As exemplified by the recent book by Tim Blanning, Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (2007), and most histories after the mid eighteenth century share a common assumption: the only empires that matter are the colonial empires of the Europeans - until Japan starts to borrow the colonial idea at the turn of the twentieth century. The drama of the African scramble has led to a distorted image of a rampant imperialism that nothing could stop. But if we look closer at Asia we get a different impression. For all their nibbling at its maritime fringes and their halting inland advance at the end of the century, with the grand exception of India the Europeans' domination of Asia was very partial at best. The case could be made that the real story in Asia in the long nineteenth century was one of Asian persistence and not of Asian defeat. The great example was China. Despite the ravages of dynastic conflict, civil war and revolution, China preserved an astonishing unity up to 1914. The idea of China survived both the end of the imperial monarchy in 19 I I and the forty years of turmoil, occupation and war that followed soon after. More surprising, perhaps, was China's retention of its huge Inner Asian empire: Manchuria, Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet. Despite the desperate crisis of the 1930S and' 40s, all were held on to (except Outer Mongolia). China today has much the same frontiers as the vast Ch'ing Empire into which Europe had crashed in the 1830s. Japan's perseverance in the face of the European challenge was even more striking. Its monarchy was reinvented to supply the ideological glue for a new political order, nationalism was conspicuously lacking. In Japan, two centuries of seclusion reinforced an intense suspicion of outsiders. But little need had arisen to identify Japaneseness with a strong central state. Yet, if the European obsession with the nation state as a union of culture and politics had little meaning elsewhere, the effort to bind society together with common values and practices (from diet and dress through to history and cosmology) was taken just as seriously. Across the rest of Eurasia, just as in Europe, traditions of learning were maintained and transmitted by teachers and texts. Around them were gathered the educated elites who enjoyed social prestige and exerted cultural authority.

In Iran and China, this class was closely identified with the idea of the state. From Safavid times onward, the ulama asserted the claim that the Iranian state's first duty was to protect Shia Islam from the assaults of its enemies. The minority status of Shia in the Islamic world made this all the more urgent. In China, the scholar-gentry formed the administrative cadre as well as the cultural elite of the imperial system - a role, it seems likely, that they continued to fill in the 'nationalist' era that followed. Even in India, where British rule was gradually imposed from the mid eighteenth century, pre-colonial traditions survived, because they were already deeply embedded in vigorous vernacular cultures. Regional patriotisms, ideas of just government, and alternative visions of history coexisted uneasily with the cultural apparatus of the colonial regime.? In the late nineteenth century, when the Indian vernaculars were being transformed into ordered literary languages, regional sentiment acquired a powerful new means to express social and political concerns. Without this foundation, it seems very unlikely that the movement through which Gandhi was able to make Indian nationalism into a popular cause would have gathered strength so quickly after 1914.

The importance of all this is that when Europe's cultural impact on the rest of the world reached a peak of intensity, in the late nineteenth century, it faced an increasingly well-organized resistance. Yet, to the guardians and 'gatekeepers' of other Eurasian cultures, the struggle for survival appeared a closely fought contest. They dreaded the outright collapse of their cultural tradition amid the tidal surge of a Western modernity.

Furthermore, imperialism can be defined as the attempt to impose one state's predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political, cultural and economic system. As we have seen already it was not just a European phenomenon, although Europeans had tended to carry it furthest. Nor was it practiced in only one mode. Sometimes it relied upon the direct political control of the zone of expansion. But it was often convenient to defer or disguise the fact of foreign predominance by leaving in place a notionally sovereign government. Sometimes it led to the displacement of peoples by a mass of new settlers colonizing the land. But in Europe's advance into Afro-Asia this trend had been weak. Quite often its motive had been to delimit a sphere of economic exclusion, reserving trade and investment to the imperial power. But not invariably: the biggest empire of all, the British, had practiced free trade until the I930s. It was usually based upon an ideological claim (the 'civilizing mission') and an appeal to notions of a cultural hierarchy in which the colonizers' capacity for 'moral and material progress' was sharply contrasted with the regression of the colonized. However, for all its arrogance, this cultural imperialism lacked the brutal certainty of 'biological racism'. Belief in the limits set by ethnic descent on intellectual or moral development was far from uncommon among late-nineteenth-century imperialists, but it was no. universal. In both the French and the British empires (by contrast with the United States) the potential for equality among persons of all races remained the formal position in law, in institutions and in official ideology. States that cherished imperial ambitions however varied considerably in their expansive capacities, in their notions of self-interest, and in the opportunities available.

