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George W Bush with then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – now king – in 2002. The US is increasingly dependant on other nations |
Stars and Stripes are flagging
Historian John Darwin believes America’s empire will unravel just like those of history’s other great imperial powers, writes Dilip Hiro
After Tamerlane: The Global History Of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin, Allen Lane, £25.
IN common parlance, Eurasia is the land mass straddling Europe and Asia.
But according to John Darwin, an eminent Oxford historian, it encompasses the combined land mass of Europe and Asia, surrounded by seas with its far west, far-east and middle, and its maritime fringes. And he describes the popularly named ‘New World’ as Eurasia’s Outer World of the Americas, or simply neo-Europe.
Hence Eurasian history becomes world history.
Darwin, a specialist on empires, explains why empires came into being: “A second propensity in human communities has been the accumulation of power on an extensive scale: the building of empires.”
His study deals with the empires after the one built by Tamerlane, who died in 1405, the last of the nomadic conquerors.
He divides the succeeding six centuries into eight periods, the first three ending in 1740, when the equilibrium between Asia and Europe ended; the next three, starting with the rise of European imperialism, including the colonisation of the Americas, and ending with the 1914-18 World War, which marked the limits of European imperialism; and the remaining periods bring the narrative up to date, with America as the sole imperial power.
Darwin distinguishes between two major types of empires. He says: “Unlike the traditional agrarian empires that merely accumulated land and people, the arch-characteristic of European imperialism was expropriation,” he observes. “Land was expropriated to meet the needs of plantations and mines engaged in long-distance commerce.”
Commerce was one of the major elements at play, the others being Christianity and colonisation, the three Cs. Collectively, they drove Europeans to build empires in the non-European world.
In commerce, the (English) East India Company, established by a Royal charter in 1600 – a little over a century after Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese seafarer, pioneered a maritime passage to India – competed with the Dutch East India Company, won, and emerged as the globe’s leading commercial entity of its kind.
It went on to acquire its own army and navy and conquered the Indian sub-continent in stages by exploiting the rivalries between the competing native rulers, and funding its battles with the land revenue it collected. With the loss of Britain’s American colonies in 1783, the centre of its empire shifted to India.
The middle of the 19th century (1830-80) witnessed the rise of Europe’s power outside their boundaries. Technological advances made some European nations more productive than their Asian counterparts, and the tri-continental, multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, dating back to 1453, lost practically all its European territories which transformed themselves into sovereign states.
During the next two decades, the leading European nations divided up the vast African continent among themselves.
By the end of the 19th century, the neo-Europe’s dominant country, the United States of America, had locked horns with a leading member of the Old Europe, Spain, and snatched Cuba and the Philippines from it.
With that, America became an imperial power. It went on to acquire extra-territorial privileges in China. In 1907, its navy waved the Stars and Stripes across the Pacific.
America entered the First World War, centred around Europe, in 1917 on the strict understanding that the post-war peace settlement would concede its demand for an open door to trade and investment while accommodating the European victors’ territorial ambitions. This facilitated the entry of American corporations, hitherto focused on the western hemisphere, into the markets of Europe and its empires, and turned the US into a global commercial power.
Washington’s entry into the Second World War in December 1941 on the Allied side ensured the defeat of the Axis Powers. The war left the Euro-pean imperialist powers exhausted. This in turn led to political decolonisation – a process advocated by both America and its newly emergent rival, the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US became, in Darwin’s words, “the only world empire”. In its trail came an aggressive revival of America’s unilateralism and universalism, which stem from Americans’ pride in their exceptional origins as a democratic republic unsoiled by a history of monarchy, and their belief that what is good for America is good for the globe.
Successive US administrations have trumpeted the virtues of American-style democracy and the free market along with a commercial culture designed for mass consumption.
Today, America possesses a gigantic military machine, with 700 bases in 130 countries, manned by 250,000 uniformed personnel. Its navy commands the seas. Though forming only five per cent of the world population, it accounts for almost a third of the global GDP.
At the same time, the Pentagon is ill-equipped to fight irregular warfare in densely populated countries or urban areas or in terrain unsuited to deploying mechanised firepower. Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the Pentagon’s limits.
On the economic side, American dollars’ value depends on the inflow of Chinese and Japanese savings. In time, therefore, the American empire will go the way of the earlier precedents.
After Tamerlane is a book of truly global scale, covering the empires as varied as the Mughals, Manchus, Safavids and Ottomans as well as the British, the French, the Spaniards, the Japanese and the Americans.
It is a work of staggering importance written by a scholar who has distilled his knowledge and insights acquired over decades.
In a book of such a wide scope, a few mistakes are inevitable. Babur won the Battle of Panipat in 1526, not 1519. Since most Iranians switched to Shia Islam only in the 17th and 18th centuries, the roots of the Iranian society into Shiaism are not that deep.
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