HY 150 BISK
EUROPE IMPOSES MODERNIZATION ON THE WORLD
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskimperialism.htm

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 McNEILL
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 23:
WORLD REACTIONS TO EUROPE’S ACHIEVEMENTS, 1850 to 1914

INTRODUCTION
Transportation and Communication (592)
Population Growth (593)
The Impact of European Skills (593)
How the "Inner Ring" Got Along (594)
U.S. Domestic and Imperial Growth (594)
Political Problems at Home (595)
U.S. Expansion Abroad (596)
Culture and Society in the United States (596)
Canada and Australia (598)
South Africa (598)
South America (598)
Russia (600)
Failure of Autocratic Government (600)
The Asian "Outside Ring" (601)
China (601)
Reaction to Foreign Powers (603)
Japan (605)
Reforms in Government (605)
India (607)
Islam (609)
Internal Problems (609)
The Fate of Africans and Amerindians (610)
Amerindian Peoples (615)
Conclusion (615)
Bibliography (616)
Special Feature: Transportation and Communication (617)

IMPERIALISM

European influence spread into Africa and the Middle East from the time of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War. Natives tried diverse strategies in response to foreign intrusion. The relatively modern states of Europe easily dominated the tribal societies of Africa south of the Sahara as well as the traditional Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa. The technological and military superiority of the Europeans proved to be crucial in their expansion. Major setbacks were unusual. Ethiopia’s defeat of an Italian army in 1896 stands as one of the few exceptions to a long string of European victories, a defeat Italians avenged in 1936 when Mussolini conquered Ethiopia in a belated revival of blatant colonial imperialism.

The successes of the Europeans produced pressure for reform in Africa and the Middle East, but it was difficult to overcome resistance to modernization. The overthrow of Selim III, the Ottoman sultan, in 1807 exemplified the risks. Of course, the forces of modernization continued in the Ottoman Empire, as the successful rebellion by the Young Turks in 1908 showed. It is noteworthy that young military officers played a leading role in that rebellion. Their interest in the sources of military power helped them realize that they needed modernization to survive in the competitive international system. Yet, resistance to modernization has also proven to be a persistent pattern. During the past two decades the strength of Islamic fundamentalism has illustrated this in some spectacular ways such as the revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran (formerly Persia) during 1979 and set up an Islamic republic.

The effects of European influence on the tribal societies of sub-Saharan Africa have perhaps been more disruptive although much traditional tribal identity survived. Even after Europeans stopped engaging in the slave trade, their massive exploitation compounded the turbulence. The atrocities of forced labor in King Leopold’s African Free State (later the Belgian Congo) are the most notorious examples. Scholars argue about the extent to which black Africans benefited from European imperialism. It is difficult to weigh the disruption of kinship and tribal ties against improvements in living standards or life expectancy. Conclusions closely reflect the values of the observer. One pattern, however, is clear: African states today still seek the wealth and power that modernization makes possible.

We can survey the working of two types of European imperialism. The first transplants European people to overseas locations and the second tries to dominate and manipulate the economies of other peoples for European profit. In Latin America Spanish and Portuguese so completely displaced native institutions that they were able to create a new version of their European homelands, complete with a new Hispanic culture, religion society and politics. The English seventeenth-century idea of "plantation" applies to Hispanic America just as it did to transplanting English and French institutions to North America. The Latin American experience parallels that in North America—displacement of native culture, revolution and break with Europe, and, finally, nation-building in the New World. This begs the question of how the differences between North and Latin America came into being from their respective histories. Latin America experienced more Indian influence, a more disjointed politics and less economic progress than its northern neighbors.

The second type of imperialism, which reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, was the energetic effort of European commercial and industrial systems to reach out and control the economies of the non-industrialized world. Just as the industrial leaders in Europe and the U.S. were creating new systems to manipulate and monopolize their own economies, so other Europeans and Americans were striving to impose new systems on Asians, Africans and Middle Easterners.  All in the name of free trade and material progress, of course. It is doubtful that the idea of actually exploiting other people crossed their minds, but that is how later history interpreted these efforts. In any case, Asians had to respond. Southeast Asia responded mostly passively, Ottoman Turkey tentatively and uncertainly, China defensively and reluctantly, Mughul India with confusion, and Japan proactively. In Japan the arrival of Westerners set in motion a revolt against the old order which, out of fear of becoming like the exploited Chinese, rapidly created a unified national state which came to match European imperialists.

None of these societies was weak in the broad sense; the people were tough and hardworking and had durable cultural institutions. No society collapsed completely; each retained its cultural roots in the face of the superior military, industrial, and scientific strength of the West. The weakness lay in having a durable traditional culture badly out of step with the twentieth century. In India and Southeast Asia leadership remained disunited. In China it bogged down in self-satisfied orthodoxy. In Japan it stayed divided and uncertain. All these countries were undergoing economic difficulties that reduced public faith in the leadership. The country that changed its leadership fastest was first off the mark into the modern world. That was Japan.
 

THE CLASSIC STATEMENT SUPPORTING WESTERN IMPERIALISM

The White Man’s Burden
By Rudyard Kipling
McClure’s Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).

Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly

Take up the White Man’s burden
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man’s burden
Ye dare not stoop to less
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden!
Have done with childish days
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

adapted from
"THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN? IMPERIAL WARS IN THE 1890S"
Lawrence James

ANECDOTE AND ITS MEANING
In the summer of 1900, Colonel James Willcocks led a small army of troops to Kumasi in what today is Ghana to fight the Asante King Prempe who had defied his new British overlords. During the march, a village headman approached Willcocks and claimed the Haussa soldiers had broken down his people’s huts in their search for firewood, and he demanded compensation. Willcocks investigated the story, found it untrue and had its teller seized and brought before him. "All he had to say," recalled Willcocks, "was that I was his "good father," and I accordingly treated him as a good father does his child." The headman was like a naughty schoolboy whose mischief a firm but benign headmaster had uncovered and punished. The headman bore no grudges, later telling Willcocks he was a "devilish fine fellow."

This incident, and for that matter the campaign of which it formed a small part, are instructive, shedding light on contemporary attitudes toward empires and their subject races. Willcocks, a professional soldier with twenty years experience waging the small wars of empire, was advancing against a native prince who had broken faith. His duplicity and the headman’s were reminders that those whom Rudyard Kipling characterized as "sullen, new caught peoples, half devil and half child" needed sharp lessons before the British could set them along the road to moral and physical regeneration. Moreover, Willcocks revealed by his treatment of the headmen that he had that gift, claimed by many others like him, British and French, of a deep understanding of the native mind.  This understanding enabled him to see through the fraud, treat its perpetrator fittingly, and at the same time win his respect.

All that is implicit in this anecdote might repel modern readers, their counterparts in the 1890s saw it as an amusing incident in the irresistible advance of European civilization across Asia and Africa. This decade witnessed the heyday of self-confident, often self-congratulatory and always aggressive imperialism in which Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States conquered and annexed in the name of civilization.

