CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2.0
river valley into three detachments. Two of them will hold off their attackers after costly retreat, but the no men under his command, forced against the crest of the bordering hills, will be overwhelmed within an hour. By the end of the day they will all be dead, their equipment stripped, most of them with heads scraped of flesh and hair.1
In the long run, however, the victors of that day will be the losers. Their reservation will be diminished again. More cavalry will come, the railroads will bring new settlers, and the tribes will be continuously pressed into the inhospitable highlands over the years to come, until one of their leaders makes a final capitulation a generation later. The victorious chief of the summer of 1876 will be killed on the allotment his people were granted, an old man, in 1913. Still, let us start with them, with those who across the world resisted the encroachments of the modern state, with its aspirations for territorial expansion, its exploitation of steam and steel, and its highly developed organization of government. Let us give the communities who faced these instruments of domination (for so they encountered them) a last chance to preserve their homelands under their own control. The tableau they offer is a familiar one captured in nineteenth-century novels, paintings, and the engravings commissioned for weekly newsmagazines, and later, after the administration of final defeat, by the haunting melancholy of silver halide photographs of "noble" warriors or disconsolate families confronting the unrelenting pressure of settlers and explorers and soldiers.
Communities we used to label casually as nomadic or tribal—whether (to cite only a few generic cases) of desert Bedouins on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, the villagers of the Caucasus or the highlands of Central Asia facing the tsar's administrators, the Indians of the North American arid lands, and the peoples of the African savannas—were slowly but inexorably subjugated. Their long and difficult retreat, of course, had started well before the late nineteenth century: when Europeans reached the Americas, the Portuguese and Dutch pressed inland from the coasts of southern Africa, the French and British sought to control the North American Great Lakes, or the Qing and Romanov dynasties established adjacent imperial control over Xinjiang and Mongolia, By the twentieth century they survived as depleted units, allowed legalized or de facto tribal habitations, sometimes even subsidiary states within the empires, but their earlier confederations and international roles were just a memory—often neglected by
the later anthropologists who studied their local customs and family structures but not their politics, or ignored by the historians who were encouraged by all the resources of the victorious states to focus on their nations' success stories.
i But just occasionally, the indigenous defenders of these sprawling regions
i gave pause to the steamroller of "civilization." This is what happened on June 15,
! 1S76, at the Little Bighorn. So, too, three years later, when Zulu soldiers destroyed
an encroaching British encampment at the Battle of Isandlwana. Between 18S1
\ and 1898, the extensive Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, waged in the name of a
: purified Islam, inflicted costly defeats on the Turco-Egyptian governors in Cairo and the British commanders who led their makeshift armies. In 1S93 the Rif tribesmen, in theory subjects of the king of Morocco, besieged and defeated Spanish troops at Melilla. Ethiopian soldiers wiped out Italian detachments at Dogali in 1891 and even more catastrophically at Adwa in 1896. Ethiopia, of 11 course, was no mere tribal region, but one of the globe s oldest kingdoms. The
Europeans, set back for a decade or two—until 1935-1936 in the case of Italy's assault on Ethiopia—hardly took account of the complex political and religious polities that managed to slow their conquest. They beheld a series of savage last stands on the part of nomads and tribes.
i In fact, the common word tribes does not adequately summarize any of these
regional peoples' political existence, for they too had states or quasi states.2 Tribes refers to communities who believe themselves organized by descent from early founders or chiefs, which, after all, was also the theoretical claim of the Otto-man Turks and of the Qing Dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644. But tribes were also political units, sometimes taking decisions of war and peace in confederal assemblies, although usually without the population density and the differentiated offices that marked the European states. The Spanish had conquered two elaborately organized tribal empires in central Mexico and Peru in ■j ' the sixteenth century. The early United States repeatedly signed (and then uni-
laterally revised) treaties with the Indian nations of North America that recognized aspects of tribal statehood, including control of territory, as well as degrees
' . of incorporation within the international boundaries of the North American ■■} v republic. The Creek and Seminole, and Cherokee, Iroquois, Comanche, Sioux,
: ~-r-^ Apache, occupied extensive territories, sometimes exclusively, sometimes in
symbiotic exploitation of rival peoples. Under their charismatic and ruthless leader
CHARLES S. MAIER
Shaka, the Zulu had created a robust nineteenth-century polity that dealt with neighboring Boer republics and British intruders. Some tribes might find it advantageous to move their abodes in a yearly or periodic pattern, whether to take advantage of animal hunts, as on the Great Plains, or of different elevations and their seasonal climates for animal husbandry. But many others had become sedentary and agricultural. Along the steppe lands of Russia, dozens of tribal confederations and hundreds of subunits recognized only the wispy remote claims of a Russian power thousands of miles away, as did the communities on the southern sides of the Himalayas and Afghan frontiers who dealt with Queen Victorias local agents. As in the American West or Zulu South Africa, the Islamic khanates of the Turkestan region were subjugated as political units only in the 1870s and 1880s, as were the Kurdish tribes of southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq at the hand of Ottoman military forces throughout the 1880s and 1890s.3
These decades signaled the last stand for indigenous political autonomy, for many reasons that will be explored below. Despite the lethal capacity of spears and bows and tomahawks, tribes recognized the advantage of firepower and had acquired rifles. But they depended on the horse (or camel), and had not developed the more recent railroad, which limited the size of their military mobilizations. They might claim large areas of terrain as their own but imposed no fixed boundaries and moved about without efforts at permanent settlement throughout. Although their statesmen might negotiate compacts and alliances, tribes also fought each other over decades, often in ritualized and savage warfare. And, fatal for their own collective survival, they had often solicited the European peoples encroaching on their lands to help tilt the balance in their own intertribal warfare. Still, for all its momentum the state did not penetrate everywhere. Large regions of upland or deep forest remained refuges for smaller peoples stubbornly seeking not to be governed, in the phrase of James C. Scott, who has celebrated their refractory evasiveness, which in part can be attributed to the inaccessible terrains they inhabited.'5
The winners were the well-organized representatives of Europeans and their American or African or Asian descendants organized into the most efficient engine of expansion and governance that the world had seen for centuries: the modern nation-state. This was a large-scale unit organized to permeate and master territory, to pursue sedentaty agriculture and industrial technology, possess-
■[ 3* ]•
LEVIATHAN l.O
in>r complex legal systems that allowed the preservation and transmission of family and individual property, the salaried employment of large-scale private jnd public workforces, the rapid communication of commercial and policy decision's by electrical telegraph, the ministerial archives and records that ensured in-•.i irutional memory, and ideologies of rivalry and group purpose that generated intense loyalties.
booking at the forces that drove the historical development of the modern stue over two centuries, I would emphasize three. Critical thinking was crucial in undermining the old regimes; formal ideas but also the dramaturgies of discontent and protest played a major role in the constant questioning of existing institutions and the imagining of new ones that operated so powerfully after 1-5.J. Technological inventiveness—that is, a different range of ideas, thinking applied to the material world—was crucial to the transformations of the mid-nineteenth century. The inventions that overcame the constraints of distance ar.d time allowed the global restructuring of territory that transformed the states or the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time they introduced new forms of social stratification that renewed intellectual discontent, no longer just with a timeworn status quo but impatience with the new results of economic and political transformation. For the eighteenth and nineteenth century these impulses tended to originate in Europe and its New World offshoots and radiated outward, compelling the massive societies of Asia to take up the same processes by the twentieth century. The third major force was more a condition of global territorial organization and less an active agent. It was the fact that states have always existed in the plural—in continuing competition, if not open warfare. Any history of the state, like it or not, must follow an institution whose organization and social divisions have been premised on insecurity. The fact that this circumstance has continually contributed to the maintenance of internal hierarchies, even in modern societies, does not make it less real.
State is a heavy word, not so easy to define. It refers to the institution to which human communities have entrusted the coercive power they find necessary for the legal regulation of collective life.5 How much power, with what limits, for what ends remain issues contested in the West since at least the ancient Greeks. Much of the history of the world's peoples has been told in terms of the rise and
•[ 33 ]•
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN Z.O
fall of their states. States, of course, are ancient structures, hierarchies of political and administrative decision-making designed to ensure ongoing control for elites and continuing security for those who accept their claims to rule. States are abstractions. While they have often been represented in the person of their rulers, they usually generate an ideology of existence as communities in their own right. States claim to operate according to general laws or norms (although they may legislate different levels of privilege and entitlement for different groups within their jurisdiction), and these rules are the basis for their claims to legitimacy— that is, to their meriting loyalty from citizens and recognition from foreigners on grounds that go beyond the mere exercise of coercive power.
The fact that states have remained stubbornly plural throughout history means they each have claimed a degree of supreme authority (usually defined in terms of geographical reach or territory), which theoretically excludes the writ of other states—a condition called sovereignty. Although political theorists have often insisted that sovereignty is absolute, in practice it has often been partial or nested within imperial or associative structures. States have sometimes accepted some overarching claims against their freedom of action, whether as protectorates or tributary units, and often even large states have had to grant privileged legal enclaves or functions to other powers. Increasingly states have agreed to cede functions and authority, whether over their economies or their military or even their frontiers, to common authorities such as today's European Union. Sovereignty has never excluded the prerogative of making self-limiting treaties.
Because states are always interacting, sometimes peacefully through trade, migration, or diplomacy, sometimes through warfare, it is natural enough that they often reform themselves as a group and not just one by one. Renovation therefore has come in waves. From time to time states are reorganized, reconstituted on new principles, endowed with new goals, and claim new capacities. This does not mean that all states successfully renovated themselves. Some, especially the old imperial structures such as China or the Ottoman Empire, made important efforts but could not sustain their territorial integrity or capacity to ensure internal "order." Still, a global perspective suggests that a "long century of modern statehood," proposed here as a meaningful description for political modernity, extended from about 1850 to the 1970s. This is a history of how it arose, what innovations it brought, and why it seems to have ended.
The modern Western language of statehood is generally regarded as assuming its modern form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to differentiate claims to govern from the powerful religious claims asserted and contested at the rime. By the end of the sixteenth century, so Quentin Skinner explains, the concept of the state had become "the most important object of analysis in European political thought" as the "form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled, an<i constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory."6 This European-wide discourse reflected the vast transnational splintering of post-Reformation Christian authority, the intensive communication of ideas in an era of print culture, and the painful search for alternative nonreligious principles of legitimacy. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers (such as Jean Bodin in the 1570s and Thomas Hobbes in the 1640s and 1650s) focused on the absolute authority that such sovereignty required. Without a powerful ruler, so Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651), individuals within territories must live in the same insecure and violence-prone "state of nature" as nations did in the international realm.
The international properties of statehood and sovereignty are usually deemed to have been defined most decisively with the end of the Thirty Years War and the Treaties of Westphalia (Miinster and Osnabruck) in 1648 that finally closed that long and complex struggle in Central Europe. The idea of sovereignty thus emerged with a dual thrust. Looking "inwatd," sovereignty was defined as the prince's governmental supremacy within the territorial unit—supremacy especially above any rival claims of religious authority. Looking "outward" to the collection of states as a whole, sovereignty was defined as the international independence sanctioned by the Treaties of Westphalia or recognition by other states more generally. Precisely because these properties of statehood—a supreme legal power within a home territory and full rights vis-a-vis other states—continued to be highly theorized after 1648, we tend to refer today to the "Westphalian" order.'
We should not overgeneralize. Such a vision of state sovereignty, absolute and integral, was foreign to large areas of the world with respect to both external relations and internal authority. Within South Asia, for example, the Mughal Empire and its successor, the British Raj, recognized partial sovereignty for hundreds of princes or rajas or sultans, and claimed only what medieval European law
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN z.o
often defined as suzerainty. In Ease Asia, where the massive and venerable Chinese Empire dominaced the mainland, the Westphalian paradigm of state equality would have seemed unnatural. The communities around the rim of that megastate recognized its primacy although expected no real interference in their domestic affairs.8
just as fundamental, the inner coherence of the Chinese state seemed to rest on a particular relationship with the realm of the sacred. Whereas in Christian realms, religion was invoked to support the state and its leaders, the religious sphere still remained distinguishable from what the state had come to be about. At least since the Investiture Conflict of the eleventh century, popes and emperors alike insisted on distinguishable, if sometimes overlapping, missions. That dualism was reaffirmed implicitly even as the seventeenth-century construction of Leviathan i.o subordinated the political claims of religious officials to secular rulers. To be sure, wherever an anointed monarch feigned, the separation was hardly absolute. Religious officials still often claimed the authority of an autonomous normative order, and it was the task of the monarch to protect their claims. Roman Catholic Church officials served as the political rulers of various territories within the Holy Roman Empire until 1803 and in Italy until 1870. In Islamic regions, the relationship was fully as complex. Although Islam originally envisaged a political domain coterminous with the community of believers, a succession of rival imperial units had come to contest the vast territories where Muslim affiliations prevailed. Ottomans, Persians, and Mughal rulers in India usually made allowance for alternative worship but in so doing often conceded the preeminent role of Islamic religious authorities and law. The Ottomans, moreover, sought to claim the earlier extensive idea of Islamic political rule and the function of the caliphate until the Tutks abolished the office and the empire in 19ZZ. In East Asia the claims were different still. The Japanese emperor, no matter how weak over the centuries, retained an aura of divine origin that was celebrated through special rites; and until 1945 modern nationalists sought to strengthen his divine status. The Confucian legacy perhaps overcame to the greatest degree the dualism of sacred and political authority that persisted elsewhere at least until recent decades. Somewhat as in the earlier Mesoamerican polities destroyed by the Spanish, the Chinese emperor, deep into the nineteenth century, was to ensure the good order of a society by ritual practice in a cosmos that extended
•[ 36 ]•
!
b
frti-i the family to the heavens. Any tourist who follows his and his servants' pi-iicessidns to ensure the year's crops through the precincts of the Temple of Hiv.ven in Beijing can sense that the world's largest state had an aura of its own.9
Not that Chinese imperial functions and structure cannot be compared w itli Western institutions—they certainly can—but the language developed in the West, and taken for reasons of familiarity as a discursive base for this history, diiL-i not capture the vibrations that filled other realms. The Westphalian concepts were thus restricted in scope, but as European influence spread through trade, diplomacy, and conquest, the more absolute categories of state and nation also diffused. By the late nineteenth century, states possessed a degree of dedication to governance, of bureaucratic functionality, of at-oneness with fixed territorial space, of belief in their own competitive mission, that was unprecedented.
Nonetheless, that climax was also a renewal and partial transformation. New technologies of communication and transportation allowed a decisive intensifi-cation of state ambition and governmental power in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, sufficient to justify the numerical suifix used for compurer software: Leviathan 1.0. The fundamental properties of the state—the supremacy of its legal norms at home and its reliance on a territorial base—remained the same. But territorial ambitions became vastly greater in an age of renewed imperialism, no longer content with trading rights and enclaves, but pursuing enclosure of vast territories abroad.
Moreover, the older ideals of an autonomous and supreme legal order, of government by law, whether bureaucratic and monarchical or based on popular sovereignty, also changed. Leviathan z.o seemed to accept that its own supposedly transcendent legal norms become entangled with economic interest groups and political caucuses. To be sure, the Anglo-Scottish (and later North American) interpretation of a legal order never separated the law so formally from the world of commerce and association as did continental legal theory. With the smuggle against supposed Stuart absolutism behind them by the eighteenth century, British Whig, if not Tory, publicists measured human progress less by the unsullied transcendence of law than by economic progress and the development of civility. Continental liberal thinkers, struggling until the mid-nineteenth century to limit monarchical authority, still retained a more transcendent concept of law as "above" interests, just as it was above personal rule. Still, by the
•[ 37 ]-
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN X.O
early twentieth century the ideal of a pristine state was difficult to maintain. It was hard to disentangle from the web of corporate interests, labor unions, and political parties that claimed the right to govern, whether in a competitive system or exclusively and without tolerating rivals. Only a century or so after the idea of a government of laws had slowly disengaged itself as the ideology of Enlightenment politics, the state seemed about to be reabsorbed as just a regime of party or of interests.10
How far any of those trends might be pursued without undermining the state as such remained a question for political actors and—in retrospect—for scholars. Looking ahead to the late twentieth century, we can grasp that the abuses of single-party and military regimes became so terrifying that political activists wanted to revive the theory and the practices of liberal government. But the old idea of a transcendent state and legal order no longer promised a realistic liberal refuge. Instead theorists and practitioners accepted, and sometimes celebrated, the entanglement of the public legal order in the welter of associative interests, churches, unions, economic enterprises, and the media. These entanglements might seem menacing or beneficial. When economic difficulties thteatened, as in the 1970s, many analysts envisaged a recourse to private-public bargaining they labeled neo-corporatism. "When authoritarian rule crumbled, as in the later 1980s and 1990s, they celebrated the benevolent forces of civil society that had resisted dictatorship. In either case state and society seemed hard to disengage. Not, however, that those forms seem inscribed for permanence. By the late twentieth century many commentators were theorizing the state as a regime of discursive expertise, hopefully protected from untutored populist pressures—perhaps to be designated by some future historian as Leviathan 3.0.
To return to the 1870s, arrayed against the encroaching machinelike national communities, the momentary tribal victors of the Little Bighorn or southern Africa did not really have a chance. The states had superior weaponry, particularly the rapid-firing guns, railroads, and river gunboats decisively improved in the late nineteenth century. The states had the agencies to persist in policy and to replace those boastful military leaders who so often courted defeat. States came back—they wore down the tribes, reduced them by disease and, from time to time if resistance persisted, by genocidal repression and driving them into the
'4
1
1
deserts, where they could be left to die of thirst, hunger, and exposure. Still, many of these tribal communities survived to bear witness. Some clung to highland areas whose arduous climate did not encourage dense settlement. Some continued on the steppe, driving their animals in yearly patterns from summer pasturages to more sheltered winter terrain. Some emerged as the components of ihe states created in the wake of decolonization after 1945. The desert Bedouins benefited from the inhospitable margins of a weak empire. The American Indians ivere settled in hardscrabble reservations, continually diminished in size, where the price they often paid for the continuity of their tribal life was economic stagnation and alcoholism, or chose assimilation and intermarriage, retaining only the memory of their collective past and perhaps nurturing revivalist myths and folklore.
"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," or at Kokand in Turkestan, or Melilla in Morocco, or Omdurman in the Sudan—battles occasionally won by those resisting, usually lost, in any case episodes in the global triumph of the modern state and the marginalization of a nomadic alternative. In some locations, as in Central Asia, the tribes might continue traditional modes of life, wandering across new and weakly established frontiers. In the Americas they gave up their collective property rights, and access to land, and the rights to mineral wealth they might have developed. Where the Europeans came from afar, as in Africa, the tribes faced harsh regimentation, reinforced by doctrines of racial hierarchy. The states won, expanded, and then turned with murderous single-mindedness on each other and sometimes on their own citizens.
The rest of this chapter examines the ascent and transformations of the modern state. From the 1860s to the 15170s these units of territorial organization prevailed without any real alternative institutions to contest their triumph. Then diey entered a period we still live in, one that seems to have imposed some important limitations on their freedom of action and even perhaps on the loyalties they compel. In the course of their trajectory, the violence they inflicted on each other dwarfed in scale the casualties they took at their tribal margins.
LEVIATHAN i.O
i. The World Is Weary of the Past
THE LINE is from Shelley, the twenty-nine-year-old British poet living in Italy and intoxicated by the opening of the Greek rebellion against the Turks:
The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her wintry weeds outworn ... The world is weary of the past, Oh might it die or rest at last!
When did the past die at last? Sadly, the impatient Shelley went first, drowning a year after he wrote his ode "Hellas" in i8zi. This history proposes that insofar as statehood and public institutions were concerned, the past died in the mid-nineteenth century. As the poet suggested, the end of an old order and the birth (or rebirth) of a new are part of the same process. Still, rather than presenting the revolutionary era of 1776 to 1830 or even to 1848 as the seedtime of a global future, I argue that we better understand the entire century from 1750 to 1850 as one of institutional meltdown. Assuming that the ideas and practices of the early modern state—call it, after Thomas Hobbess tough-minded treatise of 1651, "Leviathan 1.0"—arose in the seventeenth century, then fell into difficulty in the later eighteenth century, they were reconstituted after 1850 as "Leviathan 1.0." That process of reconstruction lasted, I will suggest, through the 1960s and 1970s, since which time the edifices of modern statehood have begun to decompose in their turn.
To propose the importance of two roughly hundred-year epochs divided at 1850 raises a labeling problem, as they straddle the more familiar divisions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.11 Neither do they coincide with such conventionally inscribed periods as the Enlightenment, "the age of revolution," or "the era of world wars." In particular, most historians have seen the de-
■ idi-s around the French Revolution as so fundamental a rupture (at least for I'uivpe) that they have tended to divide the prerevolutionary era from that wliiJi followed. For modern Middle Eastern history, they pivoted "before" and ",ifte:': around 1798, the year of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. For China, until iva-iitlv historians regarded the Opium War of 1841 as a crucial rupture. Similarly, many have accepted the notion of a short twentieth century, an epoch of ideological and military conflict beginning with the outbreak of World War I ,ind ending with the fall of the communist system in Russia and Eastern Europe bvt veen 19S9 and 1991. Without denying that such dramatic moments structure wkn I have called our moral narratives, I am urging that we need to keep a dif-kn iititempo and follow long-term processes.12
Still, the argument here is not simply that institutions fell apart from 1750 to 1S 3, whereas in the subsequent long century strong leaders reasserted the capacity in rule. Revolutionary crises in the first epoch simultaneously reshaped institutions. New principles of political recruitment, new concepts of rights, a redefined sphere for religious authority, administrative rationalization, geographical reconstruction, and legal codification mark the history of the American territories and of French-dominated Europe from the 1760s on. Conversely, widespread and protracted upheavals in Asia and Latin America as well as political violence in Europe punctuated the long century of state formation after 1850. Within that second extended century we have also lived through an extensive era of crisis, which brought a world war, widespread revolution, massive unemployment, and a second global conflict and the replacement of colonial empires with the Soviet and American spheres of influence. Both century-long spans were periods of transformation; both constituted long episodes in the creation of what historians think of as modernity. This section examines the era from 1750 to about 1850; the remaining sections discuss what has followed. The conclusion attempts to take stock of what trends have intervened since 1970—that is, the world in formation. Older readers of this book have been imprinted with experiences and mentalities shaped by the long century of modern statehood that began in 1850. Younger readers have come of age since 1970 in the flux of newer currents and rapidly evolving institutions. Hopefully what follows makes sense t:f both. .
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN Z.O
Contagious Ideas
Return for now to the years after 1850 and generalize extravagantly, as must any history on a global scale. In the decades receding into the past as of the mid-nineteenth century—remain for the moment in the domain of Western culture and sensibility—youthful, enthusiastic, sometimes Utopian and even violent yearnings marked advocates of change. Conservative opponents summoned up visions of allegedly organic communities that would be arbitrarily destroyed. In the decades ahead, harsher and more realistic calculations will govern group behavior. There will be no less a recourse to violence, but it will be governed more by the alleged requirements of ethnic and national necessity, and less frequently by Utopian hopes. Already dissipating as of 1850 is a fervor for revolution, although such exiles in Paris as Richard Wagner or Alexander Herzen echo accents of a generation earlier (again we choose that Romantic radical, Shelley):
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent... Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be ... free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.13
By midcentury such a sentiment seems more bombast than enthusiasm. Dated, too, is the fervor for "young" national societies (Young Italy, Young America), for Utopian communities, for socialist equality among radicals, or for enchanted estatist hierarchies for conservatives. Instead, for those who followed after 1850, a different spirit will dominate: a utilitarian commitment to "order and progress," the Comtean motto that foreswore revolutionary juvenilia and came to terms with power—the power of soldiers, of machines, of artillery and repeating rifles, of finance, of electricity. Summoned to serious work, the post-i8sos generation will grow the heavy white beards of mature citizens. They will take precautions against the rebellious potential of the threatening street, become attuned to Darwin's "survival of the fittest" (misinterpreting it to mean survival of the strongest) and the apparently inexorable laws of social development. In fact, the generation that straddled that mid-i8oos line will make the conversion in their own lifetime, passing from romantic fervor to convinced sobriety—as over a
■[ 42- ]•
century later, the protesting youth of the 1960s will buckle down as middle-aged dults to programs of realistic reform or even repentant reaction.
