Maps illustrating this post

Moreover, the USA, as we all know, had expanded mainly into North America, and the 1898 conquest of the Philippines is something of a red herring. Likewise, Canada and Australia represented territories occupied by an expanding UK, as did some other territories. A careful reader of historical data would wonder if my allusions to "mediocre" British growth, "moderate" French growth, and "robust" German/US growth would naturally wonder if this was on a per capita basis: clearly, with a population expanding at a blistering pace, as were the USA, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Chile, it would appear as if the key difference was these latter countries merely offered huge unutilized economic opportunities. Instead of supporting the claim that imperialism was a drag on the economy, one could instead argue that growth was following the colonists to the colonies.

My research was showing that countries tended to throttle back on growth soon after major acquisitions, unless the acquisitions were sparsely populated (Russia, Australia) or occurred in response to a depression (e.g., France's acquisition of territory in Indochina in the 2nd Empire). But it was also clear that there was an odd mismatch between national size and empire. At one extreme was the UK, with an empire 7.7 times as populous as itself; at another was Germany, with a domestic population five times that of its empire, or the USA, with 13 times the population of all its overseas possessions put together (1898). There was no logical economic coordination between the "award" of territories and the industrial needs of the colonial power; if so, how could Germany, with an economy as similar to England's as it was, suffice with territories like Papua and Namibia? Or Denmark, with none at all?

It makes far more sense instead to treat the entire peninsula of Europe and North America as a single national unit, with a single empire. Also, this empire needs to be regarded as including Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, the Q'ing Empire (China), and Qejar Iran. The various "cold wars" among rival powers tended to be over surprisingly trivial possessions: Fashoda (an outpost in Southern Sudan, over which the UK and France nearly came to blows), Central Asia (scene of the Great Game, and a region useless to industry until the 1950's), Agadir (a coastal town in Morocco over which France nearly fought Germany) and Samoa (a territory hotly disputed between Germany and the USA). Had each of these tussels had opposite outcomes from the ones they had, it's hard to imagine the world would have looked very different. No imperial power faced off for possession of the Persian Gulf (at least, not since the discovery of oil there).

The astonishing misalignment of motives for territorial war, and the ones actually fought, or colonies and the industries they were supposed to boost, or capital flows from imperial powers and their own empires, is as extreme as can be. Arguing that "reason" plays no role in jingoism, while true, contributes nothing to understanding why territories get awarded. I'm the one busy arguing that wars are fought so a class can obtain firmer control over the state; there's no need to trot out the wag-the-dog hypothesis to explain why WW1 was fought a strip of the Rhine's left bank. I've tried to defend that idea myself. My point is that the question of how the economically valuable territories were "awarded" remains unanwered by even a willfully cynical hypothesis. So I propose that the separate existence of rival European and North American powers, after 1792, was illusory; and that the wars fought among these powers within the TEP were, in fact, civil wars.

There was nothing "civil" about the wars between the Burmans and the Thai for control of territory between them; Thailand and Burma were implacably alien empires, and one could expand only into territory occupied by the other. Likewise, the wars between European powers and the peoples of the bush, or the older kingdoms of South Asia. The advancing army sought to destroy the defender's raison d'etre, eradicating all basis or even evidence of an urban civilization of the defeated people. In a few cases, the conqueror realized it was possible to proceed faster by devising a bureaucracy that could govern conquered peoples, rather than liquidate the foundations of their society. In this way, bureaucracy was to prove a blessing and a curse. But it was not until the 1800's that France developed a regime that might actually be more popular than the ones it sought to replace: Napoleon I's conquest of Europe was historic insofar as his armies were propagating a regime that would be welcomed by a sizable portion of the "defeated" population. The opera Tosca would not have made any sense at all prior to the events it describes. This was an extreme case, not really repeated, but a curious trend emerged in European history: regimes did not survive military defeats. In other words, warfare invariably transformed the government of the losing power, often in a revolutionary way. The Austrian Empire, uniquely, did remain intact after the Seven Weeks War (1866) because it was so complex a society; likewise, Denmark did not suffer a revolution in 1864. However, both Denmark and the Austrian Empires were drastically altered by their defeats, leading the former to pioneer the now-familiar Scandinavian social welfare state, while the latter began a laborous process of federating into states. In both cases, the effect was to end for good a type of class rule in Europe.

Such a trend meant that, while there might be limits on the ability of, say, Berlin to rule beyond the Rhine, or London to rule over the Netherlands, the ability of local state functionaries to command the respect of local elites could fade. In 1944, as English-speaking armies poured into France, there was little thought of transforming the country into a continental England. In the 14th century, English soldiers had sought to do just that to much of France. The French, knowing the change, mostly welcomed the armies as liberators. But the 4th Republic (1944-58) was held in little regard by the French electorate, and scorned as a failure. During its tenure, French society lacked strong cultural or administrative rallying points, and was "Americanized." Germany, more lacking yet, was far more totally altered in this direction than France was. No postwar plan for Germany included "turning the country into a convincing replica of Maryland," yet that virtually happened. The "American" triumph was actually one of US industrial managers and their techniques. Needless to say, such managers tended to enjoy a distinct advantage in the global labor market.

(Part 3)

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