As we have seen in P.1, to buy peace from the Germans, the Bolsheviks were forced into concessions on a staggering scale. Most of western Russia, including Poland, the Baltic provinces and modern Belarus, had to be given up. The great salient that had made Russia a great power in Europe was simply wrenched away. But just as extraordinary was the loss of the Ukraine, where the invading Germans had promoted a separatist regime, the Rada. Russia's great grain basket (source of much of its export earnings before the war), its main source of coal, and its prime industrial centers were now controlled by a German client state. Indeed, the Brest-Litovsk treaty seemed only the prologue to a larger drama. German military power was set to extend all round the Black Sea, 'liberating' Russia's colonial territories in the Caucasus and perhaps beyond the Caspian. And, as civil war brewed in Russia's remaining lands, the grip of the centre on its old imperial periphery in Central Asia and the Far East provinces looked certain to fail. One great rivet that had clamped Eurasia together was breaking in half. The implosion of Russia opened the door to a vast reordering of the whole Eurasian ·land mass. Its immediate effect was to allow the Germans to transfer men from the east to knock out France and Britain before American help could become decisive. In the great offensive of March-June 1918, they came very close. As the armies of the Entente reeled under the blow, it seemed in London as if a catastrophic change in the shape of the war was about to unfold. France and Italy (after the disaster at Caporetto, in October 1917, when the Italian armies were thrown back by the Austrians) were on the verge of defeat. That would mean British (and American) withdrawal from the European mainland, where German control would become complete. What remained of Russia would be of no account: it is unlikely that the Bolshevik regime would have lasted long if Germany had won the war. With their Ottoman ally, and their newfound friends in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, the Germans would become the dominant power in the Near and Middle East. They would make Iran a client, and advance on the Gulf. British India would be in their sights. Nor could London be sure that, in this appalling scenario, its Japanese ally would not change sides, to protect the wartime gains it had made in North East Asia.

By March 1919 a general crisis of European control was well under way across much of Asia. On IO March, British officials in Egypt reported riots in Cairo after the arrest of a leading nationalist, Saad Zaghlul. Within days the violence spread through the delta towns and into upper Egypt. A thousand Egyptians had died before the revolt was suppressed; the political unrest was much harder to quell. In early April there were violent disorders in British-ruled India. In the province of Punjab (the main recruiting ground for the Indian army), the British faced what they thought was an organized rising to smash their control. Their savage reaction reached a bloody climax in the events at Amritsar on I3 April, when nearly 400 protesters were shot by troops. In Anatolian Turkey, parts of which had been assigned by the peacemakers in Paris to an expansionist Greece, a national uprising began in May under Mustafa Kemal, a pre-war 'Young Turk' and a wartime general in the Ottoman army. In south-eastern Anatolia, a Kurdish revolt threatened the precarious grip of the British occupation in the province of Mosul. In the Arab Middle East, where Damascus was the epicenter of political action, the great powers' permission for a free Arab state was awaited impatiently, but with growing suspicion. In the old tsarist empire, the struggle for freedom by Bashkirs, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis and the Muslim peoples in Russian Central Asia also hung in the balance. Most momentous of all, events in May I9I9 showed that the Chinese revolution, apparently stalled since I911, had at last taken off. The May Fourth demonstrations in Peking, whose immediate target was the decision in Paris that Japan should retain a sphere of influence in Shantung, signaled a far wider movement of national consciousness. That China must be a constitutional state, not a dynastic empire, now seemed accepted by all educated opinion. The restoration of full Chinese sovereignty, the end of foreign (especially British) enclaves and privileges, and China's acceptance as an equal member of the international community became the objectives of this new Chinese nationalism. The implications for East Asia, and for the colonial states that bordered China's territories or had Chinese minorities, were bound to be large.

Case Study China During The Great War.