JUSTIFICATION FOR IMPERIALISM
Westerners saw this unprecedented spate of expansion the culmination of a natural historical progression. Nations that had now reached what Cecil Rhodes believed was the highest state of civilization were taking control over those which had lagged behind, or races, like the Asante, whom Europeans thought were unfit to manage their own affairs. This process was inevitable and beneficial for all concerned. "The future of Africa under any form of European tutelage must be better than the dark and evil nightmare of the past." The Dublin Review concluded this after delegates to the 1885 Berlin Conference had sanctioned the continent’s division among the European powers.

The work was soon underway in Africa and in some areas the results looked promising. Technical and cultural progress advanced side by side in the French Ivory Coast where a report of 1896 described the laying of telegraph and telephone lines through the bush. Most important was the spread of French taught in recently established schools where, allegedly, the pupils were proudly mastering the language of their new rulers. Using their new tongue, they would learn, among other things, about the achievements and superiority of French civilization and in time feel themselves a part of French culture. The "benevolent, fatherly and firm" governor received credit for transforming the Ivory Coast. This model of enlightened imperialism had its equivalents elsewhere, although Frenchmen in general dismissed British civilization, which they regarded as inferior to their own.

For their part, the British assumed the superiority of their own moral qualities that uniquely qualified them to govern. "The British race," proclaimed Joseph Chamberlain, the future Colonial Secretary in 1885, was "the greatest of governing races the world has ever seen" and therefore alone it was Britain’s "mission" to protect and enlarge her empire. In America, ardent imperialists followed a similar moral imperative; in 1900 Senator A. J. Beveridge announced that "the civilization of the world" was the God-given "mission of our nation."

THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
This was the opinion of Kipling, who believed in the brotherhood of all Anglo-Saxon nations. He aired the general view of their duty to uplift and civilize in his poem "The White Man's Burden," which was an appeal to the American people after they had annexed the Philippines.

Those who shouldered the burden or undertook its French equivalent, the "civilizing mission" had first to win over the hearts and minds of subject races and persuade them that this was to their ultimate advantage. Marshal Lyautey, a soldier-administrator who had developed his theories in Indo-China during the 1890s, favored what he called displays of "our care and welfare for their [the natives] moral and material interests." "It is," he wrote:

In the moral sphere, the most noble, the highest and the purest one, that the most worthy work of France and her tradition is associated with the destiny of Moroccans—not as a subject people—but as a people who are benefiting thanks to our Protectorate, from the fullness of their natural rights and the satisfaction of their moral needs.

RESISTANCE: THE SUDAN
Kipling echoed these sentiments.  He celebrated the conquest of the Sudan in 1898 with a poem whose theme was the British promise to build a university in Khartoum:

They do not consider the Meaning of Things;
They consult nor creed nor clan.
Behold, they clap the slave on the back,
And behold he ariseth a man!
They terribly carpet the earth with dead,
And before their cannon cool,
They walk unarmed by twos and threes
To call the living to school.

This was reassuring after British artillery, machine gun and rifle fire during the recent Battle of Omdurman had killed nearly 11,000 Sudanese. Such blood-letting was unparalleled in a colonial war of this period.  It had been necessary, argued the Daily Mail's war correspondent, G. W. Steevens, to secure the "downfall of the worst tyranny in the world" and to provide the Sudan with "immunity from rape, torture and every extreme of misery." His readers would have needed no such reminder because the press had presented  the two-year campaign as a contest between benign civilization and brutal barbarism. Two Daily Graphic illustrations nicely showed the contrast: a line drawing which portrayed a medical orderly tending a wounded Sudanese and a photograph of the bones of Jaalin tribesmen massacred at the orders of the Khalifa Abdullah.

RESISTANCE: RHODESIA
And yet, the Sudanese had fiercely resisted Kitchener’s invasion. Wherever they went in the 1890s, the imperial powers had to overcome determined opposition before they could lay the foundations for their "civilized" order. Even conquered people could display an alarming recidivism which some found inexplicable. Frederick Selous, colonist and big-game hunter, reflecting on the 1896 Ndebele uprising in Rhodesia, decided that armchair imperialists were wrong to expect gratitude.

When we free a tribe of savages from what we consider a most oppressive and tyrannical form of government, overthrow the power of witch doctors and take measures to safeguard life and property.

The evidence suggested not, and only the most condign chastisement, resolutely and repeatedly applied, would teach the natives "the uselessness of rebelling against the white man."

RESISTANCE AND RESPONSE
General Sir Francis Younghusband, who had spent much of the 1880s and 1890s putting it into practice, forthrightly explained the dogma of the swift, annihilating response.

The moment there is a sign of revolt, mutiny or treachery, of which the symptoms not unusually are a swollen head, and a tendency to incivility, it is wise to hit the Oriental straight between the eyes, and to keep on hitting him thus, till he appreciates exactly what he is, and who is who.

Politicians, aware the public could easily misunderstand the nature of these applications of main force, had to be more circumspect. Chamberlain told the Commons in 1895 that, "expeditions, punitive or otherwise" were "the only way we can establish peace between contending native tribes in Africa" and "the only system of civilizing and practically of developing the trade of Africa." Like the nanny's smack or the caning delivered by the schoolmaster, war was a means of inducing the purblind or recalcitrant to accept what was best for their long-term interests.

The application of this simple doctrine revealed a gulf between the high-minded ideals of imperialism and the realities of empire-building. Columns of heavily armed troops penetrated disaffected districts, chivvied rebels or resisters, burnt crops and villages, and slaughtered or carried off livestock. Many found the work distasteful; others justified it on the grounds that barbarous methods were the only ones that would make a lasting impression on barbarous minds.

One officer, in his published version of the mini-campaign fought against mutinous Sudanese askaris in Uganda in 1898-99, omitted details of killing the mutineers' families and was privately deeply ashamed of what he called a "hateful" type of warfare. In French territories it took the form of the razzia, a systematic program of destruction and looting designed to induce terror. While suppressing the Maji revolt of 1905-06 in German East Africa, 75,000 died, nearly all the victims of an artificially created famine. American troops employed similar methods in 1900 to suppress the Filipino revolt. Asked by a Senate investigating committee to defend having burned villages, General Robert P. Hughes answered, "These people are not civilized." Hughes' reprisals against the Filipinos had been the response to that most exasperating form of native resistance, guerrilla warfare.

In conventional conflicts, imperial armies relied on overwhelming firepower against the traditional tactic of the headlong charge, often by warriors who had convinced themselves that they had supernatural protection from bullets. On the way to relieve the Peking legations in 1900, a boxer onrush amazed Captain Jellicoe, then commanding a naval landing party.

Without any hesitation they charged a Maxim and were literally mown down coming on at a jog trot and collapsing when hit. They often stopped a few yards off and went through gesticulations for rendering themselves immune from bullet wounds.

EUROPEAN DEFEATS
Nevertheless over-confident, neglectful, or rash commanders could suffer defeats. The Italians face disaster at Adowa in 1896 by an Ethiopian army that, unusually, had a sprinkling of machine guns and modern artillery, and two small French columns were overwhelmed in southern Chad in 1898-99. The Brussels Agreement of 1890 by which the European powers banned the import of modern weaponry into Africa reduced the chances of such disasters again occurring.

