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THIS chapter follows the later nineteenth-century career of nationalism and empire building, which were among the dominant features of the age. It integrates discussion of these two great incubuses of historiography, but also examines the peoples, ethnicities, and religious groups that were excluded by nations and marginalized by empires. The chapter argues that the more vigorous stirring of nationality in the late nineteenth century was a global phenomenon. It emerged contemporaneously in large parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, rather than first in Europe, later to be exported "overseas." In many cases, the tide of nationalism also drew on indigenous legends, histories, and sentiments about land and people, rather than being a malign imposition of the West. In future, theorists of nationalism will have to bring the extra-European world into a central position in their analyses, rather than seeing it as an "add-on extra." Finally, the chapter considers the many links between emerging national institutions which began to create an inter-national civil society at the end of the nineteenth century. Again, the paradox of globalization reveals itself. The hardening of boundaries between nation states and empires after 1860 led people to find ways of linking, communicating with, and influencing each other across those boundaries. Nationalism (along with empire) is among the few thoroughly "theorized" historical topics. It will be useful, therefore, to consider "theories" of nationalism before examining the questions "When was nationalism?" and "Who or What created it?" THEORIES OF NATIONALISM "Theories of nationalism" were a major talking point for historians of the later twentieth century. This was partly because nationalism refused to die, as it was supposed to in the socialist theories which had earlier influenced historians. It was partly because historians were stirred into action by the programmatic writing of colleagues in the social sciences, at least on this issue. The following section hopes to demonstrate that these theories should really be seen as tools of interpretation, rather than theories proper. They can help to illuminate one case or another of late-nineteenth-century nationalism, singly or in conjunction. But they have no predictive value, and none of them taken separately can possibly explain the nature, still less the timing, of the emergence of nationalism. 1 One set of ideas about nationalism, which directly follows the assumptions of thinkers and patriots of the late nineteenth century, argues that modem nations emerged naturally out of earlier communities of language and culture. Most of today's cultural nationalists still hold to this view. They assert that the events of the late nineteenth century were no more than the culmination of a broad process by which incipient peoples claimed nationhood and claimed the statehood which guaranteed it. This was the historical legitimation sought by the Italian patriots Mazzini and Garibaldi, and by their Indian admirer, Surendranath Bannerjea, who wrote of "nations in making." This naturalistic interpretation of nations was the message proclaimed in a thousand novels, operas, and national anthems, which lauded the German Volk, le peuple franr;ais, or an "Egypt for the Egyptians." Typical of these effusions was the poem "Battle hymn" of the Greek revolutionary poet, Rigas Feraios: "How long, my heroes, shall we live in bondage, alone like lions, on ridges, on peaks. Living in caves, seeing our children turned from the land to bitter enslavement. Better an hour of life that is free than forty years in slavery." 2 Despite the intense skepticism of modern historians, some aspiring nations of the late nineteenth century inside and outside Europe could reasonably claim a much deeper lineage than others. They were not living, evolving entities, but neither were they the lately come fabrications of populist demagogues and bigoted intellectuals. This was often the case, as implied in earlier chapters, where old patriotic identities, religious and linguistic homogeneity, and compact ethnic homelands coincided. Adrian Hastings has made the case strongly for England and France. 3 Historians of Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Japan have argued for similar continuities. In a different context, T. C. W. Blanning has examined a deep sense of identity, even of chauvinism, in German cultural nationalism well before the nineteenth century, which transcended the boundaries of its principalities. 4 Elites in some Indian regions, too, appear to have forged a sense of patriotic identity around popular religion, language, and resistance to invaders in the early modern period. Later nineteenthcentury nationalist leaders appropriated and built on these living traditions and histories as they sought to consolidate modern national states against internal and external enemies. Here the theorist A. D. Smith's idea of the continuity between what he calls "ethnies" - that is, old cultural and linguistic zones - and modern nations seems persuasive. 5 However, modern historians, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, are very skeptical about such claims, with the majority arguing that nations were recently "constructed" by political forces or acts of imagination, rather than growing like living organisms. And there is no doubt that in many regions during the late nineteenth century, it was indeed these state-driven constructions of nationalist sentiment which were most in evidence. Here, the debate has turned, therefore, on the conditions which made it possible for elites to invent or construct nations. In the 1980s many professional historians followed the anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner, 6 in arguing that nationalism was closely connected with urbanization and industrialization. He observed that in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, and in Asia and Africa after the 1930s, it was people congregated in new urban centers who were most likely to portray themselves as unified peoples and to demand statehood. It was, for instance, the melee of Hungarians, Serbs, and Italians in nineteenth-century Vienna and their competition for resources and jobs which tended to harden the distinctions between these "races" and propel their demands for national autonomy. Gellner's, then, was a modernization theory. It saw nationalism as the functional equivalent in politics of capitalism, industrialization, the nuclear family, and "possessive individualism," forces which were all believed to be on the march to dominance across the modern world by steady stages. In this view, nationalism moved from west to east to south, finally coming to rest in Africa in the twentieth century, as the "last continent" was penetrated by capitalism and urbanization. Rather predictably, Gellner's thesis works best for the central and eastern European societies which were to the forefront of his mind. So, the confrontation between Czechs, Germans, and Hungarians within the Austrian Empire took place in an atmosphere of rapid urbanization. Prague's population, for example, rose from 157,000 in 1850 to 514,000 in 1900.7 It also speaks to the German case and to Italy, insofar as Piedmont at least was a new industrial center. There are many other cases, however, where vigorous national movements emerged in societies where industrialization remained at a very low level. Writers who were less sure about the onward march of capitalism and individualism came to argue, somewhat later than Gellner's book, that nationalism was the product of the state itself, the working of a pure principle of power. As Eric Hobsbawm puts it, nationalism follows the state, not vice versa. 8 He and John Breuilly, 9 above all, have argued that the conscious policy of new political elites, especially in the later nineteenth century, was what created nationalism. States promoted popular education, defined citizenship and its duties, counted and imprisoned people. Their sense of urgency was enhanced by the needs of capitalism, the rise of socialism, working-class activism, and the fear of crime. This was a period when governments began to institute regular censuses and to control immigration and emigration more closely through the use of the passport system. All this was consciously or unconsciously directed to strengthening the sentiment of nationalism and making people on the margins choose one or another nation-state. Even the Dnited States in the later nineteenth century fits this model quite well. A corollary of this theory, rather than a separate theory in its own right, is found in the formulation of Benedict Anderson made in the l 980s. 10 This was a more anthropological view, which emphasized the role of the imagination and shared feeling in the invention of nationalism, rather than changes in power and resources. Nations were "imagined communities" created by "print capitalism." The diffusion of books and newspapers across the world inscribed a sense of belonging in the minds of those elites and, later, ordinary people who read them. Anderson's position has one great advantage. It can explain why people in territories not yet subjected to capitalism, industrial urbanism, or even strong states could begin to advance claims to nationhood. This is why his work, which was generated out of a study of Dutch Indonesia, and has been particularly popular with historians of India and Africa in the nineteenth century. A complete account of the emergence of the competitive nationalisms of the late-nineteenth-century world would incorporate all of these discrete "theories" as preconditions. Some of them would have to be given more weight in some situations than in others. So, for instance, the emergence of nationalist movements in the still-rural societies of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa widely predated modern industrial urbanization and even the widespread diffusion of print capitalism. In these societies, urbanization rarely went higher than 10 percent before the end of the nineteenth century, and male literacy was probably a few percentage points less. Nor, in fact, was this simply a condition of the non-European world. It is important to remember that even in 1848, when something which could be called nationalism was clearly on the march, the same was true for Germany, where 75 percent of the population still lived on the land, and the urban population was made up predominantly of officials and old-style artisans. Again, the emergence of nationalism was not a single event so much as a process. An inchoate sense of nationality, generated by memories and traditions of earlier patriotisms, could be honed and molded by the activity of a newly powerful state, if we follow the arguments of John Breuilly and Eric Hobsbawm. This is not to say that the state created a sense of nationalism out of nothing. In the United States, for instance, the Civil War forged more firmly a sense of American nationality, at least among the dominant northern population. After 1865 the word "nation" was heard more often across the North American continent. This last example reminds us of a condition for the emergence of nationalism which has remained rather marginal in most of the major "theories": the importance of armed conflict, particularly armed conflict between states, but also conflict among their constituent populations. The intensification of nationalism during the nineteenth century was itself preeminently a consequence of war and invasion. Nationalism defined itself against "others." The experience of common military service, basic education in the ranks, and elite leadership widely transformed peasants and workers into nationalists. In turn, this militarized nationalism often gave rise to further wars and invasions. The world wars at the end of the eighteenth century speeded up the process by which the regional patriotisms of the old order were transformed into more exclusive and aggressive nationalisms. The multiple crises of the middle of the nineteenth century widely confirmed that transition, not only in Europe, but also in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. The new industrial machinery and communications discussed in the last chapter made a national community more visible, or at least more feasible. WHEN WAS NATIONALISM? For historians, then, if not generally for theorists, the timing of the emergence of the new nationalism at world level is important. This needs elaboration. As stated, nationalism has often been seen as a sentiment which was passed from supposedly advanced white people to less advanced Asians and Africans. This diffusionist theory needs to be greatly modified. It is true that many subSaharan Africans lived in local or regional communities without deep social hierarchies in which broader social identities had little relevance. Yet even here, the mid-nineteenth century was a period when, in response to missionary propagation of the Bible, local intellectuals writing in African vernaculars began to assert the claims of African "peoples." Moreover, vigorous independence movements existed in India and Egypt by the 1880s, and across other parts of Asia by 1900. Japan was in many respects a nation-state before the end of the Tokugawa regime in 1868. It may well have had as strong a sense of nationalism as contemporary Germany, and one more developed than Italy's. The contrast with Europe should not, therefore, be overdrawn. After all, few of the nationalist revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe had widespread support. As Jonathan Sperber notes, the leading Romanian nationalist newspaper of that year had only 250 subscribers. 