hard for any American administration to argue that it did not have the power to intervene on behalf of American investors.
U.S. administrations may have had the power to intervene on behalf of private interests, but their willingness to intervene depended on both the character of the president and the strength of the pressures brought upon him. When investor groups lined up the same way and could make a credible case that intervention served strategic interests, then intervention became more likely. Conversely, if investor groups were divided and there was no strategic interest, then intervention would be practically impossible.
In 1904, as instability threatened American direct investments, President Theodore Roosevelt was under pressure to intervene in the Dominican Republic, but he waited to build political support. In fact, he waited until the Dominican government joined bondholders and direct investors in requesting intervention. Roosevelt then proclaimed his intervention in terms of broad principles. The United States would exercise an “international police power” across the entire Western Hemisphere should Latin American governments engage in “chronic wrongdoing” or collapse into chaos.
By phrasing his reasons in the broadest possible terms, Roosevelt effectively committed his successors to the protection of American property rights across the circum-Caribbean. With Roosevelt’s declaration, risk premiums fell on all sovereign debt issues across the circum-Caribbean (that is, all countries with a Caribbean coastline, plus El Salvador), not just those of the Dominican Republic. A future president could not back down from that commitment without risking a strong adverse market reaction. In fact, when crises emerged in the U.S. intervention sphere, markets did react adversely until the administration of the day showed its willingness to act.
A corollary of the argument that intervention was likely when the interests of investors were aligned is that intervention was not likely when the interests of investors were divided. Such a situation in fact occurred in Venezuela in 1902. President Cipriano Castro confiscated the assets of an American asphalt company. Castro, however, carefully designed his expropriation around conflicting claims between two American asphalt interests—and the interests that benefited from Castro’s actions were closely connected to powerful Republican politicians. Castro therefore managed to forestall an American reaction. He did not prevent the aggrieved asphalt interests from privately funding a revolt against his government, but he did keep the United States from using its power against him.
...
Theodore Roosevelt was not usually a man to choose inaction when action was an option. He nevertheless moved slowly in declaring hegemony over the Americas. It took an unfortunate and extended series of events in the Dominican Republic to get the American president to declare that the United States would exercise an “international police power” over the hemisphere.
The Dominican Republic had been chronically unstable since independence from Haiti in 1844. The republic suffered armed revolts in 1849 and 1857. Fearing a Haitian invasion (and hoping to stabilize his government), President Pedro Santana agreed to annexation by Spain in 1861. Spain, unfortunately, proved unable to bring stability: after four years of civil war, Madrid withdrew in 1865. In 1870, President Buenaventura Báez invited the United States to assume sovereignty. President Ulysses Grant signed an annexation treaty that promised Santo Domingo territorial status and eventual statehood, but race-based opposition against the admission of a “Negro republic” into the Union caused the treaty to fail on a 28 to 28 vote on the Senate floor.
Dominican political instability translated into financial instability. In 1869, the Dominican government contracted £757,000 ($89.7 million in 2011 dollars) in debt on the London market. The government promptly defaulted. In 1888, the Dominican government arranged a new issue worth £770,000. It used £142,820 to pay off the defaulted 1869 debt—at 45 pence to the pound—and the rest to finance the government. As security, the Dominican government placed the customhouses under the formal control of the underwriter, Westendorps & Co., a Dutch company, which sent managers from Europe to the republic. Two years later, in 1890, Westendorps underwrote a £615,000 issue intended to build a forty-two-mile railroad across the mountainous terrain between Santiago and Puerto Plata on the coast. The issue failed, and Westendorps assumed the debt. By 1892, eleven miles of railroad had been completed, at which point the Dominican government forcibly took back control of the customhouses and again defaulted on its debt. The Dutch government protested, but it had no legal recourse and took no action.
In 1892, a newly incorporated American firm bought out Westendorps’s interest. It sold the debt at 65 cents on the dollar to the San Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC), headquartered in New York. The SDIC gained “control” over the customhouses, but its managers understood that they could do little if Santo Domingo decided to revoke their privileges. As security, therefore, the SDIC wrote into the contract that, in the case of default, the governments of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States would appoint a “financial commission” to take direct control of Santo Domingo’s finances. SDIC refinanced the Dominican Republic’s existing debt and issued new bonds to finish the construction of the railroad.

~~The Empire Trap -by- Noel Maurer

Day 63 : Book Excerpt : No god but God

When Majnun heard of the death of his beloved, he rushed back home and writhed in the dust of her grave. He lay down and pressed his body to the earth as though in prayer, but his parched lips could utter only one word: “Layla.” Finally, he was released from his pain and longing. His soul broke free and he was no more.