USE OF NATIVE TROOPS
Climates, fevers and intestinal distempers caused more casualties than native weaponry, modern or antiquated. Three thousand men, a third of the army, died from diseases during the 1894-95 French campaign against the Hovas of Madagascar and only twenty-five from enemy action. Meticulous logistical planning prevented losses on this scale, and, whenever possible, Europeans deployed native troops and locally recruited auxiliaries in torrid or febriferous regions. Jollre's detachment of 380 which captured Timbuktu in 1894 contained only twenty-eight Frenchmen. Sudanese mercenaries and Sikhs borrowed from the Indian army fought the British campaigns in East and West Africa. White officers and NCOs always commanded and, as a precaution, manned machine guns that were the key to victory on the imperial battlefield. In 1905, there was one machine gun to every 130 men in the German army in East Africa, a far higher proportion than generals thought necessary in Europe.

In the imperial wars of the 1890s, Black, Egyptian, Arab, Indian, and Indo-Chinese troops did most of the donkey work. Their European officers prided themselves in their skill in choosing those races and tribes who were the most warlike and responsive to training and discipline. British officers credited their power of leadership to character, that amalgam of bravery, selflessness, adherence to duty, team spirit, and prowess in games that the English public schools had instilled in them. These institutions produced young men ideally suited to command and govern.  In 1911, a Guards officer insisted that "Public School spirit and public spirit are almost synonymous."

MOTIVATIONS FOR SERVICE
It was not a sense of public duty alone that impelled young officers to seek service on imperial frontiers. A love for adventure, high rates of pay, an addiction for sport, especially shooting game, and the chance to make a name for themselves that would guarantee rapid promotion also drew them. "When one once started on safari, that is, the line of march in Africa, one never knows where it may lead to," wrote one subaltern during the 1898 Uganda campaign. For Kitchener, Haig, Joffre, and Gallieni the path led to high command while others, like Wingate, Lugard, and Lyautey stepped sideways and became high-ranking administrators.

INDEPENDENT POLICIES IN THE FIELD
All warrior proconsuls were unshaken in their belief that they were following a creed that was morally right. Often, they were impatient with political control exercised from afar by men ignorant of the day-to-day realities in areas where European power was still precarious. Some, particularly those keen to make a career for themselves and win public attention, acted off their own bat or defied their political masters. In the early 1890s, commandant supérieur, Louis Archinard, followed his own initiative and launched a series of offensives.  These included one against Timbuktu that caused an exasperated official in Paris to complain about the "State within a State" created in West Africa by a handful of disobedient Officers. Lugard followed his own judgment rather than Chamberlain's and, in 1902, went ahead with preparations for a campaign in Northern Nigeria despite Colonial Office misgivings. Most famously, Rhodes engineered a coup de main, the Jameson Raid, against the Transvaal in 1895-96.  He believed that he was serving the best interests of the British Empire and with it the cause of civilization in southern Africa which he though the Boers would never promot.

LESSONS FOR SCHOOL
Imperialists taught their lessons in the schoolroom. In 1896, the Practical Teacher promoted regular lessons in elementary schools on the British Empire in which pupils would learn about the supremacy of the Royal Navy, the names of colonies and trade routes. Adults also had their schooling, advertisements.  For example, under a headline, "The Two Greatest Navies in the World," Players Navy Cut tobacco displayed the product with the numbers of British warships and sailors. During the Boer War copywriters went wild, and fighting men in khaki endorsed mustard, tobacco, cigarettes, beef extracts, and patent cure-alls. This was an attempt to cash in on the enormous public excitement aroused by the war in South Africa. Its early and dramatic phases dominated newspapers (headlines included "Koorn Spruit Ambush" and "More Deeds of Derring-Do") and newsreel footage for showing in cinemas captured troops on campaign.

OPPOSITION TO IMPERIALISM
Later when the war resolved itself into a tedious anti-guerrilla campaign, public concern wearied and the views of opponents of the war made some headway. During the 1890s, there had been those, mainly on the left, who were apprehensive about imperialist principles and critical of the methods used in imperial wars. Reports of the fighting in Rhodesia and war artists' drawings of horsemen galloping down fleeing natives provoked Irish and radical MPs to make charges of inhumanity. There was disquiet about stories of Kitchener riding in triumph into a captured Sudanese town followed by emirs laden with chains. For fear of public outcry, the government kept secret equally distressful incidents, such as using firing squads on the North-West Frontier in 1895 to execute captured rebels to test the effectiveness of different types of ammunition. The public did hear, in 1902, of the trial and execution of Lieutenants Morant and Handcock for the multiple murders of Boer POWs, a crime that left one senior officer fearful that the Boer War would "degenerate into pure savagery." Sometimes the civilizers came close to embracing the very vices they were fighting to extirpate. [Interestingly, those tried and executed were Australian, not British. The Australian movie, Breaker Morant depicted the events leading up to and including the execution. This movie was part of a series of Australian movies (no, not Crocodile Dundee, but rather, for example, Gallipoli) that tried to define the relationship between Australia and its former colonial master, Britain. Made in the last years of the Vietnam War, the movie also spoke to many Americans.]

Imperial wars of the 1890s aroused great public interest, most of it emotional and transient. Disappointed and enraged Italians rioted when they heard the baleful news of Adowa. New York theater-goers cheered the popular song Unchain the Dogs of War as American fleets sailed for Cuba and the Philippines. The British public swung between mass despondency and delirium during the Boer War. There was exhilaration of another kind in Khartoum when nationalist Egyptian officers heard news of British defeats in South Africa in 1899 which seemed to them to mark an end to a decade of European invincibility. Indian nationalists likewise took heart from the news of Japan’s victories over Russia in 1905.

Domestic patriotic hysteria never traveled to the imperial front line. A Scottish volunteer yeomanry man in South Africa noticed that soldiers never sang the jingoistic songs so popular at home. Another yeomanry man discovered in Cape Town a book kept to record the comings and goings of young patriots like himself. It contained one entry that read: "Reason for Joining: Patriotic Fever; Reason for Leaving: Enteric Fever." There was always a gap between rhetoric and reality in the imperial wars of civilization against barbarism.

CRITICISM AND SATIRE OF IMPERIALISM

Ernest Crosby
"The Real ‘White Man’s Burden’"
February 1899
Crosby later served as president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York

Take up the White Man’s burden;
Send forth your sturdy sons,
And load them down with whisky
And Testaments and guns.
Throw in a few diseases
To spread in tropic climes,
For there the healthy niggers
Are quite behind the times.
And don’t forget the factories.
On those benighted shores
They have no cheerful iron-mills
Nor eke department stores.
The never work twelve hours a day,
And live in strange content,
Altho’ they never have to pay
A single cent of rent

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And teach the Philippines
What interest and taxes are
And what a mortgage means.
Give them electrocution chairs,
And prisons, too, galore,
And if they seem inclined to kick,
Then spill their heathen gore.