11 With this caveat, it still seems possible to set out some broad periods of change which would make sense at a world level, and not simply for Europe. The two interlinked sets of world crises, those of 1780-1815 and 1848-65, gave a great impetus to incipient national identities. It is generally accepted that Napoleon's conquests in Europe gave a fillip to national identities in Germany, Italy, and Russia. Equally, French and Russian invasion made Ottomans, Egyptians, and other North Africans aware of a heightened sense of vulnerability and of the need to reorder their societies. Two generations later, the Eurasian wars of the mid-nineteenth century convinced the elites of late Tokugawa Japan of the need for self-strengthening. In India, the 1857 rebellion and the new British invasion which it brought about forced the merchants and professional people of the seaboard regions to reconsider their status within the empire. This heightened and broadened sense of nationality was not simply a consequence of the rolling tide of global wars, however. It also reflected new opportunities for inter-regional communications and the transfer and adaptation of ideologies. In the 1820s, the Indian reformer Raja Ram Mohun Roy Was able to read about the post-Napoleonic revolutions in Europe in Calcutta's English newspapers and wrote about national self-determination. Before 1914, Nguyen Ai Quoc, alias Ho Chi Minh, was reading about the thought of Thomas Jefferson, the American founding father, in his French school books. Nor did these ideas and models simply move from the West to "the rest." Even by the 1880s, Japan's own hybrid modernity had become a powerful model for other Asian and African nationalists. The classic general histories of Europe describe the later nineteenth century as an age of alliances and tension between newly industrialized nation-states. These nations projected their power abroad in the guise of a "new imperialism," exemplified particularly in the partition of Africa. This broad periodization still holds true, though it was a global, not merely a European, one. After 1860, political leaders within and outside Europe rapidly extended their project of making nation-states. By 1870, Italy was unified under the leadership of a rapidly industrializing and modernizing Piedmont, following the intervention of France and Prussia against her erstwhile overlord, Austria. Though landed magnates still retained great influence, especially in the south, a small industrial middle class based in Milan and Turin, which consciously adopted the Tuscan form of the Italian language, provided the country with a degree of unity. Germany was unified in 1871 following the military victories of Prussia over two former overlords of the German-speaking regions, Austria and France. While the German fatherlands still attracted the loyalty of their people, a common culture and language and a growing role in the outside world brought together the landowners of the east, the bourgeois of the Rhine valley, and the Catholic peasantry of the south. In the same span of years, rapid social change and the reestablishment of the Union in the United States brought into being a more vigorous sense of American nationality. The British dominions, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, became federated states between 1860 and 1901. In Japan, meanwhile, young reformers refashioned the authority of the Meiji emperor as the center of the nation. In eastern Europe, pan-Slavism, encouraged by a newly assertive Russia, began to partition the European parts of the Ottoman Empire into small, aggressive Christian principalities following the Balkan War of 1878. When the British occupied Egypt in 1882, they were confronted by a coalition of military officers, clerics, and landholders which signaled the emergence of a new sense of identity in this former southern province of the Ottoman Empire. In Asia, the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the strident denunciation of the Manchus in the 1890s by young coastal and overseas Chinese registered the desire of new Asian elites to capture "their own" embryonic nation-states. WHOSE NATION? Even if warfare and social changes brought into being nationalisms over similar periods, it is important to remember that the form of the national communitY remained highly contested and ambiguous in almost every case. It is unwise to "read back" the form of today's nationalisms into the later nineteenth century, let alone an earlier period. Irish home rule, for instance, did not require a separate Irish nation-state for many so-called Irish nationalists of the 1880s or 1890s. Thousands oflrish people, including many Catholic Irish people, were to fight in British armies in both world wars. Leaders of Britain's white dominions also remained intensely loyal to the British connection, but social and economic integration had begun to create distinct regional nationalisms in Australasia and Canada by the time of the South African war in 1899. In a very different context, proponents of what is called Egyptian nationalism certainly began to cry "Egypt for the Egyptians!" during the years of European intervention after 1876. Yet many of them were at the same time "Ottoman patriots," for whom Istanbul remained the center of the world. Some Chinese nationalists after 1896 may well have been denouncing "Manchus," oblivious to the fact that this category was partly created by the very Qing Manchu dynasty itself. But that ethnic divide became critically significant only after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. So, while many more intellectuals and statesmen were talking about "the nation" after 1860, this does not mean that there was any consensus about whose nations they were, or what the nation was. Yet we need not completely retreat to the cover of ambiguity. It may be useful to classify types of nationalism on a spectrum. This in turn makes it easier to specify historical turning points. At one end of the spectrum were the nationalisms which emerged out of "old patriotisms" - that is, relatively homogeneous communities of language and religion. These were often fortified by relatively long-lived centralized states and traditions of virtuous government. England, France, Japan, and, less surely, Indian Maharashtra and Sri Lanka fall into this category. Ireland definitely had an old sense of patriotic identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though this identity was rather different from the Catholic mass nationalism of the end of the nineteenth century. So, too, did at least the northern part of "Vietnam," what the French called "Annam." In these areas ruling groups were able to marshal more active forms of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century precisely because they could be rooted in an already existing sense of common purpose, reflected in common language and culture and old regional connections. Latenineteenth- century nationalism here was not simply a top-down phenomenon, nor simply a creature of the state or its elites. 12 People from poorer and subordinate groups sought a stake in what they thought of as their nations. Sometimes, too, emigrants outside the borders of states played a powerful part in stimulating the desire for a unified national territory. Irish emigrants to the United States or Australia and Chinese emigrants to Hawaii and Southeast Asia were very important in the emergence oflrish and Chinese nationalism respectively. This type of nationalism, then, falls firmly within the camp of A. D. Smith, Adrian Hastings, and others who are skeptical that nationalism was easily "constructed" in very recent times. At the other end of the spectrum were nationalisms which were created by states, as opposed to states which were created out of old patriotisms. Britain, as opposed to England, was forged during the long wars with France, and Particularly during the world crisis of 1 780-1820, as Linda Colley has argued. Belgian nationalism was fostered by the government after the creation, in 1831, of the Kingdom of the Belgians from a set of polyglot northern European provinces. Latin American nationalisms, similarly, followed, rather than preceded, the creation of independent states there in the 1820s and 1830s. True, literate people and landowners had a vague sense of "Creole-ness," of being American as opposed to Spanish, as early as 1760. But there had been little sense of being a "Colombian" or "Venezuelan" - the very names were later inventions. Again, there was certainly an ideal of patriotic commitment in the United States before 1860. Yet it was the Civil War and the growing, if still marginal, US participation in world affairs after that date which bred a more robust American nationalism. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum were located those large states whose leaders were not really sure whether to foster or suppress the various proto-nationalist leaderships which emerged within their borders during the later nineteenth century. The rulers of Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and China all faced the problem that, by patronizing an emerging sense of nationalism in one section of their population, especially if it was a dominant one, they might pull apart the whole fa~ade of empire. If, conversely, they failed to give such nationalist leaders their head, the rulers themselves might become politically irrelevant. These cases will be considered in more detail later in the chapter. PERPETUATING NATIONALISMS: MEMORIES) NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS) AND PRINT The origins of nationhood have been treated in greater detail than has its perpetuation. In recent years, however, historians have become more interested in how the idea of nationality was represented and "read" by ordinary people. As important in the rooting of nationalisms as the brute experience of armed conflict were memories of it. Memories and traditions, education, 13 and the emergence of national politics ensured that this heightened sense of nationality was reproduced generation by generation. Sites of memory - battlefields, graveyards, the dwelling places of national liberators, the statues of patriots and martyrs - all these created the sacred landscape of nationalism. The attempt to link and formalize these sites in public memory was particularly widespread after the wars of the mid-nineteenth century. The new French Third Republic defied monarchists, Bonapartists, and the Church to impose public celebration of Bastille Day. Streets throughout France were renamed after the heroes of the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution. In America, Washington DC was adorned with monuments to the heroes of the Union, including one memorial to the black soldiers who died in its defense. In united Italy, a huge cult developed around Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel, whose equine statues can still be seen galloping or strutting through the piazze of hundreds ofltalian towns and cities (see illustration 6.1). The state's insistence on drilling and paramilitary volunteering, which accompanied the European wars of unification, became one means by which the new sense of national destiny was imprinted on the mind of the following generations. School textbooks, romances, atlases, museums, public entertainments, military and naval parades kept them always in front of the eye. Outside Europe, too, aspiring leaderships could warm their hands around the memorial fires of old patriotic resisters. The tradition of "Vietnamese" resistance against the Chinese or Japanese resistance to the Mongols were embroidered in many nationalist speeches and books of the late nineteenth century. "Racial" struggle and the military mobilization of nations had been the dominant themes of the mid-century crisis. Nationalism was heightened by these conflicts. But how did the political theory of the liberal nation-state accord with all this? Another theme of 1848 in Europe and of the Union's war against the Confederacy had been the representation of all the people. Popular Politics and the democratic urge have long been recognized as the brighter side of the tarnished force of nationalism. The paradox that the search for an equal citizenry often led to a narrow nationalist autocracy is recognized in the phrase "plebiscitary dictatorship" which was used of Napoleon III, paragon of the 1848 barricades turned emperor. How far can the expansion of popular democracy be seen as a forcing house for the new nationalisms of the years after 1860? On the face of it, it cannot. The nationalism of the leaders of the new Germany and Italy, Bismarck and Cavour, led them to be more suspicious of an extension of representative government than had been the leaders of the "springtime of peoples" in 1848. Both aristocratic liberals and the men of blood and iron were suspicious of the hold of priests and socialists on the masses. In America, the liberation of the slaves did not lead to their mass enfranchisement, as local whites soon began to rig electorates. The British elite was turned against the idea of extending the franchise in part by their observation of Napoleon Ill's "tyranny" in France. 14 The representation of interests through parliament was held to be a good, but democracy was still equated in the eyes of political leaders with oppression. In the new Germany, where a wide franchise did exist, electoral support carried little purchase in the inner organs of government. Elsewhere, the franchise remained severely limited, and concessions were wrung only reluctantly out of governments, in the case of Russia in 1905 by force. Non-European subjects of the colonial powers saw at best tiny local electorates or minor concessions in the right to govern parochial affairs according to the old norms. In the 1880s, for instance, the British Liberal government established municipal and district boards in India with tiny direct electorates of Indian worthies. Even if popular sovereignty played only a muted part in the development of nationalism after 1860, the period did see the emergence of national political parties. These tended to project local events on a wider scale and to make people aware of the politics of the nation, even when they could not themselves vote. The mobilization of people through political parties and pressure groups to capture and give meaning to the state arose in the context of the decline of royal and aristocratic legitimacy after 1789. This, as chapter 4 noted, was merely halted, but not reversed after 1815. The corollary of this was the massive expansion of social and political pressure groups, from labor unions through women's movements to religious associations, which claimed the nation as a whole as their constituency. Nationalism was cemented by the constant reiteration of claims to national legitimacy made by such sectional associations, as well as by pressure from elites "at the top." So, even in the highly decentralized USA, the national political arena became more important for both Democrats and Republicans as economic and technological changes brought different parts of the Union into contact with each other. In Britain, the Liberal Party emerged from a congeries of Nonconformist and reforming associations under the leadership of W. E. Gladstone. When the franchise was extended to include working men after 1884, the Conservatives began for the first time to enlist the support of working-class supporters. Consequently, appeals to the national interest and national symbols became an increasingly important part of British elections, and indeed of the vigorous world of voluntary associations throughout the country. In Germany, where political parties were unable to exercise much influence on ministers, the conflicts between the conservatives, the Catholic Center Party, and later the Social Democrats similarly drew politics away from the state and lodged them at a national level. In the Russian Empire, too, where popular politics was virtually non-existent before 1905, bureaucratic factions or patrimonial political interests attempting to demonstrate support were forced to campaign and build opinion in the Russian localities, Siberia, and the Ukraine. This growing sense of Russian-ness among elites in the major cities jostled uneasily with the emerging nationalist sentiments of urban Poles, Lithuanians, and Finns. In the colonized world, electorates remained tiny, if they existed at all. Yet national parties and lobby groups existed throughout the British, Dutch, and French colonial empires by the 1880s. One further change, which fostered stronger allegiance to national political entities, was the growth of means of communication, especially of newspapers which sought to appeal to a national interest. Here Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities of print again becomes highly relevant, though not so much in creating nationalism as in spreading and generalizing it. In 1840, the European press had been overwhelmingly provincial, speaking to the interests and need for information of small groups of readers. After 1860, there was an impressive growth in mass publication, and the new syndicated newspapers published in their millions, many of them being directed almost at national markets. Press "barons," such as the British radical W. T. Stead and the American William Randolph Hearst, saw newspapers as vehicles for education, drawing working people to an understanding of their duty as citizens. The communications revolution had a literally electrifying effect on the aspirations of people outside Europe, too. What made the Persian "constitutional revolution" of 1909 possible, for instance, was the linking together of different centers across desert and mountain by telegraph messages. This created a much stronger sense of shared national endeavor. The political effects of these developments were ambiguous. They strengthened national governments as well as national civil society. As so often with the development of communications media, an initial pressure towards freedom of communication was frustrated by the implementation of powerful measures of control. Governments became the protectors of telegraph lines. News syndicates such as Reuters controlled and channeled news. These controls tended to ensure that governments and national political elites read little that they did not want to hear. The war correspondent, whose despatches detailing the belligerence and brutality of the enemy were now found on middle-class