Hi. Welcome back. Make yourself comfortable. This presentation is going to talk about the way global forces are interacting with local situations. Let me take a moment and explain a little more about what I mean. The middle of the 1800s really is a period of intensified globalization. The linkages around the world are getting stronger, tighter, faster, including of commerce, steam ships, all the rest which we've talked about before. So it would be really easy to then come up with a whole story for the 1800s in which global powers are just invading everywhere and rearranging the world. But that would be really misleading. Think about global forces creating a lot of new situations. So you've got global forces that are impacting situations in lots of different ways. But they're impacting at a distance. It still takes a lot of time for messages to go back and forth, for people to know what's going on. So we're still talking about weeks of travel back and forth from one place to another. So, there are global circumstances, but in this situation, the local people are still making the key decisions. What tends to happen then is the local representative of, say, a distant European power, that person will make a choice about what to do in a situation. Choice for which he might not have any instructions, a choice based on what he and his friends think is the right thing to do. He'll tell people back home this is what he's decided to do. Weeks will then pass. He won't hear anything about what it is they want. Meanwhile, stuff is going to happen. And then local people are going to react to the choices that are being made there. Weeks or months later, they'll get new instructions, new information. And they'll either be told not to do what they're doing, stop, and so on. But the point is that a lot of interaction between the global and the local is playing out all over the world. But it's still really important to emphasize local choices. Let me delve into that in a little more detail. The period we're looking at right now, the middle of the 1800s, we'll say between about 1850 and 1870. I don't think it's right to think of this as the age of imperialism. Yes, there are some very conscious imperial designs. France is a good example. In the 1830s and 1840s, the French are deliberately setting out to create an empire in Algeria, right across from them in the Mediterranean Sea. They're basically annexing new land that will become a part of a larger France. And yes, the new French Empire is being ruled by a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who calls himself Napoleon III; the quote Second Empire. He's trying to validate his vainglorious dreams for France by also one last effort to establish a French empire in North America. This time using the disorder in Mexico as a way to do that. He'll try to do that in the 1850s and early 1860s, that effort will fail in about the middle of the 1860s. So that's an example of true imperial design that fails. But generally, the British and others are not pursuing grand imperial ambitions so much in the 1850s and 1860s. They've already got a lot of foreign domains. But rather than think of the 1850s and 1860s as a period where there's this conscious, purposive imperial design, it's more helpful to think of it as a period in which they've got a lot of foreign positions, and from these foreign positions, there are a lot of empowered people on the spot. The man on the spot: an admiral here, a colonial administrator there, who's confronting a situation, or might see an opportunity, and then does something. And then it's up to the home government to back him up or repudiate him. So as I emphasize local choices here, I don't just mean local choices being made by Europeans. I mean local choices also being made by the Non-Europeans on the spot. Their choices they're making about: do I fight back against what this person's trying to do? Do I run away from it? Do I adapt to it somehow? Uh, compromise or actually even say, hey, these Europeans are creating tremendous opportunities for me. Like, for example, if I'm the local person, and I'm the establishment, I'd been in power, I might see that European as a threat. Or, if I'm kind of, if I'm the local person and, I've kind of had the boot on my neck from some local administrator, I might see the foreign power as a potential rescuer, the person who can overthrow the way things are and give me some opportunities for the new space. Or, I might be a local merchant who thinks mm-hm, if I form an alliance with these foreigners I can make a lot of money and become their essential, indispensable partner in what they're doing. Term for this in China, for example, would be a comprador. That would be the term for the local, say, Chinese speaking merchant who is the essential partner for the foreigner who can't speak Chinese and actually runs a lot of the foreign trade business and mercantile business on the spot. One of the situations that creates problems or opportunities for these men on the spot is where they've established these settler colonial domains in places like Southern Africa, or in Canada, or in Australia. Here's an example, the British, I told you in a previous presentation, had established these colonies in thinly populated Australia. In the middle of the 1800s, that's rapidly expanding, and they begin to leap across the water to these islands, which we now call New Zealand. In New Zealand, they find that there is a fierce warrior tribe there, the Maoris. The Maoris