“Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need,” starts Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem of American expansionism in the Philippines, “The White Man’s Burden”. Those lines will ring familiar to many, particularly those who have received an education in the United States—so widely has the poem become emblematic of American imperialism and the “civilizing mission” during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Imperialism
It is easy to forget, in the linear narrative of the British Raj leading to an independent India, that there were other, albeit much smaller, bits that hung on as colonies of other European countries (let’s not call them “powers”) for some time longer. One of these, the most venerable, dating back almost five centuries to 1510, was Goa. The succinctly titled Goa, 1961 tells the story of India’s forceful expulsion of the Portuguese, focusing in considerable detail on the year it happened.
Oman and the connected history of Zanzibar is something those of us of a certain age (and especially those of us who used to collect stamps) perhaps knew to at least some extent, but then (also perhaps) largely forgot as the Arabian Peninsula rearranged itself around the ever-increasing political and economic clout of Saudi Arabia and Gulf states. Oman isn’t an oil power, nor does it host major global sporting events or own iconic football teams or airlines.
The title of French writer and filmmaker Éric Vuillard’s short book on the First Indochina War (1946-1954) exudes sarcasm. For Vuillard, there was nothing “honorable” about France’s efforts to hold on to its Indochinese empire by force. In this, he mirrors those on the American left who ridiculed the Nixon-Kissinger formula of “peace with honor” in the Second Indochina War. Vuillard reduces the complex historical and geopolitical aspects of the French war to a single anti-capitalist narrative—the war was all about money and greed.
While most of the now common histories of the East India Company (EIC) and British India discuss the politics, conflict or culture of empire, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s Empire Building: The Construction of British India, 1690-1860 focuses on the physical construction of British India through the buildings that were constructed, the background to their design, the political and economic constraints that shaped their design and how these colonial constructions influenced India’s society, economy and polity.
In everyday usage, the “Middle East” is generally taken to mean the region that runs more or less from Egypt to Syria to Iraq and the Gulf. It has, especially in recent decades, come to overlay the issues of oil, the Arab-Israeli conflict and terrorism (Islamic or political). Conventional wisdom has it that the word came into use with the fall of the Ottoman Empire as, among other things, a replacement for the less precise and less useful “Near East”. In other words, the general perception is that the expression is either self-evident or that it emerged thanks to a sort of natural evolution in terminology.
For a book that is fundamentally about hope, Philippe Sands’s The Last Colony is a depressing read, not just its in its tale of colonial injustice, but also in its recounting of the US and Britain’s refusal to abide by the norms, the “rules-based order”, that they demand of others. “One rule for you, another for us?” as Sands succinctly puts it.
It may come as a surprise, but probably shouldn’t, that the seemingly well-worn concepts of “losing” and “saving face” are relatively modern and their wide usages in English date from the period of 19th-century imperialism. In his new (and refreshingly brief) book On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation, Michael Keevak claims the terms’ wide acceptance can be quite precisely traced to a publication of the last decade of the 19th century.
2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO. Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu.
Sometimes the further away in time you get from an event, the clearer it becomes. Time often enables historians to learn more facts and circumstances about, and fosters a more dispassionate view of, historical events like wars. The Vietnamese wars against France in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and against the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, have far too frequently been analyzed through ideological and political lenses, with both sides ignoring or downplaying facts that do not fit within their ideological-political agendas. The greatest merit of Christoper Goscha’s splendid history of the First Indochina War (1945-1954) is his unsparing devotion to letting facts inform his assessments and conclusions.
You must be logged in to post a comment.