They need our labor question, too,
And politics and fraud,
We’ve made a pretty mess at home;
Let’s make a mess abroad.
And let us ever humbly pray
The Lord of Hosts may deign
To stir our feeble memories,
Lest we forget—the Maine

Take up the White Man’s burden;
To you who thus succeed
In civilizing savage hoards
They owe a debt, indeed;
Concessions, pensions, salaries,
And privilege and right,
With outstretched hands you raise to bless
Grab everything in sight.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And if you write in verse,
Flatter your Nation’s vices
And strive to make them worse.
Then learn that if with pious words
You ornament each phrase,
In a world of canting hypocrites
This kind of business pays.


 

Extracted and Adapted from:
HIRAKAWA SUKEHIRO.
“PRISONERS IN BURMA: THE ANGLO-JAPANESE HOSTILITIES FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE.” JAPAN ECHO 26 (DEC. 1999): 43-50.

Born in 1931, Hirakawa is a professor emeritus, University of Tokyo and is an authority on the intellectual history of Japan's nineteenth-century modernization.

REACTING TO "THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
The most influential ideologue of Japan's war against the Anglo-Saxon nations was definitely Tokutomi Soho (1863-1957).  What is interesting about this journalist is that he formed his opinions in a reaction against typical opinions voiced in the West.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western opinion leaders could ignore the reactions of Asians, while Asian opinion leaders had to pay attention to what was going on in the West.  That asymmetry in attention comes of course from the asymmetry in power relations of the countries concerned.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the superiority of Western civilization appeared so evident that the British poet Rudyard Kipling could write a poem like "The White Man's Burden" without considering the reactions of races other than his own.  Born in India in 1865, Kipling was two years younger than Tokutomi.  He wrote his poem in 1899, one year after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, when the United States was emerging as an imperialistic power in Asia, having occupied the Philippines and made them its colonies in the Pacific.

Kipling, the most popular British poet of the time addressed "The White Man's Burden" to the American people.  He first sent the poem to Theodore Roosevelt, then Vice President of the United States. Only afterward, on February 4, 1899, did Kipling have it printed in the Times.  Kipling was so popular as the national poet that a literary magazine also printed his poem.  It also appeared in the United States in the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune on February 5.  Just one day later, on February 6, the Senate voted to approve American administration of the Philippines.  Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge about Kipling's poem, saying that it "is rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint."  Roosevelt recognized that Kipling's poem held a strong political appeal to the public.

What is interesting—and what few Westerners know—is the reaction the poem provoked in Japan.  Tokutomi was one of Japan’s most influential opinion leaders, a position he held for more than half a century until Japan's defeat in 1945.  At the outset, he was an Anglophile.  But then, after Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, he began to talk about the "Yellow Man's burden."  He advanced this idea in his journalism, because he knew that after the breakdown of the myth of the invincibility of the White Man, new political movements were underway in colonies of the British Empire.  His arguments, however, were not as self-assertive as Kipling's poem.  Kipling urged his fellow countrymen and "peers," that is, Americans, to take up the burden of races other than their own.  Tokutomi urged his fellow countrymen to take up the burden of oppressed peoples of the same "yellow" race of Asia, who were aspiring for independence.  In short, "Asia for the Asians" was Tokutomi's argument—a sort of Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine.

These were not simple matters.  Because Tokutomi challenged the status quo of British supremacy in Asia, the Japanese ruling oligarchy did not like the propagation of this idea.  Pan-Asianism, however, began to gain strength, especially after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.  Okakura Kakuzo's slogan "Asia is One" found ears in India and elsewhere in the British colonies.  Ironically, Okakura's slogan gained a sympathetic reception in some parts of Asia because Asians could read his books in English.

When we look back at what happened half a century ago, the rapidity with which the basic myths about technological, racial, religious, or cultural superiority have come tumbling down amazes us.  Probably everyone has a personal cultural perspective through which to look back at the history of the Anglo-Japanese conflict in Southeast Asia.  One's perspective tends to become one's prejudice. Culturally, Asia is not one.  The common denominator among Asians of the Pan-Asianistic creed was political, namely, that they were against the White Man's rule.  It was this anticolonialist sentiment that peoples living in various parts of Asia more or less shared.

In this context, some reflections on the racial aspects of the problem are indispensable.  Let us begin by quoting an article that triggered a series of reactions among Japanese intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century:

The Japanese cross the Yalu and defeat the Russians with precision in Manchuria.  Their sailors destroyed a European fleet elegantly.  Immediately, we [Europeans] discern a danger that menaces us.  If it exists, who has created it?  The Asians have already known the white peril for many years.  The sacking of the Summer Palace, the Peking massacres, the drownings of Blagoveshchensk, the partitioning of China—were not these causes of anxiety for the Chinese?  And did the Japanese feel themselves safe under the cannons of Port Arthur?  We have created the white peril.  The white peril has created the yellow peril.

Anatole France, the most influential French writer at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote this during the Russo-Japanese War. The idea that the white peril created the yellow peril brings to mind the assertion of some today who insist that we should not describe interracial problems between blacks and whites as a black problem, but a white problem.

This argument by a prominent French intellectual strongly affected Japanese intellectuals. Leading figures agreed with the view voiced by Anatole France.  These intellectual undercurrents were strong even among pro-Western Japanese, and that must be one reason why most Japanese wholeheartedly supported Japan's war efforts during World War II.

From the opening of the country in the nineteenth century through the late 1920s, the Japanese government of the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) eras behaved itself as a "good boy" within the comity of nations.  Leading oligarchs were circumspect about international politics, and they did not venture to challenge Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Japan took part in the international expedition to North China in 1900 to put down the Boxer Rebellion and shortly thereafter concluded the Anglo-Japanese alliance.  So long as the two states upheld that alliance, there was not much conflict between Britain and Japan.  However, Pan-Asiatic opinion leaders like Tokutomi began to win followers among the younger generations.  London and Tokyo terminated the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921.  Meanwhile, movements against Japanese immigration grew violent on the West Coast of North America.  The Japanese senior statesmen now steered the ship of the Japanese Empire with difficulty. Japan tried hard to play the role of the Britain of the East.

Japanese businessmen, diplomats, and naval officers stilled admired and respected much in Britain as Japan tried to build its colonial empire. They studied British imperial administration in Egypt and elsewhere as Japan annexed first Taiwan and then Korea. One conspicuous difference between the British and Japanese histories of colonization is that no member of the British aristocracy ever married a member of a colonial princely family.  On the other hand, Japan's Princess Masako, from a branch of the imperial family, married Prince Yi Un, the heir of Korea's former ruling house, in 1920. This politically arranged marriage may give the impression that Korea’s annexation proceeded on equal terms, but this was not the case. Further, the railways and factories Japanese engineers built in Korea chiefly served Japan's colonial purposes. All the same, developing heavy industry in a colony was something new and rarely seen in European colonies.

We can identify the problem posed by Japanese Pan-Asianists like Tokutomi.  They much admired the builders of the British Empire.  In Hong Kong and in Singapore, Japanese travelers marveled at the magnificent government buildings, splendid hotels, and majestic churches. The Japanese too built government buildings in Taipei, in Seoul and later in Changchun, the capital of Manchukuo.  They also built Yamato Hotels and Shinto shrines.  But even as they strove to make Japan the Britain of the East, the Japanese had mixed feelings toward the British, and some openly resented the White Man's dominance in Asia.