don't wish to accept these British settlers, and the Maoris are good fighters. Here's a picture that just gives you a little bit of a sense for local Maori culture at the time the British would have encountered it in the 1840's and 1850's, as they fight a series of Maori wars. Here's another illustration of how the British were waging those Maori wars. The British war ship in the foreground, that vessel called the HMS North Star, has landed British soldiers who were traipsing up the hill to burn a Maori village. By the way, at the same time that the British are engaging in these wars in New Zealand, the 1840s, the British are thinking about whether they want to establish a colony in California; there is an enterprising man on the spot, a British sea officer who's making that argument back to London. The government in London, though, actually isn't looking to expand British imperial domains. They're worried about managing the problems they already have, the administration of Lord Aberdeen, so they turned down the idea of setting up a British colony in California, but they're backing the play to go ahead and try to defeat the Maoris, a very long struggle by the way. The Maori resistance was tough but it was not entirely successful; the British do establish New Zealand. But the Maoris are still there and their cultural influence in New Zealand today is still pretty strong. But now let me talk about another example of the choices local people are making between resistance and adaptation. Maybe some of you have seen the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I. In the story, an English governess is invited to the household of the King of Siam. The time is the 1850s. The King of Siam is very much a traditional figure, the warrior ruler of his kingdom. Very traditional ceremonies, beliefs. The English governess has been brought in though to educate the king's children in Western ideas, Western ways, so that they can later bridge the worlds between East and West. As you'll remember, if you've seen the play or seen the movie that stars Yul Brynner as the King of Siam and Deborah Kerr is the English governess, it works out okay for the English governess, and at the end the King of Siam is able to pass this legacy onto his young son being tutored by the English governess. This is based on a book called Anna and the King of Siam. If you're curious about whatever happened to that child who is being tutored by the English governess, here's a photograph of him at the end of the 1800s. He's the fellow seated in that chair. And as you can tell he's adapted to Western ways. He's on a trip in Europe; his sons are behind him, gathered in the picture. Look at the clothes they're wearing. Picture of the English gentleman seated, surrounded by the young gentlemen. But the King of Siam was still the king of an independent country. Siam is perhaps the only country in Southeast Asia to retain its independence through this entire period. So in this case the king, Chulalongkorn, adapted pretty successfully to a very, very difficult environment and was able to keep the autonomy, not only of his kingdom, but also of his royal family. Okay, so let's just review for a second. So far, I've shown you the interaction of the global and the local, in a couple of different ways. In case one, local, just pure native resistance against the foreigners. Case two, native adaptation to the foreigners to preserve a measure of independence. Now I want to give you a more complex case. Case three, in which the global-local interactions actually create civil wars, including civil wars of local against local. Let me give you some illustrations of that in some really momentous cases, starting with that of India. By the 1850s in India, the British have created an extraordinary conglomerate in which the British have many powerful Indian partners, working together to create an enormous enterprise. This enterprise has several ingredients. Commercial: Indian merchants, Indian bankers, working with the British as they create Indian realms that are very much part of the global market revolution. Financial ties: British investment into India, building railroads for example, but then working with Indian partners. Military ties: the British army is partnered with a new British trained, British officered Indian army. The British Indian army is now a kind of military partnership. The Indian army under British rule is actually more numerous than the British army. The Indian army is not only key in security issues in the Indian subcontinent itself, Indian soldiers will march in Egypt. Indian soldiers will march in China. In other words, the British imperial forces rely on the Indian army as the critical partner that gives them an extra measure of military power worldwide. That partnership is coming under a lot of Strain, and the great episode here is usually referred to in the literature as the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Why the term mutiny? Because it starts out with the mutiny of some of those soldiers in the Indian army. The partly apocryphal story is of Muslim soldiers who are being told that the new cartridges that they have to bite in order to open up the gunpowder in them have been greased with pig fat. That is abhorrent to them as devout Muslims. And, therefore, the soldiers rebel against this foreign imposition on their religious beliefs. That actually captures a little bit of the global and local narrative in just that little story. But, of course, the mutiny