breakfast tables in every major country, was the forward standard-bearer of combative nationalism. The British populist liberal politician Winston Churchill began his career as a war correspondent during Britain's African wars, for example. For even in Britain and the USA, where a long-lived sense of nationality had to some degree stifled the birth of a sharper nationalism, the joint stirrings of Political parties and a hectoring press began to create a vigorous chauvinism. Before 1898, when the United States went to war over Cuba, the press stirred a Wave of anti-Spanish sentiment. The strident British campaign against the Boers, Germans, and French, which accompanied the South African War (1899-1902), and Anglo-French tension in central Africa, prepared British public opinion for the deepening of European conflicts after 1900. On the other hand, colonized peoples eagerly plugged into these novel news media. Indian nationalists eagerly read Stead's Review of Reviews, while North African nationalists bombarded the British and French authorities with telegrams. FROM COMMUNITY TO NATION: THE EURASIAN EMPIRES This section moves on from a consideration of "theories of nationalism" and their broad development to chart in more detail the emergence of nationalist leaderships in areas where the old agrarian empires had been dominant. As a type of nationalism, these cases were located in the middle of the spectrum between old patriotisms and state-constructed nationalisms which was outlined above. The rise of nationalism in these polities was perhaps the most important development of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, as chapter 11 will argue, it is important not to write off the great empires too early. One can point to parts of the world, and even parts of these same imperial polities, where nationalism was of little salience before 1914. All the same, there were large tracts of former agrarian empires where vociferous nationalist leaderships emerged quite rapidly after about 1860. This created severe strains in these complex societies and often resulted, as the next section will show, in the harassment and exclusion of "ethnic minorities," a tendency which also became sharper after 1860. Multiethnic empires faced a severe dilemma in the late nineteenth century: whether to patronize or suppress these stirrings of nationalism. European and quasi-European empires had particular problems. The Habsburg dynasty and its German ruling groups were forced to cede more and more influence to their Hungarian partners in power, if only to fend off a growing challenge from spokesmen for the "Magyar people" reflected in newspapers, books, and growing resentment among urbanizing Hungarians hungry for jobs and status. 15 This in turn raised questions about what it meant to be a Czech, a Slovak, or a Romanian in the Habsburg lands. Most historians of the AustroHungarian Empire see the 1890s as an important turning point. During this decade, nationalist spokesmen appear to have gathered widespread support, especially in the big cities and amongst the more prosperous farmers. Russian rulers faced similar difficulties. Tsar Alexander III realized that he had to give a degree of latitude to Russian Orthodox nationalism within his empire. The danger was that this could easily spark into life leaderships which claimed to represent Polish, Lithuanian, and other nationalities. For these non-Russians continued to make up 60 percent of the tsar's subjects. The palace looked on in horror during the late 1870s when Russian nationalist agitation in the press and society forced Russia into a costly war with the Ottoman Empire. 16 In Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian polities, the dilemma of how to handle national aspirations was heightened by economic backwardness and European dominance. In the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, the Orthodox Church, the Greek language, and the success of Greek entrepreneurs within the eighteenth-century Mediterranean had spurred Greek patriotism. The old Christian commonwealth of the eastern Roman Empire was already showing some fissures at this time, as Greeks and "Slavs" began to create different lineages of nationhood for themselves. It was, however, the intervention of Ottoman armies in Greece during the 1820s which forged a more cohesive sense of nationhood among Greeks and made possible the creation of an independent Greek kingdom. The contemporary European discovery of the ancient Greek past invested this nationalism with an invented historical lineage and encouraged the Western powers to accord Greece the trappings of nationhood. Successively, over the next 80 years, the other Christian parts of the Balkans - Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria - progressed towards independence. At a deeper level than the intervention of the Christian powers, the main force aiding the intelligentsia in fragmenting the empire was the practical calculation of the peasantry that it would gain more secure property rights after national independence from the Ottomans. Elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Syria, some historians have argued that there was a vague sense of "Arabness" emerging in the eighteenth century. This did not imply any hostility to the adjacent Ottoman Turkish populations or the Ottoman governors who ruled Syria. It was reflected, though, in a sense of sacred and historical geography, a kind of "soft" patriotism. It was the wars of the late nineteenth century between the Ottomans and the Russians and Austrians which began to create wider fissures outside the Balkans. Ottoman rulers facing Christian aggression sometimes tried to rouse Muslim feeling against the foreigners. But this was problematic, because it was bound to raise questions about the status of the many Christians and Jews who still owed allegiance to the sultan in the central Ottoman lands. Alongside religion, ethnic origin became a site of political debate. If Greeks were a nationality, what on earth were the Druze, the Orthodox Christians, and the Shias of Syria and Mount Lebanon? The Ottomans were by no means as ineffectual in brokering and compromising these disputes as was once thought. On Mount Lebanon, a mid-century civil war between sectarian groups gave way after 1860 to a new political system under the sultans. Decentralized government made room for a distinct sense of Lebanese identity, while bargaining between community leaders remained peaceful and effective until the Western powers again intervened during the First World War. 17 Nevertheless, the dilemma of managing difference yet creating a strong state became more acute after the so-called Young Turk revolution of 1908. PanTurkish feeling was, as yet, not very widespread, though a number of literati had begun to write passionately of Turkish language and culture. The young tnilitary officers, who took power in 1908 and restored the constitution, were in a dilemma. They felt that they needed to consolidate the empire and make it tnore like a European state. Most of them were still Ottoman patriots at heart, rather than Turkish nationalists, and were to remain so until the 1920s, as Hasan Kayali has argued. 18 They included Arabs and Armenians as well as ethnic Turks. Yet they did put in train some measures for expanding Turkish language education in the Arab provinces, though these were later watered down. The world Arab Conference which met in 1913 was, in part, a reaction to these tentative moves. Locally, as in Mesopotamia, pro-Arabist societies began to query the purpose of the empire. 19 Nationality was indeed becoming an issue within the empire, though much opinion, even amongst the Greeks of Asia Minor, remained broadly Ottomanist in attitude as late as 1916. Egypt, by contrast, had always been a unique province within the Ottoman Empire. This was partly because Egyptians spoke a distinctive form of the Arabic language and partly because modern Egypt was set amongst the remains of ancient Pharaonic civilization. With its relatively large population, intensive riverine agriculture, and strong economy, Egypt had a long history of local autonomy. Ironically, it was the Albanian and Turkish-speaking ruling family of Mehmet, or Muhammad Ali, which encouraged the Egyptian sense of separateness in the early nineteenth century through its military and fiscal reforms and tactic of promoting local people to office. Though there is some disagreement between historians about the extent of this "Creole" policy, it does seem that Egyptians displayed a well-developed sense of regional identity by the 1880s and 1890s. 20 As in the German case a decade or so before, the need for a "national political economy" to protect local industry and fend off rapacious European moneylenders and bondholders also created an economic alliance between landowners, entrepreneurs, and bazaar people, reinforcing this sense of regional identity. By the 1870s, Egypt had become a virtual colony, with upward of 200,000 European residents in its cities and its ruling house hamstrung by British and French commercial interests. 21 After 1878, the Western powers forced the Egyptian rulers to cut back their army, raise taxation, and accept foreign advisers. The result was the transformation of an Egyptian feeling of resentment into a widespread nationalist movement demanding "Egypt for the Egyptians!" That movement was by no means anti-Ottoman in ideology, but it was nonetheless testimony to a growing sense of Egyptian solidarity. 22 Elsewhere in North Africa, the theme of "holy war" in defense of a particular homeland situated within the wider world of the Ottoman Empire and Islam was as conspicuous as it was in the plural society of Egypt. North Africans tenaciously remembered the Spanish reconquest of the Muslim lands of southern Spain three centuries before. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the inhabitants of North Africa feared Christian invasion and began to consider their political future. In the wars after 1830, they responded to the danger with a sense of solidarity that was peculiarly North African.2 3 their fears were confirmed when France invaded Algeria, precipitating a long War of occupation and an almost constant succession of revolts through the l30 years of French rule. This was no homogeneous "Islamic reaction," nor Was it a simple response to economic desolation. In its commitment to land, people, and traditions, it was as much and as little nationalist as the sentiments that Napoleon had once stirred through his Italian conquests. Some black Africans, too, began to talk of an "African nation," even though the continent remained divided between many different polities. By the 1860s, West African Creoles, freed slaves, and mission-educated men trained in Britain and the United States were arguing that Africans deserved independence and humane treatment. They were not under "the curse of God." This sort of pan-Africanism had few supporters, but it did have a growing literature, newspapers, and congresses well before 1900. 24 The tone was set by men such as Edward W. Blyden, professor of Greek and Latin. Born of slave parents of Ibo origin, he went to the USA and later to Liberia under Presbyterian auspices. A pan-African nationalist by the 1880s, he wrote: During all the years that have elapsed since the commencement of modern progress, the African race has filled a very humble and subordinate part in the work of human civilisation ... [but] there is a peculiar work for them to accomplish both in the land of their bondage and the land of their fathers. I would rather be a member of this race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or an Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century. Here, race and the idea of progress come together with the idea of Christian redemption to create the beginnings of a sense of shared nationality. 25 Outside the west coast, Africa south of the Sahara did not really throw up anything that could be called nationalism before 1914. Yet African kingdoms embattled by European advance north from the Cape, such as the Ndebele and Shona, embodied a sense of pride in land and community. They were more than military despotisms. Adrian Hastings argued that the appropriation and use of the Bible by African elites during the later nineteenth century also created a new sense of local patriotism. Significantly, Hastings and a new generation of African-born historians are beginning to argue that, while missionaries and colonial officials helped categorize Africans into "tribes" in the years between 1860 and 1900, there already existed in many parts of Africa a sense of "peoplehood" which went beyond simple loyalty to a king. The 20 years after 1860 were also critical in the building of an all-India nationalism, broader and more self-consciously modern than the older patriotism of the Indian regions. Already, as early as the 1830s, Indian reformers and conservatives were calling for what amounted to a national political economy in both Bengal and western India. This was a response to Britain's importation of its early industrialization to the subcontinent and to resident Europeans' pressure for free trade. The commercial and landed magnates of Bengal were as aware as any European of the wars between republicans and monarchists in the aftermath of 1815. They understood the import of the British Reform Bill of 1832 and bewailed the plight of the Irish during the 1848 famine. Perhaps again, the small elites of merchants and professional people were probably no more or less "nationalist" than Hungarians or Neapolitans during these years. Many of them were worried by the apparent anarchy loosed by the rebels of 1857 and rejected the notion that the mutiny was a patriotic movement. Further experience of British invasion and of humiliation by the new breed of post-mutiny white expatriates created amongst the Indian elites a clearer sense of the need for political revival through the creation of a national community. Though large parts of India had seen no war since the end of the eighteenth century, their elites increasingly came to see themselves as citizens of an occupied country. The greater visible presence of white British troops after 1857 and the construction of railway lines and new military and civil stations fed this sentiment, at least among urban people. The various associations and varied elites which hesitantly came together in the first Indian National Congress at Bombay in 1885 drew on a sense of conflict and economic and racial disadvantage. These leaders inherited some of the themes of the old patriotisms of the Indian regions. They also lauded the virtues of the homely artisans and their products, the need for kings to obtain good counsel, and the need to keep the land free from the pollution of cow killing and alcohol. 26 Yet the leaders of these associations were also aware of British liberal doctrines of popular representation and control of bureaucracy. In China, as in the Ottoman Empire, sentiments of solidarity were complicated by the emergence of a new rhetoric of ethnic division which began to pit Chinese against "Manchu." Ironically, these distinctions had been institutionalized by the regime itself during the eighteenth century, as part of imperial ideology. By the 1900s, however, it was possible to speak of an incipient Han Chinese nationalism, fortified by an idea of racial uniqueness, as well as Qing imperial patriotism. Both sentiments were redoubled in their strength by the experience of defeat and occupation. The Chinese humiliations of the opium wars were deepened by the unequal treaties forced on the empire by the Western powers after 1860. Christian missionary intrusion along the coasts brought traditional Chinese literati and ordinary people to a stronger sense of their own identity. Sometimes this feeling of rage against foreign intervention turned the Chinese against the regime. Sometimes it created a popular patriotic movement of Chinese elites and populace hostile to all foreigners who supported the regime. This was the case in 1900, when a martial and religious movement that westerners called the "Boxers," rose against foreign missionaries and businessmen, declaring its loyalty to the Chinese empress. 