Similarly, the Wafd (or 'delegation') party was formed to take Egypt's case to the Paris peace conference and win international support for the virtual independence (or better) that the country had enjoyed before I882. The brusque British refusal to permit this appeal, and the jailing of the Wafd leaders to pre-empt a popular campaign, produced the breakdown of order of March 1919 as strikes and demonstrations and the effects of rumour and fear fused with wider sources of social tension in a deeply stratified society. When the violence died down it was replaced politically by a climate of bitter resentment. The British controlled Egypt through Egyptian ministers and the Egyptian monarch (renamed the sultan in I9I7). They preferred this indirect rule as a less confrontational way of securing what they wanted: a monopoly of foreign influence and absolute security for the Suez Canal, the lifeline of their empire in the East. Egypt, they argued, could never enjoy a 'real' independence. But after March I9I9 no Egyptian minister would stay in office unless the British promised exactly that. Without Egyptian ministers, the British faced all-out opposition from every shade of local opinion: non-cooperation by officials; denunciation by teachers and clerics; strikes by key workers in transport and utilities; perhaps even recourse to the 'Irish' methods they feared the most - boycott, assassination and terror. Between March 1919 and February I922 they struggled to find a formula that would appease a 'moderate' group of Egyptian leaders and split the nationalist coalition against them. It was only when they declared Egypt to be an independent state (but bound to follow British 'advice' in defense and foreign policy) that the fierce anti-British feeling began to die down. (J, Beinin and Z. Lockman, '1919: Labour Upsurge and National Revolution', in A. Hourani, P. S. Khoury and M. C. Wilson (eds.), The Modern Middle East (London, 1993), PP·395-428.)

In the Arab lands the issue was more complex. The force behind demands for an Arab state was the alliance between Feisal and his Hashemite clan (the hereditary rulers of the holy places in Ottoman times) and the Syrian notables. It was Feisal, as the son of the sharif of Mecca, who had led the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire after I9I6, with British help and encouragement, and who had extracted the notorious promise of an Arab state at the end of the war. The Syrian notables had taken the lead before I9I4 in urging an Arab consciousness against Ottoman overrule - indeed Syria (Suriyya) had begun to be thought of as an Arab homeland from the 1860s. (A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London, 1962; repr. Cambridge, I983), p. 276.)

Both Feisal and the Syrians had reason to be fearful. They knew that the Palestine district would be separately governed, partly to allow the creation of a 'national home' for Jews. They also knew that in 1916 the British and French had agreed a partition of the Arab lands, placing modern Syria and Lebanon under French supervision and most of modern Iraq under British. To make matters worse, it soon became clear that the new British regime set up in Baghdad regarded the idea of an Arab nation as at best irrelevant, and at worst absurd. It had no intention of allowing the Baghdadi notables to make common cause with their friends in Damascus. What Feisal hoped for was a British change of heart: a decision to repudiate the agreement with France and create an Arab state or states under a loose form of protection. The British had allowed him to head a provisional government in Damascus under their overall control. Feisal himself sought to buy off the French and to assure Jewish leaders that their 'national home' would be safe under an Arab government. But his hopes and diplomacy were both in vain. By the end of 1919 the British had agreed to pull their troops out of Syria and make way for the French. In the following spring the European victor powers (the United States had withdrawn into 'isolation') decreed (as the Supreme Council of the League of Nations) that the Arab lands would be divided up and governed as 'mandates', until each unit was deemed fit for self rule. Palestine and Transjordan would be British. So would the new state of Iraq, an awkward combination of three disparate provinces:

Mosul, with its large Kurdish population; Baghdad, which was dominated by a Sunni Muslim elite; and Basra in the south, which was overwhelmingly Shia. But Syria would be French and cut down to size, losing Lebanon (to be a separate French mandate) as well as the British mandates to the south. In a last act of defiance, a 'Syrian Congress' assembled at Damascus to denounce the mandates and call for Arab unity and independence under Feisal as king. With a makeshift army, Feisal tried to resist the French occupation. After a hopeless battle in July 1920 he fled into exile.

If the dream of 'Greater Syria' as a free Arab nation had been wiped from the slate, the Anglo-French partition was still far from secure. Defiance in Syria had spread to Iraq. The Baghdad notables, some of  them linked through a secret society with Feisal's supporters, fiercely opposed the colonial-style rule the British had imposed at the end of the war. In June I920 their political grievances found a massive echo. In the rural communities of the Euphrates valley, pent-up resentment at foreign rule and taxation set off an explosion of violence. As the British struggled to contain it, deploying more and more troops and spending more and more money, the case for installing a suitable Arab-led government became more and more urgent. It was Winston Churchill's idea (Churchill was colonial secretary with responsibility for the Arab Middle East, but not Egypt) that the now-exiled Feisal would be the best choice as leader, since only he, so it seemed, would have the skill and prestige to keep this ramshackle creation together in one piece. Yet whether even he could do so, and then on what terms, were still profoundly uncertain. For the fate of Iraq was only part of a larger question. By the end of I920 it seemed more and more likely that a new Turkish state, hostile and aggressive, would rise from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and claim its old place in the politics of the region. In I921-2, Mustafa Kemal imposed the authority of his Turkish republic across most of Asia Minor, smashing both British hopes of a weak Turkish client state ruled by the sultan and the grand Greek project to turn much of western Anatolia into the 'Ionian' extension of a 'Greater Greece'.( See M. Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor I9I9-I922 (London, I973).