was a much larger phenomenon than just some angry soldiers. Here's a map of British India in the late 1850s. Everything you see that's colored here, this is British India. The areas in orange are still under the rule of Indian princes who are dependents on the British Governor- General. The British East India Company is still playing a very significant role. The mutiny is really just centered in one particular part of this domain. The center of the area of the mutiny, of public unrest, is right in here. What happens really then is a civil war, in which British soldiers, allied with loyal Indian soldiers, are fighting against a variety of armed groups, including large numbers of rebel Indian soldiers. The groups they're fighting against though are both Muslim and Hindus. If you look at the region in which they're fighting, you can see people who feel a deep sense of loss at the lost traditions of the Mughal Empire. You can also see the influence of Hindus, still bitter over the defeats of the Maratha Confederacy, earlier in the 1800s, and the loss of a whole traditional hierarchy and set of customs associated with Hindu rule. Here's a pretty representative image of the culture clash of global and local. This is a mid-19th century image of an English missionary, preaching the gospel to a scattered group of people in India. You can see in this group actually, some of the men, and even a woman, are distinctively attired as Muslims. There are also a couple of Hindu holy men in the group as well. Standing next to the missionary is an Indian supporter; it looks like he's carrying some of the missionary tracts to be handed out. By the dress I'd guess that he's Bengali. Among the famous episodes in the mutiny is the siege of the British garrison and British dependence here at a place called Lucknow. Here is a European image of the embattled defenders of Lucknow fighting off the attackers. You'll notice that the Indian attackers are dressed in a variety of garments: some of them the remnants of Indian army uniforms, some of them, like this gentleman over here at the left, more traditionally attired. Here's a romantic painting, from later in the 1800s, of the relief of the besieged defenders of Lucknow; the commander of the garrison is greeting the general who's arrived to relieve him and obviously, as you can see from the left, there are some people who are pretty happy to see them. The mutiny was a great shock to people in England. Troops were sent out from England to help put it down, and it was put down with a great deal of brutality. Here's another illustration that shows how some of the captured mutineers were punished in a particularly public ritual called: being blown from guns. Literally the prisoners are tied to the muzzles of cannons and then the cannons were fired. The British government also reorganized the whole establishment in India and brought it more firmly under British rule. The East India Company mainly disappears from the scene, the civil servants are now going to come from a government service, an Indian service. In other words, this becomes another part of national service. A stronger nation state and its people, trained in England, are going to go out and learn how to staff these outposts of empire. So as the Indian subcontinent is being rocked with civil war that settled in the late 1850s, there's more huge conflict on an even larger scale going on in China. Let's dive in a little more to what's going on in China in the 1850s and 1860s. Of course, you start with the empire, the Chinese Empire, the Qing Dynasty. Qing's spelled, using modern transliteration: Q-I-N-G China has a new emperor: this young man will barely live to the age of 30. He's called the Xianfeng Emperor. His domain is very troubled. Let's think about the situation of China in the 1840s and 1850s. They�ve had these fights, especially in the 1840s. As a result of these fights, all these different British establishments have been set up, Hong Kong, South China, treaty ports in Hong Kong, more treaty ports being set up along the Yangtze River valley. Alright? Foreign ideas, foreigners, foreign merchants, now breaking into the empire, penetrating an empire long isolated from all kinds of outside influence. And what are they encountering? Those foreign influences are interacting with a population that's undergoing the hard part of a Malthusian crisis. Densely populated, pushing up at the limits of the amount of food that their land can support, net incomes declining, a lot of unrest. And then into that mix, you've got all these foreign ideas interacting. That's the environment in which a charismatic rebel comes to the floor. A man named Hong Xiuquan. Hong Xiuquan has had a lot of exposure to foreign ideas. He's encountered Christian missionaries, Baptist missionaries. He's been exposed to the Holy Bible. He's read the Gospel. Rather, however, than becoming a docile Christian convert, he actually turns the Christian gospel into his own set of religious ideas. He's not the only person who exposed the teachings of the Bible, adapts them distinctively. A few years earlier, a man in the United States named Joseph Smith announces that he's uncovered new books of the Bible, and a new gospel, that will then lead to the foundation of the Mormon branch of the Christian faith. Now look at what kind of interaction is happening in China. This man Hong Xiuquan, he will fuse these foreign, these Christian ideas with Chinese ideas and form an ideology of rebellion against China's