27 The threat to Western economic and cultural assets in China was averted only by a full-scale invasion by European, Japanese, and American troops. Meanwhile, a more modern and sometimes explicitly anti-Qing form of Chinese nationalism was emerging among the missionary-educated middle class and business people of the coastal regions and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Sun Yatsen, first president of the Chinese republic after the First World War, was a case in point. He had been educated in Hong Kong, Hawaii, and Japan. He also had contacts amongst the Chinese in Bangkok and Malaya. In 1895, Sun Yatsen and his supporters attempted a coup against the Manchu authorities in Canton. His aim was to create a new Chinese state, dedicated to the salvation of the Chinese people. This new regime would stand up to Western cultural and economic intrusion in a way that the Qing regime had failed to do. Following the coup's failure, Sun and other young Chinese reformers and nationalists fled to London. Here, in the imperial capital, they encountered a host of colonial nationalists and radical students, Indian, Irish, and Egyptian. They read of other movements against the colonial power, and Sun began to draw together in his mind the threads of what would be his "Three Principles of the People," one of the key documents of Asian nationalism in the twentieth century. 28 WHERE WE STAND WITH NATIONALISM Previous chapters and the first sections of this chapter have been developing what amounts to a three-stage proposition about the emergence of nationalism. In summary, this argues, first, that in several world regions, including non-European societies, such as northern Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Ethiopia, leaderships steadily and over long periods transformed older sentiments of patriotic attachment to land into more aggressive and exclusive understandings of nationality. This occurred under the pressure of war, economic and cultural change, and the development of communications. Often these "old patriotisms" were connected with an early history of statehood, so that a cultural region, an economic region, and a state emerged as overlapping forms. But some old kingdoms did not overlap with well-defined cultural zones in this way, while some cultural zones did not throw up old states. Often, too, these old patriotisms had emerged on the boundaries of great multiethnic polities and in reaction against them. Yet this, again, was not always the case. The growth of the market and social connections among ordinary people in these emergent old "motherlands" solidified connections amongst the regional elites. The process, therefore, was "bottom-up" as well as "top-down." It was accelerated by the world conflicts of 1780-1820 and 1848-65. It was deepened by global forces towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it had a longer history. In these cases, if nations had indeed been "constructed," it had been over a very long period and was in part the unintended consequence of much wider social and economic changes. The second proposition is that in other areas, and particularly in the complex large polities of eastern Eurasia and North Africa, the change came more abruptly, in the nineteenth century and especially in the years after 1860. Here, international war and colonialism drove intellectuals and publicists to adopt the language and practices of modern nationalism. While this was true of many non-European areas which were coming under extreme pressure from European imperialism after 1860, something similar occurred in the Russian and Austrian empires. Here also, the attempts of statesmen to modernize and industrialize their societies to face war and economic conflict galvanized regional leaderships, which cherished a history of cultural difference, into a new assertion of their separatism and claims to nationality. In this sense, the development of a more assertive nationalism in Hungary and Poland after 1860 was related to the emergence of Indian and Egyptian nationalism and occurred over very much the same span of years. Thirdly, there were areas, such as the central Ottoman lands and parts of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and even parts of southern Ireland, where nationalism had still not emerged as a coherent set of ideas and political practices even in 1914. None of these different trajectories can, however, be summed up in any easy distinction between the timing or nature of nationalism inside "Europe" and in regions outside "Europe." As far as "theory" is concerned, continuity with old patriotisms was not a necessary condition for the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalisms. Or, as Ernest Gellner wittily put it in a debate with A. D. Smith, nations need not have "navels." 29 They did not need to have been born out of some earlier patriotic solidarity. That, however, does not mean that "navels" were unimportant where they did exist, as Gellner seems to imply. Some nationalisms, indeed, had more pronounced navels than others. Some were clones with false navels; some were designer-babies with no navels at all. Others again were virtual children, drawing-board imaginings, like nineteenth-century Zionism. But for historians, the existence or otherwise of such navels is important, because they helped form the political sensibilities of national leaderships and common people. The relative youth of the United States, its "constructed" nature as a nation, for instance, is one reason why it has retained its archaic eighteenth-century constitution. Change to such a recent construction was too fraught with danger. By contrast, the longevity of the common law and the sense of English nationhood has blocked the creation of a written constitution. Navels have unintended, unexpected, and sometimes deep consequences. PEOPLES WITHOUT STATES: PERSECUTION OR ASSIMILATION? This section turns to those groups which found it difficult to assimilate into the more homogeneous national movements that were widely in evidence by the later nineteenth century. It deals with peoples that were too small or too scattered to effectively press home their claims for autonomy or, conversely, were marginalized and oppressed by the emergence of the "big" nationalisms considered earlier. For almost everywhere there were, within these real or aspirant national territories, other groups marked off by religious affiliation, assumed racial difference, or language and life-style. Sometimes these minority groups were located on the fringes of national domains, as were the Russian Tatars and the American Indians, sometimes near their heart, like the plainsdwelling Karen of Burma and the German Jews. Sometimes they were scattered across their whole territories, like the Armenians and the Catholic Irish immigrants to the Protestant states of the English-speaking world. "Others" of these varied types provided a perennial challenge for nationalists and state-builders. The lexicon of nationalism insisted that such groups should be assimilated for strategic as much as cultural reasons. Paradoxically, the very act of nation building and the very symbols of resurgent big nationalisms tended to increase the perception of difference, spawning obdurate subnational movements and militant ethnicities among those excluded or put under surveillance. Some colonial governments found it useful to exploit difference through policies of "divide and rule" and welcomed the existence of such fragments. The leaderships of most nations and emerging nationalist movements, however, sought to melt them down and meld them with the nation as a whole. Outside the United States, this was a tactic which had only mixed success. The great empires of the old order before 1780, and even old national states such as England, France, and Japan, had developed ways of handling cultural, religious, and life-style differences which minimized, even if they did not eliminate, persistent tensions. In societies where statuses were complex and intertwined, it was simpler to devise schemes to separate, segregate, and avoid conflict. If the king, rather than the people, was the fountain of authority, issues of "us" and "them" were less important. All were subjects of a universal monarch. In Europe, Jews, for instance, were widely denied the rights of the wider populations, being seen as aliens and religious anomalies. Yet the kings and aristocracies of the old order offered them some degree of protection some of the time. The politics of accommodating difference was particularly successful in the Ottoman Empire. Non-Muslim minorities were grouped in semi-autonomous orders called millets. Each millet was governed by supposedly traditional heads: bishops in the case of Christians, rabbinic councils in the case of Jews. The Ottomans devised similar structures for dealing with their Muslim minorities and the Bedouin tribes of the internal frontier. They were allowed to practice their own ritual and customary forms, provided they paid allegiance to the sultan and served in his armies when required. The administration of revenue collection by provinces was generally kept separate from the millets and tribal organizations. The Ottomans, like the Mughals, the Safavids, and, particularly, the Qing, made a virtue of cultural difference. Though Middle Easterners and Asians had a complex hierarchy of racial types, determined by climate and supposed bodily substance, this was not a rigid ladder of superiority and inferiority. After all, it was thought, the best Muslims and the best servants of the sultans might come from the lushness of Africa or equally from the barren cold of the northern, Christian mountains. After all, the Prophet himself had been a man from the desert fringes. The Ottoman Empire, like the other empires, was multinational or multiethnic, except that nothing like nationality existed in its modern sense and the notion of ethnicity is a little exclusive. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, a number of changes occurred which highlighted the issue of difference and began to create a "nationality problem." First, the growth of the Atlantic economy and its tributaries within the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean began to give economic advantages to some groups and disadvantage others, sowing the seeds of envy. Greeks within the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean capitalized on old seafaring skills and connections with the Venetians to capture much of the carrying trade. Armenians prospered over a wide area. On the Levant coast and in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Jews, Assyrians, and Coptic Christians also flourished. As non-Muslims they were not debarred from taking interest, and they benefited from connections with the Christian ports and the Knights of St John of Malta. In Egypt, Muhammad Ali's regime, trying to fill its coffers and build up a new army, found the Copts to be good clerks and accountants and rewarded them with local office. Paradoxically, the slow strengthening of the notion of "Egyptianness," noted in the last section, tended to enhance the sense of separateness of some Copts. Secondly, the rising Christian powers of Europe gave encouragement and support to the Ottoman minorities, out of business acumen but often simply because their members were effective middlemen in trade and diplomacy. The British and the French made Jewish merchants honorary consuls in the coastal cities. Under Napoleon III, harbinger of the new French imperialism, missions to the Christians of Mount Lebanon redoubled their efforts to cultivate a sense of allegiance to France and its culture. Meanwhile, British and American Protestant churchmen and missionaries put out feelers to the Egyptian Copts and Assyrian Christians. European consuls intervened at Istanbul to press the sultan to give relief to the Christian minorities from the disadvantages from which they were supposed to suffer. This pressure became more insistent as European and American pilgrimages to the Holy Land began to increase when communications improved. Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the Ottoman Empire was itself undergoing significant internal change, particularly after 1830, when successive military defeats forced modernization on the state under the Tanzimat decree. The old military corps and Sufi orders were dissolved; a form of constitution was set up. If even a hint of popular representation was conceded, then the question of who were "the people" inevitably rose to the surface. After 1870, when the Ottoman Empire was periodically involved in "Balkan wars" against the Russians and the Austrians, religion and the question of the identity of the state came to the fore, as we have seen. In a world in which Christian anti-Turkish rhetoric had become a successful rallying cry, it was not surprising that the later sultans began to see themselves increasingly as Muslims. Battle lines drawn against the West, however, raised the issue of the internal foe. Armenian and Lebanese Christians, Jews, Arabs, and Kurds, who were thought to be dallying with foreign powers, became a potential enemy within. Even before the onset of world war, local servants of the now more selfconsciously Muslim state had sometimes taken the decision to stifle dissent by mass killing. For colonial powers, the existence of religious and cultural difference among their subjects posed both difficulties and opportunities. The European empires did not always find it easy to deal with the heterogeneity of their conquests. These differences might complicate attempts to impose common forms of law and administration or impede the economic exploitation of their Possessions. The British, French, and Dutch, therefore, often separated off those parts of conquered territories which seemed to be inhabited by "minority peoples," especially when they were located in hill lands, forest, or desert. This is how the Shan and Karen states of British Burma came into existence after 1886, and the different kingdoms of French Indo-China. In many parts of newly conquered Africa, a system of "indirect rule" was created under special commissioners, ostensibly to maintain "native administration" rather than to impose European government. Thus at the Cape, the San or "Bushmen" territories were always under a separate administration from the colonies of white settlement and also from the surrounding enclaves of African farmers and settled nomads such as the Xhosa. In northern Nigeria, Lord Lugard made a virtue of reconstructing "traditional" Muslim kingdoms after the British conquest of the 1890s. "Indirect rule" saved money and also stifled the growth of English-educated elites like those who were causing such trouble in India and Egypt. Special administrative arrangements of this sort and the colonialists' tendency to treat these forest-dwelling, nomadic, or culturally different Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans as special "peoples" inevitably enhanced these very differences. It disrupted many earlier and subtler economic and cultural relations between the predominant agricultural groupings in these territories and the "tribal" people. The latter had once served as hunters, providers of forest produce, men of magic, and even mercenaries for the rulers of the settled. Under colonial rule they lost these functions and were often transformed into little more than pools of poor labor. They were often now suspect to those defined as majority populations. More significant for the future of non-European nationalisms and nationstates was the tendency of colonial powers to privilege differences of religion and race within the majority societies of their territories. Here the advantages of policies of "divide and rule" became more prominent. In part, this arose from political calculation. An army composed of indigenous minority groups, different from, and suspect to, the majority populations was less likely to tum against the colonialists. The headmen, rajas, or chiefs of such groups might also provide a useful counterweight to aspiring nationalist leaderships. More often, these aims were unspoken and unacknowledged. The contemporary prejudice about race and nationality made it impossible for the colonizers to see colonial peoples as anything more than a congeries of mongrel groups between which it was their function to arbitrate. For instance, very subtle differences of language and culture between different forms of North African were elaborated by the French into the idea that recent Arab invaders were set against supposedly indigenous Berbers, or Kabyles, the latter being much closer in civilization to the peoples of the European Mediterranean. This distinction did not prevent Berbers from revolting against the French, which they did as late as 1912. But it did tend to set Berber politics and society moving in a subtly different direction from those of their Arab neighbors and coreligionists. 