The currents of ideas—first romantic, then realistic—coursed through Europe and the societies settled by Europeans in North and South America or dominated by their colonial administrators in Bengal, Batavia, and elsewhere. In the first half of the nineteenth century they were already exerting a powerful ,-.hd unsettling impact in the Ottoman Empire, whose administrators and intellectuals had confronted Europeans across their borders and in the Mediterranean for centuries. The Ottomans had fallen under increasing pressure in military encounters—having had to cede territory on the north shore of the Black S'ea to Russia and in 1798 having experienced a disastrous French military invasion, which only the British fleet and not their own soldiers had compelled to withdraw, and then in the first decades of the nineteenth century facing open icbellion in Greece and then Serbia.
Traditional Islam, represented by a conservative establishment of judges vand scholars, collectively known throughout the Middle East as the 'ulama, and ethnic Turkish loyalty to the house of Osman no longer seemed to provide the legitimacy for this large domain to stand up to more universal concepts of citizenship that had come with the French armies and books. Its organizational principles—based on the management of religious and ethnic diversity by drafting talented Albanians, Greeks, and others to high office, allowing non-Muslims their own communal authorities (the millets), and relying on extensive clientelist networks with regional notables—had served a vigorous expansionist empire well. But in an era of unrelenting pressure and the fashionable emerging European notions of homogeneous nationhood, they appeared creaky and backward.14 East and south of the Ottoman Empire, throughout the great arc of South Asia, a great ferment of Islamic revivalist ideas challenged rulers in Persia, in the Central Asian khanates, and in the decrepit Mughal Empire. Emerging in religious schools and focusing on nonpolitical moral renewal, Islamic revivalism tended to undermine the regimes in which their doctrines took hold, whereas the Western currents were increasingly oriented toward enhancing political structures.
European missionaries had arrived in China and Japan by the sixteenth century. Once the Tokugawa leaders secured decisive control of their realm, they moved to reverse Christian inroads and extirpate the converts by the 1610s.
i 43 ]-
■
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2..0
Jesuits and Franciscans would vie for influence at the Ming court, but the Chinese seemed interested primarily in assimilating the Westerners' ideas to their own Confucian principles. Insofar as Chinese policy intellectuals later tuned into the ferment in the West, they latched on to practical writings of the Victorians, such as Samuel Smiles's tract on self-help. The Japanese listened more closely, and a few of the quasi-autonomous feudal domains into which the Tokugawa rulers had divided the islands sought Western learning, but the age of intellectual infatuation and importation would come after the rnid-i8oos. Still, contemplating the diverse global currents of intellectual ferment, any observer from outside the planet would have had to admit that the clash of ideas in the West was claiming increasing attention. Emanating from the West were notions of citizenship, that is, the idea that ordinary male adults, at least those with some property of their own, could claim a voice in constituting a nation and judging its policies; concepts of inherent rights; appeals to a literate and propertied middle class as a key political actor; and the appropriateness of becoming wealthy.
We shall have to examine more closely the physical milieu and built environments in which this remarkable moral trajectory took place. The technological transformation was leaving obvious tracks across on the landscape. The Industrial Revolution is usually dated from the accumulation of mid-eighteenth-century innovations in British textile production and the breakthroughs in harnessing sream power. Its effects increased exponentially after the Napoleonic wars. Textile factories brought new urbanization: the metropolises of 1800 had been administrative and court centers or commercial ports: London, Paris, Madrid, Dublin, Naples, St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Edo/Tokyo, Guangzhou (Canton), Calcutta (Kolkata). Alongside these cities after midcemury would emerge the industrial suburbs and conurbations of the Midlands, the Ruhr, eventually New York, Chicago, and so on. Steam power, and the capacity to smelt iron and then steel, meant the feasibility of railroads and new migration and production for distant markets. The telegraph meant that empires and large nations could be run in real time. Midcentury wars—the large, brutal combats that severed the first half of the century from the second: Crimea, the American Civil War, the German wars of unification—accelerated the technology and the movement of individuals.
•[ 44 ]■
Everyone could see the impact of these changes and write, as did William Cbbbett early in the century, about their effect on the landscape or their creation of an impoverished urban laboring mass—sometimes in factories, often in small workshops or performing casual physical labor—that nineteenth-century social commentators a generation later, following the German historian of French social movements, Lorenz von Stein, would now define as a proletariat. None-fheless, the gradual transformation of life on the land acted as profoundly on world populations even if unattended by such obvious visible signs. These were the changes, after all, that affected the overwhelming mass of global population, involving the transition from agriculture as a communal, subsistence-oriented activity, with prescribed routines set in village structures, to a market-oriented enterprise, where land could be bought and sold and peasants could depart for the city or across oceans to new continents, or, if less fortunate, lose their inher-* ited protected status and become wage laborers or bound to their plots as in-
jj debted tenants. Market relationships, long established in Britain, and to a degree
I wherever peasants had to supply cities, were intruding into all the settled ways of
rural life.
[ What was new was the growing liberalization of markets for land and labor.
Until the nineteenth century, land and labor had been mutually shielded from
c- market relations in a web of status restrictions and customs. Now in the most
fundamental transformation of those under way, they lost their fixity.15 Peasant emancipation, the vendibility of land, and market insecurities came as a piece,
I .ind provided the underlying seismic shirts that helped generate rural uprisings
f in the seventy-five years before 1850 and then again new revolutions at the thresh-
old of the twentieth century.
These cumulative interacting transformations—in the constitution of the countryside, the application of an energy technology with radical consequences tor moving goods and peoples, the altered mentalities—divided the convention-
: ally demarcated nineteenth century into two epochs. Between them lay the mid-
iSoos watershed: a generation-long set of shocks that inaugurated the era of the
l modem. Not that what went into that transition was ail of a piece culturally, re-
ligiously, or in terms of politics and economics. Nor that what emerged would be
1 ill of a piece, although the diverse cultures of the second half of the nineteenth
century would be far more interconnected than they had been before 1850. But
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CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2.0
across the world each great geographical or cultural region would be recast and reshaped across that long caesura. And the states and nations that organized political life on the global surface would likewise reemerge transformed.
Interactive Geographies
States are authorities generally based on the control of territory and its inhabitants. Most states have claimed to control the behavior, the loyalty, and often the beliefs of those who resided within their boundaries. Land and sea gave states their most fundamental opportunities and set them basic challenges. High-density      ^ j-settlement required a settled and productive agriculture, whether based on rice, wheat grains, maize (corn), or root crops, such as manioc and potatoes. It usually \ entailed an ecology in which some of these grains supported animal husbandry,       • | whether for meat, milk, or textiles. Animals in turn provided fertilizer that helped | in grain production. High population densities existed in much of Europe, the Valley of Mexico (before devastating European diseases depopulated many of their settlements in the sixteenth century), South Asia, and East Asia. Societies that allocated large expanses of land for animals or left areas forested usually supported a lower density. Sparsely settled areas where hunter-gatherer popula-      ' 7 tions still existed had the lowest density of all, excluding the great deserts and       ', the arctic zones. I '
Historical transformation often involved an imperial dynamic between "crowded" and "empty" lands, sometimes within already existing empires, sometimes newly joined in imperial units. Earlier epochs had seen nomadic inhabitants of low-density areas (who probably felt the spurs of shortages more immediately than those in regions of settled agriculture and food distribution) conquering contiguous high-density regions. Peoples from the Asian highlands contested Han state expansion (the dynasty ended in 22.0 CE) and perhaps impelled con- 'it federations in western Eurasia against the Roman Empire (third to fifth centu-     ;:j | ries CE). Islamic Arabs surged across the Byzantine and Persian Middle East, North Africa, and Spain in the seventh century; again when the Mongols of      . . Central Asia conquered the same territories and China itself in the eleventh : century; the Turkic Timurids (the term derived from the name of their feared ruler, Timur or Tamerlaine) subjugated Asia to the borders of China in the
sixteenth while the Ottomans took Anatolia, the Balkans, Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. These conquests were facilitated by the fact that the areas were all part of one land mass with grasslands enough to support horses.
By the end of the fifteenth century, high-density European populations were sending first soldier-adventurers and then settlers into remote territories. Sometimes these might appear as relatively empty lands. Muscovy reversed the Tatar invasions and expanded into the steppe lands of the Urals and farther east. In the New World the population dynamics changed as the Europeans arrived. The Spanish conquerors of Mesoamerica and the Andes quickly subjugated populations themselves precariously organized as recent imperial federations and soon depleted by European-borne diseases. The "discovery" and conquest of the Americas ultimately provided the Spanish, French, and British with vast territories of low population density. For the next two centuries, European conquerors sent enough soldier-adventurers, church organizers, and eventually settlers to exploit their acquisitions for their home states. But high-density populations did not simply flow out in some hydraulic surge to low-density areas. As Alfred Crosby famously described the Columbian exchange, the Europeans exported lethal pathogens that decimated native populations and imported New World crops— corn and later the potato—that allowed population growth at home. Kenneth Pomeranz has relatedly attributed the dynamism of the late eighteenth-century British economy vis-á-vis Chinese stagnation to the "shadow acreage" that British settlers overseas could occupy. North America became a British plantation, producing over time its great cash crop, sugar, then the cotton that was the basis of industrial development, and the grain that allowed it to shift its own growing labor force into commercial and later industrial activities.16
The dynamics of population growth changed the land itself. Chinas population had doubled from two hundred million to over four hundred million, and had pushed toward the north and west, although the Qing expansion into Mongolia or Xinjiang expanded the territory even beyond the newly settled regions. Western Europe's population surged ahead from the mid-eighteenth century on. In part this reflected the fluctuation in climate that ended the relatively cold interval sometimes called the little ice age of the seventeenth century and brought milder temperatures. There were fewer crop failures, fewer famines, more children reaching the age when they could themselves have children, whether in
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•[ 47 ]"
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN l.O
households solemnized by marriage or nor. In China yams, maize, and soybeans, intensively cultivated in the North, provided the expanded carbohydrate base for population growth, with the destabilizing ramifications discussed below. The innovations we associate with the agricultural revolution—new crops, legume rotations that restored the nitrogen content of the soil, ditching, fencing, enclosure—meant higher yields in Europe. Advocates of potato culture helped the crop s spread in Ireland, northern France, and the Low Countries, such that the caloric yield per acre soared. The advent of cotton and more textiles meant the spread of proto-industrialization—multiple households taking on spinning or weaving under the organization of district entrepreneurs—conducive again to families raising more children who in turn founded their own families at an earlier age, and favorable, too, to higher consumption of tea and sugar and thus a surge in colonial settlement and wealth.
These trends, however, meant a pressure on world forest reserves. Britain could live with depleted woodland as it turned toward coal for fuel and got its naval timber from New England and Scandinavia. Japan, which did not pursue the coal option, worked to teverse deforestation. China suffered vast depletion—as a consequence not of industrialization but of the population growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The forests were "largely gone by 1810, almost wholly by i860, but mainly as a result of peasant subsistence cutting, clearing for : agriculture and for local sale as both wood and charcoal."17 Mark Elvin, historian of Chinese ecology, suggests three waves of deforestation: the impact on northern woodlands in the five centuries BCE, a second transition of a millennium ago in the lower Yangzi and the west, and the severe deforestation since about 1700 with commercial timber operations and widespread theft of wood. Deforestation meant not only a shortage of timber but erosion of vast areas and silting of the rivers, including the Yellow River, whose course shifted drastically in the 1850s. The silting had already produced a major crisis in the early iSzos, for where the Yellow River crossed the Grand Canal, the erosion blocked the Canal and with it the provision of rice from the south for the capital. Woodland pen-: ury continued in many locations. "We have reached a moment in time when the
mountains have been ruined----Our locality is in a state of decomposition and
decline," announced a stele of 1851 in the south of Hunan, ordaining that no more cutting could take place.18 The Brazilian Atlantic rain forest was stripped
h\ di fferent dynamics. It fell prey first to the rapid expansion of coffee cultivation lor export and later to the pressure of the immigrant population brought to man the industry. "There is no tool readier to hand than the matchbox for establishing a coffee plantation," has written the historian of the long assault on Hu/il's ecology."
The zones of contact where those pushing outward from crowded land met the .".parser residents of "empty" land, the Anglo-Americans called the frontier.
lh.s frontier was different from what in Europe was called frontier, the borders iwiwecn settled states. The frontier bred a characteristic "type"—the independent, sometimes quarrelsome and violent leader, who felt that the state on whose .l.ndcrs he settled should protect his acquisitive impulses but otherwise not in-lerMc with his ambitions. This populist roughneck became a character type '.lasic to national self-images: the gaucho or the cowboy or the self-made soldier-nolitician. Andrew Jackson, the truculent soldier of the southern frontier, anti-1 litist American president, domineering over the American Indians, suspicious of the northeastern banking cliques, was one personification. The Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, depicted by the Argentine statesman and writer I )omingo Faustino Sarmiento, was another. For Sarmiento, the contest between 1 he cultivated elite of the great port of Buenos Aires and the gauchos of the neighboring pampas was that between civilization and barbarism,20 The cultivated residents of the Roman Rhine frontier and the court poets of Isfahan who had to deal with Mongols in the eleventh century and with Turkic Timurids two hundred years later must have felt the same way. The cinematic depiction of the frontier type continued through the twentieth century in countless Westerns, one of the major genres of popular narrative.
In the crowded lands, population increase and the division of labor that overseas commerce stimulated meant wealth and sometimes development. They were not the same. No traveler to Iberia or to the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies today can fail to note the incredible architecture that colonial wealth
nd commerce could bestow even on societies that did not generate self-sustained economic growth. Travel out of Oaxaca to the Mixtecan highlands north of the city and marvel at the monasteries and churches—alas, some now damaged by repeated earthquakes—built by the combined effort of Indian and Spanish artisans, that rise from the sparsely populated arid lands; or admire the richly
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•[ 49 ]•
CHARLES S. MAIER
adorned cathedral fronts, whether in the metropole or in the former colonies. Take note of the size and scale of public buildings and grand houses that crowded lands could indulge in. But recall, too, the immense social distance between the masses of population that toiled near subsistence and the grandees or corporations that enjoyed these possessions. Much of that wealth—whether in Europe, or Mughal India, or China—rested on accumulation at home, and the steady improvements of cultivation and willingness to reinvest that constituted what has been termed the "industrious revolution."2' The surpluses that created modern armies, monuments, music, and art did not require colonies. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of empty and crowded land created new opportunities for subjugation, on the one hand, and enrichment, on the other.
Imperial Tandems
Major geopolitical patterns were emerging from the juxtaposition of crowded and empty land and would dominate international politics and rivalry throughout the whole era of modern statehood. Empires constituted the state structures that optimally united the flows of commodities, labor, and cultural values between crowded and sparsely settled regions. Economists would say that these assemblages lowered the transaction costs of territorial governance that separate sovereign units would have entailed. This is not to claim that empires were founded for such a sophisticated motive—although Western mercantilist theory by the seventeenth and eighteenth century implicitly posited this premise—only that its logic made imperial expansion "rational," within limits. If we judge by outcomes, the logic of imperial power worked itself out best not by single empires in constant contention but by imperial combinations or tandems. Certainly it remains instructive to compare the particular institutions created by national empires for their own internal organization, such as the colonial assemblies encouraged by the British in North America versus the audiencias or royal investigative commissions that reviewed the administration of New Spain and Mexico.22 But from the viewpoint of global rivalry, what proved decisive were ambitious coalitions for empire negotiated by a cosmopolitan elite across state lines on the basis of dynastic and cultural affinities and common adversaries. Such partner-
•[ 50 ]•
LEVIATHAN 2.0
ships constituted in effect three or four imperial enterprises at any time. As of 1800 some had a past, others a future.
After the War of the Spanish Succession and the advent of the Bourbon dynastic line in Spain, French and Spanish interests tended to converge in opposition to British ambitions. In effect a Bourbon colonial realm and agenda emerged involving defense of French and Spanish overseas possessions against British sea power. But between the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714 and the revolts in Latin America a century later, the Bourbon New World empire collapsed in fits and starts. The so-called Bourbon family pact, based on the shared royal-family cousinage and the renewal of conflict in 1739, as the British Whig leader Robert Walpole lost his influence, led to a series of major contests in and for the far-flung peripheries outside Europe—Canada, Hispanic America and the Caribbean, and Bengal. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Franco-Spanish colonial coalition had lost the Canadian coast and Saint Lawrence Valley, but it still played a major role dominating the Great Lakes and the length of the Mississippi Valley, thence west to the California coast and south to Mexico, Central and South America, and half the Caribbean. This was a vast juxtaposition of imperial and European interests, potentially as formidable as the Anglo-American association. Later in the nineteenth century, Southern US slaveholders would from time to time be attracted as possible co-participants, but their bid for secession from the American union came fifty years too late, for by then the French had sacrificed their assets in the Mississippi Valley (as they had earlier in India and Canada), and the Spanish had lost their possessions to the Creoles of Latin America and did not have the means to recover them. Even Napoleon's effort to reconquer the half island of Haiti on behalf of French slave owners was defeated by yellow fever and inspired, if brutal, resistance by the communities of African descent. Bonaparte calculated, probably correctly, that in the long run the French could not retain the Mississippi and New Orleans against the United States' westward expansion, and by 1803 he sold the vast French colonial domain on the lower Mississippi to the American republic. What is more, his very effort to integrate Spain into his continental blockade of British trade by putting his own family candidates on the Spanish throne severed the remaining loyalties that the Spanish Creole elites (the colonists of European family descent but born
CHARLES S. MAIER
in the New World) felt toward either the Bonapartist regime in Spain or the restored Bourbons after 1815. French and Spanish dreams of regaining their lost colonies after 1815 were preempted by implicit American and British agreement to prohibit any such moves—what Washington termed the Monroe Doctrine. A later French effort at Mexican conquest, taken while the United States was involved in civil war, also collapsed.13
Whereas the Franco-Spanish condominium of the New World was doomed, the Anglo-American co-imperial sphere was soon ascendant. Essentially a large English-speaking Anglo-American association of cotton and wheat growers on the trans-Appalachian as well as coastal lands of the former colonies was increasingly interlocked with the banking, investment, and industrial communities of the British islands. From the beginning of the American republic, both North American ruling groups shared a common language and a Protestant commitment (which more than matched the Bourbons' loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church). Both cooperated in prohibiting any Bourbon reconquest of Hispanic America. After American forces failed to conquer Canada, first in the American Revolution and then later in the War of 1812, Britain and the United States would reach a de facto compromise over Canada. The British would grant it autonomy, the United States would renounce annexation, and the Canadians would finally (by the 1850s) resolve to thrust toward the west and not link up with the country to their south. Such an implicit settlement meant that Anglo-American elites might overcome disputes to claim shared leadership in global politics—an emerging trend confirmed at several junctures before 1850 and then in the century after. By the 1890s the bonding of Anglo-American elites was being cemented in social as well as policy spheres, and this despite the mass of US immigrants who remained outside its charmed circle. Both powers would resist any German efforts to wrest economic influence in Latin America. Finally, from the early twentieth century on, both would effectively cooperate across the Pacific in trying to defend a faltering Chinese state against Japanese efforts to dominate East Asia. The Americans desisted on making any claims in the Indian Ocean area until 1945, while the British refrained from hindering the US claims in Oceania and accepted the US Open Door doctrine with respect to China's future. The Japanese, in fact, remained the most isolated of the imperial contenders in the Pacific, colliding as they did with Russians, Chinese, and eventually British and
LEVIATHAN i.O
Americans. Despite the energy of their efforts to develop the extensive colonies tlicv did acquire—Taiwan and Korea and a growing presence in Manchuria even before its formal takeover in 1931—they never kept a tandem partner. Their later effort in the 1940s to lead an Asian movement against European colonizers recruited some collaborators but ultimately could not prevail against Anglo-American and Anglo-American-Russian resistance.
Anglo-American imperial cooperation rested on maritime strategy. There were potential alternative combinations based on landed domination—above all a possible German-Russian condominium resting on gradually winding down Austrian and Turkish possessions while precluding the reemergence of a Polish nition. German-Russian imperial association promised domination of Eurasia, as the professors of geopolitics during the second half of the nineteenth century would recognize. Dynastic interconnections, the large number of German bureaucrats that the Russian monarchs employed, the common interest in suppressing ■■■■ilie independence of Eastern European Slavs, and the growing economic exchanges of the late nineteenth century would all bode well for this coalition between 1850 and 1890. But German politics was too fitful (and in fact too liberal, for all its military trappings) to follow this strategy consistently. Efforts at cooperation could not overcome the tendencies toward mutual suspicion, which would culminate in the two world wars of the twentieth century. The alternative for Germany of keeping the Austrian Empire viable while working with the Ottomans to dominate the Middle East would have rested on partners inherently too weakened by their nationalities problem. The Portuguese, the Dutch by the nineteenth century, and later the Belgians exploited their rich colonial holdings but claimed no larger role of global order, as had the Bourbons earlier and as did the Anglo-Americans or Germans.
No stable combination of Russo-German, Russo-Japanese, or German-Japanese imperium in Asia was easily envisaged. Even when Germans and Japanese shared much common ambition in the Second World War, they could not make their association, the so-called Axis, function in any more than a nominal sense. Between them lay Russia and China, empires too extensive to conquer despite the huge efforts that would be made between 1937 and 1945. There was, however, the potential for a Russo-Chinese combination of interests, which >:d in fact emerge to dominate inner Asia in the eighteenth century. By the
{ S3 ]■
r
CHARLES S. MAIER J
mid-nineteenth century, China, like the Ottoman realms, would be simultane- ; ously the protagonist of an old empire and the object of other empires' piece-by- $ piece (and function-by-function) colonization. But this had not been the case for .ji the great Qing imperial structure of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth \ centuries—itself an imperial assemblage of diverse peoples run by a non-Chinese '< dynasty. From the close of the seventeenth century the Qing negotiated with ; Russia a frontier settlement that allowed them in effect to constitute an imperial ;'| tandem to finally suppress the Zunghar nomadic state in Mongolia and decimate its population by the late 1750s. The subsequent expansionist campaign ? west to secure the "new dominion" of Xinjiang added a huge territory, but one ? that remained beset by continuing ethnic and religious resistance to Beijing. The 1 Russians would suppress their "nomads" a century later but face continuing re- f sistance in the Caucasus territories that abutted the weaker Persian and Otto- % man states.24 Empires the world over proved most successful when they could *■ operate as dyads. - 1
Commodification of the Countryside I
■ ft
The immense turbulence of the first half of the nineteenth century did not re- \
quire the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That development played a large i role in some societies. But concentrations of factory labor were still rare outside ; |
zones of Western Europe and the northern United States before 1850. The larger :|
reservoirs of unrest lay on the land. Perhaps 75 percent of the world's active popula- j
tion worked the land or rendered services that supported those who farmed di- 1
rectly. The share went from about a third of the population in the England of I
1800 to perhaps 70 percent in eastern and southern Europe and probably higher |
in Asia and Africa.25 It is customary to think of agricultural communities as I
traditionalist and quiescent. But the burden of taxes and rents and labor services [
had ignited frequent protests, most confined to one village or another, but some- J
times sweeping up large areas in frightening rebellions. The century or so after I
1750 or 1760 was to add a further cause for unrest as market relationships in- [
vaded the countryside. Land and labor, fundamental factors of world produc- f;
tion, hitherto locked into customary or legally stipulated relations, would be- j
come far freer to be bought and sold as ordinary commodities. Peasants who had I
■[ 54 I" 1
LEVIATHAN l.O
been bound to a village or a landlord could depart for other villages or towns. Rural estates, controlled for generations by a given family or religious foundation, might be seized by state authorities and auctioned off to a new owner. They were to be swept into the flux of the market, and in the process would shake up state and society.
