Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Edwardes, M. The World of Empires. London: Benn, pp. Fairbank, J. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Hall, J. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company. Hao, Y. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keene, D. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lockwood, W. Available at: www. Martin, C. New York: Abelard-Schuman Limited. Moulder, F. Storry, R. London: Penguin. Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.
E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. Meanwhile, cooperation with the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish community in Palestine or Yishuv, which had been the foundation of British rule through the s and s, also came under pressure in the wake of the White Paper, with its proposed limits on Jewish immigration. In this respect one might once again note that it is odd that so much of the historiography of the decline of the British imperial role in the Middle East has focused on the humiliation of Suez in Certainly in terms of Arab perceptions of the British role in the region, it was the outcome in Palestine that mattered much more in ensuing years.
Without question, the most successful outcome of the British experiment in mandatory rule lay in Transjordan. Herein, one might observe an irony, for the British approach in Transjordan was almost wholly ad hoc in the early years of the mandate.
Certainly the first ruler of Transjordan, the Emir Abdullah, played a significant role in establishing the foundations of the state during the s and s, albeit that he could not have succeeded without British support. He was the nominal ruler, but in practice was obliged to do as the British representative, or resident, wanted.
In both cases, the methods adopted involved ruling through elements of the established elites. In both cases, each imperial power took up its mandates principally to defend perceived imperial interests against the possible encroachment, or excessive aggrandisement, of the other. The main difference between the British and French, though, was that the French refused to offer a schedule for independence in their mandates.
Moreover, France had relatively little experience of the region to fall back on in working out how to govern its mandates. The French had, in fact, done little actual fighting to gain their share of the Ottoman spoils. Thereafter, Fieldhouse draws an interesting comparison between the methods of French colonial rule in Syria and British rule in Iraq.
In Baghdad, all the main departments had Iraqi ministerial heads who notionally made policy, even if in practice this had to be cleared with a British advisor. Nevertheless, the French succeeded in maintaining control because the local Syrian notables proved largely docile under their rule, which effectively preserved the social status quo. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the French found ready collaborators in the form of the Maronite Christian community, which feared being swamped in an independent Arab state.
Fieldhouse concludes his analysis with an interesting counter-factual section looking at what other outcomes might have been possible had the mandate system not been imposed on the region in the wake of the First World War. He effectively dismisses the possibility that the Allies might have allowed Ottoman rule in some form or another to continue after the war.
There had been too much blood spilt for that. What then of the possible outcome had the British honoured their promises to the Hashemites and created an independent Arab state? There was simply no existing political, administrative, or economic basis on which to found such a state.
Could separate, independent Arab states have survived after the war? The probability of success elsewhere, he believes, was even lower. The mandates were, in theory, a good way to avoid this chaos. Had they in fact acted as devices to aid political development, they could even have been a good thing. Such overt violence and terror is only a small part of the story of European domination of Asia and Africa, which includes the slow-motion slaughter of tens of million in famines caused by unfettered experiments in free trade — and plain callousness Indians, after all, would go on breeding "like rabbits", Winston Churchill argued when asked to send relief during the Bengal famine of The unctuous belief that British imperialists, compared to their Belgian and French counterparts, were exponents of fair play has been dented most recently by revelations about mass murder and torture during the British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the s.
Nevertheless, in one of the weirdest episodes of recent history, a Kipling-esque rhetoric about bringing free trade and humane governance to "lesser breeds outside the law" has resonated again in the Anglo-American public sphere. His apparently more intellectual rival Gordon Brown urged his compatriots to be "proud" of their imperial past. Embracing such fantasies of "full-spectrum dominance", American and European policymakers failed to ask themselves a simple question: whether, as Jonathan Schell put it, "the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st"?
After two unwinnable wars and horribly botched nation-building efforts, and many unconscionable human losses between , and one million in Iraq alone , the "neo-imperialists" offering seductive fantasies of the west's potency look as reliable as the peddlers of fake Viagra. Yet, armour-plated against actuality by think tanks, academic sinecures and TV gigs, they continue to find eager customers. Of course, as the historian Richard Drayton points out, the writing of British imperial history, has long been a "patriotic enterprise".