30 Similarly, the British authorities in the Malay states often found it prudent to treat the incoming Chinese tin miners and rubber tappers rather differently from the Malay Muslim smallholders. Yet they were too suspicious of Chinese businessmen and laborers in the tin mines to push this too far, fearing Triads, secret societies, and the seditious politics of these articulate settlers more than the sedate conservatism of the Malay Islamic courts. The Dutch, in turn, made much of the difference between the inhabitants of Java and those of the "outer islands," especially the Moluccas. Likewise, the French preferred Melanesian and even Vietnamese indentured laborers to the indigenous Kanaks of New Caledonia. There were parallels in India. Here complex histories of difference separated Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Yet the difference was very subtle, Muslims having adjusted to centuries of relationships with surrounding Hindus, while Sikhs continued to operate to some degree within norms and cosmologies derived from a common Indian religious past. 31 As in other colonial territories, British rulers found it easier to rule a continent divided into religious and racial blocks. The legal system, the census, and the emerging "science" of anthropology recognized and to some degree enhanced these differences. In the late nineteenth century, however, leaders within these communities also insisted on difference on their own account. Some Sikhs argued forcefully in the 1870s that "We are not Hindus." Some Muslims argued that Muslims were an incoming, conquering race, wholly different from and superior to the mass of Indians, and that they deserved the support of the colonial rulers. These attitudes reflected the spread of the idea among the indigenous intelligentsia that religions and races were real, substantial entities, and that they needed men to speak up for them. The colonial power tended to think, govern, and write with these rigid categories in mind. Indigenous intelligentsia also attempted to enhance their status by describing their histories as communities or peoples. At the same time, some adherents of these often still-fluid religious traditions began to think of themselves as "minorities," threatened both by the steamroller of the modern state and by the timid beginnings of the politics of representation in the colonial territories. The outcome for such assumed ethnicities varied. The British Liberal government gave Indian Muslims a special political status in 1909, with far-reaching effects for the history of the subcontinent. It was too weak to do the same for the Egyptian Copts. In the Malay archipelago and in Fiji, however, special administrative commissions were created to set Chinese and Indians apart from Malays and indigenous Fijians. The French rulers did much the same with immigrant Indians and Chinese in Indochina, while in Indonesia, the Dutch created special customary codes which were supposed to reflect the legal traditions of their different "peoples." Even the Americans in the Philippines built on the earlier Spanish ethnic categories of administrations, distinguishing Malays from Chinese and from indigenous Filippinos. The Eurasian empires of Russia and eastern Europe stood somewhere between the old Asian and Middle Eastern empires and the newly industrial societies of the Atlantic in their treatment of minority groups and subnationalities. The Russian Empire certainly operated very much like the British in India as far as the inhabitants of its central Asian territories were concerned. Special administrative areas were marked out. Councils of elders and Islamic jurists were set up. A kind of "reverse" millet system was held in place, in which Muslims played the same role as Christians within the Ottoman Empire. But the Russian and Austrian empires faced the considerable problem that, very often, their non-Russian and non-German populations were amongst the richest and most powerful of the whole empire. The Russian rulers had to accommodate the interests and identities of Germans, Lithuanians, and Jews, as well as Tatars, Kazakhs, and other central Asians. Too vigorous assimilation would spark them into political activity; too little assimilation and administrative intervention might allow the development of "states within states." Even in western Europe, cultural and religious differences inherited from the older, more plural political and religious orders of the eighteenth century sometimes reappeared towards the end of the nineteenth century as the new middle-class electorates redoubled the pressure to assimilate to a national pattern. Better communications, the statistical, categorizing mind-set of the state, and, above all, suspicions of minorities generated during wars were responsible for making self-styled peoples more aware of their past and their future potential. Irish nationalism developed a stronger mass base, and one which was predominantly Roman Catholic, partly in response to Protestant attempts at assimilation after 1815. In tum, Protestant Unionists stressed their English and Scottish roots and Protestant heritage. Legends about difference were elaborated into a history of the "Kingdom of Ulster" and its later contribution to Britain and its empire. Late-nineteenth-century continental Europeans began to define themselves with reference to similar ethnic identities: Basques, Bretons, Corsicans, and inhabitants of the Alto Adige all came to resent the pressures of the nation-states into which they had been incorporated, often quite recently. The case of the Jews was different. By the 1870s most Jews across the European continent had been formally assimilated into the civic orders of the emerging states; they were no longer ghettoized. This had happened during the Napoleonic empire over much of northern Europe, and after 1848 in Italy. In the case of France and Germany, increased marriage of Jews to Gentiles and the rise of reformist religious traditions which downplayed differences in life-style between Gentile and Jew pushed forward a piecemeal assimilation. A symptomatic Jewish saying of the time was "Be a Jew in your home and a man outside." 32 But assimilation had gone only so far. Most Jewish communities continued to be endogamous. Thousands of oldstyle Jewish communities continued to guard their distinct and separate lifestyles. These stretched from Algeria and Libya, through Poland and Russia, or south by way of Yemen, to Cochin in India and southwestern China. Powerful movements for the revival of faith and culture were also on the move, and these challenged assimilation in a different way. Alongside these traditional communities and assimilationist tendencies, there emerged the Zionist movement for a separate Jewish homeland which first took fire at a delegate congress in Basie in 1897. Amongst Gentiles, especially in central and eastern Europe, the symbol of the Jew as a commercial parasite as well as a "killer of Christ" became, ominously, a touchstone of nationalism. Anti-Semitism, once a localized phenomenon of religious hatred and commercial rivalry, as in 1848, was now annexed more closely to the narrative of nationalism in large multiethnic cities. This transformation was to make European Jewish populations yet more vulnerable during the twentieth century. War exacerbated the fear of the enemy within. Though Jews in Russia and Austria had assimilated quite quickly into Christian society in the first half of the century, the strains of urbanization and the rise of capitalist production marked them out as targets for those who had failed to benefit. War and international tension hardened hostility against them. It was particularly after Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 that conservative Russian politicians and bureaucrats gave the head to pogroms against the empire's Jews. At the same time, ideology was important. Whereas Budapest's Jewish population was 23 percent of the total in 1900, it was in Vienna, where they were no more than 7 percent that anti-Semitism was most virulent. German nationalism was harder and more suspicious of "outsiders." 33 In western Europe, hatred of the "internal enemy" proved to be the underside of the new nationalism. Alsatian Jews moved to Paris after the defeat by Germany in 1871, making the community more visible. But it was in the 1890s, as rivalry with Britain and Germany grew, that anti-Semitism really took off. It was fueled by works such as Edouard Drumont's La France juive ("Jewish France"), published in 1886, and reached its peak with the wrongful prosecution of the military officer Dreyfus for treason. Dreyfus was an Alsatian Jew. 34 This sharpening of the sense of ethnic difference and mini-nationalisms in response to the growth of majoritarian nationalism occurred even in the Americas. In Canada, the Catholic Frenchness of Quebec was enhanced in the later nineteenth century as the country emerged as a federated dominion within the British Empire. Immigrants to the settler societies of South America also tended to retain the language and culture of their homelands to a great extent. The United States, however, was rather different. It was a nation of immigrants, and there was no "national homeland" to claim to defend. The USA was a state that did not rest on an ethnic sense of nationalism. The earlier domination of Protestants from the British Isles had been diluted. After the 1848 famine in Ireland, millions of Catholic Irish joined the earlier generations of Protestant settlers from that country. Up to 20 million Russians, Poles, Germans, and Italians crossed to the USA in the years between 1850 and 1914 as steamship travel made the journey less hazardous. Amongst these immigrant communities, the memories, culture, and, for a time, languages of their European homelands survived. Ethnicity underlay voting patterns to some extent. But these ethnic groupings never became so politicized as to impede the immigrants' assimilation into what was now conceived of as an American nation. The reasons for this throw light on the hardening of attitudes to minorities and racial discourses in many parts of Europe. The federal government remained relatively weak in the United States, so the status of any given group of immigrants, apart from Asians, did not become subject to national debates or definition by a centralized state. State governments and local communities handled the processes of immigration, settlement, and assimilation through the extension of the English language. Because the United States did not have an established church or even now a dominant Protestant identity, religion never became an issue beyond the local level. The richness of land and natural resources meant that labor was almost everywhere in short supply, so that none of the European-style conflicts over control of land, credit, or economic access became entrenched. Social mobility was rapid, and where, as in the cities of the east coast, a hierarchy seemed to be emerging, settlers could always move on to less hierarchical and individualistic societies. Class and ethnicity never became implicated with each other to the same extent as in the Old World. This, of course, applied mainly to the European population. As elsewhere in the world, the United States saw a hardening of racial boundaries between people of European descent and non-Europeans. Indeed, Americans had been pioneers of racist and eugenic theorizing. After 1860, the immigration of Chinese, Japanese, and Indians was specifically restrained. By the 1890s, black slavery had been replaced by segregation on the basis of color. In practical terms, emancipation, by increasing political and economic disparities between blacks and whites in the South, had made the race barrier more contested and more important. Hunger for land pushed American "first nations" further back into impoverished reservations. Chinese, Japanese, and, occasionally, Jewish immigrant laborers were subject to well-orchestrated campaigns of discrimination, especially after the mid-1890s. In this respect, the United States did, in fact, mirror the racial histories of the British "white dominions." For it was in the later nineteenth century, too, that Canadian Amerindians and Maori and Aborigines in Australasia were penned down and restricted in their access to civil society. In South Africa, the contest between the British and the Afrikaners was accompanied by the gradual destruction of the remaining black free farmers and a pervasive campaign to exclude blacks from the skilled work force. This section has shown that the creation of harder boundaries between "majority" and "minority" populations was the mirror image of the creation of the nation itself. It was, therefore, in the later nineteenth century, when the urge to build nations was running strongly, that internal boundaries between supposed ethnicities were also reinforced. The "divide and rule" tactics of European colonial empires were one extreme example of a more general phenomenon. Yet the state could not have secured this perception of difference without the active aid of the leaderships of these assumed ethnicities. Socalled minorities saw themselves as mini-nations, even when they did not intend fully to separate from the wider society, as for instance in the case of most Jews. Their leaderships created histories, legends, and languages for them which mirrored the larger projects of the nation. Some of these groups were to secure homelands for themselves in the course of the twentieth century. Some continued to fight for a homeland well into that century. Others were to suffer persecution and even extermination. IMPERIALISM AND ITS HISTORY: THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY The last two sections of this chapter tum, first, to the projection of latenineteenth- century nationalism abroad through imperialism and, then, to the internationalization of global linkages. Many areas of modem historiography are rather undertheorized - that is to say, historians have provided a good deal of evidence and argument but find it difficult to discern principles by which their material could be ranked in a hierarchy of relative importance, and hence understood. That is not true, however, of the later nineteenth century, for which "theories" of nationalism and of imperialism are legion. It is striking, though, that in recent times debates about these two phenomena, which were so clearly linked in the minds of contemporaries, have drifted apart. European historians study nation-states and, more recently, those excluded from or pushed to the margins within them. Imperial historians consider the origins of empires. The historians of non-European nations analyse the effects of imperialism and propose theories of non-European nationalism, which at present often revolve around the question of how nationhood was represented through gendered symbols, ceremonies, and literary themes. Rather than looking for the origins of nationalism in imperialism, or vice versa, it is better to regard them as being in a long-standing relationship with each other. Imperial expansion forced the leaders of states to consider the substance of the nationality they claimed to embody. Equally, the experience of imperial expansion sharpened patriotic identities, amongst both the conquerors and the conquered. European expansion in the later eighteenth century had been one force by which groups on the periphery of the old nationalities had been incorporated into the emerging states of Europe. The Corsicans who became rulers in France and Napoleon's empire, and the Scots and Anglo-Irish who led the armies of the British Empire, provide examples of this process. At the same time, expansion often gave a sharper edge to the dynasty-led patriotisms of the old order in the areas invaded by imperial armies. For example, Spanish patriotism became sharper and more popular as a result of Napoleon's invasion. The British occupation of Ceylon after 1818 and the Dutch crushing of the Javanese resistance of 1825-30 began to forge a lineage for patriotic resistance against the colonial power in both these colonized societies, remembered and elaborated by later generations of peasant rebels and nationalists. DIMENSIONS OF THE "NEW IMPERIALISM" It does seem that the imperial expansion of the period after 1870, like the intensity of its competing nationalisms, was of a different order from that of the previous period. This was the age of the "new imperialism," when most of sub-Saharan Africa was seized by Europeans. 