In September I922 he captured Smyrna (Izmir) and was marching on Constantinople, the old imperial capital, when he met a small British garrison stationed at Chanak to guard the Dardanelles. A vast crisis now loomed. If a new war began between the British and the Turks, the political future of the whole Middle East would be back in the melting pot.( D. Walder, The Chanak Affair (London, 1969).

The actual outcome after months of tense diplomacy was a treaty of peace agreed at Lausanne in July I923. It recognized Turkey as an independent republic. It restored Constantinople as a fully Turkish city. (It was officially renamed 'Istanbul' in I930.) It voided the claims for European spheres in Turkey's Anatolian heartland. It scrapped the old system of foreign extraterritorial privilege (the 'Capitulations') and released Turkey from the thrall of the pre-war Debt Administration. It provided for an exchange of populations, clearing Turkey of 'Greek' Christians and Greece of Muslim 'Turks': a portent of things to come. (J. McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims I82I-I922 (Princeton, 1995), ch. 7.)

The Turks accepted the demilitarization of the Straits, accepted the loss of their Arab empire, and agreed to arbitrate their special claim to Mosul. It was a remarkable compromise. It reflected the reluctance of both British and Turks to resume the armed struggle, the modest reassertion of Russian influence in the region after I920 , and the eagerness of Kemal to build his new Turkish state along the European lines favoured by pre-war reformers. It was the crucial stage in solidifying the grip of the British and French on their new Arab mandates. It allowed France a free hand to parcel up Syria and crush the great revolt that followed in I925-7. It made a cheap British presence possible in Iraq, where the British traded air power (to help crush Feisal's opponents) for the bases they needed to guard the approach to the Gulf and reach India by air. Nevertheless, the scale of post-war resistance had left a deep mark on the Middle East's politics. In Syria and Palestine, Arab claims to self-rule had been roundly rejected. But in Egypt and Iraq the British had been forced to agree to wide local autonomy and acknowledge the claim of both states to independence - in I922 to Egypt, a decade later to Feisal's Iraq - as a quid pro quo for Britain's control of their strategic zones, the Suez Canal especially. Even Transjordan had been given its own (Hashemite) king. Despite the trauma of partition, the Arab Middle East had not been transformed into a fully colonial region. The sense of pan-Arabness, awake before the war, had not been extinguished. There were many spaces left in which it could grow. European authority (it was mainly British) was shallowly rooted in social and cultural terms. It depended heavily on geopolitical contingency: the temporary easing of great-power rivalry with the eclipse of Germany and the isolation of Russia. In an age of depression, it gained little help from the spread of trade or the region's accession to the international economy. The growth of the oil industry was too long delayed (the Middle East produced only 1 per cent of world output in I920, only 5 per cent in I939, almost all of it from south-west Iran) to allow it to serve as a real Trojan Horse of European imperial influence. Once the brief excitement of war imperialism had passed, there was little enthusiasm for an Arab empire in either Britain or France - especially one that was going to cost money. A British withdrawal from Iraq altogether was actively debated in the cabinet in 1923. The prime minister of the day, Andrew Bonar Law, was in favor of going.

 If the Middle East's partition was the high tide of empire, it was the tide that turned soonest, the imperial moment that was shortest. adopted a programme of change strikingly similar to Kemalist Turkey's. A large army was built up to crush provincial rebellions and tribal indiscipline. New railways and roads increased the government's reach. Laws about headwear (requiring caps or hats), on the adoption of surnames (Reza took the name 'Pahlevi'), on the treatment of women and outlawing the veil signaled Reza's main target: the influence of the mullahs. Faced with resistance, Reza became a virtual dictator: in April 1926 he crowned himself shah. Huge dynastic estates and extensive court patronage were added to the power supplied by the army and bureaucracy. Reza had fashioned a new imperial state far stronger than anything that the Qajars had hoped for. He was able to do so without the reliance upon foreign funds or concessions that had rallied the enemies of Qajar reform. The key reason for this was a new source of wealth. For, although Reza stopped short (as prudence dictated) of taking control of the oilfields just north of the Gulf from the British-owned company that held the concession (the Anglo Persian Oil Company, of which the British government held 51 per cent of the shares), his revenues profited from the hundredfold increase in the income they earned after 1913. But for him, as for the republic that Ataturk (who died in 1938) had made, the real test would be felt when the geopolitical lull they had exploited so skillfully collapsed into war after 1939. See A. Mango, Ataturk (London, 1999); M. E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2002). For Reza Shah's reconstruction of Iran, E. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982), pp. Il8-65. See A. T. Wilson, Persia (London, 1932), p. 307, for the huge increase in the value of oil exports. M. E. Yapp, The Near East since the First World War (London, 1991) is an excellent general account.