Market relationships were not, of course, the only transformative agent in play. But they were the newest (and for the moment, at least, perhaps the strongest) among three basic forces that together undermined the structures of the premodern world and prepared for the new regime of modern statehood. Warfare and its inexorable appetite for higher taxes and military modernization continued to exert the pressure it had since the seventeenth century when Jean Bodin had called money the sinews of war. And as a countervailing pressure, religious revivalism sometimes emerged as a manifestation of communal resistance to change, what E. P. Thompson called the "chiliasm of despair."" Perhaps it is more accurate to say that new religious movements represented an alternative impulse to change—one that radically denied fulfillment through the market, although in some cases, such as the American Latter-day Saints, market skills were annexed to communal and not individualist ends. Commodification of the countryside, the state's search for greater penetration of society to meet the demands of modern war, and religious evangelization would interact in the transition to modern state politics.
Such processes played themselves out within a triangular framework constituted by laboring families on one side, by landlords and their agents on another, and by representatives of the state on the third. The state varied in its role. Peasants might encounter its agents as oppressive tax collectors or dreaded army recruiters. But the state also had an interest in defending hard-pressed peasants against rapacious landlords. The rights of the landlords themselves emanated from different principles, and the revenues they collected were based on different sorts of claims. As "owners" or as stable leaseholders, landlords could collect rents from peasants to whom they let out the land, whether on an individual basis or as residents of a village community. As members of a privileged, legally defined estate" (etat, Stand)—that is, a legally defined social stratum with defined tax privileges and conveying in some cases an aristocratic title, and the right to representation in local or national assemblies consulted by the monarch—landholders
■[ 55 ]■
CHARLES S. MAIER .|
could claim payments and services by virtue of their inscribed legal status as well as rents from the tenants on their land: an arrangement that Western lawyers .I;!, often termed feudal. Sometimes these landlords—or recognized local headmen, even if not proprietors—were given the right to collect payments on behalf of the state as well. They became local tax collectors (zamindars in Indian agriculture), or even regional tax "farmers" for large areas, being assigned a quota they | had to pass on to the state but allowed to collect whatever the market or custom J might bear. In some societies, including Britain and Prussia, landlords retained the right to act as local judges in civil and minor criminal cases until the 1870s. f In some cases they had the duty of conscripting peasants for military levees, as 1 the Prussian state imposed until 1815. With each layer of duty came new honor-       : | ific status and "offices" and claims for financial compensation. Over the centu- [ ties, "deference" of tenants toward landlords, expressed by gestures of submission, had also become integral to the texture of rural life. In times of hardship or under the influence of charismatic concepts of equality, agrarian subjects might abandon deference for direct efforts to destroy hierarchies they had earlier lived with. Such rebellions, elemental and violent, meant frightening times, and when jitney were finally suppressed, those in charge usually administered the dismemberment, torture, and executions needed to "teach a lesson." J Mass rebellion seemed infrequent enough and the privileges of aristocratic [ office sufficiently desirable to attract the wealthy and ambitious. A major attraction was that they often brought the right to be transmitted by inheritance to one or more children. Crucial to the system was the long-term embeddedness of many public functions in the land, specifically in the role of landlords. Thus the £' laboring peasantry, the class or estate of landowners—who had pretensions to      -1-grander living in imposing houses with servants—and the agents of the state,      . 1; which needed taxes for military expenses, interest payments, display, and public [ projects, all vied for a share of the earth s yield in a triangular contest. But there ; were often religious functionaries who also had the right, as officers of great or | small churches or monastic communities, to claim a share of rents as landed pro- : prietors along with state-sanctioned taxes (tithes). Monastic organizations were numerous and strong in Roman Catholic countries, in the Orthodox church of Russia, and among Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia, Japan, and China. | In the Islamic lands of the Ottoman Empire, there were some rural monastic     : J:
t
LEVIATHAN Z.O
communities, but also urban religious communities supported by generations of pious gifts as "endowments" or waqfs.
There were innumerable variants and complications even in small areas. No automatic correlation made village communities or those benefiting from commercial and market relations in the countryside into revolutionaries. Explanations that serve for one episode sometimes fail for others. Many studies have sought to account for the divergent political choices of adjacent regions in France. William Taylor has found that in the Mexican war of independence Oaxacan Indians engaged in numerous village protests and uprisings but generated no overall revolutionary movement until the southwestern peasant war of the early 1840s—a protest against commercial agriculture exploited by rival elite leaders. To the north, however, Jalisco peasants, whose village bonds were more frayed and their clergy new arrivals, joined in the early war for independence.27
Still, we can attempt to sort out the major patterns of agricultural life and labor. Especially in upland communities or frontier zones where population was sparser, or among tribal confederations, the supervisory community remained weak or perhaps nonexistent and freehold farmers produced for their own subsistence and/or brought their goods directly to market and retained the proceeds. This situation pertained in parts of western and northern Europe and North America. The families involved retained legal independence although they might live in grinding poverty and sometimes indebtedness. At the opposite end of the legal structure, usually in areas of dense lowland population, landlords dealt with peasant labor, sometimes as tenants but also as hired labor (or even legally coerced labor) who lived in cottages grouped apart from fields (though they might retain small garden and livestock plots). This sort of agrarian enterprise was often described as a latifundia (a term inherited from Roman antiquity); and in North America it tended to become known as plantations. Plantations specialized in crops that benefited from "gang" labor—whether the arduous cultivation of sugar cane in Brazil and the Caribbean or cotton and tobacco in the mainland of the American South. Mediterranean agriculture retained such factory-like agricultural enterprises, which would become more important in the late nineteenth century as land reclamation projects and commercial agriculture increased in significance. The Dutch and the French organized such enterprises for the cultivation of Javanese sugar and Vietnamese rubber.
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LEVIATHAN l.o
Such plantation laborers were usually deemed the lowest in status, especially when they were racially segregated, as in the case of black slavery. For about two centuries slaves had been captured in the interior of Africa, herded to rhe coasts, then forcibly transported in overcrowded, sweltering ships from Africa to the Americas. By the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps ten to twelve million Africans had been transported and reproduced and formed an absolutely basic constituent of the economic interchange between Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The transoceanic slave trade was suppressed in 1808 in the United States by the ; terms of a compromise at the time of the Constitutional Convention. The French Jacobins abolished slavery in French colonies in 1794, although Napoleon rein- ; stated it. The British abolished the trade throughout their domains in 1807, and the condition of slavery itself in 1832.-1835. Still, for slaves "bred" in captivity, the status continued until 1863-1865 in the United States, 1887 in Cuba, and 1889 in Brazil, The Mexican government sold some captured Mayan rebels into Cuban slavery as late as the 1860s; slavelike labor conditions persisted in the mines of the Belgian Congo and elsewhere in Africa, and in the nitrate and copper mines of the Andes, long after formal abolition. Slaves had no legal rights against their I owners in court (although a slave supposedly could not be put to death if he did r| not take up arms or commit ordinary crimes). Slaves could be beaten (as could I Eastern European serfs), often at will, their marriages were not given legal status, '. and, most disabling, the status was deemed hereditary, to be removed only by J legal manumission. The fact that the slaves of the New World were defined as distinct according to racial features rendered them particularly tainted, and the     : J racial disabilities were legally enshrined in the United States and South Africa ; (as were de facto systems for preserving subjection) long after inherited legal j bondage formally ended. '
Most agrarian laboring families occupied an intermediate status between } freehold independence and outright slavery. In areas where slavery had not been ■: !| sanctioned (as in most of colonial Mexico, where the Spanish had granted enco- I miendas or tracts of land together with their Indian population) or later abol- ^ ished (as in the United States), peasants could slip into such total dependence on i landlords for their seeds and housing that they became bound de facto by their j recycled debts. In Europe east of the Elbe River and in Russia, peasants had been [ reduced to serfdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this condition of |
■[ 58 ]■ }
legal inherited bondage was not alleviated or dissolved until varying points between the 1770s and 1860s. Serfs needed landlords1 permission to leave their villages or to marry, and often had to work a varying number of days per week on the lands that their lords farmed directly. Serfs in some locations in Slavic Europe, in particular, could be transferred from one owner to another, whether for purchase or to settle debts, although in the German areas they were usually seen as an appurtenance of the estate to be transferred along with the land. In contrast to slaves, serfs retained higher legal status, including recognition of marriage; their families could not be broken up by landlords. Through the course of the first half of the nineteenth century (and in some areas after 1850), both slavery and serfdom would be eliminated. Traditionalist landlords fought bitterly against the waves of emancipation, but in fact would find that market pressures and control of credit provided most of the enforcement mechanisms they required to retain a compliant labor force.28
Crucial to this "old regime" was not just the superiority of the landlords, but the village structure and the claims on the land itself. Emancipation did not usually bring a transfer of ownership to the former slaves or serfs. The idea of endowing each ex-slave family head in the American South with "forty acres and a mule" was never enacted; in Prussia emancipated peasants could claim land only if their assets fell above a certain threshold, and within a generation or two many had fallen into the status of hired hands. In Russia, former serfs would be taxed to redeem the bonds given to landlords for compensation, while the village communes retained control of the land. For better or worse, the village provided a corporate existence: its elders could periodically redivide the farmland among different families, and it retained control of a common pasturage or woodland. We have learned that like a modern trade union, the village could confront a landlord with enough collective strength to keep rents and services tolerable.23 Elsewhere, including Japan and China, it provided a structure that was often more disciplinary than protective. It stood as an enforcement mechanism in a hierarchy of duties and expectations. Villages could control land, allocate labor, enforce obedience—but they did not own land.
Outright ownership, as envisaged under ancient Roman law or British "freehold" or today's American home ownership, thus remained an alien idea across much of the globe. Land went with people—whether organized in families or
•[ 59 ]■
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN l.O
villages—and people with land. In Russia estates were graded by the number of attached peasants or "souls." In some societies, especially where a conquering or formally invested sovereign claimed supreme power, ownership was theoretically retained by the conquering sovereign, as in the Ottoman Empire, and rights of "use" (usufruct or the old feudal notion of dominium utile) alone were ceded. In fact, after a generation or two it would become almost impossible to reclaim effective control, although programs of national "restoration" might try to reinsti-tute this claim.
Land ceded by sovereigns or pious donors to monasteries passed to an institution from which it could not easily be reclaimed—until the governments of the sixteenth century in Britain, or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Roman Catholic states. Governments, it was understood, could confiscate, or = at least compel sale to the state. Possession of land by charter conferred status : rights, but also restricted sale, often to ownets who possessed the same "noble" qualifications. This made it hard to hypothecate, or use as collateral for a mortgage loan, and was thus seen as a disadvantage. Such restrictions on marketabil- :;    | j ity or hypothecation were termed entail, and they became less a protection for magnates than a burden. Still, the privileges over control of land that were inherited from feudalism determined the horizontal layering of estatist society and-what in Europe was termed the Old Regime.
In some tribal societies, the concept of ownership as Europeans conceived it did not really exist. Land was plentiful, its cultivators—who used it for pas- [. turage and hunting as well as agriculture—scarce, and the idea of exclusive possession (with its rights to sell or bequeath) played no role because use seemed     J j guaranteed. One must be cautious about ascribing such a pastoral or collective mentality: many traditional societies constructed institutional equivalents to family ownership and certainly to tribal custody. White colonizers moved to : purchase these residual rights for insignificant sums and sometimes, as in Australia, to claim that the land was terra nullius (unclaimed) and theirs for the taking or by right of conquest—modes of expropriation that would exert a dev-     % j astating impact in the American, Australian, African, and Indonesian settle-, -ments. Those who spoke for taking possession pointed to the povetty of collec- ^ tivist societies. "Several nations of the Americas," John Locke had written, "arc . rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life... for want of improving [the \
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naterials of Plenty] by labour, have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences ve enjoy: And a King of a large fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad vorse than a day Labourer in England."30 Thus possession, vendibility, tax bur-Jens, and labor claims were all woven together in a complex tapestry of honor-fic, economic, and political claims. Untwisting the fabric was the work of .nodernization—the great process of legal and economic change from traditional dcicties across the globe to their modern successors. Even in China, where family jlaims on land remained strong, the eighteenth century strengthened the idea of definitive sales and contracts retained importance.31
This process added immensely to the unrest that already was inherent in the lOunttysides economy of scarcity. Peasants and magnates, and indirectly rulers and city dwellers, all depended on the physical extraction of food from the countryside. It was natural enough that the pressures of population increase, the vicissitudes of weather and harvest, and the ravages of disease would produce conflict. Villages living on the margins of subsistence could be provoked by rigorous tax collection and bad harvests, and their discontents could be rendered ideological by popular millenarian religious doctrines. Prosperous peasants might be angered by efforts to tighten up rules that had grown softer over time. Rising prices worked to the advantage of the party that marketed the harvest. If the peasant paid relatively fixed money rents but could bring grain or rice to market on his own, then the landlord and the state would be squeezed in an era of inflation. If the landlord collected his rents in kind, then he benefited from inflationary trends. Peasant revolts, usually localized but occasionally coalescing into broad protest movements, were a frequent seasoning of rural life.
But add to these latent tensions in the years from 1750 to i860 a new transna-t ional impulse: the penetration of rural land and labor relations by market forces, that is, the commodification of the countryside. Much of the globe s arable land had been farmed in one or another fabric of collective relationships or at least under arrangements that guaranteed tenure and fixed terms of labor and deference. Public authorities had a role: they protected landlords against major protest, raked off shares of harvest proceeds, might call on manpower for military uses. But states needed money. Eighteenth-century war was expensive and endemic. Current ideas among reformist European philosophers and statesmen— aaove all those who deemed themselves Physiocrats—envisaged that dissolving
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all the restrictions on the market for land and its crops could significantly increase national wealth. The fruitfulness of land, claimed the Physiocrats, was the ultimate source of society's wealth or surplus. One of their major theoreticians, Francois Quesnay, had devised a table that showed the cycle of production. ; Agriculture brought to market yielded more than was spent by the peasants and middlemen who dealt with it. On the basis of that surplus landlords received their rents and the urban sector its payments for its goods and services. From , these continuing dividends created by agriculture would be built the roads, harbors, palaces, all the nonagricultural products that a society consumed. Agriculture paid for government and the military and private incomes.
The key to the process was encouraging those who owned land and sowed ; it to expand their production. That meant creating a broader class of owner-entrepreneurs who would respond to market incentives. It also suggested, in contrast to centuries of efforts to keep grain prices down for fear of public unrest, that the traditional price controls be suspended so that higher prices would entice producers into producing more. Of course, in the eighteenth century, where crops could fail and the harvest might be precarious, higher prices could mean shortages, inflation, urban riots, and unrest. This had been the result of the freeing of grain prices in France and Spain in 17S4-1765, and the monarchs retreated. Still the basic insight was amazingly influential.
Americans think of Physiocracy as a curious adulation of the soil held by in- : tellectuals who had visions of agrarian republics. But in fact the underlying insights were broadly influential. The British governor of Bengal, the monarchs of j the Iberian states and their Latin American colonies, the reform-minded minis-      , t ters of the Italian states, whether Austrian-governed Lombardy in the north or prosperous Tuscany or Bourbon Naples and Sicily, all agreed on the major outlines of reform. Transform peasants from downtrodden ignorant workers in ■ * thrall to landlords, priests, and religious foundations into an agricultural middle class. Remove the personal restrictions that bound peasants to their village and their owners: let them marry and migrate and contract at will; remove the inher- : ited stigmata of serfdom and slavery, and they would become a class of sturdy yeomen producers. Increase the output of grain, of olives, of wine, of forests, or     . I. rice and silk in Japan, tea in India. Invest in agrarian infrastructure—canals, roads, harbors—and in improved techniques of cultivation. Consolidate the patchwork - ;.
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of taxes and spread the burden to the landlords or nobility, who were often exempt, ;o that it might be lowered overall. Free grain prices to encourage higher production. Remove the impediments to free purchase, sale, and mortgaging of land, and tvrest land from churches and abbeys and village communes.
But the concept did not work out so easily. In the late 1760s, following de-rades of criticism of Roman Catholic institutions, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal decided that they could expropriate the extensive lands of the Jesuit xder held in Iberia and in Latin America. As in most such auction procedures, :he beneficiaries were not poor peasants but substantial proprietors who could participate in the market. The French revolutionary peasants who freed their loldings from the remaining rents, corvees, and occasional labor exactions that itill persisted (what French lawyers called feudalism) perhaps fared the best, [n most places—whether Central Europe, Ireland, Iberia, and Italy, eventually ;he American South—the new peasant proprietors fell into the snare of growing indebtedness. The British may have dreamed of awakening the torpid villages of Bengal and making the agrarian middle classes into gentry-like farmers and agents of indirect rule. Their governors thus proposed a "permanent settlement," or freezing of the taxes on agriculture that would supposedly benefit farmers who could turn toward commercial agriculture without fearing tax hikes. They ended up, however, tending to reinforce the power of the tax farmers (zamin-clars) and the reduction of the peasants (ryots) from whom they collected rents and taxes into further dependency and poverty.
Physiocracy was only the most formalized version of the underlying trend, which saw the growing commodification of land and the labor that worked it. All the traditional restraints on a pervasive market mentality, whether religious teachings, feudal privileges, the inscribed status of nobles or churches, or the customary village control of common lands, were underpressure. Population growth, the cost of military and colonial competition, and the burdens of alleviating poverty ratcheted up the demands for extracting resources and money from the countryside. Economic development, not yet labeled as such, became a major preoccupation in China, the reform-minded semiautonomous feudal domains or ban of Japan (such as Tosa), the lands of the East India Company (EIC), the Ottoman Empire, as well as the reformist monarchies of Maria Theresa's Austria ■■tid Archduke Leopold's Tuscany, Frederick the Great's Prussia, the Spain of
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Charles III, Turgors France, and throughout the global state system. But the result ; was agrarian unrest, and there was a cluster of major rural revolts in the 1770s and      4 j 1780s: the great Pugachev rebellion in Russia in i773~!775. the Bohemian revolts in the same period, the French upheaval of 1789 once it spread to the countryside— and outside Europe, the 1780 Inca uprising led by Tiipac Amaru II in the viceroy-alty of Spanish Peru, and from 179 6 the White Lotus rebellion in China.32
These diverse upheavals cannot be ascribed solely to commodification or inflationary pressures, although population and markets increased. A great deal depended upon the state of harvests from year to year and the state's pressure to collect taxes and ultimately the tactics it used to assuage grievances or to repress disorder. It would certainly be too simple to ascribe the two great Western political transformations of the late eighteenth century—the American independence movement and formation of a constitutional republic (1775-1787)= andtne French Revolutions of 1789-1799—to rural turbulence. For even as the idea of a liberal market percolated in the countryside, the accompanying concepts of ; human rights and participation in government undermined aristocratic and , monarchical political claims. Despite such voices for conciliation of the North American colonies as Edmund Burke, George III and his ministers insisted on preserving the decisive rights to raise money and limit colonial voices in government, and the resulting demonstrations and efforts at repression escalated into ' forcible resistance, thereby provoking claims for the colonies' assumption of independent statehood. As a struggle for independent statehood in a society < middling incomes, class division was not a major theme. Modest family farmers      , | in the interior of the respective colonies often felt resentments at wealthier coastal     11 planters or urban merchants, and in the inland South might align with British forces. Urban concentrations, however, were relatively small, and local opinion      ' ■ leaders, including slaveholders, seized the leadership of the movement and in- . scribed its claims in traditional terms of English constitutionalism. British efforts     11 to raise slave uprisings limited American slavery opponents from acting more : decisively.
French-speaking societies were not so immunized. The sequence of late eighteenth-century fiscal crises and constitutional conflicts led in the late 1780s and 1790s to the astonishing collapse of the French monarchy, and as the Euro-pean states became involved in this great upheaval, the gens de couleur in Haiti,
and the Creole elites of Mexico and Spanish America decided to follow the same path. Given the great social inequalities in French society, the tax immunities enjoyed by its class of hereditary nobility, and the claims of the French church in the countryside, a political upheaval in that populous country (twenty-five million versus the Americans' four million) was bound to target the privileges accruing to land in the estatist structure of the Old Regime.
Great revolutions and sometimes minor ones as well become vortices that suck in outside rival powers even as they radiate principles of upheaval abroad; and this was true of the American and the French. The French armies (Republican after 1791) who sought to establish an international coalition of like-minded revolutionaries abroad in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), the Rhineland territories of the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and rhe Italian kingdoms, ended up playing on all the tensions that were built into the estatist societies of the late eighteenth century. The French armies took advantage of these tensions, and forced victories that brought their ideological allies to power in the late 179 os. But in some of the societies the new revolutionaries faced opposition not only from the old rulers allied with the anti-French coalition (British, Austrian, Prussian, and fitfully the Russians), but peasant masses who were the uneasy victims of the Physiocratic transformations described above. They helped sweep away the early collaborationist republics in Italy and, during the Bonapartist phase of French expansion a decade later, often joined the indigenous forces opposing the French occupation of Spain. The reimplantation of the revolution abroad step by ■step after 1801—no longer under the hodgepodge of local Jacobin radicals, but by middle-class or aristocratic reformers working under Napoleon's rationalization of fragmented German and Italian territories—had more enduring effects. The recruits to this cause were often reformers, who wanted to rationalize fiscal burdens, mobilize clerical wealth, modernize law codes, and use French patron-agcto reorganize their own territories by absorbing all the manifold subordinate jurisdictions—a program that the emperor of the French pushed through from :8o3 to 1806, largely at the cost of the Habsburg traditionalist claims. When Prussia resisted and was disastrously defeated in 1806, its aristocratic bureaucrats decided to emulate similar reforms such as formal abolition of serfdom and thereafter military conscription.
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Thus by 1810, the historian can discern throughout Europe and the Americas the outlines of the next generation's transnational alignment of social forces and political programs. They included, first, a conservative cohort of dispossessed or threatened aristocrats aligned with landed church officials—still dominant in Britain, Austria, and among the French exiles—who would recover partial and temporary power after 1815; and, second, a reformist phalanx of leaders who sympathized with the French reforms and were willing to administer Napoleon's European satellites and would establish themselves after 1815 as a more liberal alternative to the Restoration governments. Many of these benefited from the sale of church properties that the French secularized and auctioned off-more to commercially minded bourgeois who formed corporations to buy them than to aspiring peasants.33 Similar acquisitions, which purchasers could finance by government loans, became available to the Mexican men of property as the revolutionary and then successive governments sold off monastic and Holy Office properties.34 On the far left the small groups of republican revolutionaries who had supported the Jacobin republic remained in the political wilderness. They comprised preeminently literary intellectuals and political amateurs throughout Western Europe (including some in Britain) and the Americas.