status quo. He will eventually proclaim himself the Tien Wang, the Heavenly King, who will deliver the Chinese people from their ancient oppression. Into this mix, too, you've got some resentment against what many Chinese still regard as foreign rulers: a dynasty founded by invaders from Manchuria in the north. Here's kind of a popular illustration that's meant to portray some of the participants and what will come to be known as the Taiping Rebellion. This is an enormous, popular revolt. One of the interesting things about this illustration is just look at the hairstyles of the men. Take for example, this man right here. You'll notice he's not wearing the queue. He has not shaved the front of his head and then gathered the remaining hair in the queue, which is that distinctive signal that I am subordinate to the Empire. I'm free to wear my hair my own way. Indeed, it was the push against that kind of subordination, subordination to the formally trained scholar gentry who ruled on behalf of the Empire, that's fueling a lot of this revolt. Now just look at the situation confronting the Chinese Empire by 1861. If you look at the map, you can see a couple of things. First, the area of the revolt, very large, covering some of the most prosperous areas of the Qing Empire. Another thing to notice, notice how closely the revolt is linked to areas in which foreign influence is interacting with the local population, places like Shanghai and the Yangtze River Valley and Nanjing. Actually, some foreigners, at first, were quite enthusiastic about the Taipings. They picked up the Christian elements in Taiping ideology and thought, mm-hm, maybe this is a whole new Christian kingdom that's being established to take the place of the Qing Empire. The foreign enthusiasm quickly waned, however, as they came to judge that this particular branch of Christianity was a little bit too unorthodox for their tastes. And also as many foreigners realized that their interests were more aligned in partnership with the Qing Empire. They could make more money in a partnership with a stable government rather than these more uncertain elements that were taking charge in the domain ruled by the rebels. 1861, a real crisis for the Empire. And that's not all. In 1860, the empire had undergone yet another conflict with foreign governments. British and French soldiers had marched on Peking, presently called Beijing, and had burned the summer palace of the Emperor, who had fled to the north. After this humiliation, the Emperor dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1861, aged only 30 years old. He leaves behind a regency that will become dominated by his former concubines. One of the concubines, named Yi, will become better known as the Dowager Empress. We'll hear from her again. But again, step back and imagine the situation for the Empire in 1861. Your rule is challenged. The whole future of the Empire itself is in absolutely fundamental crisis. What the Empire does is it makes its deal with the foreign governments, accepts difficult terms with them in order to rally its Strength, first and foremost to defeat this rebellion. It will defeat this rebellion through an alliance with the foreigners who will help supply the Empire with some of the arms, and even some military advice and Support, that it needs in order to deal with them in the Yangtze Valley. The rebellion is put down. The loss of life is just enormous. There are no exact numbers, but all the estimates of the deaths in the Taiping Rebellion run into the millions of people killed or lives lost through all these disruptions. The Empire comes out of this in the middle of the 1860s, convinced that it has to continue to rebuild itself to somehow fortify itself against both internal dangers and external threats. And this is a period of internal reforms that Chinese historians refer to as: Self-Strengthening. Here are a couple of the leading figures associated with the Self-Strengthening Movement. One of these leaders in the regency group that's governing the Empire, Zeng Guofan, and this man, Li Hongzhang. You'll see that Li Hongzhang, like Zeng Guofan, are both dressed in traditional garments, very much the robes of senior imperial civil servants. Here's a physical example of Self-Strengthening. This is a photograph taken at the imperial arsenal being created at Nanjing. At the arsenal, these Chinese soldiers are photographed next to their recently acquired Gatling gun, an early kind of machine gun. So remember, we started out in talking about these global-local interactions by giving an example of violent vocal resistance, peaceful local adaptation. And then we got into these more complex cases of large-scale civil conflicts arising out of the global-local interaction. We talked about the example of India. We've talked about the example of what happened in China in the 1850s and 1860s. Now let's look at what happened in Japan. The Japanese case is different, but it is one more variation on the theme of the global-local interaction. What happens is an extraordinary thing. The old dynasty, the Tokugawas, are overthrown and replaced by the new emperor, Meiji. Here's a portrait of the Emperor. Study the portrait for a moment. Notice the uniform that he's wearing. It looks like the kind of uniform of any senior European statesman. Look at even the way his hair is dressed. Not too dissimilar from the way Emperor Napoleon III looked at the time. What's happening is the Emperor Meiji, a vigorous ruler, has made a