Among Indian Muslims, the sense of their place in the larger Islamic world had been rising sharply before 1914. The shock of the war between the British and the Ottomans had been all the greater, for the Ottoman sultan was (if only in name) also the khalifa, the 'Commander of the (Muslim) Faithful'. With so many Muslim soldiers in its Indian army (much of which was sent to fight the Ottoman forces), the British Indian government was quick to repress even the mildest expression of pan-Islamic feeling by Muslim politicians and newspapers, and several leading Indian Muslims spent most of the war in jail. It was from this quarter particularly that there was strong resentment when the British promise of reform (a much larger share for elected Indian leaders in provincial affairs) was coupled with the threat that special wartime powers of arrest and detention under the so-called Rowlatt Act would be continued indefinitely. (F. C. R. Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces Muslims, I86o-I923 (Cambridge, 1974); Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford, 1990), pp. 182-215; M. Hasan, Mahomed Ali: Ideology and Politics (Delhi, 1981). Mahomed Ali was interned for sedition by the British until 1919.)

Gandhi at first sight was an unlikely ally for Indian Islam. He was a Hindu reformer who wanted to harness a simpler and more spiritual version of Hinduism to a programme of social and moral improvement. Temperance, chastity, self-restraint and modesty were all Gandhian ideals. But, as we saw in the last chapter, in his pre-war manifesto Hind Swaraj Gandhi had linked these virtues to Indian self-rule. They could only really be practiced, so his argument ran, in the self-sufficient village communities of which India had once been made up. This was a fanciful version of the Indian past that owed something to the histories produced by British officials and a lot to the influence of later writing by Tolstoy (d. 1910) and his idealized view of the peasant commune in Russia. But in a country that was still overwhelmingly rural its appeal was enormous. Frustration with reform made Gandhi's direct methods of political action look much more attractive - until they were discredited by the violence and disorder of 1919 (most Congress politicians were respectable property-owners). But in 1920 Gandhi discovered a different way of winning the Congress over. (J. M. Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power (Cambridge, 1972); R. Kumar (ed.), Essays in Gandhian Politics (Oxford, 1971).

The secret lay in the rising anger among leading Muslims at the terms of peace imposed by the victor powers on the Ottoman Empire. Indian Muslims had been alarmed by Ottoman defeat and the break-up of the last great Islamic empire. They were concerned about the guardianship of Islam's holy places: indeed, those in Jerusalem had already fallen under British control. But they were incensed at the plans to deny Turkish rule in Constantinople, which they saw as a deliberate humiliation of the sultan/khalifa and a direct attack on the prestige of Islam as a world religion. To bring pressure to bear on the British government - the chief author of these plans - they launched a campaign to mobilize outrage among the Indian faithful against the Christian attack on the 'Khilafat' or caliphate, the sultan's hereditary office of Commander of the Faithful. Gandhi's response was inspired. He coupled the brutal repression of his Punjab satyagraha campaign (the 'Punjab wrong') with the 'Khilafat wrong', and called on Muslims and Hindus to support mass civil disobedience to achieve 'swaraj [self-rule] in one year'. Muslims were encouraged to enter the Congress and elect the delegates sent to its annual conference. The result was a coup. With heavy Muslim backing, Gandhi forced the Congress old guard to back direct action. He turned what had been an elitist political club into a popular movement with a nominal membership fee and a real grass-roots presence. He transformed a political talkingshop into a fighting machine to harass the Raj, and to pose where it could as a parallel government.