Finally, there were masses of peasants who felt threatened by rural capitalism and resented the attacks on the Catholic Church in the countryside. The Church, after all, at least as represented in the parishes and monastic settlements, was the institution par excellence that resisted the market, baptized their children, knit together their families in marriage, and offered hope as they buried their parents and, alas too often, children. Those peasants who remained religiously loyal (many did not, of course) sustained the anti-French guerrilla forces in occupied Spain and southern Italy and remained pro-Bourbon and pro-clerical and hostile to any whiffs of French-inspired elite reform. After the restoration of the Spanish Bourbons, the aging painter Goya would depict them as superstitious, brooding, ignorant Catholic masses. The proponents of agrarian reforms and the emancipation of landed society from its traditional hierarchies ignored this rural populism at their peril. The Church remained a major strand of peasant protest and revolution deep into the twentieth century, sustaining Catholic guerrillas in Spain and Mexico and peasant mobilization in Russia, China, and Japan.35
How these groups might combine or quarrel, and which might prevail, often depended upon the military outcomes—although these in turn reflected the forces that revolutionary principles awakened. Where the French armies conquered, political reorganization usually followed. Russia and Britain remained outside the reach of French armies and thus under traditional rule, which in the latter country meant the government of an oligarchical parliament—a regime :hat the British sought to institute in Sicily, which they occupied while Napoleonic forces held mainland Italy. As of 1815, when the twenty-five-year-long warfare and economic turmoil provoked by revolutionary France and its contagious principles were finally extinguished, revolutionary claims appeared defeated, but '.ike some dormant volcano they still rumbled under the surface of the Restora-don. Certainly they did not triumph. The Bourbon monarchs returned to France (to be succeeded by their Orleanist cousins from 1830 to 1848), but in both cases .aider regimes that gave a role to an elite drawn from finance, industry, engineering, and the educational establishment. These new forces counted for more than they ever had before, as technological change began visibly to transform the economies and mentalities of the literate classes in France, Belgium, the German states, and Lombardy by the 1830s and 1840s. The political question in the West was whether the traditions of the countryside and its rural hierarchies could keep these new forces in check.
The upshot was more complex, in that rural hierarchies were themselves not just barriers to change but its very agents. As a recent revisionist study of Prussian rural life suggests, "over the centuries the two parties, manor and village, approached one another as combatants, probing for weaknesses and opportunities for gain, now accepting truces, now breaking them to pursue strategic advantages with the court bailiffs lash, at the strike front, or on the judicial battlefield." Nonetheless, in all their contention they acted together as agents of i change. "Estate owners and landed villagers need rethinking as market producers open to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' technological, material, and political opportunities."36 However, they also were undermining the old rural order. The stability that had rested on legal estates and patterns of deference and the teachings of religion would have to be reestablished, if at ail, by the ligaments of rural capitalism—the pressure of rents and debts and credits. It helped that
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aristocrats would be flanked by new ambitious peasant proprietors with a stake in rural order.
Historians recognize the Congress of Vienna, which concluded peace after the Napoleonic wars, as a fundamental settlement among nations. The statesmen at Vienna, however, also believed that an enduring peace required a settlement within each country that precluded a rekindling of revolutionary energy, just as Woodrow "Wilson would later insist that peace rested on liberal democratic regimes, the Vienna leaders took for granted that it required a conservative social base. They were willing to accept monarchs whom Napoleon had put in place in Sweden and initially in Naples but wanted to reinforce the rural hierarchies of the old regime and guarantee the stability of the countryside, They left behind a structure of periodic consultations that could coordinate transnational counterrevolutionary intervention as well as curb threats to peace, the so-called Congress System. For the restored French Bourbons the Vienna settlement meant accepting a constitution and recognizing that the distribution of land by the intervening revolutionary regime would not be reversed. However, even the moderate Vienna program was soon in shambles. The domestic restoration was breaking down by the 1830s and 1840s. International arrangements collapsed in the 1850s and 1860s. Rick burning in Britain; peasant organization in Ireland; agricultural protest on the continent; that harbinger of discontent, anti-Semitic agitation in Germany; and, outside Europe, Creole revolutions throughout Latin America, peasant protests in Japan, and a huge insurrection in China, would characterize the stormy decades from the 1810s into the 1850s. The rhetoric of change could be that of liberal rights and equality; it also could be millenarian, the expression of religious protest. Each society played out these conflicts with different ideological traditions and hierarchical structures, but giving impetus to all of them was the great tension produced by the advent of market transactions for land and of the labor on the land.
The implications were contradictory: yes, expand the market energies of the countryside, mobilize the capacity for wealth; but stifle the unrest that was likely to occur. This is why the early nineteenth century was so punctuated by agricultural unrest. On the one hand, the encroaching market principles undermined the old claims of aristocratic supremacy and the sacramental legitimacy of church and religion. On the other, the actual economic results seemed to bring hard
* times to the countryside as well as the emerging industrial cities. In the long run
f ,-hc Physiocratic mechanisms might encourage surplus and wealth, but a painful
I transition of several decades lay in between. Faced with the turmoil, the elite
!faced a stark alternative. Either they might rule by repression and force (this was the stance that English Tories, frightened by the French Revolution, sought to impose from the trials of alleged "Jacobins" in the 1790s through the "Peterloo massacre" of 1819, when soldiers fired on a crowd of demonstrators in Manchester); or, alternatively, they might seek to hasten the triumph of the market and ; commodification. This latter course constituted the Liberal program that pre-
vailed after the elections of 1830 and 1831, after the narrow British political class absorbed the lesson of the 1830 revolution across the English Channel and passed the Reform Act of 183Z, which expanded the suffrage to the substantial middle classes and redistricted Parliament to accommodate new industrial cities.
Markets, Reforms, Resistance
The rise of British liberalism meant far more than a political transition in an island of twelve million. Perhaps to an even greater degree than the principles and armies of revolutionary France, its ramifications were to be felt worldwide.
' No friends of revolution, the Tory ministries of the 182.0s were still resolved to
block any Franco-Spanish reconquest of their rebellious colonies in the Caribbean. In 1807 Britain abolished the transport of slaves on its own ships and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars patrolled West African watets to intercept slave traders. Abolition of slavery itself in British colonies followed in 1833, although the voracious demand of English cotton mills kept the institution continuously profitable in the southern United States. British intervention required a global naval presence, although its financial capacity for underwriting foreign loans would also serve as a continuing asset. Britain's long-serving Whig foreign secretary and later prime minister Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple), vigorous spokesman for his nation's liberalism, helped midwife a peaceful secession of Bel-
I _"- =- 8ium fr°m Holland, and indirectly encouraged the Turkish reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. The British adherence to market principles—that is, its nsistence on the right of the EIC to sell opium in China and to protect the
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legal rights of brawling sailors—undermined the Confucian order, as Chinas resistance resulted in a clamorous military defeat in 1842.
By 1846 the political mobilization that led to abolition of the protective tar-iff on grain confirmed the country's commitment to industry, international finance, and free trade. This so-called repeal of the Corn Laws was among the most decisive legal affirmations of early nineteenth-century social change. It confirmed Britain's industrial vocation—the calculation of the Whigs that by letting wheat prices sink for a hungry working class (and indirectly the wages that workers needed to pay their food budgets), they would do better than putting tariffs on textile competitors and keeping the prices of industry high. Simply put, there were no major competitors for British or third-country markets. The industrial cities grew; paradoxically the sentimental affection for a rural Britain of pastoral villages also increased.
British loans would support the first generation of independent state leaders in Latin America after the Napoleonic wars and the wars for independence from 1810 to 1825 threw the finances of New Spain, including Mexico, into disarray. The breakdown of Bourbon fiscal systems (which remained efficient in the late eighteenth century far longer than often maintained) and the recourse to local finances advanced the federalist options supported by Latin American liberals but sparked endemic conflicts as well. The new republics and the empire of Brazil depended on British loans and investments. Until the 1850s the relative weakness of the international economy weakened the new states and aggravated the conflicts within them and between them. New loans, taxes, discounted state salaries, and the tendency to localize fiscal systems characterized the threshold of independence.37 We can construe the financial and market connections between Europe and the Americas and Asia as an early form of what 1970s commentators would call interdependence—what today's analysts call globalization. Perhaps most important, if indirect, was the impact of these early financial and commercial currents on the Ottoman Empire, India, and China. These huge, conglomerate societies already faced deep internal crises, which the interventions of foreign powers only magnified. Whereas French concepts of citizenship backed by military interventions from 1792 to 1815 had forced the harsh choice of resistance or subservience, the British connections after 1815 were weaving a fabric of
LEVIATHAN 2.0
markets and credits that compelled local elites either to develop liberal reform or to resist at the price of disabling backwardness.
In the Middle East the Ottoman Empire descended into intensified crisis. Ottoman state and society had certain traits that emerged both from its multinational imperial legacy—its responsibility for the European Balkans in the north and west, Arab communities in the southeast, Anatolian Turkish populations threatened by Russian expansion, and religious and ethnic minorities organized into partially self-governing communities in the major cities and the coastal regions—and from its ambitions as an encompassing Muslim state. In the outlying regions of the empire the strength of local notables and their clienteles generated long-term feuds that were impossible to discipline. The practice of administration amounted to divide and rule (and protect) the multifarious identities within the realm. The state had no secure monopoly of violence, often resorting to irregular troops and private forces to keep order.58 The eighteenth century had brought almost continual warfare and net renunciation of territories, against Habsburgs and Venetians in the west, Persians to the east, Russians to the north.
Selim III, who ruled from 1789 until deposed and executed in 1807/1808, understood the need for reforms as he confronted Russian military threats and watched Europe plunged into new, seemingly total warfare. In theory the army with its two branches—the cavalry of the frontier whose officers were supported by landed fiefs and the garrisoned army of the capital, the Janissaries, who were the sultan's personal force—was totally at odds with the idea of a citizen army that the French Revolution had made so central. What united army and society were the tax obligations of the subjects, which in turn rested upon their well-being within a framework of justice and Islamic law (shari a) that the sultan had also to guarantee. Over the centuries the societal framework had calcified into a collection of privileged groups defending their privileges, whether urban guilds, local notables, or waqfs. Selim planned a "New Order" based on a new army, including Western uniforms, and a more efficient tax system, but the reforms threatened, on the one hand, the quasi-feudal notables (ayan) who during the previous centuries had entrenched themselves as de facto rulers of the countryside and, on the other hand, the privileged Janissaries of the capital, who originally, centuries
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earlier, had been recruited from conscripting dragnets among the Balkan Christian populations.39
Supported by the conservative Muslim judiciary and fomenting rioting in Constantinople, the Janissaries deposed and executed the sultan and those identified with the New Order. In turn they provoked the Balkan ayan to march on the capital, kill about a thousand of the opposition, and install a new sultan, Mahmud II, who was compelled to sign a covenant of union that limited his power and that of the viziers. The compromise did not last long. The sultan turned to limit ayan ascendancy, then finally moved against the obstreperous Janissaries in 182.6, murdering them en masse and burning their barracks. But his regime faced a Greek revolt supported by Western public opinion, then the Russian destruction of the sultans Black Sea fleet in 18Z7 and a confrontation with the ambitious reform pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in the next decade.
Born in what is today Greek territory as the son of an Albanian in the service of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali would attempt to bring Egypt into the nineteenth century, destroying the Mamluk military caste, expanding irrigation canals, establishing it as a major cotton-growing territory, and reforming its fiscal system and military. He was commissioned by the sultan to quell the advance of the Arabian Ibn Saud dynasty, adherents of the austere Islamic movement, Wah-habism, that had taken hold in the Arabian hinterland. After the Saudis had taken the Holy Cities and interrupted the Hajj or annual pilgrimage routes from Damascus in 1803, Constantinople enlisted its dynamic Egyptian governor to push them back. Although Muhammad Ali retained too great a sense of Ottoman loyalty to challenge the empire or even seize the throne, Constantinople was naturally leery of his power and freedom of action even as they called on him to help suppress the Greek rebellion and added Crete to his territory. Muhammad Ali and his son conquered Syria and Mt. Lebanon (the Beirut region with a significant Christian population) and defeated the sultan's army on the Anatolian frontier, until the British routed them from these territories. For London, a fragile Ottoman state was a useful, if vulnerable, barrier to Russian expansion.40
But propping up the Ottoman imperial structure hardly restored its vitality or overcame the multiple challenges that afflicted it. European support for the Greek revolution in the Balkans, continuing Russian pressure in the Black Sea,
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J
-1
French efforts to protect Christians in Lebanon, Islamic religious radicalism in ; the Arab interior, and an ambitious Egyptian modernization effort meant that Constantinople faced crises on almost every front. The question was whether a vast and creaky empire that for the last few centuries had been governed increasingly through pervasive clientelism and had continually to contend with powerful veto groups—if no longer a corporatized army dominating the capital city, certainly a conservative Muslim establishment claiming to legitimize the monarchy—could change the basis of government.
Emerging from the violence and setbacks of the i8ios, a group of reform-J minded bureaucrat-diplomats with particular sensitivity to the dangers from abroad embarked on a modernization of the state in the 1830s and a series of reforms from 1839 into the mid-i870s that would be known as the Tanzimat. They established government departments, a prime minister, public taxation to replace tax farming, and a reform council whose proposals the sultan pledged to institute. The reforms were originally justified as aiming at the regeneration of the role of Islam, and the adherents of civic and political reform could be allies of a vast intercontinental movement for Islamic reform that was culminating in the 1830s.41 Part of the motive was to appeal to the British Whigs, who would have to provide the backup for the empire against the Egyptian and Russian dangers. All very well, but the more that the Ottoman state moved toward importing principles of citizenship and general law, the more it undermined its traditional cultivation of privileged groups. Could the six-centuries-old empire make the transition from subjects to citizens without disintegrating?
Chinese state and society were also under increasing pressure—even before ;:the Anglo-Chinese Opium War of 1839-1842, which an earlier generation of historians, at least, took as the opening of a national crisis that only deepened in the course of the nineteenth century. Contemporary interpretation has tended :to examine the strains arising within the Qing order from its very dynamic growth in the eighteenth century. Population was increasing dramatically—from : 300 million in 1700 to perhaps 450 million by 1850—as New World crops, sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts allowed the relaxation of Malthusian constraints.42 :This brought with it population pressure in the south and the expansion of Han Chinese into the northern provinces that were supposedly the homeland of the Manchu people and its Qing Dynasty that had displaced the Ming in 1644. It
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put pressure on the earlier Manchu effort to preserve domination of public office as Han officials played an increasingly larger role. The Chinese elite differed from that in Europe: it comprised the provincial and national "gentry," a class that had to pass continuing examinations based on Confucian classics, but then enjoyed office holding and exemptions from state service and corporal punishment. Meritocracy, however, is hard to divorce from class privilege. As population increased, the spread of clientelism, bribes, and the resort to exam schools to gain access to the gentry revealed the strains on the ancient system.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Manchu state, under the leadership of two remarkable long-lived monarchs, the Kangxi emperor and his grandson, the Qianlong emperor, had devoted major military efforts to expand into the Mongolian west and had vastly increased the effective territory of the state. But the dense habitations of the southern and central provinces and the two great southern river systems (the Pearl estuaries with Guangzhou, and the Yangzi winding eastward from Sichuan to Shanghai and the coastal cities) proved as major a challenge to effective government. The commercially active populations despised immigrants from other provinces, and the networks of bandits, smugglers, and mafia-like "triads" who exploited the wealth and the conflicts among the "immigrants" challenged the precepts of a Confucian moral order. Outside the channels of social mobility and well-ordered commerce and farming, messianic religious doctrines known as White Lotus Buddhism flourished. Government efforts to suppress the congregations led to massive rebellion in 1796 in the provinces of Taiwan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Hunan, and Guizhou, which would require almost a decade to overpower.43
Still, as late as 1800 China could be counted as a wealthy society. The question of how it compared with the West has produced a cottage industry of recent scholarship. In his 1776 Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained that to account for the prosperity of labor, the critical issue was less the degree of wealth than the comparative rate of growth: a stagnant rich nation was in greater trouble than a poorer but dynamic one: "The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe." There was trade in land; feudal tenures had been eliminated, although debt relationships kept many in dependency; great estates rarely exceeded 150 acres. Probably a third of agricultural production went into trade, some of it over
leviathan 2.0
great distances. Proto-industrial organization produced a great deal of cotton cloth and silk, some of which was processed by owners of several hundred looms. Letters of credit issued by emerging banking houses were replacing shipment of silver bullion. Luxury items such as porcelain and furniture were prized in the West.
Difficulties recurred and increased in the early 1800s. If outright rebellion was stanched, the inner bleeding of the state continued. The grain tribute administration, which had charge of ferrying rhe major taxes in rice eight hundred miles northward along the Grand Canal from Hangzhou on the Yangzi to Beijing, was undermined by corruption, overhiring, a tripling of boat fees, and growing commercialization of the grain tribute as local officials had to purchase rice from private traders to meet their quotas. If bureaucratic fricrion, corruption, and monopolistic labor practices were not enough, Yellow River silting blocked the major crossing of the Grand Canal in 182.4-1815, even as the vested interests of the river merchants vetoed the alternative of shipment along the coast. The canal route would be restored by borrowing water from the Yellow River to augment the canal, but the sea route had to be adopted by 1845, and by 1853 the advance of the Taiping rebels and the Yellow River's change of course (itself attended by catastrophic flooding and environmental challenges) ended the canal route. The price inflation of the eighteenth century brought a trebling of grain prices. Because taxes on commodities were fixed in quantities of silver, peasants could initially keep up their income as the tax rates increased, but by the 1830s the rapidly expanding opium imports began to drain silver from the country and increased the tax burden in real terms. "Not a year has passed without fears of Yellow River floods, not a year without having to raise funds for river conrrol," lamented the leading intellectual of the era, Wei Yuan, before the Opium War. "This is something unknown in previous ages. Foreign opium has spread throughout the country, and silver flows overseas. Because of this the grain tribute tax and salt monopoly develop ever more evils, the officials and people are ever deeper in
trouble----Standing in the present and surveying the past, the difference is as
between black and white."45 Within the constrainrs that continuing interpretation of ancient Confucian texts mandated for the elite, he reinterpreted the almost twenty-five-hundred-year-old Book of Odes as a summons for a renewal of literati activism in the public interest and for the court to use the lettered elire to
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break the bureaucratic blockages the country faced. In a British context one might label such an approach Tory reform, certainly better than no reform but rarely sufficient to master the tides of nineteenth-century economic and demographic change. In the United States its functional equivalent perhaps was the belief, expressed by the Virginian Democratic Republicans of the 1790s, that a "natural aristocracy" could pursue the disinterested public interest—a vision soon submerged under the pressures of commercial development and electoral democracy.
The Daoguang emperor from 1840 did allow a reinvigoration of intellectual life and the cautious application of traditional learning to practical problems such as defense and management of the coasts and frontiers.46 Pressure from the avid world of commerce abroad, however, came too soon and too rapidly for any gradualist or traditionalist coping. The opium boom, of course, involved China in a disastrous military defeat. Opium had been prohibited by the Chinese in i8zi, but traded nonetheless. Addiction grew above all for the smoked leaf. It was an Indian product and the EIC had charge of the trade with China. Growers in Indian territories outside EIC control sought to break into the trade, and rather than cede control, the EIC decided to buy and export greater quantities, although it consigned these exports to Chinese merchants. Because the British sold no other products to China, opium sales also promised a way to balance growing their imports of silk and tea. Moreover, as the EIC also explained at home, even the purchases from the independent Indian producers would let the Indian population buy more British cottons and manufactures.
Chinese merchants and smugglers and even foreign trade officials might connive in the imports, but concern grew that London was insisting on the principled defense of free trade to profit from the addiction of the Chinese population. By the mid-i830s the EIC no longer had a legal trading status, but British representatives spoke for the English merchants based in the official entrepot of Guangzhou. Chinese officials also believed the trade was responsible for the rise in silver prices and thus the tightening of monetary conditions, although three-quarters of British proceeds flowed back into the country for purchases of tea and silk. The British expected the Chinese to legalize imports, but after a vigorous debate Beijing reaffirmed the ban in 1836. The Beijing coutt entrusted its policy response to an official, Commissioner Lin Zexu, whose war against drugs
led him to confine the British merchants at Guangzhou to their factories until supplies of opium were surrendered. The conflict escalated over the rights of merchants and British citizens, in particular the immunities of British sailors from Chinese law. Still, British authorities and the Chinese court debated policies of concession and resistance, and full-scale warfare followed only after a series of British attacks and withdrawals. At that point British progress upriver toward Nanjing with successive Chinese defeats finally led to Beijing's military humiliation, which compelled the state to cede Hong Kong and extraterritorial rights.'17
On the face of it Japan was as vulnerable as China. But the unrest provoked by the rise of commercial pressures mobilized not rebels against a nominally unified empire but the ambitious leaders of autonomous feudal domains. Attendance of these daimyo at the emperor's court involved a large percentage of theit public expenses. Although public order seemed under far better control than in China, the pressures of market forces had an effect in Japan as well. The early Tokugawa after 1600 had thought to escape from decades of anarchic civil strife and to fix a stable order on Japan, to freeze it into a pyramid of isolated and hierarchical Confucian peace and order. The Christianity that had begun to make inroads was violently suppressed between 1600 and 162.0; foreign contacts were prohibited by 1630. But over the next two centuries, population rose, a money economy made inroads with all the inflation and debt that entailed; some peasants went into market farming for the cities or specialized in crops such as rape-seed oil or silk worms; merchants and artisans proliferated; new self-made men bought office and title, the samurai lost their military virtues, and the administrative offices within the ban and at the center proliferated. Peasants began to produce fot the markets and became more disputatious as they entered market relations. Retainers, lords, and the shogunate itself fell further into debt—some of the domains owed up to a couple of years of expected revenues—the currency was periodically debased, samurai debts had to be periodically canceled, while after 1800 occasional crop failures, tax gouging, and corruption produced unrest and frequent, if small, rebellions. Administrators in the daimyo oscillated between imposing forced loans and writing down interest rates on loans. Some administrators, often samurai of humble origins, attempted heroic reforms in the decades before 1850, whether for the national or the domainal governments.
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Occasionally they resorted to setting up state monopolies for commodities. But reformers, whether in Edo or in the domains, could also be forced out by conservative samurai opposition.
Even before Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his black ships in 1853, the Japanese old regime faced fiscal difficulties and social unrest, although without foreign wars as a source of crisis, which suggested that indigenous development in its own right destabilized societies of legal privilege and rank. Incidents of tax protest rose in the market-oriented domains, where new crops, especially the cultivation of silkworms, were increasing, while Samurai control remained stronger in the less commercially developed ban; and the divergence characterized the choice of sides in the civil war at the end of the Tokugawa order in the 1860s.48
Pause for a moment of skeptical interrogation. Was the world from 1810 through the 1840s really in an epoch of coordinated transition? This historical account argues that world civilizations had arrived at some parallel rhythms of development as they interacted more intensely and systemically. Still, the wary reader and the cautious researcher should distrust any effort just to select convenient parallels. States and cultures do present a persisting individuality, as docs any community that can be identified for study, whether at the grandest level of empires, on a middle scale of nations and regions, or at the local level between counties and villages, often between enterprises, parishes, and families. The world the historian investigates is differentiated, so to speak, "all the way down." But it is also fractal, in that at each scale similar pressures and similar rifts can be detected. The historian has to decide the relative importance of what is similar and what is different; these are not measures inscribed in the societies themselves. But he or she must make a persuasive public case for these judgments, which ultimately have to be validated by the critical reader.