revolutionary decision. He's going to lead a revolution in Japan. He's going to lead it from the top. He's determined to organize his country along Western lines, with a European style army, European style industry, European ways. But there are a lot of Japanese who resent these new ideas, resent these European ways. Who want to stand up for Japanese traditions. One result then is that the forces of the Emperor Meiji find themselves in a series of civil wars against other Japanese nobles who don't want to become part of a centralized nation state, in which they'll lose a lot of their traditional privileges and customs. The Meiji Emperor and his allies get help from a variety of European sources, some British, some French, some Prussian. Here's an example of the military help that they were getting, especially from the French. Early on, at a very critical phase, a group of French military advisers, a military mission depicted here. The man depicted here in the foreground on the left, an officer named Brunet, is sitting here with his Japanese colleagues, also garbed in the very latest of French military fashion. Another example of Japanese adaptation can be captured in the story of this quite extraordinary person. Fukuzawa Yukichi. By the way, you'll sometimes see him referred to as Yukichi Fukuzawa. That's because in Western literature, we sometimes tend to put the surname last, but in Japanese, the surname is put first. So, let�s borrow the Japanese usage here and call him Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa Yukichi is fascinated by Western ways early on. Goes to Nagasaki to try to find out more about the Dutch learning, the way the Japanese called Western ideas back then. He's determined to visit places like the United States of America, learn more about these ideas, and then bring those ideas back to Japan. He's a huge believer in education, in cultural adaptation. But as you can see from this photograph, he also wants to bridge that with Japanese tradition. Fukuzawa will become a founder, not only of some of Japan's very first newspapers, which he will edit. He'll also found one of Japan's first great universities, which remains today, Keio, K-E-I-O, one of the proudest universities of Japan. One of the things to notice about the clothes people wear, of course they're communicating to you a lot about their identity with the clothes they choose to wear, is actually in the Japanese case, they'll switch from traditional Japanese garb to Western style garb as the occasion demands. The kind of situation they're in. But just to call out the way that the Japanese adaptation is contrasting with the Chinese world. The Chinese world in the late 1800s is still holding on to a lot of their traditions. So you have two contrasting images here. On the left, you have a photograph of a traditional Chinese household. At the bottom, you have the master of the house with some of his family sequestered upstairs, the traditional garden, and so on. Here's an image from Japan, in which the Japanese matron is shown in a way that would have been instantly recognizable in Victorian England or in this case, in Germany in 1890. Japanese woman wearing Western style garb, seated at a Western style sewing machine, but one, as you can see from the carving on the sewing machine, designed a little bit for Japanese consumer taste. And take a look at this Japanese illustration, in which you can see the Japanese are adopting the railroad, building the trains. Depicting one of these new trains pulling into a brand new railroad station that you can see on the left hand side of the illustration. Of course, against the very traditional background, Mount Fuji looming on the horizon. This map gives you a sense of just how rapidly Japan is transforming itself. Look at the spread of railway networks across the length and breadth of the country. The coloring on the map is designed to show what percentage of people are working in manufacturing and services. You can see significant concentrations in manufacturing centers. In new industries, especially around the great metropolitan centers of Tokyo and the port of Yokohama. In this area here, the traditional city of Kyoto, and the great new cities of Osaka and Kobe. In the final example of civil wars that arise out of global- local interactions, we actually to return to the case of the United States. You'll remember that the American Civil War is significantly influenced by global economic forces, above all the relation of Southern cotton to the global industry in textiles, the great emblem of this phase of the Industrial Revolution. But it's also an arena for a clash of global ideas. Can a large republic work or does the Southern Confederacy, with its veneration of traditional hierarchies and its toleration of slavery and emphasis on local rights as opposed to the claims of the nation state, is that going to be the way of the future. The outcome of the Civil War is very important in this global-local interaction. It signals the triumph of anti-slavery and anti-slavery beliefs, the triumph of the nation state as the emerging model of the way in which these societies are going to be organized. It becomes an emblem for the zenith of a set of ideas that in the 1860s were called liberalism. This is not liberalism in the way we talked about that today in the politics of the United States. Think of liberalism in the middle of the 1800s as a different set of ideas, which I'll explore some more in the next presentation. See you then.