35 Beginning about 1878, the French strengthened their hold on the coastal territories of West Africa, while its colonial army pushed into the arid lands of the western Sudan. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt and, by 1898, they had conquered the upper Nile valley. Meanwhile, they had also consolidated their hold on central, South, and East Africa, outflanking the two small independent Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. After Japan's defeat of China in 1894-5, a new European struggle for territory and influence broke out on the China coast. When European and American expeditionary forces invaded China to quell the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, it was quite clear that nothing but mutual rivalry prevented a partition of China along the lines of the partition of Africa. Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, complacently foresaw the possibility of a British protectorate on the Yangzi river garrisoned by Indian troops. The tsar's lieutenants strengthened their grip on central Asia. This was a period, too, when existing imperial polities made good their claims on outlying dependencies: the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago, the Brazilians in the interior rain forests, and the Russians in central Asia. King Leopold of the Belgians decided to enter the fray by making the Congo a great agricultural storehouse and reserve of forced labor for his country. 36 Germany, secure in its new-found military dominance in Europe, acquired Tanganyika, German West Africa, and a colony in New Guinea. Pushing out from the subcontinent, the British Indian empire reinforced its informal influence in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Tibet, and north Burma. The British domination of the Malay Peninsula was consolidated, and its sultans brought to heel. Even the Ottoman Empire, now a semi-European state, began to build modern administration in the Tigris and Euphrates valley and in southern Arabia. Tellingly, the Ottoman administrations used translations of British Indian military and administrative manuals in their government of southern Arabia. What needs to be explained, then, is the velocity and ferocity with which the European powers snapped up the remaining independent territories in Eurasia, Africa, and the Pacific, even when their absolute economic value may have been relatively limited and the danger of provoking competitive wars even greater. 37 What also needs to be explained is the eager participation in this imperial carnival of the new Japan and, briefly and more ambivalently, the USA, two powers which had themselves emerged as a consequence of struggles against imperial control. The new imperialism of the later nineteenth century has been put down to a variety of causes. Notable among the explanations are Marxist-Leninist economic arguments, which suggest that big capitalist combines, having extracted super-profits in Europe now began to redivide the resources of the world by armed force. 38 Other historians, Marxist and non-Marxist, implicate financiers, who allegedly tried to make the world safe for foreign investment by expanding European territorial control to the rest of the world. 39 Another variant of the economic argument emphasizes the importance of "men on the spot," such as cotton-traders, mine-owners, or traders in palm oil, in pressing governments to intervene and create safe areas for their exploitation of native resources and labor. 40 The famous arguments of Robinson and Gallagher, by contrast, stressed the significance of crises on the "periphery." 41 These crises, notably in Egypt and South Africa in the 1870s, were said to have undermined the existing native economic collaborators who serviced an expanding Europe, so convincing the "official mind" in the European capitals of the need to take direct territorial control. Some bravely old-fashioned historians still insist on the primacy of diplomatic maneuvering amongst the European powers in the rush to "divide and rule." Others argue that what should really be studied are the consequences of the partition of Africa or the Pacific for native peoples, not the aims of the white conquerors. All these arguments seem to have some force at different places and at different times in the history of the new imperialism. It is probably fruitless to seek for one overarching explanation. There do, however, appear to have been some general preconditions for the surge forward of European territorial control and informal influence over non-Europeans. To repeat, one general Point, which seems obvious but has sometimes slipped from sight, is that the new imperialism was closely related to the more strident European nationalism which was considered earlier in this chapter. This may be an oldfashioned argument, but it does not mean that it is wrong. Imperialism and nationalism were part of the same phenomenon. Nationalism and conflict in Europe made states more aware of their competitors abroad and more inclined to stake out claims and prefer their own citizens. The partition of Africa was, indeed, partly a preemptive exercise, by which national governments attempted to steal a march on their rivals by claiming tracts of territory which might at some time in the future become economically or strategically important. Critically, however, European governments were in a much stronger position to project their power overseas than they had been in earlier generations. Rapid-firing guns and battleships opened up an even greater military distance between Europeans and indigenous peoples. New medicines protected imperial troops more effectively. The telegraph made communications between metropolis and colony infinitely easier. 42 Technology made it possible to achieve what many earlier empire-builders had only dreamed of. But the desire had to be there as well as the means. There is, then, much truth in the old claim that the machinations of the Concert of Europe, the high councils of the European powers, encouraged the partition of Africa and battles for concessions in Persia and the Pacific. 43 British preeminence was on the decline, and new European powers were asserting themselves. 44 The promotion of national prestige and an intense desire on the part of statesmen and soldiers to advance the interest of their own countries provided a motivation. The French invasion of West Africa and the western Sudan from 1878 to 1898 was justified by reference to a dozen petty wars of local trade and the ever-present fear of Muslim jihad. Yet trade and local defense were not really the motive. The French Overseas Army wanted to achieve domestic recognition and international glory in an atmosphere still darkened by France's defeat by Prussia in 1871. 45 After 1880, by contrast, the newly united Germany was determined to achieve status as an arbiter in Europe by adjusting its overseas conflicts. The blueprint for the partition of the remaining parts of Africa not yet staked out was drawn at the Berlin Congress of 1884, when Bismarck, the German chancellor, held the balance of power between Britain and France. Inevitably, the creation of putative spheres of national interests in Africa, in the Pacific Ocean, and on the China coast after 1896 encouraged nation-states to actually lay hold of their claim, lest others move in on it. The invasion of China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 by European, American, and Japanese armed forces provides a good example of competitive imperialism. It is undoubtedly true, as proponents of the idea of economic imperialism argue, that there were side benefits from the African partition. Locally based European and even indigenous business firms were able to achieve greater security, as did the British entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, in central southern Africa. Indigenous labor could be coerced and controlled more easily to produce staple cash crops cheaply in areas subject to direct European control, as King Leopold predicted in the Belgian Congo. Debts incurred by indigen- ous regimes could be paid off more quickly, as in the case of Britain's occupation of Egypt. The cotton-growing lands of central Asia conquered by Russia after 1860 provided a valuable supply of raw material for Russia's industrialization. The threat of the collapse of world commodity prices in the 1870s added to the sense of crisis in the overseas world. This set governments and economic interests at each other's throats. It was helpful to firms operating in West Africa to have the support of colonial governments. 46 Despite these considerations, however, the economic benefits of the second age of global imperialism were always less tangible than those of the first, in 1780-1820. The grand orchestrators of the new imperialism were not international capitalists, as Lenin averred, but national governments which encouraged the commercial interests of their own citizens to preempt rival mining, telegraph, railway, or commodity companies. Southern African gold, for instance, was vital to the strength of the British currency. This predisposed British governments to search for political stability in southern Africa and, if necessary, to secure it against Dutch settlers or German rivals by armed force. Yet this does not mean that some malign cabal of international financiers sitting in dark, smoke-filled rooms in London took the British into the South African War of 1899-1902. Rather, a kind of coalition of metropolitan interests and "men on the spot" in the Cape Colony and Natal emerged. These men decided, wrongly as it turned out, that the conquest of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was the solution to what they saw as problems oflabor control, high taxation, and the lack of firm administration in these states. Economic imperialism was more often the handmaiden of agents of the national state than the underlying motive force of territorial expansion. This line of argument seems even more convincing when we consider the imperialism of smaller, later-formed nation-states. Whatever dubious benefits in the longer run may have accrued to Italy from its capture of North African and Ethiopian fastnesses, Italian empire was the dream of the right-wing nationalist governments of Francesco Crispi and Agostino Depretis. These politicians were attempting to consolidate their influence in a still half-formed Italian state during the 1880s and 1890s. Given a slight Marxist twist, this is also the burden of the assertion that Bismarck's imperial ambitions in Germany were the result of "social imperialism." On this argument, Bismarck used imperialism in Africa and the Pacific as a way of "burning off" class tensions which had arisen during Germany's rapid industrialization. While it is difficult to locate the political mechanism which makes this model work, most historians would agree that Bismarck used overseas expansion as a tool of internal state building and did not see empire as an economic necessity for Germany per se. In the same way, Japan, which seized Taiwan and attacked China in 1894, following a conflict over Korea, viewed empire as both a protection for, and an inevitable extension of, the national empire founded in 1868. Rival factions of military and naval officers, rooted in the half-assimilated Choshu and Satsuma domains of the earlier era, vied with each other in their desire to pursue an oceanic or a continental plan of territorial aggrandizement. Japanese traders and peasant settlers were greatly advantaged in Korea and Taiwan by the country's imperial expansion. All the same, this was essentially a nationalistic project. As one Japanese statesman opaquely put it, when urging the extension of Japanese power to mainland Asia, "If the sun is not ascending it is descending ... If the country is not flourishing it is declining. Therefore to protect the country well is not merely [to prevent] it losing the position it holds, but to add to the position it does not hold. " 47 Japan did, in fact, have powerful competitors to fear. The Russian expansion across Siberia and into north China had clearly been motivated by a desire to strengthen its territorial and economic grip in the Far East. Even in cases of the new imperialism, where economic interests seem to have been paramount, the promotion of national prestige was a critical consideration. 48 For instance, King Leopold may have benefited handsomely from his rape of the Belgian Congo when he occupied it in the 1880s. His plan could only have worked, however, in an era of intense national competition between the larger European powers. Leopold's aim was a gamble to aggrandize the king of the Belgians and to earn his small country more respect in the wider world. There is a second sense in which nationalism itself should be seen as the key component of any theory of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. Heightened European nationalism was one trigger. Another was the contemporaneous growth of national feeling among colonized people or people threatened by colonial expansion. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 was itself precipitated by the Egyptian national movement of 1879-81. The blatant financial exploitation of the country by representatives of the European bondholders after 1876 transformed Muhammad Ali's earlier state-sponsored patriotism into a vigorous nationalist movement under Colonel Urabi. 