We have made the case so far on the basis of fundamental and encompassing transitions: the century-long dissolution of hereditary and ascribed relations in the countryside; the growth of sufficient wealth to reward the growth of commercial agriculture as long-distance markets thrived for wheat and rice, for tea, coffee, naval supplies (timber, hemp, resins), and opium; the accumulating technologies that allowed coal and steam to magnify the energy at the disposal of labor; the denser networks of trust that let payment for investment and trade be
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postponed and reassigned to distant sources of savings—and the progressive casting of land itself into the maelstrom of the market. The case for the global history rests further on the ever-widening pressure from the West, whether through the unsettling presence of Enlightenment ideas or the capacity to draw on and transfer capital, and to move effective military units to far-flung shores. Europeans and North Americans pressed their demands no longer just on tribal i societies (although this pressure continued remorselessly), but on the ancient states of Africa and Asia. Whether demanding that the rulers of East Asia open their realms to trade, or calling on the Islamic territories around the Mediterranean to protect their Christian subjects, continuing to intervene militarily in the republics of the New World or moving to control wider provinces of South Asia, Europeans encroached to an ever greater extent. Where they did not directly take over new territories (as the French did in Algeria in 1830), they pressed capitulary treaties on Asian and African rulers, insisting that their own nationals face trial only in their own courts and that Christian subjects enjoy protected status.
But finally, there was a worldwide blowback that constituted a global ■response—the mobilization of religious loyalties throughout the globe in large
■ part as a reaction to the tendencies described above. Precisely as the traditional
■ structures of the global old regime became unhinged, religious impulses emerged Ico offer a compensatory vision. As the West encroached, and traditional rulers seemed powerless to resist or even wished to emulate the new techniques and ideas, prophets and saints emerged to resist. This is not to say religious beliefs were ideological responses to social unrest. They were genuine and sprang from deep convictions. Bur they erupted as powerful organizing and missionary forces as long-term expectations of economic and political stability melted around newly exposed communities. Caught in the currents, conservative elites would deploy the traditional authorities and congregations to keep control, while the marginal elements of society more vulnerable to social dislocation or wedded to territorial
■autonomy would flock to doctrines of direct inspiration and leaders who demonstrated it. And subsequently, as states were reconstructed, women would assert .their own historical role by establishing a presence in significant sectors of religious and charitable activity.
In their implicit claim to reintegrate emotional wholeness that imperial religious bureaucracies had deadened or market society corroded, all sorts of
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religious congregations arose to contest the new trends and sort alternativi values. Thus, religious activism played a role in the great uncongealing of globa.      ~ ; society that was occurring. One consequence of the turbulence in the country side was the generation of new messianic cults. But commodification was not the       ,: only incitement. The stirrings of imperialist pressure also contributed. Religion' arose from the margins of settlement: whethet Wahhabism in eighteenth-centur, Arabia or Mormonism in the "burnt-over district" of eastern New York state. Similar movements were created every few generations in movements characterized in the American colonies as Great Awakenings, more generally as revivalist: new revelations, new and unlikely prophets, often women or erotically charismatic male preachers. These would develop as faiths that tapped an outpouring    |§ f of emotional energy, whether cathecting on other members of the community c on the deity.
It is not making any judgment on the doctrinal content of religion to analyz ■ its this-worldly functions. Certainly these varied, as did political programs. Most      * I religions could accommodate those who lived in compliance with the seculai order and whose values of orderliness, family transmission, and ritual served to strengthen it. As in other epochs, religion could serve as a buttress for social h erarchy as it existed. In particular those sects or faiths tied to secular authorities served programs to reestablish authority. Whether the 'ulama of the Ottoman • Empire, the appeals to Neo-Confucianism by conservative Chinese political leaders seeking to restore the empire's defensive capacity against the West and domestic rebels, or the so-called union of throne and altar and the reactionary appeals of the Holy Alliance among the European courts, political programs of monarchical restoration and imperial strengthening found support among the upholders of orthodox religious establishments or rites.
But at the same time the sects of the periphery, or those of the popular classes, fused faith and collective appeals. Their rites seemed destabilizing and subverted hierarchic authority even as they sometimes promised to reenergize • [ outworn creeds. Their prophets, whether Christian or Hasidic, or Muslim Sufi holy men, preached austerity and inwardness or communal love, sometimes intense rigor, sometimes the emancipation from tiresome rules and structures, in eith< case a return from encrusted formalism. Their adherents sang hymns, danced,
j'ocked to shrines, sometimes enlisted in the armies of prophets and used the in-ef convictions of the faith to conceive a world of far greater emotional energy id equality. Everywhere they offered an alternative collective vision of individual as well as communal fulfillment. The city of God might become manifest only I - eer, but meanwhile the villages of God enlisted tremendous nineteenth-century •■-lergy-
Religious rededication, however, was not just a response of the dispossessed. Older elites and communities turned toward renewed faiths—responding not with Pentecostal zeal, but a puritanical and intellectual rigor or quiet mysticism. Islam in particular—its faithful spread from Nigeria north and east in Africa, to t;Le Balkans and the Middle East, thence via Central Asia and the remembered domains of the Mughal Empire to the sultanates of Malaya and Borneo—was a tjith in ferment. The difficulties of the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East were a revealing crossroads. As Constantinople's bureaucrats pressed forward with their secularizing and reformist Tanzimat edicts, the old elites of the outlying empire who had earlier been the agents of administration took contradictory paths. Some benefited from the new commercial activity tied in with European i ading and became the local notables of the modernizing empire. Others resented the displacement of the traditional 'ulama and found new doctrines congealing that called for a purification of Islam. Whether Wahhabi currents .rom the Arabian interior, or the influence of Algerian exiles who had resisted die French conquest and penetration of the 1830s and 1840s, or old scholars, Islamic reformers called for a return to Quranic doctrine and the removal of o:nturies-old accreted practices—veneration of Muslim saints and tombs, the use -if amulets, and such. The reform movement of Salafism took hold among the educated of Damascus, somewhat as Calvinism had galvanized Swiss and French urban congregations three centuries earlier. Salafism might tap energies similar to those that sparked the Wahhabi revival of the Saudi state in the Arabian He-jaz, but could also argue that Islam had called for tolerance and mutual learning horn Christians, whereas the Wahhabi advocated religious war and the slaying <j [^corrupt Muslims.49 The contemporary reader, who reads about the recruiting by militant Islam in Pakistani madrassas or Asian immigrants in Hamburg or Birmingham, will be more familiar with this phenomenon in the early twenty-first
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century than one would have been fifty years ago. In the early 1800s no faith was !-untouched by the resources of radical communal fervor. The religion of the early | nineteenth century could serve as a volcanic force. :.|
Moreover, just as state rivalries kindled emerging nationalism, so the new J religious energies stimulated and provoked responses from the other faiths contending for the loyalties of spiritual communities: British Protestants carried j their message to the new domains being encroached on in South Asia; American Protestants followed the China trade with gteat energy. And as the imperial [ courts of East Asia sought to revive their fortunes later in the nineteenth century, S successfully in Japan, less so in China, they tried to strengthen supposed national | orthodoxies, Shinto and Neo-Confucianism. These religious energies were two- I edged swords, however. Imperial rulers—including too the Ottoman sultans and the British in India—might sponsor religious academies and patronize spiritual authorities in the search for reliable intermediaries and propagators of their own legitimacy. But the energies they tapped into had their own crusading vigor : and were not always to be contained within a pro-state program. Sufi prophets of      = ■ [ spiritual renewal within Islam, for instance, organized their own quasi states in      -1 the peripheries of empire, whether the upper Nile or northern Nigeria.50 As we reflect on the vigorous revival of Islamic practices today (or Christian, too) in the wake of what seemed like an unparalleled US extension of influence after 1989, we should remember that the extension of national and imperial authority across the globe in the later nineteenth century provoked some similar push-back from Islam and other religions. Those who render unto Caesar will awaken those who want to render unto God—sometimes by organizing their own purified state authorities. I
Quasi-religious impulses flowed into secular doctrines as well. The transformations of global society could not take place without the most exciting of visions opening up to participants, both those who were enthused and those who : were uneasy. Even as some social critics feared that trade, commerce, and the rise of industry and new technologies were debasing community life, others saw the possibility of new concepts of emancipation and fraternity. Socialist theorists and "utopian" projects marked the decades after the French wars. The Scottish industrialist Robert Owen preached the value of collectivist communities, and his disciples organized a few in North America as well as New Lanark in Scot-
LEVIATHAN Z.O
land. The French writer Claude Henri de Rouvroy, count of Saint-Simon, who argued that factory owners and investors constituted a new elite that was far more important than the old upper crust of dukes and archbishops, inspired a movement that preached his doctrines. Remove the decorative nobility and no adverse consequence would follow; remove the productive elite (he termed them indtistriels) and society must stagnate. He was farsighted: it was the new fusion of commercial leaders, educated civil servants, and reformist landlords who would coalesce in midcentury—not only in France but throughout the world— and create the institutions and states that were understood to be modern.
Saint-Simon and his followers were sometimes termed Utopian socialists. In a European world where a new urban working class crowded into flimsy tenements, drank hard, often contracted the scourges of microbe-infected air and water, tuberculosis and cholera or typhoid, the "social question" was to become anguishing. The workers of Paris and London at this point were hardly disciplined trade unionists seeking respectability, but migrants from the country seeking work, often casual labor, sometimes reduced to crime and prostitution. Anarchic private development augmented the problem; did not the solution lie in a far greater effort at collective organization, whether by reformist entrepreneurs (as Robert Owen thought), or through workers' cooperatives themselves (as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted), and finally by an encompassing working-class international (as Marx would argue)? Charles Fourier argued for reorienting family and social functions within the boundaries of "phalansteries." As these small but energetic movements recruited followers, they built on otherwise suppressed claims of erotic fulfillment (and in the case of some movements, erotic repression). Others were more strictly based on reorganizing capitalism.
Elusive Revolution
Rebellion is sometimes used as a synonym for revolution, but there are shades of difference. A revolution is a rebellion that succeeds in removing a given regime (or escaping from its jurisdiction) and installing another, even if the results are later reversed. Revolutions are supposedly carried out in the cause of an articulated program for government. Rebellion refers more to revolts, against rulers domestic or foreign, that ultimately fail to sustain their objectives even if they
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enjoy interim success. Rebellions can seek to institute radical and even Utopian programs of equality, or they can seek to restore economic, political, and social orders that participants recall as less exploitative. Modern history in general has witnessed revolutions and rebellions great and small. In Europe and the Americas, the century after 1750 was an era motivated by a newly discovered discourse of rights and happiness. Its philosophers preached self-realization. Its Romantic sensibility glorified man's revolt against tyranny. All of this culminated in the 1840s and carried over into the 1850s, even as a new phase of state reconstruction got under way.
The era between the 1760s and 1860s concluded with two major revolutionary efforts, one in Europe, the other in China—and a third if the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1856—1857 is also counted. The uprisings of 1848-1849 in the West erupted after several years of difficult economic conditions, including rural immiseration and urban overcrowding, and growing impatience with the status quo on the part of frustrated elites who wanted greater political representation. It was not that reform would not have ensued: in Britain the tariff had been repealed; in Prussia a national parliament, or United Landtag, was finally being summoned; in Rome a new young pope seemed sympathetic to reforms even as nationalist secret societies, the so-called carbonari, called for unification of the peninsula. Partial progress only led to more impatient demands and agitation. A frightening peasant revolt against Polish aristocrats in Austrian Poland had taken place in 1846, and Protestant and Catholic Swiss cantons had come to the edge of warfare the year before. The Chartist movement in Britain managed a last active surge as it collected signatures for universal male suffrage annual elections and secret ballots. French leftists, in opposition to the complacent Orlean-ist regime, were organizing a campaign of political banquets. Revolution happened to be ignited in a state that was one of the weakest but had a reactionary ruler: the restored Bourbon monarchs of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or Naples. The parliament of Sicily, renewed during British occupation of the island in was not a popularly elected legislature, but an assembly of hereditary magnates. On January i%, 1848, they declared themselves in revolt against the monarch across the straits in mainland Naples. Revolution soon spread in the Italian states, and then to France and the Germanies with extraordinary speed. Monarchs quickly abdicated, or at least conceded constitutions and summoned
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liberal ministers to office, as if the governing powers realized how illegitimate they were held to be. These spring months of easy triumph were precarious in turn, however. They rested on a coalition between democrats infused with ideals of Romantic populism and the reform-minded among the civil servants and new bourgeois who had acceded to influence since 1815. The Romantic intellectuals provided the gestures and the rhetoric; the more solid men sought to build new institutions. But 1848 also saw the emergence of an urban proletariat whose demands and recurrent street demonstrations were frightening enough to alienate the liberals whom they had helped bring to power, and the coalition fell apart. Three days of street fighting in Paris, not in February when the monarchy fell, but in June when the working class threw up barricades, undermined the revolution. In the presidential elections scheduled for December 1848, Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Bonaparte, gathered many of the votes of the urban middle classes frightened by radicalism, and of the peasants who likewise wanted an end to months of demonstrations and liked the name of the emperor, whose reputation for victories and national pride was still powerful.
Elsewhere the process of rolling up the revolution took even less time. Military and tough-minded civilian advisers counseled the king of Prussia and the new young emperor of Austria to reassert their authority. Moreover, the moder-| ates' national agenda failed. Whether in Italy, northern Germany, or the Aus-
[ trian crown lands, middle-class moderates could realize their objective only by
defeating Austria. This they failed to do. They remained concerned preeminently 1 . with defending their own cities, but not assisting their fellow rebels in other cen-
I ters of revolution, thus could be successively defeated by Habsburg generals in
their would-be national capitals: Milan, Prague, eventually Venice and Buda-j pest. The German liberals had also sought to summon an all-German legislature
in Frankfurt, but did not know how to solve the conflicts that existed among ethnic claims. The Habsburgs, who under the energetic minister-president Felix zu Schwarzenberg and a new, young emperor, Franz Joseph, recovered their nerve and authority by the autumn of 1848, responded to the Frankfurt liberals that if the Austrian Empire was to form part of a new German national federation, the monarchy must enter as an integral unit with its non-German nation-t alities, Bohemians and Hungarians. The Prussians did not wish to leave out their
Polish subjects. The Frankfurt assembly would be suppressed before a "small
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German" alternative without the Habsburgs might be launched. Frustrated rad-; icals revolted again in the spring of 1849, rnost seriously the Hungarians whose national militia defeated the Austrians. Now the Russians decided that the agitation must be calmed and, with Vienna's approval, intervened. The Austrians: themselves extinguished the revived Italian national aspirations led by the king of Sardinia (whose kingdom, despite its official name, was based in Piedmont or Savoy) and Venice's own republic, while Louis Napoleon, newly elected as president of the French Republic, wooed French Catholics by sending troops to wipe out the Roman republic that had wrested power from the pope. A detachment of Prussian troops vacated the Frankfurt parliament and restored dynastic authority in Dresden and Baden. Richard Wagner, the composer, and his friend Gottfried Semper—later to design the grandiose Dresden opera house—fled from the Saxon barricades. The Austrian and Neapolitan dynasties were not charitable toward defeated revolutionaries, and their firing squads worked overtime.
What was snuffed out in 1849 was not the entire program, but the romantic elements—the belief that each national group might discover and build a state on its own Volksgeist, the genius of its people. Likewise the claims that personal liberty might motivate state building. Some parliaments survived the repression. The Savoy or Piedmontese "statute" and parliament conceded by King Carlo Alberto in the spring of 1848 would become the constitution and parliament of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860-1861. The Prussian parliament summoned in 1847 remained in being, although the suffrage would be restricted and skewed in favor of the wealthy. The last measures of formal serfdom remained abolished in the Austrian Empire. France would never again become a monarchy under its traditional dynastic families. Governments would recognize the force of public opinion as represented in assemblies and the press. The "winners" would continue the program of bringing the market to the countryside—the Piedmontese liberals would embark on extensive secularization in the 1860s, as would the Mexican liberals, who passed the Lerdo Law, dissolving not only church holdings but Indian village communes as well.
There were some exceptions to the revolutionary ferment. Where representative institutions were already in place and public debate remained untrammeled, young, frustrated middle-class crowds did not tend to rush into the streets. The
LEVIATHAN 2.0
Americas were liberal enough that no revolutionary upheavals took place. The United States was busy absorbing its recent conquests from Mexico. The slavery issue precluded any coalition of radicals. Britain's institutions were sufficiently liberal—if its suffrage hardly democratic—that it could escape unscathed except for massive outdoor gatherings on behalf of the People's Charter. At the other extreme, Russia was still able to resist and repress any liberal assault before it went beyond salon chatter. Still, elsewhere in the West, the age of positivism, of realism, of solid moneymaking and middle-class aspirations was to begin—and the geographic boundaries of states would soon be transformed.
In Asia, though, the huge convulsions lay elsewhere. China was weakened by the outcome of 1842, and then the vast upheaval of the Taiping, which would cost twenty to thirty million lives. This was hardly a liberal revolution, but in fact a civil war that originated in the ethnic clashes, new endemic banditry, and eschatological protest. The fragmented gentry's capacity for ensuring the stability of the Yangzi region and the tradition of self-policing communities were badly frayed. The dynasty and its administrators faced multiple challenges—the continuing and humiliating pressure from Europeans for economic and legal privileges, the erosion of a precarious economic order among poor and crowded settlements, and the addition of messianic Christian ideas to the repertory of redemptive hopes that frequently inspired protests. The Yangzi region, as during the earlier White Lotus rebellion, was roiled by conflicts among new migrants, Han Chinese, and communities of non-Han peoples, by grievances at the Man-chu leadership that had been humiliated in 1842, and by the pressure of taxes in increasingly scarce silver currency. Christian missionaries proposed a gospel that might fuse or confuse radical social ideas with promises of ultimate salvation. A leader emerged in Hong Xiuquan, born to immigrant peasant proprietors in 1814» studious but failing to pass the all-important civil service exams, and then converted to a millenarian Christianity by a Chinese missionary convert with a jumbled but austere doctrine of Chinese degradation and the need for redemption. The "Good Words to Exhort the Age" foresaw Chinese tribulations, such as also usually portended dynastic collapse, and left the concept of heavenly kingdom—imperial or supernatural—ambiguous. For Hong the "Good Words" were combined with denunciations of the Manchus and Confucian appeals to rectitude and good order and his own personal vision of having been transformed
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CHARLES S. MAIER \
I
physically as well as spiritually by God during a serious illness after his third f
examination failure. With his own first converts he migrated inland from the I
Canton coast to preach in the hilly southwest of Guangxi and found a receptive ■*»
hearing among the fellow Hakka, or northern Chinese migrants in the south. ■
Over the next years branches of the God Worshipping Society metastasized in I
the province and brought forth new leaders, including a gifted military commander, I
Yang Xiuqing. Conflicts with locals and bandits under famine conditions dur- '■
ing 1849-1850 led to the assembling of an army thousands strong and the procla- I
mation of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in January 1851. A Manchu f
force sent to disperse them was defeated and its general decapitated. f
Thereafter the Taiping army moved up the Yangzi, growing in size to a horde f
of over three hundred thousand, taking Wuchang, Anqing, then Nanjing in j
March 1853, killing all the Manchu inhabitants. Four kings were appointed }
alongside Hong, who claimed the titles "king of heaven," Tianwang, and "sec- t
ond son of God," and allowed Yang Xiuqing to assert his claim as third son, f
filled with the Holy Spirit. The Land Regulation of the Heavenly Dynasty de- 1
creed from Nanjing envisaged that the countryside would be divided into units ', I
of twenty-five families each. Wine, opium, and tobacco were prohibited, as were t nonmarital sexual relations, which, as might be expected from earlier such Utopian foundings, did not preclude exemptions and privileges among the hierarchy. From Nanjing the Taiping divided their forces to attack north and west. But the expedition to Beijing failed at Tianjin, and its remnants were wiped out in the spring of 1855.
The forces of order who organized to resist this wave of what they perceived ~% f as Christian radical barbarism were local gentry commanders who had raised ethnic militias since the White Lotus rebellion, the talented Zeng Guofan in the lead. They defended an ideology of puritan Confucianism, which stressed the traditional precepts of a well-ordered social hierarchy under the emperor but
combined with a mastery of new military technology, a reorganized Chinese ;. (and not Manchu) army, and a less oppressive tax system. They did not immediately prevail, however. The Taiping held a three-hundred-mile stretch of the
Yangzi from Wuchang to Zhenjiang and scored important victories in 1855- : ■
1856. Nonetheless, conflicting ambitions and ruthless mutual jealousies were *' K dividing the rival Taiping "kings," who murdered each other successively along
LEVIATHAN Z.O
with their families and thousands of adherents. Despite the bloodbaths, the Taiping reorganized and found a new gifted military commander and civilian administrator in Hong Ren gan, who was a cousin of HongXiuquan and moved to turn toward a more orthodox Christianity and connections with the mercantile elements downriver in Shanghai. Still, the process of attrition became stronger even though the Beijing court distrusted Zengs local initiatives and strength. The imperial forces moved to control the Yangzi above the Taiping and scored victories below them. The rebels failed to take the Wuhan cities to their west. Hong Ren'gan sought to assure the British in Shanghai that he would form a more orderly administration than the Manchu court, who had just lost another war against the British. But the British minister in China, Frederick Bruce, was convinced that the Taiping of any stripe were radical, unreliable, and inimical to the interests of commercial order. With French assistance the British helped ferry imperial ttoops upriver. In July 1864, Hong died, perhaps, so it was rumored, poisoned, and Zeng Guoquan, the brother of Zeng Guofan, conquered Nanjing, massacred its inhabitants, and burned the city.
The civil war had raged over an area equivalent to France and Germany for almost a decade and a half and had involved a million insurgents in military campaigns. Another vast civil war half a world away in the United States was grinding its rebel armies to defeat in the same months. Could the Taiping have prevailed and toppled the Manchu dynasty? They had engendered tremendous loyalties on the basis of an eschatological program. Nonetheless, their communities also remained outside the traditional society of the countryside. In this they differed from some of the other forces for endemic disorder in China, whether the ethnic uprisings of the Miao aborigines in the 1830s or the simultaneous rebellion of the Nian further north, who like the White Lotus and Triads in effect permeated peasant life. Anti-Manchu the Taiping might be, but they also remained outsiders among the Han Chinese majority. The local elites of the Yangzi region, moreover, were not prepared to see a Manchu dynasty toppled at the cost of unrest. In this, as we shall see, they resembled the forces of order, who would build new regimes conducive to reform from above throughout Europe, the Americas, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.51
It was not surprising that the British had decided to join in the suppression of this persistent rebellion. Seven years earlier they had faced their own frightening
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uprising, the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, which in fact had threatened to develop as a major revolt against their thin presence in India. Ostensibly it had started as a revolt among the Muslim soldiers whom the English had recruited to police their growing acquisitions in northern and central India as they wove one native principality after another into their dominion, whether by displacing its ruler or having him recognize London's authority. But, as C. A. Bayly emphasizes, there was a long history of forcible resistance to Mughal taxation and then to the takeover of territory and financial rights by the EIC in the previous decades. "Revolt was inevitable in areas where more fluid, segmented forms of polities had been preserved by climate or terrain from the weaker pressures of Mughal centralisation."52 The British presence meant new pressure to support the EIC's army and to extract crops for export. It was easier for the English to co-opt urban Indian elites than the diffuse forces of the countryside, which often were galvanized by religious reform movements. But no consistent socioeconomic background seems to have united the revolutionary forces; in some places they were hard-pressed villages squeezed by new taxes; in others, new peasant proprietors that the British had counted on as the basis for a new loyal class. Rural class divisions increased in the decades after 1857, not before. Those magnates who had done well in the preceding half century as the British moved in hesitated to throw in their lot with the rebels, as did civil servants and Indians in commerce.