Some say Majnun’s body lay on top of Layla’s grave for months; others say years. No one dared approach, for the grave was guarded night and day by the beasts of the desert. Even the vultures that swooped above the tomb would not touch Majnun. Eventually, all that remained of him was dust and bones. Only then did the animals abandon their master to lope back into the wilderness. After the animals had gone and the dust of Majnun was swept away by the wind, a new headstone was fashioned for Layla’s tomb. It read:

Two lovers lie in this one tomb
United forever in death’s dark womb.
Faithful in separation; true in love:
May one tent house them in heaven above.

Sufism—the term given to Islam’s immensely complex and infinitely diverse mystical tradition—is, as Reynold Nicholson long ago observed, fundamentally indefinable. Even the word Sufi provides little help in classifying this movement. The term tasawwuf, meaning “the state of being a Sufi,” is without significance, referring as it probably does to the coarse wool garments, or suf, which the first Sufis wore as an emblem of their poverty and detachment from the world. Indeed, as a descriptive term, the word Sufi is practically interchangeable with the words darvish or faqir, meaning “mendicant” or “poor.” Some have argued that Sufi is derived from the Arabic word safwe, meaning “elected,” or suffa, meaning “purity,” though both of these must be rejected on etymological grounds. Others have suggested that Sufi is a corruption of the Greek word sophia: “wisdom.” This is also unlikely, though there is a tempting symbolic connection between the two words. For if sophia is to be understood in its Aristotelian sense as “knowledge of ultimate things,” then it is very much related to the term Sufi, just not linguistically.

As a religious movement, Sufism is characterized by a medley of divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an empty caldron into which have been poured the principles of Christian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islamic Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi‘ism, Manichaeism, and Central Asian shamanism thrown in for good measure. Such a hodgepodge of influences may frustrate scholarly analysis, but it also indicates how Sufism may have formed in its earliest stages.

The first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individuals who traveled throughout the Muslim Empire seeking intimate knowledge of God. As these “wandering darvishes” grew in number, temporary boarding houses were constructed in high traffic areas like Baghdad and Khurasan where the mendicants could gather together and share what they had learned during their spiritual journeys. By the eleventh century—around the same time that the Abassids were actively persecuting the Shi‘ah for their heterodox behavior—these boarding houses had become permanent structures resembling cloisters, a few of which gradually evolved into sophisticated schools, or Orders, of mysticism.

The Sufi Orders centered on a spiritual master who had withdrawn permanently from the Ummah to pursue the path of self-purification and inner enlightenment. Called Shaykhs in Arabic and Pirs in Persian (both of which mean “old man”), these Sufi masters were themselves the disciples of earlier, legendary masters whose unsystematic teachings they had collected so as to pass them on to a new generation of disciples. As each disciple reached a level of spiritual maturity, he would then be charged with transmitting his master’s words to his own pupils, and so on. It is therefore easy to see why Sufism appears like an eclectic recipe whose ingredients have been collected from a variety of sources over a long period of time. Of course, as the Sufi master Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri teaches, “there is a big difference between merely collecting recipes and actually cooking and eating.”

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Sufism, like Shi‘ism, was a reactionary movement against both the Imperial Islam of the Muslim Dynasties and the rigid formalism of Islam’s “orthodox” learned class, the Ulama. Both sects vigorously employed ta’wil to uncover the hidden meaning of the Quran, both concentrated their spiritual activities on devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, and both developed cults of personality around saintly characters—whether Imams or Pirs.

~~No god but God -by- Reza Aslan

Day 59 : Book Excerpt : Science and Empire

In the 1950s and 1960s, studies by American social scientists such as Walter Rostow popularized a view of agrarian societies as ‘traditional’ communities that were constrained by long-term fatalism and stagnation. For Rostow, as for other early exponents of modernization theory, a major cause of this inertia lay in traditional peoples’ attitudes towards science and the physical world, which he described as ‘pre Newtonian’. The Newtonian moment was symbolic of a watershed in  world history when western man [sic] came to believe the external realm was subject to knowable laws, and thus capable of systematic manipulation. The transition to a ‘modern growing society’ was marked by econ omic, political, social, and most of all, attitudinal transformations which cleared the way for the fruits of modern science and technology to be fully exploited in ways that would secure sustained economic growth. One’s physical environment came to be seen as an ordered world rather than simply ‘given’ by providence, which if understood rationally could be managed in ways that yielded greater productive surpluses and material progress.