From late 1920 until early 1922, with the Indian National Congress as his tool, Gandhi waged a form of pacific war against British colonial rule. Demonstrations and marches, boycotting government courts and schools, refusing to buy imported British goods and rejecting the reforms the government had offered (including a sharing of power at the provincial level) made up 'Non-Cooperation' - the withdrawal of consent to British authority. Coinciding as it did with so much disturbance elsewhere, and threatening to lapse into large-scale disorder, Non-Cooperation was a source of acute alarm to India's British masters. But what they feared most was the Islamic element in ~ Gandhi's campaign, the religious appeal of the Khilafat cause to the Muslim masses, the influence of the imams, and a sudden upsurge of Islamic fervour that might spread unchecked to the police and army - both disproportionately Muslim. (D. A. Low, 'The Government of India and the First Non-Cooperation Campaign, 1920-22', in Kumar (ed.), Gandhian Politics; D. Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control I920-I932 (Delhi, 1982).

In 1924 the office of khalifa was abolished not by the British but by Mustafa Kemal's secular Turkish republic. The Muslim-Hindu alliance to win India self-rule lost its rhyme and reason. The great Gandhian experiment seemed to end with a whimper.

The British certainly hoped so. But the revolutionary phase in Indian politics left a powerful legacy. It showed for the first time how British rule could be challenged by an organized mass movement right across the subcontinent. Non-Cooperation's collapse had been a bitter blow to Gandhi's close disciples. Its obvious meaning was how hard it was to control such a movement and sustain its momentum. Yet, for their part, the British could now never be sure when they might have to face a new round of mass action to corrode their prestige and unravel the loyalty that bound Indian soldiers, policemen, public servants and local notables to their system of rule. Indeed, fear of a repeat dominated their policy for the next twenty-five years. Secondly, Gandhi's attack upon the British Raj had been an ideological triumph. Many Indian nationalists were still deeply attracted to the representative institutions the British had created. Gandhi's achievement was to persuade a huge new constituency of potential supporters that his version of nationalism, with its social and moral content, would meet the needs and wants of India's rural masses, and that Indian problems required Indian answers. He created, in short, an Indian rather 'British-Indian' nationalism. Thirdly (and partly in consequence), Gandhi made nationalism - and the Congress - a grass-roots movement, drawing in peasants, women, industrial workers, the 'tribal' peoples of the forests and hills, and the untouchables. Of course the level of popular interest and the scale of Congress membership could rise and fall (as they did after I922). But the cadre of Gandhians pursuing 'village uplift', or promoting Gandhi's schemes of education and hygiene, formed a network of activists ready and waiting for the next satyagraha campaign. It remained to be seen when their chance would come. (B. R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj (London, 1976).

For the time being, however, even nominal self-rule of the kind granted to Egypt remained a distant prospect. Gandhi had shaken British self-confidence badly. But the 'steel frame' of Britain's Raj the army, police and bureaucracy - with its tens of thousands of loyal Indian servants, was still in place. The religious and social divisions that Gandhi had been so anxious to bridge made a grand nationalist coalition against alien control something to hope for, not a practical basis for political action in the immediate future.

China was different. Between 1919 and 1922, against all the odds, Chinese leaders successfully asserted China's right to full sovereignty that had seemed at such risk after 1890. As seen our case study above hey won China a place on the new League Council, the steering committee of the League of Nations. By refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles (because of the clause on Shantung), they eventually forced a new settlement for East Asia in the Washington treaties of 1921-2. They even secured what had seemed almost impossible before 1914: a programme to reverse the 'unequal treaties' - winning tariff autonomy, abolishing extraterritorial privilege, and shutting down (gradually) the numerous foreign enclaves on Chinese soil. China's revolt against a global order in which empire was the norm was far more complete than almost anywhere else in the Afro-Asian world.( Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System, I9I8-I920: The Middle Kingdom at the Periphery (London, 1991).

Of course, part of the reason was that, although the West had encroached upon China's independence in the nineteenth century (a number of Western countries enjoyed extraterritorial rights, including the USA, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia), the Chinese had fiercely resisted reduction to a form of semi-colonial dependence in the crucial decade before 1914. Instead, the need to turn China into a nation state (not a dynastic empire) with a republican government to express the popular will was accepted with astonishing rapidity among the educated class. The explosion of feeling in May 1919 when China's  claim to Shantung was rejected in Paris showed that this new style of patriotism had not stopped there. The May Fourth movement began among students in Peking. But it quickly became a much wider protest, enlisting merchants and artisans in its demonstrations and boycotts, and spreading far beyond the capital. It was graphic proof that foreign business interests could be badly damaged by popular outrage, and that the angry crowds would take their cue from the nationalist rhetoric of the new literati. Yet this new popular mood was not translated into a strong national government. Between 1919 and 1922, China had a government in Canton as well as one in Peking. The Peking government was a cockpit of factions, and its writ hardly ran beyond the walls of the city. ( A. J. Nathan, Peking Politics I9I8-I923 (London, 1976).