From the 1860s to the outbreak of World War II, the main route from Japan to the Western world was by sea.  It began from Yokohama or Kobe and went to Marseilles or London with stops on the way at ports like Hong Kong, Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Aden, Suez, and Port Said. The educational value of the Eurasian sea route was so high that a detailed description of the voyage appeared in a national elementary-school Japanese-language reader. The first mission of the shogunate to Europe took this route in 1862. Among the party was a young interpreter called Fukuzawa Yukichi, who later became the intellectual leader of the "civilization and enlightenment" movement. Ito Hirobumi who, after distinguishing himself in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was to become the chief political architect of Meiji Japan, also made this trip, traveling to England first as a stowaway aboard a British ship. Almost all the leading intellectuals of Japan's modernization took that route and, thus, shared common experiences.

Even those Japanese who had formed an idealized view of Western civilization through their bookish knowledge had to recognize the vast and ruthless expansion of the Western colonial powers. Once the Japanese left their own country, all the intermediate stops on the way to Europe were under Western, mainly British, rule. ManyJapanese travelers to the colonizing Europeans and colonized Asians vividly recorded their reactions in their diaries. Not only army or navy men of chauvinistic temper but also civilians bridled at the manifestations of the White Man's dominance in Asia. There was a surprising degree of coincidence in the reactions of Japanese travelers witnessing similar scenes when white passengers threw coins from the sides of ships and native boys dived into the water to catch them. Mori Ogai's observations in 1884 and Natsume Soseki's remarks in 1900 were practically identical.

Against the historical background of the age of nationalism, it was understandable that slogans like "Asia for the Asians" became popular among the common people of Japan.  Through the 1910s and 1920s, their voices began to grow stronger as education and democratization progressed. They at first justified Japan's expansion into Korea and Manchuria in terms of Japan's national survival and security. Later they declared that it expressed Japan's duty toward less advanced peoples of Asia who needed leadership in their struggle against Western imperialism. In this way Tokutomi's "Yellow Man's burden" became the political slogan of the Japanese army and rightwing politicians.

There was, however, an obvious contradiction in the Japanese attitude towards Britain.  While Japan followed the British model, building an empire and keeping colonies, self-righteous Japanese journalists began to denounce British colonialism.  In the 1930s, the Japanese military men and some journalists began to attack the diplomacy of the Japanese government as Anglophile and pacifist.

Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931, Japan's policy became what I would like to call anti-imperialistic imperialism. Objectively speaking, the Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s was an aggressor. Subjectively speaking, however, many Japanese fought the war to liberate East Asia. That sort of national self-conceit was something similar to the attitude of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people on the eve of the First Gulf War. Their strongly nationalistic attitude and their "holy war" rhetoric reminded older Japanese of the atmosphere on the eve of war in the early 1940s in Japan.  [Of course, many, especially in the Philippines, Korea, and China, would disagree with the view that Japan was fighting to free “yellow” Asians from “white” Europeans and Americans.  Millions still bitterly resent the brutality of Japanese occupation, and the government still faces international complications because of the deserved hatred occupation spawned.]

Adapted from
David Fromkin. "How the Modern Middle East Map Came to be Drawn."
Smithsonian (May 1991): 132-134, 136, 138-148.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, the British created new borders (and rulers) to keep the peace and protect their interests.

A Lawyer Historian, David Fromkin is the author of a prizewinning book entitled A Peace to End All Peace.

TEXT
Case Study: Kuwait and Iraq
The dictator of Iraq claimed—falsely—that until 1914 the Turks had administered Kuwait from Iraq, that historically Kuwait was a part of Iraq, that the separation of Kuwait from Iraq was an arbitrary decision of Great Britain’s after World War 1. The year was 1961; the Iraqi dictator was Abdul-Karim Qasim; and the dispatch of British troops averted a threatened invasion.

Iraq, claiming that it had never recognized the British-drawn frontier with Kuwait, demanded full access to the Persian Gulf and when Kuwait failed to agree, Iraqi tanks and infantry attacked Kuwait. The year was 1973; the Iraqi dictator was Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. When other Arab states came to Kuwait’s support, Iraq struck a deal.  Kuwait paid money to Iraq, and Iraqi troops withdrew.

August 2, 1990. At 2 A.M. Iraqi forces swept across the Kuwaiti frontier. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, declared that the frontier between Iraq and Kuwait was invalid, a creation of the British after World War I, and that Kuwait really belonged to Iraq.

It was, of course, true, as one Iraqi dictator after another claimed, that the exact Iraq-Kuwait frontier was a line drawn in the early 1920s on an empty map by a British civil servant. But Kuwait began to emerge as an independent entity in the early 1700s—two centuries before Britain invented Iraq. Moreover, most other frontiers between states of the Middle East were also creations of the British—or the French. The victorious Allies when they took over these lands from the Ottoman Empire after World War I drew the map of the Arab Middle East. By proposing to nullify that map, Saddam Hussein at a minimum was trying to turn the clock back by almost a century.

A hundred years ago, when Ottoman governors in Basra were futilely trying to assert authority over the autonomous sheikdom of Kuwait, most of the Arabic-speaking Middle East was at least nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. It had been so for hundreds of years and would remain so until the end of World War I.

The Ottoman Turks
The Ottomans, a dynasty, not a nationality, were originally a band of Turkish warriors who first galloped onto the stage of history in the 13th century. By the early 20^th century, the Ottoman Empire, which once had stretched to the gates of Vienna, was shrinking rapidly.  It, however, still ruled perhaps 20 million to 25 million people in the Middle East and elsewhere, comprising perhaps a dozen or more different nationalities. It was a ramshackle Muslim empire, held together by the glue of Islam, and the lot of its non-Muslim population (perhaps 5 million) was often unhappy and sometimes tragic.

De Facto British Control of Ottoman Territory in the Middle East
In the year 1900, if you traveled from the United States to the Middle East, you might have landed in Egypt, part of the Ottoman Empire in name but in fact governed by British "advisers." An English general commanded the Egyptian Army, and the real ruler of the country was the British Agent and Consul-General—a position to which the crusty Horatio Herbert Kitchener received in 1911.

The center of your social life in all likelihood would have been the British enclave in Cairo, which had (wrote one of Lord Kitchener’s aides) "all the narrowness and provincialism of an English garrison town." The social schedule of British officials and their families revolved around the balls given at each of the leading hotels in turn, six nights out of seven.  Before dark, official gathered around the Turf Club and the Sporting Club on the island of El Gezira. Throughout Egypt, Turkish officials, Turkish police, and a Turkish army were conspicuous by their absence. Outside British confines, you found yourself not in a Turkish-speaking country but in an Arabic-speaking one. Following the advice of the Baedeker, you’d likely engage a dragoman—a translator and guide—of whom there were about 90 in Cairo ("all more or less intelligent and able, but scarcely a half of the number are trustworthy").

On leaving Egypt, if you turned north through the Holy Land and the Levant toward Anatolia, you finally would have faced the reality of Ottoman government, however corrupt and inefficient.  However, many cities—Jerusalem (mostly Jewish), Damascus (mostly Arab) and Smyrna, now Izmir (mostly Greek)—were not at all Turkish in character or population.