Writing at about the same time, and through a similar lens, George Basalla produced his now classic essay on ‘The Spread of Western Science’. Basalla asked the question: how was the ‘modern’ scientific tradition, which began in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, diffused subsequently beyond its original boundaries to the rest of the world? As an explanation, he proposed a three-stage model of the process of transmission. In the initial phase of contact with other lands, European observers – many of them explorers, travelers, missionaries and other amateurs – survey, collect and appraise the flora, fauna and physical features of these new lands in their search for potential sources of wealth or settlement. In time, this period of reconnaissance gives way to a second, more substantial phase of ‘colonial science’ when the number of scientists involved and the range of activity expands considerably until it encompasses the full spectrum of scientific endeavor as it exists in the metropolitan ‘core’. Despite such growth, colonial scientists remain dependent on European scientific institutions for training and affiliation, as well as on European scientific societies and journals for professional recognition. However, colonial science contains in embryonic form the seeds that, with the rise of nationalism, will eventually develop into an independent, ‘native’ scientific tradition. Colonial science is thus best seen, according to Basalla, as an evolutionary phase in the transmitting of Western science to the non-Western world. And like Rostow’s trope of ‘take off’ to self sustaining economic growth, self-reliance in scientific matters can only be achieved by consciously struggling to eradicate the barriers of resistance posed by non-European philosophical, religious and cultural beliefs.

A substantial body of historical research on science, expertise and imperialism has been produced since the publication of Basalla’s seminal study, much of it critical of the diffusionist assumptions and progressive stages that underpin his model. Inspired by new directions in development studies, historians of science in the 1970s took a more radical turn as they began to incorporate the insights of dependency and underdevelopment theory into their work. Basalla’s own analysis helped lead the way with its depiction of colonial science as dependent on an external scientific culture. Another early analysis was offered by Donald Fleming, who described the ‘reconnaissance of natural history’ tradition that dominated science in Australia, Canada and the United States until the end of the nineteenth century, as displaying a distinct ‘colonial posture’. Investigators in all three countries, he noted, remained foragers and collaborators, focused on the local and particular, while the highest responsibilities of collating data and devising universal theorems were reserved for scholars working at universities in Britain, France and Germany. But whereas Basalla and Fleming saw this dependency as transitional and relatively benign, others have viewed the derivative, fact-gathering nature of colonial science as symptomatic of the unbalanced relationship that imperial ism fostered between Europe and much of the rest of the world. Building on the insights of dependency theorists, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s directed their attention increasingly to science as an instrument of imperial control and exploitation. The imperial ‘metropole’ and its colonial ‘satellites’, to use Andre Gunder Frank’s analogy, were bound together in a system of unequal, extractive exchange in which knowledge and specimens as much as industrial raw materials flowed back to Europe, but rarely the other way.

~~Science and Empire -by- ed. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge

Day 33: Book Excerpt : After Tamerlane

The Portuguese were the oceanic frontiersmen of European expansion. The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c. 1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe. Lisbon was where the two great maritime economies of Europe – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – met and overlapped. It was an entrepôt for trade and commercial information and for the exchange of ideas about shipping and seamanship. It was the jumping-off point for the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira was occupied in 1426, the Azores were settled in the 1430s), and for the crusading filibuster that led to the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Thus, long before they ventured beyond Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa in 1434, the Portuguese had experimented with different kinds of empire-building. Their geographical ideas were shaped not only by knowledge of the great Asian trade routes that had their western terminus in the Mediterranean, but also by the influence of crusading ideology. Ironically, the crusading impulse assumed that Portugal lay at the western edge of the known world and that the object was to drive eastward towards its centre in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was this and Portugal’s early forays into North Africa after 1415 (where it heard of Morocco’s West African gold supplies) that pulled the Portuguese first south and east rather than westward across the Atlantic. The tantalizing vision of alliance with the Christian empire of Prester John (supposedly lying somewhere south of Egypt) encouraged the hope of navigators, merchants, investors and rulers that, by turning the maritime flank of the Islamic states in North Africa, Christian virtue would reap a rich reward.