49 The British government was tutored by its local agents to regard this as a threat, not only to the security of credit in London, but also to its whole strategic position on the route to India, which was dependent on the Suez canal. In a rather similar way, the Boer patriotism of Dutch African settlers, founded on Calvinism and patriarchy, was transformed by British pressure into something much more akin to an Afrikaner nationalism, long before the onset of the South African War of 1899. A host of men on the spot, adventurers, and commercial interests conspired to bring East and Central Africa under European domination after 1878. But the desire of Britain and its agents to get ahead of the Afrikaner republics in their race to exploit the lands to their north remained an important stimulus to the seizure of territory. Even in territories already held by Europeans, imperial rule became more vigorous and interventionist in response to the rise of colonial nationalism. In this sense, too, the "new imperialism" was as much the consequence as the cause of nationalism. Proconsuls and administrators such as Curzon in India, Cromer in Egypt, Milner in South Africa, and Sarra ult in French Indochina, all governed their territories in the 1890s or 1900s with the aim of heading off, diverting, or suppressing demands by the educated intelligentsia for greater freedom and political representation. In turn, all four administrators goaded local politicians into more vigorous opposition, terrorism, and armed resistance. Further east, the expansion of Dutch rule, outward fromJ ava to the islands of the archipelago, such as Sumatra, was prompted in part by Islamic and local resistance on the fringes. Only in retrospect did these newly pacified territories yield the prospect of profitable plantation agriculture and logging contracts. In summary, when historians investigate the expansion of European power in any one area of the extra-European world, they commonly find a variety of metropolitan or local interests which were held to cause or legitimate intervention. In order to explain why the late nineteenth century saw a speeding up of empire building, large claims have been made for the importance of world economic crisis, the interests of capital, the need for agricultural raw materials, or the clamor of local commercial interests. Certainly, new technologies had come into existence, which held out the hope of exploiting the interior of vast continents. But this does not altogether explain why European governments resorted to territorial and land grabbing so determinedly, and on such a large scale. A more powerful general argument arises out of the concurrence of the new phase of imperial expansion with the full emergence of the European, American, and Japanese nation-state and the rise of extra-European national movements. Claims had to be staked out quickly, or else others might occupy them.  A WORLD OF NATION-STATES? A key feature of the nation-state - for some analysts, the key aspect of the nation-state - was not its intrinsic nature or its claims and demands on its own population. It was instead the fact that the nation-state operated in a world populated by other, similar nation-states and imperial provinces, and this gave further impetus to the pressure for political uniformity across the world. The looser connections of the old, overlapping ecumenes and their circles of honorific exchange and trade diasporas, dubbed "archaic globalization" and discussed in chapter 1, were gradually eroded. In their place arose an international system driven by cooperating or conflicting national political economies. After about 1815, the European state and Western colonialism began to impose a new pattern of internationalism on the old world order. The nation-state increasingly dominated global networks. It imposed its system of more rigidly bound territories, languages, and religious conventions on all international networks. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the older patterns of globalization persisted strongly under the surface of the new international order. Links created by pilgrimage, older patterns of connection created by the universalizing empires of the past, and even the consumption of precious and exotic items continued to remain important. More than that, these links both facilitated and subverted the new international order. This point will be elaborated first. THE PERSISTENCE OF ARCHAIC GLOBALIZATION When we consider how international networks were structured in the nineteenth century, the unintended consequences of older-style links as much as the policies of the leaders of the national states remain crucial. Why, for instance, after two savage and destructive wars, and despite widespread British support for the Confederacy during the Civil War, did the United States and Britain drift together in the course of the nineteenth century? International relations specialists have usually viewed this question from the perspective of "reason of state." Yet prevailing old connections were equally, if not more, important. Even after the American Revolution and the war of 1812-14, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic continued to cling to the old lineages of common law. Old-established Protestant churches renegotiated their links and mounted an evangelical offensive across the globe. The old literary culture, which arose at the time of Shakespeare, continued to be discussed and reinterpreted in journals and books sold on both sides of the Atlantic. Before 1848 or even 1870, transatlantic links of marriage and emigration remained very similar to what they had been during the "peopling of America" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The massive export of coolies from China, Japan, and India and laborers from East and West Africa across the nineteenth-century globe extended older patterns of internal and inter-regional migration and slave trading, even as they were subjected to new forms of commercial control. Archaic links of religion, economy, and bodily practice also continued to underpin the new international order of the nineteenth century in the economic sphere. Classic Marxist and liberal theories of economic change have emphasized the rationality of expanding capitalism. On this theory, the aim of Western expansion was to seize resources and subordinate labor. This is true in great measure. As we have seen, in the early nineteenth century much of the globe became a vast agricultural hinterland for western Europe. This occurred before mass industrialization, even in Britain. Still, many features of older global economic links persisted and remained formative in these new systems. Archaic globalization had been partly driven by the desire to acquire the exotic, to collect rarities, and to transform one's moral status and substance. That desire did not abate in the nineteenth century. If fans and exotic spices had proved lucrative items of global trade in the seventeenth century, ostrich feathers and Japanese pottery continued to flow to the European and American markets. Rhinoceros horns, sea slugs, and birds' nests were still prized in Chinese markets. Despite growing moral campaigns against it, opium in various forms remained a vital trade in Asia and continued to reach Europe and the Americas in various forms. One particular item of international trade still proved to be greatly resistant to conventional analyses of supply and demand. Large populations, especially in Asia, consumed gold, a key item of international trade, because of its charismatic qualities as a transformer of status and even health. After 1860, gold may well have been mined through capitalist forms of production and labor control in Australia, California, and southern Africa. Its markets, however, responded to quite different rationales of prestige and family consumption. Throughout the nineteenth century and even up to the 1980s, gold consumption in India and the Middle East was highly price-inelastic. That is to say, Indians, Arabs, and others continued to import huge quantities of gold for jewelry and familial saving, regardless of its price on the international market. Anthropologists have shown how gold operates as a universal, honorific currency in India, independently of the market. 50 Until recently, the accumulation of gold bangles and other ornaments was an important tactic for preserving the financial viability of women in their husbands' families. Gold was also believed to protect, strengthen, and purify the bodily humors of the wearer. These archaic principles of consumption continued to bulk heavily in the ledgers of the "gentlemanly capitalists" of the modern world. The global marriage patterns of the nineteenth century also preserved some archaic features. In general, anthropologists have examined the structure of marriage patterns within small societies. Social historians have tended to consider the marriage practices of particular national aristocracies. What happened in the nineteenth century, though, was a massive expansion of global hypogamy, of men taking women of perceived lower status. This often entailed marriage across boundaries between distinct cultural or assumed racial groups. It was once said that by the 1830s sexual relations between British men and Asian women were a thing of the past. There is certainly evidence of a slow imposition of racial boundaries in marriage and sex in India in the course of the nineteenth century. But this should not be overstated. The Anglo-Indian community may generally have been formed before 1820. But large Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Burmese and Dutch-Indonesian communities came into existence after 1860. They played a dominant role in commerce and the service economies of much of southern and eastern Asia. The ancient practice of Muslim travelers contracting temporary marriages with foreign women continued to pin together the Arab, Indian, and Muslim East throughout the nineteenth century. It later became important as a network of sentiment which helped link pan-Islamic movements worldwide. Mixed-race community formation remained common in the Americas, even though what became known as "miscegenation," race mixing, was gradually limited by bourgeois, nationalistic, and racialist ideas in English-speaking North America. Archaic conceptions of kinship continued to act as powerful formative influences on the European and American worlds themselves. The global links of European royal families - the Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, SaxeCoburgs, and others - became a strategic network for the prosecution of private diplomacy in the later nineteenth century. 51 At the same time, the practice of aristocratic hypogamy, downward marriage, in northern Europe was to provide a vital resource for declining estate-owners after the onset of the great agricultural depression of the 1870s. British aristocratic families welcomed American heiresses. The case of the Churchills and the Curzons, whose families both acquired "new blood" and new wealth by bringing in American heiresses, are only the best-known examples of this. Old Spanish, Portuguese, and French property-owners kept their estates solvent by bringing over women from wealthy colonial backgrounds in Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. All these archaic connections were transformed within the new capitalist structures of the world economy. Yet all of them reflected the traditions and strategies of an earlier period. Modern eugenic theories about racial vigor merely validated older conceptions about manipulating bloodlines. It is now easier to see how this type of archaic global network did, nevertheless, become a set of international connections over a relatively short span of the nineteenth century. Much has been written about the growth of the nation-state and its alter ego, the imperial state, after 1850. Less attention has been paid to the process by which global links were themselves reconstructed by, or in relationship to, the system of nation-states. These older patterns of global interactions persisted. But they were increasingly represented in terms of national essences and controlled by nation-states. FROM GLOBALIZATION TO INTERNATIONALISM Chapter 1 suggested that global links in the old world were determined by ideologies and bodily practices. Before the nineteenth century, the ideologies NATION, EMPIRE, AND ETHNICITY, C .1860-1900 of universal kingship and universal religion had been dominant. The critical point of change after 1800 was the way in which writers, jurists, and politicians across the world borrowed and adapted theories of individual and states' rights to their own use. Intellectual history remains very European- and American-centered. It is important to consider the ways in which Asians and Africans took up and used rights theories. Imperial expansion was obviously a key determinant of this. The apparatus of the European state and its territorial rights over space and citizens was exported to the fluid, segmented world of Asia and Africa. The idea of a universal Chinese, or Ottoman, or even Catholic Christian empire became redundant. European nationalists and colonial patriots began instead to assert their rights as individuals or representatives of cultures in the language of these appropriated theories. In the 1830s, Ram Mohun Roy, the Bengali reformer, argued in London that the rights of the Mughal Empire, now perceived as a state rather than as a universal polity, had been violated by the English East India Company. The defeat of China during the opium wars ultimately forced the Middle Kingdom to claim not superiority but merely equal territorial and economic rights under the law of nations. The ideological landscape of the modern international world was seen as a dialogue or concert of equal political entities which claimed uniform rights. Equally, the universalizing tendency inherent in newly diffused theories of individual and group rights began to create networks beyond the nation-state. These constituted a kind of embryonic international civil society. Other aspects of global ideology were also transformed in the nineteenth century. Religions still remained global in their aspirations, as chapter 9 will show. Increasingly, though, they tailored their activities, forms of bureaucracy, and appeal to the nation-state. Later-nineteenth-century Christian missions were national missions. The revived Catholic Church of the late nineteenth century spoke a universal language, but its bureaucracies paralleled those of the nation-state, and its appeal was particularly strong among submerged nationalities in Poland and Ireland, for instance. Equally, pan-Islamists dreamed of a universal caliphate. Yet their political method was to empower submerged or embattled Muslim nations. Race theory, which became dominant at the end of the nineteenth century, purported to be a global historical theory. Yet its implications were almost everywhere worked out in the language of the nation-state. For instance, French racial theorists worried about the enduring characteristics of the "Teutonic" and "Latin" races, but generally their concern was whether a mixture of these two elements would weaken or strengthen the French nation and its state. In this the ideologies of race differed from the tactile, embodied system of archaic castes, which was discussed in chapter 1. The global connections of the Old World were also created by the movement of peoples. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such movements were increasingly regulated by state surveillance and by the control of flows of migrants. Antislavery measures by the British and later French governments created a new system of checks and treaties in international waters. Colonial governments controlled the flow of indentured laborers both inside and outside their territories. From the regulation of transatlantic emigrant ships by the British and American governments in the 1820s, through the quarantine regulations of the great cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s, states acted more and more insistently to control the international traffic in free migrants. The doctrine of free trade struggled for some decades with this urge to increase state regulation. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, fears of racial decline and panics about the movement of foreign criminals or agents had handed victory to state surveillance. One aspect of this was the imposition by the United States after about 1890 of more rigid controls on immigrants, particularly "Asiatics" and Jews. This culminated in the National Origins legislation of 1924. This type of legislation defined more clearly the "essence" of the state, but it also determined the nature of international links. In the same manner, older and looser links of global trading gave way to more formal commercial conventions between nations. This was true even in the days of free trade before the 1870s. But as political and industrial leaders sought to protect their economies by tariff agreements, the nation-state inevitably became the key actor in an international economy. This led to increasingly formal trading arrangements. The old system of honorary consuls or consultation by local rulers with the headmen of "guest" merchant communities was replaced by networks of commercial consulates and international economic treaties. The growth of the Western-dominated world economy in the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, produced a paradox. On the one hand, the movement of capital became more complex. Long-range direct investment meant that businessmen from many different countries worked together to form and invest capital. On the other hand, states became increasingly worried by such flows of capital and attempted to control the firms and their capital. During the Anglo-Boer crisis, for instance, British politicians panicked over the way in which international firms were supposedly perverting the course of international stock markets and capital flows were strengthening. At the same time, national controls on the location and use of capital became stronger with the development of the national patent and the idea of the national head office. Thirdly, at the level of bodily practice, global links were now conducted in a different way from the earlier hierarchical cosmopolitanism. Assumed racial groups were increasingly physically separated. Europeans in the East gave up the practice of using Indian and Chinese wet nurses for their children. In the course of the nineteenth century, they rejected non-European dress and foods. 