Heading south by steamer down the Red Sea and around the enormous Arabian Peninsula was a different matter. Nominally Ottoman, Arabia was in large part a. vast, ungoverned desert wilderness through which roamed Bedouin tribes knowing no law but their own. In those days Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the youthful scion of deposed lords of most of the peninsula, was living in exile, dreaming of a return to reclaim his rights and establish his dominion. In the port towns on the Persian Gulf, ruling sheiks paid lip service to Ottoman rule but in fact their sheikdoms were protectorates of Great Britain. Not long after you passed Kuwait, you reached Basra, in what is now Iraq, up a river formed by the union of the great Tigris and Euphrates.

A muddy, unhealthy port of heterogeneous population, Basra was then the capital of a province, largely Shiite Arab, ruled by an Ottoman governor. Well north of it, celebrated for archaeological sites like Babylon and Nippur, which drew tourists, lay Baghdad, then a heavily Jewish city (with Jerusalem, one of the two great Jewish cities of Asia). Baghdad was the administrative center of an Ottoman province that was in large part Sunni Arab. Farther north still was a third Ottoman province, with a large population of Kurds. Taken together, the three roughly equaled the present area of Iraq.

Ottoman rule in some parts of the Middle East clearly was more imaginary than real. And even in those portions of the empire that Turkish governors did govern, the population was often too diverse for them to govern effectively by a single regime. Yet the hold of the Turkish sultan on the empire’s peoples lingered on. Indeed, had World War I not intervened, the Ottoman Empire might well have lasted many decades more.

The Ottoman Empire Enters the First World War
In its origins, the war that would change the map of the Middle East had nothing to do with the region. How the Ottoman Empire became involved in the war and lost it, and how the triumphant Allies found themselves positioned to redesign the Middle East the Turks had ruled, is one of the fascinating stories of the 20th century. It is rich in consequences that we are still struggling with today.

The story begins with one man, a tiny, vain, strutting man addicted to dramatic gestures and uniforms. He was Enver Pasha, and he mistook himself for a sort of Napoleon. Of modest origins, Enver, as a junior officer in the Ottoman Army, joined the Young Turks, a secret society that was plotting against the Ottoman regime. In 1913, Enver led a Young Turk raiding party that overthrew the government and killed the Minister of War. In 1914, at the age of 31, he became the Ottoman Minister of War himself, married the niece of the sultan and moved into a palace.

As a new political figure, Enver scored a major, instant success. The Young Turks for years had urgently sought a European ally that would promise to protect the Ottoman Empire against other European powers. The Turks had approached Britain, France, and Russia but they had refused. On August 1, 1914, however, just as Germany was about to invade Belgium to begin World War I, Enver wangled a secret treaty with the Kaiser pledging to protect the Ottoman domains.

Unaware of Enver’s coup, and with war added to the equation, Britain and France began wooing Turkey too, while the Turks played off one side against the other. By autumn, the German Army’s plan to knock France out of the war in six weeks had failed. Needing help, Germany urged the Ottoman Empire to join the war by attacking Russia.

Though Enver’s colleagues in the Turkish government opposed the war, Enver had a different idea. To him the time seemed ripe: in the first month of the war German armies overwhelmingly turned back a Russian attack on East Prussia, and a collapse of the czar’s armies appeared imminent. Seeing a chance to share in the spoils of a likely German victory over Russia, Enver entered a private conspiracy with the German admiral.  He commanded the powerful warship Goeben and its companion vessel, the Breslau, which had taken refuge in Turkish waters at the outset of hostilities.

During the last week of October, Enver secretly arranged for the Goeben and the Breslau to escape into the Black Sea and steam toward Russia. Flying the Ottoman flag, the Germans then opened fire on the Russian coast. Thinking themselves attacked by Turks, the Russians declared war. Russia’s allies, Britain and France, thus found themselves at war with the Ottoman Empire too. By needlessly plunging the empire into war, Enver had put everything in the Middle East up for grabs. In that sense, he was the father of the modern Middle East. Had Enver never existed, the Turkish flag might even yet be flying if only in some confederal way over Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem.

Consequences of Turkey’s Decision to Enter the War
Great Britain had propped up the Ottoman Empire for generations as a buffer against Russian expansionism. Now with Russia as Britain’s shaky ally, after winning the war and overthrowing the Ottomans overthrown, the Allies could reshape the entire Middle East. It would be one of those magic moments in history when fresh starts beckon and dreams become realities.

"What is to prevent the Jews having Palestine and restoring a real Judaea?" asked H. G. Wells, the British novelist, essayist, and prophet of a rational future for mankind. The Greeks, the French, and the Italians also had claims to Middle East territory. And naturally, in Cairo, Lord Kitchener’s aides soon began to consider a plan for an Arab world ruled by Egypt, which the British in turn would continue to control.

The War Goes Badly for the Turks and International Politics
At the time, the Allies already had their hands full with war against Germany on the Western Front. They resolved that the Middle East would not distract them—until later. The issues and ambitions there were too divisive. Hardly had the Ottoman Empire entered the war, however, when Enver stirred the pot again. He took personal command of the Ottoman Third Army on the Caucasus frontier and, in the dead of winter, launched a foolhardy attack against fortified Positions on high ground. His offensive was hopeless, because it was both amateurishly planned and executed, but the czars generals panicked anyway. The Russian government begged Lord Kitchener (now serving in London as Secretary of State for War) to stage a more or less instant diversionary action. The result was the Allied attack on the Dardanelles, the strait that eventually leads to Constantinople (now Istanbul).

Enver soon lost about 86,000 of his 100,000 men; the few, bloodied survivors straggled back through icy mountain passes. A German observer noted that Enver’s army had "suffered a disaster which for rapidity and completeness is without parallel in military history:" But nobody in the Russian government or high command bothered to tell the British that mounting a Dardanelles naval attack was no longer necessary. So on the morning of February 19, 1915, British ships fired the opening shots in what became a tragic campaign.

Initially, the British Navy seemed poised to take Constantinople, and Russia panicked again. What if the British, having occupied Constantinople, were to hold onto it? The 50 percent of Russia’s export trade flowing through the strait would then do so only with British permission. Czar Nicholas II demanded immediate assurance that Constantinople would be Russia’s in the postwar world. Fearing Russia might withdraw from the war, Britain and France agreed. In return, Russia offered to support British and French claims in other parts of the Middle East.

Sir Mark Sykes Redraws the Map of the Middle East
With that in mind, on April 8, 1915, the British Prime Minister appointed a committee to define Britain’s postwar goals in the Middle East. It was a committee dominated by Lord Kitchener through his personal representative, 36-year-old Sir Mark Sykes, one of many remarkable characters including Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence, to remake and remap the Middle East.

A restless soul who had moved from school to school as a child, Sykes left college without graduating, and thereafter never liked to stay long in one spot. A Tory Member of Parliament, before the war he had traveled widely in Asiatic Turkey, publishing accounts of his journeys. Sykes’ views tended to be passionate but changeable, and his talent for clever exaggeration sometimes carried over into his politics.