Prester John was only a legend, and so was his empire. Nevertheless, by the 1460s the Portuguese were pushing ever further south in search of a route that would take them to India – the goal triumphantly achieved by Vasco da Gama in 1498. But it took more than navigational skill to carry Portuguese sea power into the Indian Ocean. Two vital African factors made possible their sea venture into Asia. The first was the existence of the West African gold trade that flowed north from the forest belt to the Mediterranean and the Near East. By the 1470s, the Portuguese had managed to divert some of this trade towards their new Atlantic sea route. In 1482–4 they brought the stones to build the great fort of San Jorge da Mina (now Elmina in Ghana) as the ‘factory’ for the gold trade. (A ‘factory’ was a compound, sometimes fortified, where foreign merchants both lived and traded.) It was a crucial stroke. Mina’s profits were enormous. Between 1480 and 1500 they were nearly double the revenues of the Portuguese monarchy.6 In the 1470s and ’80s, they supplied the means for the expensive and hazardous voyages further south to the Cape of Storms (later renamed the Cape of Good Hope) rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. The second great factor was the lack of local resistance in the maritime wilderness of the African Atlantic. South of Morocco, no important state had the will or the means to contest Portugal’s use of African coastal waters. Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets.

In these favourable conditions, the Portuguese traversed the empty seas and then pushed north from the Cape until they ran across the southern terminus of the Indo-African trade route near the mouth of the Zambezi. From there they could rely upon local knowledge, and a local pilot who could direct them to India. Once north of the Zambezi, Vasco da Gama re-entered the known world, as if emerging from a long detour through pathless wastes. When he arrived in Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, he re-established contact with Europe via the familiar Middle Eastern route used by travellers and merchants. It was a feat of seamanship, but in other respects his visit was not entirely auspicious. When he was taken to a temple by the local Brahmins, Vasco assumed that they were long-lost Christians. He fell on his knees in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary. It turned out to be the Hindu goddess Parvati. Meanwhile the Muslim merchants in the port were distinctly unfriendly, and, after a scuffle, Vasco decided to beat an early retreat and sail off home.

But what were the Portuguese to do now that they had found their way to India by an Atlantic route that they were anxious to keep secret? Even allowing for the lower costs of seaborne transport, it was unlikely that a few Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean would divert much of its trade towards the long empty sea lanes round Africa. In fact the Portuguese soon showed their hand. The Malabar coast, with its petty coastal rajas and its reliance on trade (the main route between South East Asia and the Middle East passed along its shores), was the perfect target. Within four years of Vasco’s voyage to Calicut, they had returned in strength with a fleet of heavily armed caravels. Under Afonso Albuquerque, they began to establish a network of fortified bases from which to control the movement of seaborne trade in the Indian Ocean, beginning at Cochin (1503), Cannalore (1505) and Goa (1510). In 1511, after an earlier rebuff, they captured Malacca, the premier trading state in South East Asia. By the 1550s they had some fifty forts from Sofala in Mozambique to Macao in southern China, and ‘Golden Goa’ had become the capital of their Estado da India.

~~After Tamerlane -by- John Darwin

Day 27

O.S: Do the particular origins of the US Empire make it in any way different, more prone to ignore or deny history?

T.A: When I think about the origins of the American Empire, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that the colonists began by destroying the native population they encountered, and this was linked to a religious fundamentalist belief in their own goodness and greatness. I mean, the fundamentalists who came here, the pilgrim fathers, had a way of thinking that wasn’t basically different from that of the Wahabis or Osama bin Laden. In fact, there are lots of similarities between Protestant fundamentalism and Wahabi fundamentalism, and you see that in how they treat women, all the campaigns.

O.S: The Salem Witch Trials?

T.A: Exactly. You know, women are possessed by the devil. Beat it out of them. So that was the origin. Then you have slavery, the basis for much of the wealth generated inside the United States. Then you have the violent expansion of the empire, which is something Cormac McCarthy describes very well in one of his finest novels, Blood Meridian. Then you have the Civil War, which we are told is about the liberation of slaves, and which is partially to do with that, but which is essentially an attempt to unify the United States by force. So all this created the modern United States as we know it. And from the First World War onward the United States grew in size and influence, and became a dominant power, which after the Cold War has become an ultra-imperialism, unchallenged, unchallengeable militarily, very strong, without rivals. This is the first time in human history that an empire has been without any rivals. The Romans sometimes used to think that they were, but that’s because they weren’t totally aware of the strength of the Persians or even the Chinese. They thought in terms of the Mediterranean world, not globally. So, this is the first time that this has happened. And it made the leaders of this empire extremely complacent, who took the consent of their people for granted.

~~On History -- Tariq Ali In conversation with Oliver Stone