 Across much of China, the real voice of authority was the provincial dujun, the military commander or (a hostile translation) 'warlord'.(A. Waldron, 'The Warlord: Twentieth Century Chinese Understandings of Violence, Militarism and Imperialism', American Historical Review 96, 4 (1991), pp. 1073-1100).  By 1922 the simmering hostility of these provincial bosses and their factional groupings had set off the civil wars that dominated China's politics until the capture of Peking by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928. The enthusiastic endorsement of China's sovereign statehood and the solemn promises to respect it in the Washington treaties are thus somewhat puzzling. If anything, the domestic turmoil of post-imperial China seemed to invite the interference of the foreign powers as much if not more so than before 1914.

By the end of 1920, the Peking government had revoked the extraterritorial privileges of Germany and Austria-Hungary, its wartime enemies. The Bolshevik government had renounced Russia's claims. It seemed more than likely that Peking would go on to denounce the privileged status of the treaty powers that remained, including Britain, Japan and the United States.( Yongjin, China in the International System, p. 184.) It was easy to imagine the explosive effect of such a move in Shanghai and elsewhere, and the enormous difficulty of defending foreign interests and property against the mass demonstrations and boycotts that seemed certain to follow. It seemed safer by far to enlist Peking's support for a gradual change. The British and the Americans had an added reason to come to terms with Peking. They had watched with alarm the growing power of Japan, and mistrusted the 'militarist clique' that directed its policy. (Sir B. Alston (British minister in Peking), I Aug. 1920, in R. Butler, J. P. T. Bury and M. Lambert (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, 1st Series, vol. 14 (London, 1966), pp. 81-6.)

Throughout 1920 they pressed the Japanese government to pool its commercial concessions in an international consortium, and opposed its claim to a special position 'beyond the Wall' in Manchuria. (Y. T. Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria 1904-1932 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 242ff.)
 The upshot was the remarkable settlement embodied in the Washington treaties of 1921-2. The Western powers and Japan guaranteed the independence and integrity of the Chinese republic. Provision was made to reform the unequal treaties. No power was to seek any special concessions or make exclusive deals. China, it seemed, had recovered the national dignity painfully surrendered in the chaotic I890s. But the status revolution was not the end of the story. From I922 onward, foreign interests in China faced militant nationalism on a growing scale. A second revolution, social and political, made the Washington treaties' leisurely timetable for the recovery of China's full sovereignty look strangely complacent. The epicentre was Canton, the southern metropolis. Canton had been the centre of anti-Ch'ing politics. The Cantonese, said an old China -coast diehard, were the 'Irish of China', it was not meant as a compliment. (J. O. P. Bland, China: The Pity of It (London, 1931), p. 40.)

Canton was less than eighty miles from Hong Kong, which served as its outpost, and a safe haven for dissent in imperial times. It was where Sun Yat-sen had struggled before I9II to build up his revolutionary party, later the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party (KMT). But, without a mass following, Sun was poorly placed to exploit the growing antagonism of merchants and artisans towards the exactions and oppressions of the new provincial rulers (many of them military) who had pushed aside the mandarin-scholars of the old imperial system. Nor could he appeal to the educated class (a category that included the young Mao Tsetung), who bitterly resented their displacement from power by warlords and soldiers. In I922 he was even chased out of Canton by a warlord faction. But the next three years brought an astonishing change. For in I923 Sun made an epic compact with an agent sent from Bolshevik Russia. He accepted the offer of military aid and a corps of Soviet advisers to rebuild the KMT on the Leninist model, in partnership with the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The KMT -CCP began to build a mass base among peasants and town workers. And with its own party army it at last had the means to defeat the warlords and build a new state.( Hans van der Ven, War and Nationalism in China 1925-1945 (London, 2003), ch. 2.) For an account of this that stresses the limited influence of the Communist Party, Ming K. Chan, 'The Realpolitik and Legacy of Labour Activism and Popular Mobilisation in 1920s Greater Canton', in M. Leutner, R. Felber, M. L. Titarenko and A. M. Grigoriev (eds.), The Chinese Revolution in the 1920S: Between Triumph and Disaster (London, 2002), pp. 187-221.