As a traditional Tory he had regarded the sultan’s domains as a useful buffer protecting Britain’s road to India against Britain’s imperial rivals, the czar chief among them. Only 15 months earlier, Sykes was warning the House of Commons that "the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire must be the first step towards the disappearance of our own." Yet between 1915 and 1919, he was busily planning to dismantle the Ottoman Empire.

The Allied attack on the Dardanelles ended with Gallipoli, a disaster told and retold in books and films. Neither that defeat, nor the darkest days of 1916-17, when it looked for a while as though the Allies might lose the war, stopped British planning about how to cut up the Turkish Middle East. Steadily but secretly Sykes worked on. As the fight to overthrow the Ottoman Empire grew more intense, the elements he had to take into account grew more complex.

British Needs and Policies: Colonial Troops and the Arab Revolt
It was clear that the British needed to maintain control over the Suez Canal, and all the rest of the route to their prized colonial possession, India. They needed to keep the Russians and Germans and Italians and French in check. Especially the French, who had claims on Syria. But with millions of men committed to trench warfare in Europe, they could not drain off forces for the Middle East. Instead, units of the British Indian Army with other Commonwealth forces attacked in the east in what are now Iraq and Iran, occupying Basra, Baghdad and eventually Mosul. Meanwhile, Allied liaison officers, including notably T. E. Lawrence, began encouraging the smallish group of Arabian tribesmen following Emir (later King) Hussein of the Hejaz, who had rebelled against the Turks, to fight a guerrilla campaign against Turkish forces.

Throughout 1917, in and near the Hejaz area of Arabia, the Arabs attacked the railway line that supported Turkish troops in Medina. The "Arab Revolt" had little military effect on the outcome of the war. Yet, the fighting brought to the fore, as British clients and potential Arab leaders, not only Hussein of the Hejaz, but two of his sons, Faisal and Abdullah. Both were deadly rivals of Ibn Saud, who by then had become a rising power in Arabia and a British client too.

British officials in Cairo deluded themselves and others into believing that all the Arabic-speaking half of the Ottoman Empire might rise up and come over to the Allied side. When the time came, the Arab world did not follow the lead of Hussein, Abdullah and Faisal. But Arab aspirations and British gratitude began to loom large in British, and Arab, plans. Sykes now felt he had to take Arab ambitions into account in his planning, though he neglected those of Ibn Saud (father of today’s Saudi king), who also deserved well of Britain.

By 1917 Sykes became convinced that it was vital for the British war effort to win Jewish support against Germany, and that pledging support for Zionism could win it. That year his efforts and those of others resulted in publishing a statement by Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, expressing Britain’s support for setting up a Jewish national home in Palestine.

1917: The Turning Point and 1918
The year 1917 proved to be a turning point. In the wake of its revolution Russia, pulled out of the war, but the entrance by the United States on the Allied side insured the Allies a victory—if they could hold on long enough for U.S. troops to arrive in force. In the Middle East, as British India consolidated its hold on areas that are now part of Iraq, Gen. Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian-based British army began fighting its way north from Suez to Damascus. Lawrence and a force of Arab raiders captured the Red Sea port of Aqaba (near the point where Israel and Jordan now meet). Then, still other Arabs, with Faisal in command, moved north to harass the Turkish flank.

By October 1918, Allenby had taken Syria and Lebanon, and was poised to invade what is now Turkey. But there was no need to do so, because on October 31 the Ottoman Empire surrendered.

Churchill Takes Over Deciding the Fate of the Middle East
As the Peace Conference convened in Paris, in February 1919, Sykes, who had been rethinking Britain’s design for the Middle East, suddenly fell ill and died. At first there was nobody to take his place as the British government’s overall Middle East planner. Prime Minister David Lloyd George took personal charge in many Middle East matters. But more and more, as the months went by, Winston Churchill had begun to play a major role, gradually superseding the others.

Accordingly, early that year, the Prime Minister asked the ambitious 45-year-old politician to serve as both War Minister and Air Minister. ("Of course;’ Lloyd George wrote Churchill, "there will be but one salary!"). Maintaining the peace in the captured—a and now occupied—Arab Middle East was among Churchill’s new responsibilities.

Cheerful, controversial, and belligerent, Churchill was not yet the revered figure who would so inspire his countrymen and the world in 1940. Haunted by the specter of a brilliant father, he had won fame and high office early, but many distrusted him, in part for having switched political parties. Churchill’s foresighted administration of the Admiralty in the summer of 1914 won universal praise, but then the botched Dardanelles campaign, perhaps unfairly, brought blame. As a Conservative newspaper put it, "we have watched his brilliant and erratic course in the confident expectation that sooner or later he would make a mess of anything he undertook." In making Churchill minister of both War and Air in 1919, Lloyd George was giving his protégé’ a try at a political comeback.

By the end of the war, everyone was so used to the bickering among the Allies about who was going to get what in the postwar Middle East that the alternative—nobody taking anything—simply didn’t enter the equation. Churchill was perhaps the only statesman to consider that possibility. He foresaw that many problems would arise from trying to impose a new political design on so troubled a region, and thought it unwise to make the try. Churchill argued, in fact, for simply keeping a reformed version of the Ottoman Empire. Nobody took him seriously.

Discord in the Middle East
After the war, a British army of a million men, the only cohesive military force in the region, briefly occupied the Middle East. Even as his real work began, however, Churchill faced the demand that the army, exhausted from years of war, be demobilized. He understood what meeting those demands meant. Relying on that army, Prime Minister Lloyd George had decided to keep the whole Arab Middle East under British influence; in the words he once used about Palestine: ‘We shall be there by conquest and shall remain." Now Churchill repeatedly warned that once British troops withdrew, Britain would not be able to impose its terms.

Lloyd George had predicted that it would take about a week to agree on the peace terms the Allies would impose on the defeated Ottoman Empire. Instead, it took nearly two years. By then, in Churchill’s words, the British army of occupation had long since "melted away;" with the dire consequences he predicted.

In Egypt, demonstrations, strikes and riots broke out. In Arabia, Ibn Saud, though himself a British client, defeated and threatened to destroy Britain’s protégé Hussein. In Turkey, the defeated Enver had long since fled the country to find refuge in Berlin. From there he journeyed to Russia, assumed leadership of Bukhara in its struggle for independence from Moscow, and was killed in battle against the Red Army of the Soviet Union in 1922. Turkish nationalists under the great Ottoman general Mustafa Kemal (later known as Kemal Ataturk) rebelled against the Allied-imposed treaty and later proclaimed the national state that is modem Turkey

In Palestine, Arabs rioted against Jews. In what is now Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, armed revolts by the tribes, sparked first by the imposition of taxes, caused thousands of casualties. "How much longer;" the outraged London Times asked, "are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose on the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?"

Churchill Assumes Greater Authority
By the end of 1920, Lloyd George’s Middle East policy was under attack from all sides. Churchill, who had warned all along that peacetime Britain, in the grip of an economic collapse, had neither the money, the troops, nor the will to coerce the Middle East, had been right.  On New Year’s Day 1921, the government appointed him Colonial Secretary and soon began to expand his powers, consolidating within his new department responsibility for all Britain’s domains in Arabic-speaking Asia.