Still, because the British were a numerically small presence in a massive terrain, the uprisings had the potential to destroy their position throughout the subcontinent. The revolt broke out when the British commander of a local garrison punished soldiers who refused to distribute new rifle cartridges greased with animal fat. The colonizers soon confronted frightening and widespread uprisings, which they believed were encouraged by the shadowy and hardly substantive authority of the Mughal dynasty in Delhi. The rebels held Delhi from May to September 1857 and besieged Lucknow until November. But the British never lost control of the Ganges valley and the trunk road between Delhi and Calcutta, nor of their base in Bengal. They retained the loyalty of the Sikh units in the Punjab and could march east on beleaguered Delhi. Once the British overcame the emergency, they would force the formal end of the Mughals and take over their position, transferring formal power from the EIC to their own officials.
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In China they finally threw their lot in on the side of the dynasty, recognizing a fundamentally different structure. The Chinese dynasty was weak, but the country was not built on a substructure of principalities that might be subordinated to London's governance. China remained a still-massive cultural and political entity whose government could grant them the concessions they needed. Between 1856 and i860, the British gained additional territory for Hong Kong and further commercial connections in the so-called Second Opium (or Arrow) War, triggered by the Guangzhou police's effort to arrest Chinese crew members on an opium vessel, the Arrow, formerly—but no longer—under British registry. The move provoked the British admiral to bombard Guangzhou; the Whigs in parliament challenged Prime Minister Palmerston over the bellicose response, but were set back in new elections. Responding to the murder of a French missionary, Napoleon III threw in his forces alongside London's. The British and French attacked Chinese forts up the coast in Tianjin, forced an armistice that opened new treaty ports along the northern coast, allowed missionaries the right to travel, imposed reparations, and finally compelled the Chinese to legalize the domestic sale of opium, a move they had managed to resist after 1842. The right to exploit the opium commerce had been the longer-term objective of the London government. When the newly gained acquisitions proved difficult to enforce, the British commander, Lord Elgin, the son of the Elgin who had carted home the Parthenon's frieze, attacked Beijing, torched the summer palace (partly designed in French rococo style), extracted higher reparations, acquired the Kow-loon territory around Hong Kong, and added Tianjin to the treaty ports. It was this debacle coupled with the evident weakness of the rulers that would finally compel reorganization of the empire—increasingly as a Chinese national state and less as a Manchu dynastic enterprise. Having secured the compliance of Beijing, the British decided that propping up their official source of their semicolo-nized regime was preferable to watching it succumb to xenophobic and unrestrained radicals.53
In any case, the end of the Taipings—like the extirpation of the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier, like the defeat of Polish rebels a year earlier in 1863, like the collapse and surrender of the Confederate States of America a year later, and the failure of the feudal Tokugawa forces in 1868 Japan—suggested that rebellion was a forlorn option. The long century of modern statehood would be built on
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the ashes of revolution, the reform of institutions not from "below"—not by the effort by peasant or national populists to bring about the millennium—but by programs of modernization and rationalization carried out both by farseeing conservative statesmen and middle classes, enthusiasts of the 1840s who had become the sagacious statesmen of the 1850s and 1860s. Their achievement, too, would require violence, but the measured and directed violence of warfare and repression, not rebellion.
2. Reconstruction on a World Scale
DEVELOPMENTS from 1850 to 1880 wrought major transformations in the organization of states across the globe. They constitute a genuine "moment" of world history. Political jurisdictions changed as territorial states were torn apart from within and then reconstituted on a more cohesive basis. Local leaders found that more distant authorities had greater say over their power and their finances. The social origins of men claiming public office and influence became more diverse. Whether by virtue of their professional education, or industrial and financial wealth, newcomers who came from outside the ranks of landowning elites, old families, or military office achieved a far greater voice over public affairs. They hardly replaced the former ruling groups; usually they were recruited to serve alongside them in moments when their exclusion threatened state survival or stability.
Long-distance communication, movement of peoples, and shipment of goods became more rapid and dense. Global space seemed more of a continuum, suffused no longer by divine transcendence but by vibrations of unseen energy. Paradoxically, for all the awareness of rapid communication, intellectual systems rarely became more cosmopolitan or tolerant. Ideas of pervasive rivalry and conflict often replaced dreams of fraternity. War "fulfills its cruel but indispensable role in the progress of the human spirit," wrote Italian observers of the Prussian triumph over France in December 1870.54 The appeal to brotherhood tended to relocate from patriots and poets to proletarians greeting their supposed class brothers.
These developments pose two fundamental puzzles. The first is why so many decisive changes seemed to occur concurrently with such suddenness. The tempo of change is mysterious in many large-scale phenomena—"tipping points" can be modeled for many fields, but why they come when they do remains to challenge natural scientists and historians alike. The second riddle is why so many states and societies worldwide underwent analogous transformations at the same time.
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Compression in time and extension across space remain to challenge explanation. Why does history become global? The reconstruction of states became an imperative in the Western Hemisphere, whether in the divided and then reconstituted United States, a reorganized Canadian federation, a Mexico that lost vast territories to its northern neighbor but then went on to defeat a French invader, or an Argentina that threw off dictatorship. Europe, too, was reassemblei! at its center and at the edges. Italian and German nationalists achieved unification, Austria-Hungary renegotiated its ethnic balance of power; the Spanish monarchy was abolished, briefly pulverized, and then patched together, the Ot toman state redefined its constituent principles; while the military and bureaucrats of the Russian Empire sought to overcome what they recognized as the besetting impediments of serfdom. In East Asia ambitious Japanese samurai administrators determined to create an effective modern state that would challenge the ingrown shogunate; and frustrated Chinese officials endeavored to mobilize Confucian principles to reverse their polity's catastrophic experience of rebellion, floods, and foreign incursion.
No doubt the process was infectious. States exist in an implicitly competitive universe. Major initiatives in one must impact on others. But not just diffusion or contagion was at stake. Pressures for transformation arose from within many societies simultaneously. We can't rerun the course of history to test whether or not regimes in isolation would or would not have reconstructed their institutions. Before 1S50 the Japanese state had been the large polity most insulated - I perhaps from foreign impact. It went into a fifteen-year crisis and transformation only after the outer world seemed finally to press determinedly at its gates, but there were certainly many pressures emanating from its own stratified society that were likely to compel far-reaching adjustment, and we cannot know how much change they would have compelled on their own. Did change, moreover, always emanate from "below"? Marx famously distinguished the "forces of production"—the levels of technology, and the social classes they brought to the fore—from the "relations of production" inscribed in legal and political institu- ■ \ tions. He saw the pressures of the former leading to crises and revolutionary a d-justments in the latter. Yet most historians are likely to describe a recursive process with many feedbacks, just as they envisage a recursive relationship between ! the realm of ideas and that of economic progress.
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Many aspects of ordinary life, moreover, did not change qualitatively in the period, or changed at a less disrupting pace. This particular history follows the world of political transactions, not household existence and not the bonds of intimate loyalties. For masses of people the events recorded here did not seem to impact on their daily routines. The worker enclosed from sunup to sundown in a noisy textile mill, the domestic servant cleaning and cooking, the young man single-mindedly smitten by the young woman he passed daily on the street, the child savagely cuffed by a stepparent, the rural family facing hunger from drought and erosion, may not have sensed their lives were being transformed by a common sovereign for Naples and Florence, or a new German civil code, a new definition of Ottoman citizenship, or the burning of the Chinese emperor's summer palace by French and British soldiers. The chance to vote for a delegate to a national parliament hardly allowed the abused child to strike back, or the domestic servant to be impertinent, or, in many areas of the world, the young woman to follow her own inclinations in matters of the heart. Nonetheless, states would irrevocably touch even humble lives. They could expand educational opportunities, facilitate employment, encourage (or impede) inward and outward migration, insist on the ending of inherited personal bondage-—if only to send the formerly bonded into the constraints of hard agricultural labor or long factory disciplines. States sometimes expanded and probably sometimes constrained the possibilities of personal fulfillment and household life. But then the pressures within millions of households had sent states careening as well.
The state was to be strengthened, but largely to remain viable in a world of state competitiveness, and only indirectly to cope with issues of poverty and income maintenance, except that order had to be maintained. Commentators tended to analyze the social costs of economic transition as a problem of individual or family difficulty, sometimes based on poverty, sometimes on moral failures. They organized charities, benevolent associations, educational reform, and later on, crusades for temperance and against sexual trafficking. Above all, serious-minded middle-class women, who could not go into politics, could devote their energy to these efforts on behalf of respectability and sobriety. I n the West, these reformist if sometimes patronizing attitudes had begun to emerge a decade or two before midcentury. The formation of reform associations, which took off in Britain and the United States in the 1830s, but marked the continent
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in subsequent decades, whether through the St. Vincent de Paul societies in France, or the Lutheran Church Diet in Germany, were part of the tremendous organizational effort that nineteenth-century society generated. Similar earnestness marked those in non-Western societies who responded to the Western challenge. Both Christian and Muslim intellectuals throughout the Levant and Egypt argued for the need to strengthen Eastern societies through urging them to learn about the scientific progress and discoveries recently made in Europe, and infusing them with a stronger sense of unity among "Easterners."56 The extraordinary influence of the didactic tract Self-Help by the British author Samuel Smiles testified to the search for self-strengthening measures. The Scottish author began as a political reformer and a critic of laissez-faire, not the smug justifier of success or wealth. An Arabic translation was published in Cairo and Beirut in several editions as early as 1886, followed over the years by editions in Chinese, Punjabi, and Japanese, which sold a million copies.57
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, supremely talented in giving sentimental voice to middle-class pieties, wrote, "Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal." Above all the midcentury world was earnest. Institution building reflected the earnestness. The personalis! regimes of the 1810s and 1830s—led by such brilliant, reformist, but often autocratic generals as Simon Bolivar, "the Liberator" in Colombia and Venezuela, Mehmet Ali in Egypt and the Middle East, and, in some respects though under constitutional restraints, Andrew Jackson—seemed less suitable for the midcentury decades. Witness the repeated disasters incurred by the vainglorious Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose small expeditionary force ignited Sicily and southern Italy in i860, was the closest to the Latin American model, but when he got to the midpoint of the peninsula he turned his forces over to the organizers of Italian unification from the north. The leaders who set their stamp on state building were serious and conservative, personifications of gravitas and patience—whether Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juarez, Otto von Bismarck, Ito Hirobumi, who was active in Meiji politics into the twentieth century, or the remarkable Zeng Guofan, the organizer of victory against the Taiping and continual advocate of Chinese technology and modernization. Chinese conditions, however, did not let such clear-sighted recommendations prevail.
The world of states that emerged by 1880 was a different one from that of a generation earlier—in Asia as well as the West. By then, despite the reluctance of some of its organizers, the state would have to engage with serious social issues— whether farm distress in Central Europe and western North America, factory regulation and even old age in Germany, or opium addiction and military backwardness in China. It was a world of projects and work—the labor of organizing enterprises, of reforming education, of writing huge novels and large symphonies, pressing forward with ambitious political programs, uplifting darker-skinned peoples as well as working them hard for low wages, wagering on warfare.
Iron and Blood
Technological transformation was a critical input to the reorganization of states. Bismarck told the Prussian parliament in 1862 that the great questions of the day were being decided not by high ideals and lofty speeches, but by "blood and iron." He was correct. But the role of iron was newer than the role of blood. The British had achieved commercial supremacy, and built the financial leadership that came with it, originally on mechanized cotton and textile production (and indirectly slave and proletarian labor). The cotton mills erected in new industrial towns such as Manchester or soon thereafter in Lille, France, or Pawtucket, Rhode Island, were large sheds that grouped ingenious but relatively light machines powered by water or steam to spin and weave unprecedented quantities of fiber into textiles. So far as the organization of society was concerned, their epoch-making innovation was to induce a workforce to assemble together under a time discipline set by the proprietors as the condition for tapping hitherto undreamed of quantities of nonanimate power to apply to their labor. Textile factories and later iron-smelting furnaces brought new urbanization, as suggested by the sample of city populations in Table 1.1.
Hard upon this transformed productive process arrived a wave of innovation in transportation of people and goods, based on self-propelled steam engines that ran on parallel rails or were mounted on ships. James Watt had developed the decisive improvements that made the modern steam engine possible as early as the 1730s. His design condensed the spent steam in a cooling compartment
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table 1.1
Selected urban populations
	1800	1850	1890
London	959,000	2,362,000	4,212,000
Paris	547,000	1,053,000	1,448,000
Naples	400,000 (est.)	415,000	463,000
New York	63,000	661,000	2,741,000
Chicago	—	; 0,000	1,100,000
Manchester/Salford	90,000	389,000	704,000
St. Petersburg	270,000	490,000	1,003,000
Sonne: Adna Ferrin Weber, 77« Growth of Cilia in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967}, p. 450, tabic 163.
separate from the chamber in which the heated steam drove the piston, thus avoiding having to cool the engine between strokes. Watt had also devised the off-center fastening of the connecting rod that could convert the reciprocal action of the piston into the smooth rotary motion of a wheel. From 1803, the; innovations were fitted to the paddlewheel boat that could travel upstream and propel a vessel no longer dependent on wind direction. By the 1830s steamboats were traveling intercontinentally. They did not displace sailing vessels right away but in fact led sailing ship designers to perfect the rapid clippers that expanded the China trade. As early as 1804 the steam engine was fitted to a vehicle that could run on parallel rails to haul iron, and a passenger steam train was installed in Wales in 1807. The first routes that had more than curiosity value were opened in 1830 in Britain and the United States—Manchester to Liverpool, Washington to Baltimore, Boston to its suburbs and then to Worcester, from Nuremberg to its suburb of Fürth in 1834, from Brussels to Mechelen in 1835, from the summer palace town of Tsarskoe Selo to St. Petersburg, and by 1851 in India, 1855 across Panama, 1857 in Argentina, and 1872 from Tokyo to Yokohama. In the 1850s, mileage began to increase significantly: World railroad construction had amounted to 4,700 miles by 1840; then 19,200 by 1850; 43,299 by i860; 63,300 by 1870; 101,100 ten years later by 1880; 151,200 by 1890. By 1850, US rail mileage was close to 8,600 miles; by 1861, 30,600, with 21,000 in the North (of which
11,000 in the midwestern states from Ohio to Kansas, Missouri, and Minnesota), and 9,500 in the South. By the end of the century world rail mileage was close to half a million miles, of which the United States had 185,000, while Britain, Germany, France, and European Russia had about 25,000 to 30,000 each.58
These were extraordinary developments, less because they displaced canal and turnpike traffic at first, but because they increased speed and incentivized technological breakthroughs. "Breasting the wind and light, the shower and sunshine, away and still away, [the steam train] rolls and roars, fierce and rapid, smooth and certain." "We believe that the steam engine, upon land, is to be one of the most valuable agents of the present age, because it is swifter than the greyhound, and powerful as a thousand horses, because it has no passions and no motive, because it is guided by its directors, because it runs and never tires, because it may be applied to so many uses, and expanded to any strength."" The technologies entailed in turn a vast expansion of iron (and later steel) production and fashioning—a far more power-intensive process than textiles required and one in turn calling for the extraction of huge amounts of coal and ore (Table 1.2). Britain would forge ahead into this era of heavy machinery and by the 1860s iron ships, developing new techniques for smelting iron and then purifying it into steel, requiring ever-larger tonnages of coal and coke. Britain, however, would increasingly share its economic preeminence with Germany and the United States. They increased the demand for coal, then for steel, which in turn required expansion of rail service to haul the coal and ore.
Building railways required organizing large pools of investors. Coordinating rail lines over long distances encouraged decentralized modular management techniques as well as centralized supervision. The early short trains moved slowly but much faster than lurching coaches. Before the railroad, almost a week was required to cover the 380 miles from Pittsburgh to New York; by i860 it was a day's journey. Midcentury wars—the large brutal combats that marked the seam dividing the first half the century from the second: Crimea, the American Civil War, the German wars of unification—accelerated the technology of moving individuals, large groups of soldiers, and their equipment. Pullman sleeping cars became an attainable upper-middle-class luxury in the late 1860s, brought into American public consciousness by Lincoln's funeral train. Transporting dead cows or swine en masse was a greater challenge. The development of refrigerator
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a continent—the United States, Canada, and later the Russian Empire— national political and commercial ambitions led pro-railroad coalitions to advocate that tracks should span the immense distances from East to West (as for Argentina and Chile, north-south construction was likewise compelling). Once its Civil War ended, the United States sutured together its first transcontinental line in 1869. A decade and a half later, completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885 could be celebrated as the great Canadian national epic. It may well have been a defensive response to the transcontinental US rail lines.61 The Russian state laid down its trans-Siberian line only in the first years of the twentieth century, but the fiscal exertions that were required aroused strong opposition to the reformist prime minister, Count Sergei Witte, who determinedly pressed the project forward. In China, the railroad advocates could not find the same support. An early line in Beijing was removed; the 1876 British-built line from Shanghai to nearby Wusong offended the government's sense of sovereignty and was destroyed the next year. Reform-minded officials understood the stakes and outlined the consequences. Xue Fucheng despairingly reported that "all the European countries are competing with one another for wealth and strength and their rise to prosperity is rapid. What they rely upon are steamships and railroads ... if the system of railways trains is not used, China can never be rich and strong." He understood the impact on prices: America built railroads whenever it opened untilled land: and one could travel from New York to San Francisco; ten times as rapidly as one might under Chinese conditions and at one-tenth the price. But if China should adopt the railroad, "then distant areas could be brought near, the stagnant could be made to flow, the expense could be saved, and the scattered could be concentrated." And as other officials warned, Japan was following these policies with aggressive intent.61
Railroads appealed to private investors and rulers alike. Above all they appealed to investors when the state guaranteed the returns, as it did in Canada from 1849, and in France under the Second Empire, which struck bargains with the six major lines radiating outward from Paris, as did the Third Republic in the 1880s. Railroads were major investments, but they were immensely profitable because national governments provided indirect subsidies, whether through tax concessions, guarantees of interest on the bonds issued, or help in acquiring land. The United States and again the Canadians, in their second phase of development,
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offered alternate square-mile tracts along the right-of way, often with valuable mineral rights, but also designed to tempt settlers. As the rulers of imperial possessions, the British would build railroads across India for purposes of defense as well as development. Late developers imported capital and technology. Sultan Abdiilhamid (1878-1908) in the Ottoman Empire, and Porfirio Diaz (his almost exact contemporary as authoritarian president of Mexico from 1878 to 1911), worked with the Germans and Americans, respectively.
Railroad construction shaped the internal political coalitions that dominated states with representative institutions, or at least stock exchanges. With state guarantees, railroad consortia attracted both those groups that controlled financial capital and those agrarian elites who could mobilize the wealth of commodity production. Even before the American Civil War the outlines had emerged, as powerful railroad interests supported by Illinois Democratic Party senator Stephen Douglas bowed to Southern party members to secure the territorial administration in the West that was seen as the prerequisite for investing in further rail lines. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 sponsored by Douglas and eloquently opposed by Abraham Lincoln stipulated that local voters should be able to legalize slavery in their respective territories despite the earlier prohibition on allowing it to be instituted so far north. Douglas and the railroads won the issue temporarily, only to inflame the underlying national conflict over slavery. Within a decade the railroad sutured together Chicago and its agrarian hinterland but further divided the country. Ironically, the North's extensive rail development helped it prevail in the great war that Lincoln was to conduct against the secessionist South. Rail lines let the North project force into the central areas of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Valley, and slowly choke the Confederacy. The great spurt in Southern railroads began in the years after 1865, although the crisis of 1873 interrupted the progress. When it resumed, Northern capital played a far larger role, especially the Illinois Central Railroad's domination of the Mississippi Valley.
The planter class slowly learned a lesson. Plantation owners teamed up with Northern industrial interests to extend railroads into the ex-Confederate states and simultaneously to undermine the Northern commitment to Reconsttuction and subject the African-American workforce on the land to new modalities of subjection. As in many countries, railroad investment opportunities would draw
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together "old" elites from the land and the "new men" who had risen in industry. This was true in Europe, North and South America, and Europe's colonies. Political elites (some elected and some career bureaucrats), landed magnates and city bankers, and a great mass of smaller investors swept by enthusiasm for profits and technology formed a new iron triangle that would dominate politics.63
Of course, at the local level, men of property and wealth usually controlled; the labor and conditions of life of those who depended on them. In villages the world over, the major landowners enjoyed power, and deference—by which is meant that general respect their tenants or village residents showed them without continual compulsion. Alexis deTocqueville relates how in 1848 in France—a country, after all, that had had a major revolution, and repeated minor ones— the peasants on his land came to solicit his advice on exercising the new right to vote. Fifty years later the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci would develop the concept of ideological "hegemony," by which he meant the general acceptance of law and private property and the existing social structure on the part of even those who were at the bottom of the economic pyramid, which was the true cement of domination—"soft power" applied to class relations. US conditions probably allowed the least deference, at least outside the coercive framework of African-American slavery. Eastern European, Balkan, and Ottoman societies incorporated more. Peasants touched their brows or kissed their landlord's hem. In Japan until the Meiji "revolution," ostentatious bowing before noble samurai was expected of peasants, and consequences could be severe if it was not provided. The intervention of peasants into East Asian politics remained confined to periodic upheaval and resistance.
Power at the regional level (whether in American states, French departments, German duchies, and so on), and at the central level, rested with traditional elites, but it had been challenged in the 1830s and 1840s by the new men of substance, whether of industrial and commercial wealth, professional degrees, or bureaucratic employment. European analysts then and since termed them bour--geois, or sometimes middle class, although that designation often described a more modest stratum. The 1848 revolutions had seen these elements try to seize power, but retreat with their own internal divisions. The politics of the 1850s and 1860s, however, became transformational but along new lines. Where political parties had become important they became less ideologically coherent. British
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Tories split on the fundamental issue of tariffs, American Whigs on slavery, i £ven where there were no parties, political elites would divide over issues of industrial modernization and political centralization—whether in Mexico, Japan, Italy, or Prussia. This would create the worldwide alignments that struggled to remake or preserve the societies in the decades that followed.
Wars of National Reconstitution
The reconstitution of states was not a peaceful process. It entailed violence and warfare on all continents, although to a lesser degree in Africa as of midcentury. ■In some cases long-constituted nations took up arms once again. Whereas in : Central Europe political publics felt that their nations already existed on a spiritual plane—"The nation exists in the same way that the individual does, and has ho need of a people or a Parliament to proclaim the fact," Francesco Crispi wrote the venerated Italian nationalist propagandist Giuseppe Mazzini in March ; 1865s4—in Latin America the long struggles for independence in the 182,0s had left armies, churchmen, planters, and cattlemen yet to form coherent republics. This was a process that emerged from warfare rather than preceding it.65 Between the mid-i850s and mid-i86os, the British were fighting in Russia, struggling to suppress a major rebellion in India, engaging in combats on the coast of China, and sporadically intervening in Latin America. The French were fighting :in the same war in Russia, the same campaign in China, and then in a major expedition in Mexico. The United States, which had invaded Mexico in the 1840s, was sending military expeditions throughout Central America, landing forces in Uruguay and Argentina, and then consuming its men and energies in its Civil War. Many of the wars were national, as state builders consolidated their new ^territories through armed struggle, whether to overcome foreign resistance or forge sentiments of unity at home. Other conflicts were internal or "civil," contests of force over crucial issues of who would rule at home and on what principles once compromise had broken down. Some wars had aspects of both sorts. .The old landed empires—Habsburg and Ottoman—proved particularly vulner-able as aspirations for national state building became more intense among subject, popula tions. These geopolitical assemblages were embroiled in recurrent conflicts in which foreign states joined indigenous nationalities in campaigns
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against the imperial center. Russia fared better: after in itial defeat in the Crimean War against Britain, France, and Savoy, it could expand at the expense of the Ottomans and Central Asian khanates.