52 The process, never complete, also affected Asians and Africans. By the 1920s and 1930s, Hindu nationalists were mounting campaigns to expel Muslim body servants from their households and to prohibit their women from visiting Muslim holy men and healers. This is a good example of the way in which archaic boundaries of pollution were "nationalized," as it were, over the long nineteenth century. Yet more rigid nationalization demanded a complementary internationalization at the level of the body. In the international public sphere, males were more and more constrained to wear English topcoats and top hats while they spoke, ate, drank, and deported themselves in a French style. Growing international uniformity went alongside growing conflict between closely defined nation-states. /NTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE Three examples will help us to chart this process of the nationalization of earlier global connections at different levels of theory and practice. This chapter ends with the case study of a state institution, the passport, and an international voluntary association, the Red Cross. Finally, the chapter will examine a critical international conference, the World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. Until recently, little work has been done on that preeminent tool for controlling international boundaries, the passport. But the history of the passport clearly indicates the transition between global networks of emigration and the internationalism of the nation-state. John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport filled a gap in knowledge as far as Europe is concerned. In the eighteenth century, elite traders and nobles moved readily across much of Europe. It was the poor and the peasantry who were tied to the land and needed papers to move around. The external passport was a royal letter, a boon which was conferred on great nobles, clerics, and others, royal protection and a request that they would not be hindered by the petty officials of another king's realm. In Europe and the Americas, the passport became a tool of external political surveillance only during the French Revolution, when governments tried to control the movement across their borders of political agitators, or in the case of the French Republic, reactionaries and royalists. Fear of revolution continued to spur the development of passport offices and agencies throughout the nineteenth century. The 1848 revolutions and the aftermath of the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 saw panic attempts to extend the system even to ordinary people. Otherwise, between 1815 and 1850, there was a general move to relax controls both over internal movement and over emigration beyond states' borders. It was only during the later nineteenth century, and in response to fears about the consequences of labor mobility, that further, more rigid controls on movement across national boundaries were imposed. The Asian world saw a similar process, but its roots were somewhat different. In Asia, too, great kings had given subjects charters for travel in India - they were called parwanas, leave to pass. At the local level, movement was controlled through recognized leaders and headmen. Villagers on the move do not seem to have been forced to carry papers as they were more often in Europe and China. Still, the books of the village accountant gave elites an indirect control over labor movement. In India, the expansion of the passport system to encompass ordinary merchants and travelers was at first a consequence of monopoly building by the European companies who were deeply iealous of their European rivals. The Dutch and English East India companies kept meticulous records of all foreign European subjects in their territories, fearing that they would institute competitive commerce. Asian states faced with this aggressive imperialism of monopoly instituted countermeasures, limiting foreign merchants and personnel to particular points and controlling their own subjects' relations with them. The eighteenth-century Chinese state trading corporation, the Cohong, was a good example of this. All foreigners in Canton were forced to carry accreditations from their assigned merchants. Political fear rapidly replaced commercial jealousy after 1800. By 1830, the authorities in south India were arresting merchants from the Middle East "who were travelling without passport. " 53 They feared purist Muslim teachers and other religious emissaries spreading anti-British messages in volatile port cities. In its turn, however, the imposition of passports opened up queries about who was and who was not a British Indian subject. 54 European imperial governments asserted their rights to protect or control the external movement of their subjects. Indian merchants overseas became subjects of British India, rather than guest foreigners. This was a critical point in their transformation into subjects of a nation. By contrast, some contemporary merchants of the Arab and Chinese diasporas were able to secure foreign nationality in European enclaves in order to avoid Chinese or Ottoman taxation or land law. 55 In this case, the passport as an international device was being used to subvert, rather than strengthen, the emerging nation-state; but in either case nationality had become the point of reference. The Red Cross, the second case study, provides an example of the way in which the religious ideal of humanitarian aid and of bodily help for the wounded was nationalized. Originally a response by Henri Dunant to the horrors of the battlefield of Solferino during the unification of Italy, the Red Cross organization soon became associated with Switzerland as a nationstate. 56 The Red Cross itself was not so much a Christian or an international symbol as the obverse of the Swiss flag. Since 1880 the central organization has always been heavily Swiss. The subordinate bodies of the Red Cross were built around different national committees. This nationally based international organization has pressed national governments to create international conventions on the laws of war. Yet the tension between the national and the international has always existed under the surface. In the 1880s and 1890s the symbolic unity of the organization was breached when enraged Ottoman Muslims attacked Red Cross volunteer doctors serving on battlefields because they were wearing a Christian symbol. This forced the organizers to allow the Red Crescent to be adopted in Muslim countries. During the Balkan wars after 1 911, Indian Muslims organized in defense of the Ottomans through a specifically Indian Red Crescent Organization. 57 More recently, the state of Israel has tried to insist on the use of a red Star of David in its own sphere. The example of world religions yields a final example of the shift from archaic globalization to the internationalism of the nineteenth century. This is a theme which will be taken up more fully in chapter 9. Its Christian organizers intended the World Parliament of Religions of 1893 in Chicago to celebrate humanity's global quest for religious experience. They hoped to mitigate hostilities between different religious traditions. The context for the meeting was the rise of anti-Semitism, increased Protestant-Catholic hostility, and the Western fear of pan-Islamism. From the beginning, however, the organization of the conference was dogged with controversy over the status of national religious bodies. In the tense political situation of the period, it was found possible in many cases to allow only the representatives of specifically national churches to "represent" religions. Though uninvited, the Bengali seer Swami Vivekananda arrived in Chicago d . . 5s H and, by force of character, became the de facto In ian representative. e achieved three things by his passionate speeches to the parliament. First, he managed to encourage Americans to see Hinduism as a powerful international force. He did this by ignoring the divisions between its sects and pointing to the ancient Hindu civilizations of Southeast Asia and the diaspora Hindus of South Africa and the Caribbean. He deplored the bodily practice of Western nations, their slaughter of living souls to feed their greed. He recorded his horror at the daily massacre of the sacred cow, which he saw in the Chicago stockyards. Most significantly, Vivekananda firmly welded the notion of Hinduism to the claims of Indian nationalism, contrasting the materialism of Western nations with the spirituality which he proclaimed was the essence of Eastern nations - above all, India. His moral dominance of the parliament was celebrated by many in India as the precise moment when Indian nationhood was recognized as a force in its own right, separate and superior to British imperialism. On his return, Indians hailed Vivekananda as the embodiment of India's spirituality as a nation. A few years earlier, he had wandered the subcontinent as a pilgrim in search of traces of God, like the sacred travelers of the archaic globe. Now, his devotees subordinated caste, culture, and sacred geography to the nation. Indian princes personally dragged the chariot of this lower-caste renouncer, bodily inverting the old hierarchy. Vivekananda was meanwhile serenaded with the triumphal march from Handel's Judas Maccabeus. This music had itself been composed as a celebration of the fusion of religion with the once-and-future nation by an old German patriot resident in Britain. A Calcutta daily newspaper wrote: "India celebrated its conquering champion. All sections of Hinduism came together to thank the American people. " 59 In this way, India came increasingly to be associated with Hinduism, a shift which was of great importance for the future of the subcontinent. This final section has suggested how the shift took place over the last two centuries from global networks to what increasingly became inter-national networks. It occurred in the register of ideology; so, for instance, the notion of succour to the wounded in Christianity and Islam was embodied in an international organization, the Red Cross. It took place in the register of actual human diaspora, so that migrants were controlled through a system of passports determined by their nationality. It also happened in the register of bodily practice. Indians, notably Gandhi, came to believe that vegetarianism and abstinence should be a defining feature of the future Indian nation. This last register, the register of bodily practice, formed the link between the ideological and the material through the consumption and transformation of commodities. The strategic collection by people of the exotic and health-giving made way increasingly for the consumption of uniform commodities, modes of dress, and forms of deportment which were the markers of national status in the international arena. Paradoxes and conflicts emerged. The Japanese elites, for instance, asked themselves whether their modern nationality was best served by wearing European frock coats in international arenas or by adapting their traditional garments as a "Japanese" formal suit. CONCLUSION This chapter as a whole has attempted to bring together the historical writing on nationalism, imperialism, "internationalism," and subordinate ethnic groups for the later nineteenth century. The rise of exclusive nationalisms, grasping and using the powers of the new and more interventionist state, was the critical force propelling both the new imperialism and the hardening of the boundaries between majority and assumed "ethnic" populations across the world. Nationalism itself took on more competitive and well-defined forms as a consequence of the wars, rebellions, and international conflicts of the mid-century. These strengthened, for instance, an American, and even a Canadian, sense of nationality, which had been developing before the midcentury. In Europe, the emergence of two new nation-states, Germany and Italy, and the humiliation of two others, France and German Austria, tipped the balance of the continent toward diplomatic and military competition both inside and outside its borders. The unification of Japan, yet more vigorous British imperial rule in South Asia, and a European offensive in the Middle East brought into existence new nationalist movements among the elites and commercial people of Asia and Africa. In turn, these began to deploy new forms of publicity to press their claims for self-rule on the colonial governments. Imperialism and nationalism reacted on each other to redivide the world and its people. The mid-century wars had themselves arisen from a variety of causes: uneven economic growth, the relative deprivation of peasant and artisan populations, the drive for modernization of leading elite groups, and the slow diffusion of ideas of popular sovereignty from the earlier democratic revolutions. In accounting for the onward rush of claimants to nationhood in this critical period of time, however, the dominant influence was the experience and memory of mass conflict itself. The state, urbanization, and print capitalism all played a part, but war was the origin of nationalisms, just as nationalisms caused wars. Nationalism in turn reformulated the old, looser links of global diasporas and ideologies which had linked the eighteenthcentury world. Even when conferences or congresses claimed to represent universal principles, they were now structured increasingly by the participation of nation-states. After the 55 years from about 1815 to 1870, when free trade was the order of the day, economic protectionism on national lines was more and more apparent as the century drew to an end. While flows of international trade, labor, and capital grew exponentially, nation-states sought vigorously to control and direct them to their own ends. There is a paradox, then, in this picture of the rise of the nation-state and its imperial surrogate. Statesmen may well have conceived nations as monolithic and authoritative entities, but people saw the nation as a guarantor of rights, privileges, and claims on resources. When states failed to deliver on these implicit pledges, especially if they were ruled by foreigners, people came to demand them even more vociferously and aggressively. So it was that the triumph of the nation-state also saw the emergence of a plethora of voluntary associations, reform societies, and moral crusades, now increasingly organized at both a national and an international level. The antislavery associations and clubs of liberal reformers which existed in the early nineteenth century were now joined by thousands of new bodies claiming to speak in the name of, among many others, Indians, Irishmen, socialists, women, and indigenous peoples. The socialist First International was only the most radical of these. The next two chapters deal, first, with the lineaments of the state itself and, then, with the body of political thought which informed its leaders and its radical critics.