He assembled his staff by combing the government for its ablest and most experienced officials. The one offbeat appointment was T. E. Lawrence. A young American journalist and promoter named Lowell Thomas, roaming the Middle East in search of a story, had found Lawrence dressed in Arab robes, and proceeded to make him world-famous as "Lawrence of Arabia." A complex personality, Lawrence was chronically insubordinate, but Churchill admired all the wonderful stories he had heard of Lawrence’s wartime exploits.

Working and Muddling Toward a Settlement
Seeking to forge a working consensus among his staff in London and his men in the field, Churchill invited them all to a conference that opened in Cairo on March 12, 1921. During the ten-day session held in the Semiramis Hotel, about 40 experts attended. "Everybody Middle East is here," wrote Lawrence.

Egypt was not on the agenda. Its new British proconsul, Lord Allenby, was settling its fate. In 1922, he set it up as an independent kingdom, still largely subject to British control under terms of a unilateral proclamation that neither Egypt’s politicians nor its new king, Faud, accepted.

All Britain’s other wartime conquests—the lands now called Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Iraq—were much on the agenda, while the fate of Syria and Lebanon, which Britain had also conquered, was on everybody’s mind. Immediate after the war, the control of Syria caused the most problems, as Lloyd George tried to keep it for Britain by placing it under the rule of Lawrence’s comrade-in-arms, Prince Faisal, son of Hussein. After Syria declared its independence, the French fought back. Occupying all of Syria-Lebanon, they drove Faisal into exile. The French also devised a new frontier for Lebanon that invited eventual disaster, as would become obvious in the 1970s and ‘80s. They refused to see that the Muslim population was deeply hostile to their rule.

Churchill, meanwhile, confronted constant Arab disturbances in Palestine. West of the Jordan River, where the Jewish population lived, Arabs fought against Jewish immigration, claiming—wrongly, as the future was to show—that the country was too barren to support more than its existing 600,000 inhabitants. Churchill rejected that view, and dealt with the Arab objections to a Jewish homeland by keeping—though redefining—Britain’s commitment to Zionism. As he saw it, there was to be a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but other homelands could exist there as well.

The 75 percent of Palestine east of the Jordan River--Transjordan, as the British called it, until it became Jordan in 1950—was lawless. Lacking the troops to police it and wanting to avert additional causes of strife, Churchill decided to forbid Jews from settling there, temporarily at least.

Abdullah Becomes King of Transjordan
Fittingly, while still War and Air Minister, Churchill had devised a strategy for controlling the Middle East with a minimum number of British troops by using an economical combination of airpower and armored cars. But it would take time to put the necessary units in place. Meanwhile, the British had to contain tribal fighting somehow. As the Cairo conference met, news arrived that Abdullah, Faisal’s brother, claiming to need "a change of air for his health;’ had left Arabia with a retinue of Bedouin warriors and entered Transjordan. The British feared that Abdullah would attack French Syria and so give the French an excuse to invade Transjordan, as a first step toward taking over all Palestine.

As a temporary expedient, Churchill appointed Abdullah as governor of a Transjordan, which he administratively detached from the rest of Palestine. He charged him with keeping order by his prestige and with his own Bedouin followers—at least until Britain’s aircraft and armored cars were in place. This provisional solution has lasted for seven decades and so have the borders of Transjordan, now ruled over by Abdullah’s great grandson, Abdullah (son of Hussein), the Hashemite King of Jordan.

Abdullah’s appointment accomplished several objectives at once. It went part way toward paying what Lawrence and others told Churchill was Britain’s wartime debt to the family of King Hussein, though Hussein himself was beyond help. Too stubborn to accept British advice, he was losing the battle for Arabia to his blood rival, Ibn Saud.

Meanwhile Prince Faisal, Britain’s preferred Arab ruler, remained in idle exile.

Formation of Iraq
Other chief items on the Cairo agenda were the Ottoman territories running from the Persian Gulf to Turkey along the border of Persia, which make up present-day Iraq. Including what were suspected—but not proved—to be vast oil reserves, when people were beginning to understand the value of oil, these territories had been the scene of the bloodiest postwar Arab uprisings against British rule. They caused so many difficulties of every sort that Churchill flirted with the idea of abandoning them entirely, but Lloyd George would have none of it. If the British left, the Prime Minister warned, in a year or two they might find that they had "handed over to the French and Americans some of the richest oil fields in the world."

As a matter of convenience, the British administered this troubled region as a unit, though it was composed of the three separate Ottoman provinces—Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, with their incompatible Kurdish, Assyrian Christian, Jewish, Sunni Muslim, and Shiite populations. In making it into a country, Churchill and his colleagues found it convenient to continue treating it as a single unit. (An American missionary warned one British planner, "You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history.”) The British called the country Iraq—"the well-rooted country"—to give it a name that was Arabic. The British placed Faisal on the throne, and like his brother Abdullah in Transjordan, he was to keep Iraq quiet until the British were ready to police it with aircraft and armored cars.

One of the leftover problems in 1921 was just how to protect Transjordan’s new governor; Abdullah, and Iraq’s new king, Faisal, against the fierce warriors of Ibn Saud. In August 1922, British airplanes and armored cars outside Amman stopped Ibn Saud’s camel-cavalry forces invading Transjordan. Earlier that year, the British forced Ibn Saud to accept a settlement aimed at protecting Iraq. With this in mind, the British drew a frontier line that awarded Iraq a substantial amount of territory claimed by Ibn Saud for Arabia. All the land in what is now Iraq west of the Euphrates River, all the way to the Syrian frontier. To compensate Ibn Saud’s kingdom, later known as Saudi Arabia, the British transferred to it rights to two-thirds of the territory of Kuwait, which had been essentially independent for about two centuries. These were valuable grazing lands in which oil might exist too.

It is this frontier line between Iraq, Kuwait and Arabia, drawn by a British civil servant in 1922 to protect Iraq at the expense of Kuwait, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein denounced as invalid when he invaded.

In 1922, Churchill succeeded in mapping out the Arab Middle East along lines suitable to the needs of the British civilian and military administrations. T. E. Lawrence would later brag that he, Churchill and a few others had designed the modern Middle East over dinner. Seventy years later, in the tense deliberations and confrontations of half the world over the same area, the question is whether the peoples of the Middle East are willing or able to continue living with that design.
 

JOURNAL 11

After reading Chapter 23 in McNeill; "The White Man’s Burden and Its Critics;" and the material above, please think about the following questions in your journal:
1. What were the justifications for imperialism? What were some of the counter arguments? What made imperialists so successful at imperialism?
2. How did imperialism affect the colonized peoples? What were some of the responses of the colonized peoples to imperialism? How did Japan react to Western imperialism
3. Compare and contrast Japan’s response to the West with China’s and India’s.
4. What role can satire play in creating and changing political and social opinions? Why can satire be such a powerful tool? What potential problems are there in using satire to change opinions?  Point out an example of satire above.
5. Wars, by their end, often have taken up causes and policies that at their beginning no one had contemplated or would have countenanced before they began. World War I is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Find some examples of this in the article on the Middle East.
6. How and why was Iraq created? What are the implications of your answer for the present and future?
7. What lingering legacies of imperialism can you find in the world today, including the Middle East?

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