Historians of Europe sometimes downplay the importance of the wars of re-constitution in comparison either with the twenty-five years of warfare that involved the French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion between 1792 and 1815 or with the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. It is true that warfare abated for a generation after 1815, although the contests for indcr pendence in Latin America and European portions of the Ottoman Empire flared anew in the 1820s and 1830s. Armed conflicts that might best be termed wars of European expansion led to the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and the 1842 Anglo-Chinese clash in the southetn Chinese river deltas—the so-called Opium War of 1842. At the same time that the British took up the Chinese challenge to their commercial rights in Guangzhou, they were pushing toward the Indus River valley in the states of western India, alrhough they penetrated by a politics of alliance with local princes and rajas as much as by any show of force. Nonetheless, the politics of expansion led them into the fint Afghan war of 1846. Wars of European or "white" expansion against the indigenous confederations of the Americas, Africa, and Central Asia would resume i :i the 1860s and 1870s, far from the capitals of their own home territories. They represented a transitional sort of conflict—wars in part to expand the power of the encroaching states, but simultaneously campaigns that suggested a new geno-cidal type of assault that would flourish in the twentieth century. Increasingly wars of national reconstitution were also wars of tribal destruction.
Of course, there was tremendous variety in terms of size and scope, troops committed, and duration. But these wars involved efforts to change the bases and organization of class and national solidarity. Dynastic claims, which had been so prominent in European conflicts through the eighteenth century, still played a role in the Carlist civil war in Spain in the 1830s and served as a pretext in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 but otherwise were superseded. Some wars arose from rebellion or efforts at secession; others involved efforts at annexation or sought centralization of territorial authority. Not that they were always conceived of in those terms, but these became the implicit or explicit stakes.
,\ climactic war of national unification: An illustration of German troops bombarding Paris in the fall of 1870. After the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War was the largest of the nation-building conflicts that marked the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Germans' rapid victory startled observers and allowed Otto von Bismarck to complete the architecture of the unified German Empire, while the defeat led the French to replace their Second Empire with a besieged Third Republic, (Library of Congress)
The critic can object: are not all wars in some sense wars of national reconstitution? Certainly the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon involved s:reat changes in the management of Napoleon's satellite states, as many learned ) ram the advantages that French national mobilization seemed to confer. The \s ars in Europe and the Americas from 1792 to 1830 wiped out a great deal of territorial administration by the Church, enlisted new educated elites in administration, opened up the higher military ranks to talented commanders, let the British wrest decisive maritime hegemony, and mobilized large armies. Still, they v. ere often conceived of as consequences of radical and revolutionary upheaval or later of Bonaparte s insatiable ambition; and at their conclusion there would be a major effort to restabilize a hierarchical order based on the class and constitutional equilibria of the late eighteenth century and a somewhat patched-up
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balance of power. The rulers who finally won on the continent even envisaged a restoration based on strengthened Christian principles, the Holy Alliance. Only in the Americas could self-made military commanders such as Andrew Jackson or Simon Bolivar challenge the imagery of a restored agrarian order in favor of populist republics.
The wars of national reconstitution from the late 1840s to the late 1870s shated some of these traits. But there was no would-be hegemonic emperor at thei r center and no radical ideology. They became wars for or against an encroaching nation-state order, efforts to complete the work of secularization and to challenge multiethnic empire. They were wars to survive in a world of war and of warring national states. Insofar as they led to international efforts designed to mitigate the violence, such as organization of the Red Cross of 1864 (and shortly thete after the Red Crescent), they primarily laid down the ground rules for future war. Some of these struggles are listed in Table 1.3.
The European conflicts and the American Civil War represented armed struggles to impose—or to oppose—the construction of states built on reconstituted national or imperial principles against forces that defended a traditional y.:;:::il and political organization. They might also be called wars of modernization in that regardless of their intent or motivation, they resulted in societal arrangements closer to ones that prevail today. They would be followed by sever.il decades in which the very nation-states consolidated in midcentury would tur 1 their mobilized energies and technical prowess out to the "periphery." These produced the defensive struggles by nomadic confederations at the perimeters of white settlement that were mentioned the introduction, but other confrontations as well, through the 1880s and continuing until the end of the century, struggles marked by savagery on both sides: the American Indian resistance against US control of the Missouri Valley region, and the Apaches' battles in the Southwest in the iS8os; the British conquest of the Zulu states resistance against British control in South Africa; the doomed effort by the Central Asian khanates against Russian control of Central Asian steppes and highlands; thereafter the quasi-genocidal Argentine conquest of Patagonia and the ongoing sporadic resistance in Yucatan of the Maya against the Mexican national authorities. But there vese also wars of conquest against the small states of the perimeter. The War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay included elements of racialized warfare that
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leviathan 2..0 table i.j
Wars of national reconstitution
1545- 1847    War of Swiss national consolidation (Sonderbund War).
1546- 1848    US-Texan-Mexican war for control of northern Mexican territory.
1848-1849    War for the control of northern Italy: Piedmont and volunteers against Austria.
1S49 Austro-Russian war to suppress Magyar rebellion against Habsburg rule.
1850-1864 Yangzi Valley war between secessionist Taiping state and Chinese Empire. 1S53-1855     Anglo-French-Piedmontese war in the Crimea to limit Russian power in
the Black Sea and Ottoman arenas. Settlement at Congress of Paris. 1S56-1857    British suppressions of military insurrections in India and enhancement of
colonial control.
1S56-1860    Second Opium or Arrow War: Britain and France extract further Chinese
acceptance of extraterritoriality regime. 1S58-1860    Civil war ("War of the Reform") in Mexico.
1S58-1860    Rebellions in Ottoman Near East; sectarian strife in Mt. Lebanon, Beirut, Damascus.
1859-1860    Franco/Savoy-Austrian war to remove northern Italy from Austrian
control, carried out in conjunction with Garibaldian intervention to wrest
south Italy from the Bourbon regime. 18605 The "Brigandage" in southern Italy: continuing guerrilla attacks against
the new Italian administration/occupation; finally suppressed with fierce
reprisals by the new Kingdom. Unsuccessful Garibaldian campaigns
against Rome in 1862. and 1867. 1861-1865    US war to repress secession of Confederate States. 1863-1866    French expeditionary force to seize control of Mexico. Mexican civil war. 1S64 War of German Confederation against Denmark over nationality of
Schleswig. Leads to 1866 Austro-Prussian war for leadership in German
Central Europe and Prussian-Italian-Austrian war to remove Austrians
from Veneria and Alpine regions. 1S64-1870    War of the Triple Alliance: Paraguay loses 80,000 inhabitants, or half its
male population, age 13-60, and 40 percent of its territory to Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay.
1866- 1869    Unsuccessful Cretan (Greek) revolt against Ottomans.
1867- 1868   Japanese civil war: Tokugawa adherents defeated by Meiji national forces. 1870-1871    Franco-Prussian war for territorial rearrangements and to unify North
and South Germany under Prussia.
(continued)
• I  mo 1.
charles s. maier table 1.3
Wars of national reconstitution (continued)
1875-187S    Russian defeat of Ottomans in support of Bulgarian independence struggle. Treaty of San Stefano and, later, a revised general European settlement at Congress of Berlin.
Source: Brian Holden Reid, Tlx Civil War and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century (New York: HarperCollins/ Smithsonian Books, 1006).
Note: The list is partial and omits some secessionist episodes, as in Spain (1873). but includes China's unsuccessful efforts to resist European pressure.
may have led to the highest national death rates of any modern war, perhaps 50 percent of the prewar population. Paraguay, though, was still a well-organized state with diplomatic representation.
Once the conquest of the perimeter and its peoples was largely accomplished—a result that US citizens called the closing of the frontier—the twentieth century would begin with the great wars (1894-192,3) between contending imperial states-some ascending in power, others confronting once again, as they had a genei aiion earlier, difficult internal crises.
Although they mobilized less manpower and exacted a lower level of casualties from participants (except for the Taiping uprising and American Civil War) than the Napoleonic wars or the First World War, the midcentury wan of national reconstitution could become protracted, often involving wars ol position, sieges, and long fronts. Bismarck was correct about the iron as well as rhu blood. The victors in these struggles drew on the resources of the Industrial Revolution: breech-loading rifles and the early versions of rapid-fire repeating guns, more-deadly artillery, ironclad ships, and the gunboats that proved decisive in river fighting. Prototype submarines and the early torpedo (invented by a British engineer in Austrian Trieste) made their appearance. Most important was the development of the railroads, which could move masses of soldiers with relative speed. This signaled the difference between the American Civil War and the wars of German unification, on the one hand, and the great Chinese civil war, the Taiping rebellion, which, though it began much c-ihei, would be settled in the same years of the 1860s. The Chinese fighting, though
LEVIATHAN Z.O
it featured massive sanguinary massacres, saw units of five to fifteen thousand troops ferried east and west on the Yangzi; the American fighting brought armies of over a hundred thousand to bear by means of the railroad, as well as sea and river communications."
Clear-sighted military attaches sent to observe these great conflicts or sometimes seconded to assist in them could discern another fact: although railroads might deploy armies more rapidly and in greater numbers, and modem artillery might reduce old-style fortifications, the defense could tenaciously dig in, as did Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Virginia. In some respects the brilliant victory of Prussia over Austria in the summer of 1866 was misleading. Although it was decisive for the ascendancy of Prussia and the German national state, the Prussian triumph at Koniggratz (Sadowa) in Moravia resulted from relatively bid-style tactics of a line offensive that was successful against a decrepit adversary. As the most astute observer, Archduke Albrecht of Austria, observed, the Prussians devolved responsibility on corps officers whereas his own imperial army organization impeded responsibility at all levels.67 Encouraging small-unit initiative remained the key to battlefield success from earlier French victories under Napoleon to later German triumphs in 1940, and the approach would deeply influence Israeli doctrine long after 1945.
Just as fundamental a lesson was that that modern war was often decided away from the battlefield, in those organizations required for the state mobilization of power. The Prussians had pioneered the general staff, a military think tank whose officers served both as a central planning office and as operational consultants with the battlefield units. The very grinding nature of the warfare also meant that state agencies—to procure materiel, supervise transport, supply and arsenals, organize credit and finance, and develop medical services—had to be organized or enlarged. The toll taken by projectiles led to reorganization of military hospitals: Florence Nightingale's work for the British army in Crimea, and the US Sanitary Commission's tending to Northern wounded in the American Civil War.68 And armies had to promote their gifted organizers and engineers and not only dashing horsemen or those who had family connections. For countries (including the British) that had clung to older methods of recruiting their officer corps—such as the purchase of commissions—it was realized that professional training and accreditation had to be stepped up.
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Most crucially, perhaps, the wars of national reconstitution reintroduced • ideas and practices chat suggested unarmed citizens were participants in the armed conflicts. Previous wars had never lacked for the deliberate burning of buildings and ports, and, unofficially at least, pillage and rape. And the great wars of 1789-1815 had mobilized civilian levees—most notably by the French after 1793, but then in imitation by the Prussians in 1813-1814. Warfare must, it was realized outside Great Britain, place young males under the obligation to serve their countries. As part of this democratization of warfare, however, the idea emerged that the civilian population had a responsibility for causing or continuing war. Again the French Revolution had evoked the nation in arms, but the corollary idea of the nation as a target was never made explicit. General William Tecum- ; seh Sherman decided that economic devastation in a prosperous keystone region of the Confederacy would shorten the North's struggle to defeat its adversary. Germans invading France in 1870 were convinced that French civilians would J take up arms as irregular forces orfranc-tireurs, and faced considerable guerrilla activity after subduing the official armies of Napoleon III.
In short, warfare was central to the reorganization of states, nations, and ) empires in the mid-nineteenth century. British North America (Canada) was "H| the one exception, perhaps, and it had gone to the brink in the 1830s. One can- ; not conceive of the modern nation-state, in the form that has prevailed since the 1850s or at least from the 1850s into the 1970s, without taking into account the : applications of armed force—the use of explosives, lethal flying metal splinters, maiming of young bodies, and destruction of property—that accompanied it. Nineteenth-century liberal nation builders as well as the generals, who could ; themselves be moved and dismayed by the suffering, were willing to pay that price. \ Others, less sensitive, seemed positively to welcome the exercise as a manly exer- » cise. Wars that were a path to empire were simultaneously struggles to reaffirm [ a gendered supremacy at home. Certainly that was part of their result, until, at "/*|:| least in the twentieth century, one had to enlist women in too many related ei forts. In any case, the indispensability of violence can be ignored no more than " te
one can leave out of account the role of at least localized genocidal policies in the maintenance of empire. In that sense the nineteenth century would flow into the twentieth, as we shall see subsequently. And of course, most of thos< taking the initiative in these policies believed the price was necessary and worth .
leviathan 2.0
paying. To understand the bargains, we must avoid imposing our humanistic scruples of the late twentieth century. Just as terrorists today still remain convinced that individual lives cannot be allowed to get in the way of higher principles and loyalties, for the mid-nineteenth century, history increasingly was seen as a providential juggernaut: a steamroller of civilization and higher cultures that had to triumph over lower ones.
For God or Country
Open the era with an almost comic-opera civil war of three weeks in November 1847, in which seven of the predominantly Catholic cantons of Switzerland, who had formed their own "separate alliance" or Sonderbund to resist what they saw as Protestant centralization, were invaded and defeated by the Protestant forces. The victorious invaders lost 60 dead and 385 wounded; the defeated Catholics had 26 dead and 114 wounded. The Sonderbund forces had coalesced in 1843 against the efforts by the Protestant Radical party to strengthen the constitution of the confederation as well as to close and secularize Catholic monasteries. When the canton of Lucerne invited Jesuits to establish a center, Protestant irregulars had taken up arms, the Catholics organized their internal alliance, and the war finally erupted four years later. Swiss unity and neutrality had been inscribed in the European order at Vienna in 1815, so secession was hardly an alternative. The Protestant victory, however, led to a strengthened confederation and the ascent of commercial and secular forces.
The alignment of forces in the struggle was not new. Loyal Catholics had felt on the defensive against the secularizing state since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In Spain the liberals who had pushed through a constitution at Cadiz in 1812—to be abrogated by the restored Bourbon monarch, Ferdinand VII—returned to influence with the accession of Queen Christina as regent for her daughter Isabella in 1833, provoking the Catholic traditionalists of Navarre in the Pyrenees to take up arms on behalf of the brother of the late king. The resulting Carlist War lasted six years and became a major issue in European diplomacy. Loyal churchgoers in the former Catholic archbishopric of Cologne, under French rule after 1795, then assigned to Prussia's Rhine Province in 1815, had demonstrated against Berlin's effort to secure a compliant archbishop in
CHARLES S. MAIER [
1840. The division was indicative—state supporters of secular or Protestant poli- i cies provoking a pro-papal resistance on the part of Catholic traditionalists (so- -. called Ultra montanist, because of the adherents' alleged loyalty to the religious j authority across the Alps). ,| Did the emerging nation-states and the Catholic Church have to go separate I ways? The greatest and most inspiring prophet of nationalism in Italy, Mazzini, had seen the nation as a divine association that might coexist with religious institutions. But over the next two generations the continental European nation-state—in Prussian Germany, the Third Republic, the Kingdom of Sardinia ! (Savoy or Piedmont), and then united Italy (which occupied the papal territories j in 1870)—would be reconstructed, centralized, and secularized at the expense of a papacy that increasingly set its standard against modern liberalism and state education. In Mexico the same conflicts would be enacted on an epic scale. j Monastic lands beckoned state tteasuries and would-be bourgeois purchasers at j repeated intervals: originally in Iberia and Ibero-America in the 1760s, then in } France during the Revolution, and in the Germanies, Naples, and Spain during I the Napoleonic occupations, in Spain again during the 1830s, and in Piedmont ]t under Cavour's liberal auspices in the 1850s. But it was not just land that was at       ;; I stake. Despite a few romantic populists such as Felicite Lamennais, the Roman     - J clergy was increasingly boxed into conservative stances, especially under the papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878), who had been forced to flee Rome during the revolution of 1848, and then found the papal states (stretching across central Italy up to Bologna and the Romagna) progressively annexed by the new Kingdom ol Italy. In 1864 the papacy's "Syllabus of Errors" would insist that it was wrong for Catholics to accept the teachings of liberalism; in 1870-1S71, the Vatican ! Council would insist that the pope was infallible in issues of faith and morals. { There was no room for democracy within the Church or in the wider world. ! The French authoritarian Catholic Louis Veuillot admitted that the Church ! wanted freedom of speech to propagate its doctrines but believed in denying it to \ others. Rome saw the new world of nineteenth-century statehood as a force for f despoliation—which it often was—and the indoctrination of children in atheism. Protestantism was just as bad, given Prussia's campaign against Austria-the natural protector of the papacy, unfortunately ejected from Italy after 1 Ss9- -and then Bismarck's war against the Church in the 1870s, one he christened as:a      -■■;
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struggle for civilization (Kulturkamff) and that involved the dissolution and expulsion of monastic orders, including the Prussian Jesuits. In Iberia, Freemasons supposedly threatened the Church as the occult center of the secular network, a belief that remained powerful through the dictatorship of Francisco Franco until the mid-1970s.
From the other side of this epic squaring off, state officials and liberals beheld a reactionary special interest seeking to block the rights of conscience, the freedom of the press and speech, and modern financial administration. Educational systems would become the battleground after 1870. Suffering as a "prisoner in the Vatican" after the Italians took Rome as their capital, smarting from the eclipse of Catholic loyalists after the establishment of the Third Republic in the same year, out of power in Mexico, prosecuted in Germany (until Bismarck shifted his allies in 1878-1879), beleaguered Catholics would establish votive churches, such as the basilica of Sacre-Coeur on the hill of Montmartre in Paris, to atone for the transgressions of their impious polities. (Emperor Franz Joseph would erect a neo-Gothic specimen on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, to atone for an anarchist's stabbing of his beloved wife, Elisabeth, known as "Sissi.") The secular state, defiantly male and aggressive, would face a Church that, as during the Catholic revival in Ireland, increasingly reconstructed its parish life around the role of women. And not just women nuns, but middle-class women who would tend to charities and good works, and occasionally adolescent girls of rural milieu, who, moved perhaps by the political martyrdom of their Church as explained in their Sunday homilies, claimed to see and speak with the Virgin—at Marpingen in the Rhineland, Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, and later Fatima in Portugal *9
But if the blessed mother of Jesus could cure thousands of afflicted pilgrims who came to these sacred sites, she could not really roll back the advances of the liberal state and its administrative and commercial reforms. Her new churches memorialized the inexorable setback to her claims within the nation-state, just as the brief tribal victories at the Little Bighorn or the Zulu battlefields were in their way monuments to the defeat of the resistance at the frontiers of its expansion. Protestant or secular, male and militant, restlessly commercial, building railroads and buying new and improved artillery, rifles, and naval vessels, the nation-state advanced. Whether its commercial energies would ensure that these
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CHARLES S. MAIER
politically divided territorial units would vie in peace, or whether their military instincts (strengthened by the wars that had accompanied their creation) woulc lead to catastrophic combat, had yet to be decided. Certainly there were com mentators who predicted each of these denouements.
It is correct, but too simple, to group the new loyalties that were to prevai. as those of nationalism. Nationalism—an idea originally of elites in search of i\ primitive and vital people who would be summoned to take on political form, establish a territory and government—had been placed on the European agenda by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic wars. By midway through his period of rule, Napoleon I, the emperor of the French, was provoking opponents speaking the language of nationalist resistance. The Spanish partisans of the exiled Bourbon dynasty, the constitutionalists of Cadiz, and the popular forces or ex-Bourbon soldiers in the guerrilla movements that mobilized in the peninsula formed one manifestation. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, lecturing in Berlin under French occupation, claimed to address a German "nation." The Italia n writers aspiring to political independence for their lands began to advocate the reform not just of Austrian Lombardy, or Naples, but of Italy as a political unit. Some of the intellectual and military leaders from Prussia and smaller states envisaged not just a Prussian revival (although that might serve as a beginning fo their aspirations), and not just a revived confederal organization for Central E> rope, but a German nation. The Americans who went to war against the Britis1 in 1812 and thought of annexing Canada, or a few years later Cuba, struck a new chord of national truculence.
Of course the emerging ideas went back further. Concepts of the state as an international actor, as a force that must liberate itself from Church control, \vn <.• intense since the Renaissance. The eighteenth century restored notions of the Folk as a vital people who had collectively formed languages, inspired epic poems (in one celebrated case, the supposed Scottish epic "Ossian" simply invented), arid gathered folk and fairy tales, most famously those collected in the post Napoleonic years by the Grimm brothers, who also incurred political persecution fo-their democratic sentiments. The Romantic sensibility of the era just strengthened the appeal of this new sentiment, which could be nourished by literature, poetry, and opera as well as inspiring oratory. Students and other activists formev associations of Young Italy or Young America by the 1830s. In Germany, angcrec
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at the repressive censorship that Metternich had imposed on the German Confederation in the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, students celebrated the tercentenary of Luther's original challenge to Roman Catholic authority, and in 1832. staged a patriotic gathering at the Saxon castle where Luther had found a sanctuary.70
But it was easier to dream a nation than to form one. The Italian effort failed in both 1848 and 1849. Theorists had proposed schemes for the pope to become president of an Italian federation; others just called for federation. The young monarch of Savoy, Charles Albert, envisaged that he might take the command of the revolutionary agitation that swept the cities of Italy under Austrian rule; he raised an army, crossed the river border into Lombardy, and was soundly defeated. Rebels in Venice had better luck and could declare a republic and maintain it within the city until August 1849. But the Habsburg court recovered from its indecisiveness by the fall of 1848 as the young Franz Joseph took the throne under the tutelage of determined aristocratic political advisers and generals. Austria was still large and powerful, held the key north-south river routes and their fortifications in northern Italy, and was not prepared to relinquish the provinces it had held even before the Congress of Vienna. In the spring of 1849, Charles Albert took up arms again, and was defeated anew and compelled to abdicate. Habsburg troops forced the surrender of Venice. Facing a renewed Magyar revolution, the Austrians got help from the Russians to suppress the revolutionary and secessionist regime in Budapest. Liberal nationalists had to bide their time. Many, including Lajos Kossuth, Carl Schurz, and Richard Wagner, fled permanently or temporarily into exile. Others accepted the straitened limits of populist politics and would join the new middle-of-the road forces willing to compromise with the post-1848 leadership, whether liberal as in Piedmont, or pragmatic as in Prussia. Many devoted their energies to supporting railroad development and agricultural improvement societies. Scientific agriculture as much as any rising industry looked to the soil as well as the territory. Ca-vour was a gentry farmer. The horse fairs and annual exhibitions of scientific husbandry and agriculture offered in effect a form of surrogate politics in contexts where national politics was either not yet or no longer an option—as in Ireland, Poland, and Italy during the 1850s.71
The reactionary aftermath of 1848 was bitter, but it would be relatively brief. Counterrevolutionaries, whether in Paris after the June Days of 1848 or in the
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LEVIATHAN i.O
recaptured territories of the Veneto, Hungary, and revolutionary Vienna, would shoot their opponents generously, but might pardon them by 1850-1851. Radicals changed their mentality. In 1849 the Russian revolutionary exile Alexander Herzen wrote to his son and readership in Russia, "I see the inevitable downfall of the old Europe and mourn nothing that exists, neither the heights attained by her education nor her institutions." And he rhetorically asked, "Why then do I stay heret I stay because the struggle is going on here. Here in spite of the blood and tears, social problems are being worked out and painful and burning as the suffering here is, it is articulate. The struggle is open and above board. No one hides. Woe betide the vanquished but at least they will have given battle." Twenty years later he wrote his erstwhile co-radical Mikhail Bakunin, who was still a partisan of revolutionary upheaval:
You have not changed much, though sorely tried by life----And if I have
changed, remember that everything has changed. We have seen the frightful example of a bloody insurrection which, at a moment of rage and despair [he was referring to the June Days of 1848], took to the barricades and only then realized that it had no banner____But what would have happened if the barricades had triumphed? Could those formidable combatants, at the age of twenty[,] have given voice to all that lay in their hearts? Their testament docs not contain a single constructive, otganic idea, and economic errors unlike the political ones which have an indirect effect, lead directly and deeply, to ruin,
stagnation, and starvation____Even if our whole bourgeois world were blown
to bits, some sort of bourgeois world would arise after the smoke had dissipated and the ruins had been cleared away.72
And so it did.