Wishing to "celebrate" empire, Michael Gove plans to entrust the task of rewriting the history syllabus to Niall Ferguson, one of the "neo-imperialist" cheerleaders of the assault on Iraq, who now craves "creative destruction" in Iran and whose "skilful revision of history" the Guardian's Jeevan Vasagar asserted last month, "will reverberate for years to come".
Clearly, it would help if no Asian or African voices interrupt this intellectual and moral onanism. Astonishing as it may seem, there is next to nothing in the new revisionist histories of empire, or even the insidious accounts of India and China catching up with the west, about how writers, thinkers and activists in one Asian country after another attested to the ravages of western imperialism in Asia: the immiseration of peasants and artisans, the collapse of living standards and the devastation of local cultures.
We learn even less about how these early Asian leaders diagnosed from their special perspective the political and economic ideals of Europe and America, and accordingly defined their own tasks of self-strengthening. Asian intellectuals couldn't help but notice that Europe's much-vaunted liberal traditions didn't travel well to its colonies.
Mohammed Abduh, the founder of Islamic modernism , summed up a widespread sentiment when, after successive disillusionments, he confessed in that: "We Egyptians believed once in English liberalism and English sympathy; but we believe no longer, for facts are stronger than words.
Your liberalness we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he deigns to eat.
In , British atrocities during the Boer war and the brutal western suppression of the Boxer rising in China had provoked the pacifist poet Rabindranath Tagore to compare, in one unusually violent image, such bards of imperialism as Kipling to mangy dogs.
As Ghose saw it, previous conquerors, including the English in Ireland, had been serenely convinced that might is always right. But in the 19th century, the age of democratic nationalism, imperialism had to pretend "to be a trustee of liberty … These Pharisaic pretensions were especially necessary to British imperialism because in England the puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism.
There is something to Ghose's tirade. Free-traders and freebooters may have found merely convenient the idea that Asia was full of unenlightened people, who had to be saved from themselves.
But many European and American intellectuals brought to it a solemn sincerity. Even John Stuart Mill, the patron saint of modern liberalism, claimed that "despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, if the end be their improvement. Scrambling to catch up with Europe, even the United States embraced the classic imperialism of conquest and occupation, expelling Spain from its Caribbean backyard and flexing its muscles in east Asia.
In , Liang Qichao, China's foremost modern intellectual and a major early influence on Mao Zedong, was visiting America when Washington manipulated its way into control of Panama and its crucial canal. It reminded Liang of how the British had compromised Egypt's independence over the Suez canal.
Liang feared that original meaning of the Monroe doctrine — "the Americas belong to the people of the Americas" — was being transformed into "the Americas belong to the people of the United States".
No less a "westerniser" than Deng Xiaoping would uphold the primary imperative of national self-strengthening even as he broke with Maoism in the late s and supervised China's transition to a market economy: "Our country must develop," Deng declared, using words emblazoned on billboards across China and still guiding the Communist party's politburo.
Development is the only hard truth. Liang described the endless struggle between peoples enjoined by global capitalism as extremely dangerous. The first world war, which almost all European nations entered with great jingoistic fervour, following a period of hectic expansion, confirmed these anxieties.
Modernisation still seemed absolutely imperative, but it did not seem the same as westernisation, or to demand a comprehensive rejection of tradition or an equally complete imitation of the west. Freshly minted movements such as revolutionary communism and Islamic fundamentalism, which promised to immunise Asian countries against western imperialism, began to look attractive.
Hitler turned out to be lethally envious of the British venture in India — what he called "the capitalist exploitation of the million Indian slaves" — and hoped that Germany would impose a similarly kleptocratic despotism on the peoples and territories it conquered in Europe, while avoiding what he saw as Britain's lax racial segregation in India. For many people in Asia, the two world wars were essentially conflicts between Europe's rival empires rather than great moral struggles, as they were presented to European publics, between democracy and fascism — indeed, the long experience of imperialism made Asians experience the 20th century radically differently from their European overlords.
For the first time since the middle ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war.
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