Controlled Transformation
The national agenda was far more widespread than in Europe alone. In 1853 the American naval commander Matthew Perry anchored his squadron of four ships outside today's Tokyo Bay to open negotiations with the Japanese government, which had no naval force to counter the Americans. Washington demanded
guarantees for the safety of shipwrecked sailors and commercial access to the largely self-enclosed society. With the acquisition of California from Mexico and recognition of the Oregon claims by Great Britain, the North American republic was a Pacific power by the end of the 1840s. Its vessels plied a vigorous commerce with China; Japan offered coaling stations and its own goods and lay athwart the trading route. Perry's visit followed several unsuccessful attempts to win access; for since the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate Japan had been shut down to the world with the exception of a Japanese outpost at Nagasaki at its southern tip.
Perry's menacing visit exposed what would become a fifteen-year crisis for the Tokugawa regime (the so-called bakufu or military administration), named after the warlord Tokugawa leyasu, the last of a string of three strongmen, who by 1603 after incessant campaigning had imposed a new sort of settlement on the ancient monarchy wracked by civil wars and feudal disaggregation. The imperial line, preserved with its feckless court nobility at Kyoto, had ensured ideological cohesion but little else. Policy was dictated by the shogun at Edo (later Tokyo), an office that had remained in the same family for 250 years. The realm was divided into about ninety autonomous domains or han, each ruled by a daimyo and a class of military and bureaucratic retainers or samurai entitled to bear arms and to exact visible deference from town merchants and peasants. Blood relatives of the Tokugawa line and those daimyo who had joined forces with the ascendant shoguns before 1603, the fudai, controlled the inner domains proximate to Kyoto and Edo. Those who submitted after 1603, the tozama or outer daimyo, were allocated about 40 percent of the lands farther north or south in the archipelago. In return for their domainal autonomy the daimyo were required to keep close family members at the shogun's court at Edo and reside there for half of each year with many of their samurai retainers. These great and frequent processions of the daimyo back and forth from their domains filled the roads of Japan, made Edo into a center of trade, personal services, and consumer goods, a lively theater and pleasure scene, and at perhaps a million permanent residents (estimates vary) by the eighteenth century, a rival to London, Paris, and Constantinople. The residencies consumed up to half the revenue that the domainal lords could raise from their peasantry. But the more consequential action was taking place within the further domains such as Tosa, Choshu, and Satsuma,
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where European technologies and administrative methods were being studied and emulated without the resistance of a conservative court bureaucracy such a-, paralyzed equivalent initiatives in China.
Where reforming daimyd, such as Mori Yoshichika of Choshu and Shimani Nariakira of Satsuma, could prevail, they prepared their domains to challengp the conservative forces of the shogunate. The reformist daimyd efforts to modernize rhese territories and a more strident resistance to the threat of foreign encroachment went hand in hand.
But the American visit of 1853 posed the fundamental question: must Japan open to the Western world or should it shut down and rely on a conservat nc rc-assertion of its isolation and self-stratification? It crystallized the division be tween the conservative forces of the shogunate, who sought to preserve the old regime, and the impatient nationalists of the outer han, who believed that the kingdom must modernize to withstand the foreigner and forestall the reg i; ne 1 >" extraterritorial possessions that the British and French were imposing on tl Chinese. The diaries of the fledgling British diplomat Ernest Satow reveal tl growing violence of this confrontation as young, impatient samurai resorted 1 assassinating political leaders they thought too compliant toward the foreigners.73 By 1867 the reformers of Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosa had gained dom nation at the court. After marching on Edo with theit armies, they forced tl shogun to renounce his offices and "restore" governing power to the young Mc:| emperor, who would henceforth speak for their policies. There would be f arthn resistance in the northern island of Hokkaido in 1869 and a doomed rebellion t diehard conservatives (one of whom, Saigo Takimori, enjoyed popularity as a honest and faithful reformer) in 1877.
The Meiji Restoration was in fact a controlled transformation from jbov. but with a radical impact. Japan entered one of those intense periods of rapid absorption of successful foreign models that periodically marked its history-whether centuries earlier with respect to China or later after defeat by the United States in 1945. Within a few years of 1867, the new oligarchy decreed a sweepin_ series of reforms. They eliminated the samurai class as a legal order and prohit ited the traditional right to wear short and long swords. They transformed th old han into new provinces, each of which was to be governed by an imperii 1 appointee as governor (prefect), and they fobbed off the old daimyd by pi acini,
leviathan z.o
them in a house of peers. Feudal dues were ended, and the daimyd landlords compensated by issues of government bonds that provided revenue from inter-esr. (Russia had chosen this method of compensation when the state eliminated serfdom in 1861 and placed noble lands into the control of village communes.) They started to develop shipyards and arsenals and began a more intensive program of sending bright students abroad for technical and medical education. Within a generation the country transformed itself, determined not only to avoid national humiliation but to play the imperialist game itself, seeking enclaves in China and predominant influence over the Korean court. The Japanese state entered the nation-state system as a determined and successful participant.
Only by 1890, as the Japanese elite began to claim an assertive role in the East Asian arena, would they broaden the national project by bringing in a broader citizenry. Scrutinizing European constitutions for guidance, the now-aging Meiji reformers chose the German model, not the British, American, or French patterns that granted a broad role for elected legislatures. The new Meiji constitution allowed the monarch and his civil servants a strong role in keeping parliamentary institutions within bounds: the new prime minister held his office at the pleasure of the emperor; the military leadership was given key cabinet roles as ministers of war and navy, and the army remained immune from parliamentary scrutiny. The Imperial Rescript on education of 1890 envisaged that the imperial state would in effect breathe life into an imperial citizenry through patriotic education and state-sponsored piety.74
Historians and sociologists have long groped for ways to characterize experiences such as Japan's, just as they had for revolutionary upheavals such as the French. For over a century Marxist theory seemed to offer a plausible, if often contested, framework. Marxist-derived explanations tended to view the agents for change as exponents of a bourgeois or middle-class world that advocated economic development, market forces, and universal legal norms against the feudal and agrarian elites of the past. The growth of commerce and early industry generated new group intetests, which demanded and ultimately attained a greater political and legal role, not smoothly but through a series of revolutionary upheavals, just as ultimately, proponents often believed, it would bring the working Masses to power in a new era of collective property.75 Those who contested this historical description emphasized that often members of older aristocracies led
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the reform effort and pointed to the conservative aspirations of those taking up arms. This is not a debate to be resolved in a brief historical chapter. Marxian analyses serve perhaps most usefully to reveal the similarity among radical transformative processes, but less persuasively as detailed explanations for their individual trajectories. They have often been most insightful when their advocates, including Marx himself and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, had to account for events that did not follow their early templates, such as the French and German revolutions of 1848.76 Faced with the decisive role of the Japanese nationalist samurai (or the Prussian elite), analysts have often sought to describe the late nineteenth-century transformation as modernization from above. "From above" is correct in that national leaders, sometimes ministers, sometimes monarch?, pushed through important reforms that undermined the "feudal" institutions of an older regime. Nonetheless, broad-based popular agitation and stubborn loyalties to village and local rights were never absent. The Japanese leaders themselves engaged in hard and vigorous debate over their policies, even if outside) s rarely saw the hard infighting in these years (in contrast to the assassinations that marked the 1850s and again the 1930s). Modernization from above, in fact, was perhaps the most widespread strategy for preserving state viability in an era whose statesmen understood that collective existence required fiscal efficiency, industrial and military modernization, and a dedication to competition. Thus, military challenges often advanced administrative centralization, as in earlier centuries they had compelled fiscal centralization. Other examples of this approach took place—with less decisive results, however—in the Ottoman Empire, in Egyp-., later in the Russian Empire, for a period in Mexico, and in Thailand. Sometimes the term is applied to the new unified German "empire" that Bismarck worked to make a powerful German nation-state.
In fact, modernization from above is a rather loose term and, as we sh;ul see, can be applied to at least two or three varieties of experience. The classical model of this process referred to a strategy for old empires and states that relied heavily on the traditional structures of religion and landlord domination over pen t> but found themselves threatened from abroad, especially by the most corrosive social force loose in the mid-nineteenth century: British financial and industrial capitalism, along with the burgeoning trade of energetic enttepreneurs (and thei 1 supportive regimes) in Europe and the United States. To respond, the determined
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[d ambitious administrators of these states believed they had, in effect, to create ■ifizeiis by edict and to harness their productive energies with state-sponsored ndustry. This meant in turn linking families and individuals directly to the si ate and diminishing the control of their landlords. Religious authority might a;n useful in the process, but the political autonomy of religious authorities wis to be subotdinated to the secular administration with more or less success, fjpah, Russia, Turkey were all examples. In late imperial China, the reformers who attempted such endeavors after i860 tended to be outweighed by the residual power of traditional court policies. The ancient Chinese state claimed too Li-iich conservative legitimacy. It would take a revolution to clear away resistance, .uid even then the emerging reformers confronted very resistant patterns of popular inertia and entrenched privilege.
1; Bur modernization from above is a term that can also describe a more tempo-i.iry recourse of states that had less powerful or venerable regimes in place. Several- major states with robust traditions of popular participation in legislatures ■uid at the local level resorted to a few decades of rapid industrialization and military reforms as a consequence of the civil strife and war of the mid-nineteenth ceriturv. If in the first category summarized above, civil servants attempted to Lilirhpensate for an underdeveloped civil society and little democratization at the national level, in this second group they attempted to overcome the policy stalemates that resulted from regimes already democratic, but deeply divided over fundamental issues. Naturally enough, this second set of experiences included vghificant varieties of transformation. In France the population accepted the downgrading of the national assembly by Louis Napoleon (soon crowned as Napoleon III), who helped to superintend almost two decades of economic development and ambitious foreign interventions, which finally brought him down. In Mexico another developmental dictator supported by a national elite (and foreign investors) emerged out of midcentury conflicts over reform and then in-\ iision, as in Mexico. In the United States, the Republican Party pushed through the end to slavery, opened the western lands to free homesteading, and encouraged industrial development from the end of the 1850s into the 1890s.
■ Such a recourse to controlled transformation was compatible with regimes that already gave a large scope to electoral participation. In the United States the transformations resulted from the challenge of war, which in turn derived from
charles s. maier
the deep conflicts over which system of labor and economy would prevail in the gigantic acquisitions of land at the time of the Mexican War. The founders the American Republic had compromised on the issue of slavery when they cu -ated their constitution in the late 1780s. They had agreed to let the institution continue-—otherwise there would never have been a United States—but 7>n,-hibit the importation of slaves after twenty years. This prohibition helped make the breeding of slaves for use in the newer states of the Gulf a lucrative commcn c in its own right. But what was to be the regime in the lands opened west of the Mississippi? The effort at a stable compromise in 182.0, which would have allowed slavery to be installed in Missouri, but otherwise only in territory south of Missouri's latitude (36°3o'), proved unviable.
Northern farmers and laboring men could not tolerate the expansion o: .1 system they felt threatened their own livelihood and national future. The economic stakes became higher as the factory looms of Lancashire and the American North multiplied their demand for raw cotton, even as the ideological and moi .d issues were sharpened. Southerners felt their peculiar institution was under t!-.re.it from the new parties that were emerging from the development-oriented Whig coalition of the 1830s and 1840s, whether the dissenting antislavery Democrats, ni the "conscience Whigs" in 1848, such as Abraham Lincoln, or the Free-Soilcrs in 1852. and the Republican Party in 1856. The older veterans of the Senate, 1 Icni, Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, had engineered another con |n> ■ mise in 1850, which would let slavery exist in Texas and the District of Columbia, but not in California. Most objectionably to Northern adversaries, it required the return of escaped slaves and provided a fee for their recovery. The Free-Soilcrs and then the new Republicans saw a militant South demanding an unlimited exjen sion of slavery—a conclusion strengthened by the Kansas-Nebraska Act am 11 ii-n by the US Supreme Court's 1857 DredScott decision, which ruled not only t::..t Scott, a slave, had not gained a claim on freedom through his master's having brought him into a free state, but that persons of color had no claim on the constitutional rights provided for white Americans. Antislavery senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln and incumbent senator Stephen Douglas squared off in a series of fundamental debates on race and the frayed territorial compromises on slaveiy in the Illinois campaign of 1858; Douglas won reelection, but Lincoln emerges " the Republican nominee for the presidential contest of i860.
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leviathan 2.0
'- The race took place against the threat of growing sectional violence. A radical-izitl midwestern farmer, John Brown, already a participant in the Kansas skir-
iisfies over slavery, attempted to seize a federal arsenal and ignite a slave revolt 1 ■! northern Virginia in 1859 and was executed in December. Excited Southerners c »clared they would leave the Union if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won die: presidential election of i860, which he did with 40 percent of the popular vote but a clear electoral-vote majority, in a four-way race. Advocates of secession (ipehed debates in the legislatures of the Southern states, where the firebrands of ^olith Carolina in the lead urged establishing an independent slave-holding republic. They bombarded the federal military base at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, when Lincoln sent a flotilla to supply it in April 1861. The armed clash swayed the debate in Virginia, and eleven states voted to join the secession .l'iunits of the Confederate States of America.
;i; The ensuing four-year war, which would cost the two sides together about 700,000 dead—a percentage of young men comparable to later casualty rates jrrtong Europeans in the First World War—sealed the transformation of the North American nation-state. The war itself was a slow and ponderous affait. If
0 lie measured the resources each side brought, the Union was clearly superior in .itipulation, industrial power, and railroad resources. It possessed the legitimacy of almost seventy-five years of statehood. Lincoln's call for troops brought an enthusiastic response. Nonetheless, the Confederacy was a large region and it li rtci; apparently only to keep the North at bay to secure its independence, How-
1 ver, a protracted war would also devastate its economy and reduce it materially. Its major cash crop, whose British sales had enriched the planter class in the 1850s, would probably remain bottled up because the Northern navy could blockade its major ports. The Union must be discouraged sufficiently to make it cease its effort ui compel Confederate surrender.
; The fighting began on the East Coast. The Southern capital at Richmond w:as only 150 miles from Washington. Initial combat revealed that the Southern . rmies were well led and resourceful. The attempt to land troops on the James l-cninsula and then march inland toward Richmond failed because of the exces-•>.y;e caution of the commander, General George B. McClelland. The central val-Ipyof Virginia and the upper Potomac hills became an area of frequent combat but
^conclusive gains. A major bloody victory in Antietam in western Maryland in
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CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2.0
September 1862. let Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves under Southern control to be free men. But this was a promise to liberate precisely those over whom the North had no control.
Heavy fighting also took place during 1862 and 1863 in Tennessee. The tribu- :; taries of the Mississippi that flowed through Tennessee would allow the Northern troops to penetrate the cotton states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. % But again the battles oscillated. Border states that did not secede—Kentucky, J Maryland—still had Southern sympathies but remained under the military thumb of the North. By 1862 Union forces occupied the coastal islands of Geor- * gia and took New Orleans from the sea, imposing an occupation regime on Loui | siana. A year later General Ulysses Grant secured Northern control over the J Mississippi Valley by compelling the surrender of Vicksburg, which meant ti 1 it ;f Texas was separated from the main body of the Confederacy and the nortn-south transportation axis of the western confederacy was closed. The Southc-n wager on advancing in the east into Pennsylvania (and further) had initial promising results—precisely at a moment when antiwar sentiment was becoming strong among the immigrant working class of New York, now feeling the grip cif f conscription. But the defeat at Gettysburg in July 1863 meant that henceforth f the South must fight on the defensive. j
Still it rook almost another two years to force the surrender of an increasingly devastated Confederacy. Lincoln finally found a determined, tough com manding general in Grant, but Grant advanced slowly. The 1864 fighting 1.. Virginia was immensely costly. More promising, General Sherman swung fn.m | Tennessee into Georgia, purposefully devastating the countryside as he advanced He captured Atlanta, then moved toward the coast at Augusta, then heac^'il north through the Carolinas. His army converged with Grant s near Richmc'ii I in the spring of 1865 and forced the remnants of the Confederate armies to surrender. The South was devastated. Its black labor force was now legally free, and many were fleeing from their plantations. Food was meager. Railroads and t housing were often destroyed. Marauding bands of looters terrorized parts ofrhe : countryside. The war devastated the Southern economy; reduced the influence ■ of its formerly slave-holding elite, but expanded the role of the reestablished con- : tral government and eventually united Southern and Northern industrial lead;1*
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in their determination to extract wealth from technology as well as cotton and wheat.77
Unfortunately the outcome of the war solved neither the issue of racial prejudice nor that of economic viability. Although they were legally emancipated, the black families of the South did not receive title to land, but continued as tenants where they had labored as slaves. Compelled to turn to their former masters for credit to plant their yearly cotton crop, much of which had to be surrendered to defray their debt and rent—the American "sharecropping" version of a rural pattern widespread at many times and places—many were reduced to an unremitting cycle of debt dependency. For about a decade Northern troops occupied the South, enforced voting without racial discrimination, and seemed ready to impose a regime of racial equality. But blacks were poor, the legislatures were resented, and white vigilantes often imposed local tyrannies based on nocturnal terror. The Republicans in the Congress tired of the conflict, and to secure victory in the deadlocked presidential election of 1876 agreed to remove the remaining troops. Within two decades the blacks were largely excluded from the ballot, intimidated by the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan, and reduced to subsetvience. Efforts to unite poor whites and blacks against the "Bourbon" white elites were usually trumped by racial demagogy. By the 1890s the former Confederacy would join such Eastern European regions as Hungary and Romania as one-party landlord-dominated states, where legalized servitude had been replaced by ethnic coercion, peasant impoverishment, rigged voting rights, de facto peonage, and exaggerated ideologies of national purity.78
The large geographical units to the south and north of the United States— Mexico and Canada—also underwent major transformations that combined institutional transformation, settlement of their vast territories, economic development, and consolidation of a new elite. The Mexican Republic was fated to develop, as one of its leaders quipped, so far from God, so close to the United States. Ol course, it began from a different starting point: three centuries as a colony of •1 C nholic monarchy with a powerful church and centralized monastic settle-mi'Mcs; an Indian population that recovered demographically during the long
i. nteenth and eighteenth centuries; and whites proud of their Spanish descent even as many intermarried and produced a large population of mixed or "mestizo"
CHARLES S. MAIER
ethnicity. The independence movement was ignited by a radicalized clerical leat ership in 1810 but was soon suppressed by the Spanish. It was successful.y i< sumed a decade later by ambitious military leaders—some claiming traditions < a populist and decentralizing left, others pressing the centralizing and bricfl (under Augustin de Iturbide) imperial claims of the right. Iturbide, who haJ helped Spanish forces defeat the revolutionaries of 1810, led the new rebellia, when Madrid fell under the control of the liberals in 182.0, claiming the title ot emperor until exiled and ultimately executed. However, the continuing turbi lence and warfare undermined the prosperity achieved at the end of the era ot Bourbon reform. Catholic conservatives and liberal anticlericals replaced each other in power as the cynical and populist military strongman, General Antoni Lopez Santa Anna, repeatedly switched sides, claimed the presidency, or pusl-.c forward candidates he hoped to control.75
As the strongman in charge of a pro-Catholic conservative dictatorship in 1836, the general could not prevent the secession of Texas, but he fended oTa French expedition to Veracruz in 1838 and briefly restored some of his luster I-k returned to lead a weakened state that still claimed vast territories in the Amcr can Southwest although it only nominally controlled Anglophone Texas settle and the feared Comanche federations of the borderlands. The Comanches' deva: tating raiding, carried out both to secure livestock and to exact vengear:ie, imposed the fragile hold of the Mexican state over its northern territory, incudirg the contested area in today's southern Texas that led ambitious Texans and A.'.iei-ican nationalists—President James K. Polk in the lead—to press extensive bordi claims. Santa Anna's recourse to war in 1846 was an abject failure, and the R.cp:i: lie of Mexico had to surrender large swaths of territory to Washington.
This war on the margins of the settled world had profound ramifications fcr both republics: for the United States it undermined the 1820 Missouri comprc mise on the extension of slavery; in Mexico, following another conservative < 11 by Santa Anna, it opened the way to the Revolution of Ayutla and the great .'.ber.i. anticlerical government under Benito Juarez of the second half of the 1850s. Tl" constitution of 1857 outlined the constitution of a liberal and secular state with constitutional liberties and civil marriage. The Lerdo Law of 1856 pushed through a rigorous secularization of church properties but also the abolition of all carpi-rate property, including the communal rights or fueros and collective holdings.
LEVIATHAN l.O
\uio% chat still prevailed in many rural and Indian communities. In effect they aYricd through the last of the eighteenth-century revolutions, deeply dividing the ouhtry and igniting a three-year civil war, the War of the Reform, followed in cirri by French invasion. Napoleon III believed he might take advantage of the tirmoil (and of the United States' great internal conflict in the 1860s) to try to set ip an imperial state under a Habsburg cousin, Maximilian of Austria. Maximilian Ejiind significant support among those resentful of Juarez's reforms, but the Juarez overnment rallied, and after the Battle of Puebla the French withdrew, leaving heir well-meaning creature to be defeated and then executed. Liberal government leant an end to the threat of military dictatorship although not to the periodic ,ra!rlordism that would grip the country from time to time.
Liberal government, even when headed by an Indian, too often meant in-qrriprehension, not of the almost mystical pre-Columbian legacy, but of the oc'ial and economic organization that many still chose. The ramifications made heniselves felt in the southeastern corner of the republic, the Yucatan Penin-uia. Yucatan ladinos (including Creoles and mestizos but not Indians) had at-iimpted to secede from the republic following the turmoil of the late 1830s, but .tad to come to terms in the early 1840s, only to have the port city of Campeche Vulnerable to US gunships) seek its own independence, which was then followed by a renewed secessionist uprising in the interior. In January 1847 the Indians, eonomically hard-pressed by the country's attack on communal rights, including .iaitt claims, staged an uprising soon seen in the most lurid images of race war nd cannibalism. Ladino Yucatan seemed lost to the Indians by 1849-1850, but anta Anna ground down the Mayan rebels by 1855. The liberals who ousted the ,feneral had no more tolerance for the indigenous vision of government and common: property, and suppressed renewed revolt, even selling some of the defeated 1 mirrectionists into Cuban slavery. Still, rebellion continued to smolder beyond t^Sf ladino cities, rooted in own quasi state of "the Cross" through the rest of the entury.80 Indifferent government gave way to the tightening control of the pres-leht chosen in 1876, Porfirio Diaz, who would subdue the opposition and rally S,ol!P °f cientificos, or business elites, who worked with American and British westors to lay down a modern railroad system.
:::: Diaz would rule for almost 35 years, until a new generation threw off his automatic regime. During that period Mexico would advance industrially, although