In July 1926 the KMT army set off from Canton on the 'Northern Expedition', destination Peking. By the end of the year it had reached Wuhan, the great crossroads city in the middle of China. Nanking and Shanghai lay within its grasp. China's titular sovereignty - hailed with enthusiasm at the Washington conference – had become frighteningly real. For the British, whose stake in the old order was largest, there began a race to withdraw from the most vulnerable outposts before the shooting started. (E. K. S. Fung, The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat (Hong Kong, 1991); Chan Lan Kit-Ching, China, Britain and Hong Kong 1895-1945 (Hong Kong, 1991). Not for the last time, there was friction between the views of the colonial governor in Hong Kong and his diplomatic colleagues in Peking and London.)

What the future held for the large foreign presence (Japanese and Western) in Shanghai, the greatest treaty port of all, was anyone's guess. Across much of Northern Eurasia, what mattered most was the fate of imperial Russia, apparently dissolving in chaos in 1918. As tsarist rule collapsed, the subject peoples of what Lenin had called the 'prison of nations' had a glimpse of freedom. In the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and among the ethnic minorities of Russia proper (like the Bashkirs and Tatars), independent regimes made their bid for power. On the face of things, their chances were good. In 1918-19 the Bolsheviks were struggling to survive in a civil war. Moreover, the Bolshevik view had favored liberation for Russia's subject nationalities, seeing them as allies against the tsarist autocracy. Lenin himself had proclaimed in his famous wartime manifesto Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) that colonial freedom was the crucial first step towards destroying capitalism in its European heartlands. In their state of siege after 1917, the Bolsheviks found that this revolutionary principle coincided with self-interest. They were anxious to pre-empt the threat of pan-Islamic sentiment among the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia. And, as we have seen, the fear of Japanese expansion and Anglo-American influence on its East Asian frontier had lain behind Moscow's intervention in 1922-3, first of all in North China and then, more profitably, in the nationalist south.

The Red Army's attempt to carry revolutionary struggle into Central Europe was stopped by the Poles in 1920. But Moscow regained control over most of Belorussia and the Ukraine, which the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had taken away. In the Volga region, where Moscow at first seemed to smile on an independent state for the Bashkirs and Tatars, the power of the centre was reasserted forcibly during 1920.46 In Central Asia, the Russian settler community, many of them railway men, resisted the attempt of the local Muslim elite to recover the freedoms lost forty years earlier. But the decisive factor was the Red Army's arrival to capture Khiva in February 1920 and Bukhara in September. Though 'Basmachi' fighters waged a guerrilla war on into 1921, their cause was lost. In the Caucasus, Moscow at first trod more carefully. It was anxious not to alienate either Turkey or Iran, both potential allies against British influence in the Middle East. It lacked the military power to subjugate a fractured region. It faced a tough Georgian government, whose independence it recognized in May 1920. But by the end of that year Russia's strategic position had become much more favourable. British power was ebbing from its high-water mark at the end of the war.

Thus while we have described the Eurasian industrial revolution as going in tandem colonialism. Followed by The Breaking of Eurasia P.1  describing what led to WWI as a colonial war.

Next, incidence of violent death in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 was high, but other conflicts came close. Between 9 and 10 million men were killed in the First World War, with Serbia and Scotland suffering the highest mortality rates, though the mortality rate was also high in the campaigns between the Entente and the Ottoman Empire, where disease was worse and reserves fewer. Estimates vary widely for the number of deaths in China attributable to Mao's policies, but they must certainly have run to several tens of millions. The total victims of Stalinism within the Soviet Union may have exceeded 20 million. Mortality rates in excess of 10 per cent have also been estimated for Pol Pot's reign of terror in Cambodia, as well as for the civil wars in Mexico (1910-20) and Equatorial Guinea (1972-79), and the Afghan War that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979. By one estimate, sixteen twentieth-century conflicts - wars, civil wars, genocides and sundry mass murders - cost more than one million lives each; a further six claimed between half a million and a million victims; and fourteen killed between a quarter and half a million people. In all, according to the Correlates of War Project, there were at least two hundred inter-state or civil wars between 1900 and 1990. Using slightly different criteria, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that there were over a hundred armed conflicts in the last decade of the century, of which more thap twenty were still in progress in 1999.

It might be argued that there are precedents in human history for such high rates of lethal organized violence. First, it is clear from archaeological and anthropological studies that pre-historic and pre-modern tribal societies were very violent indeed. The percentage of male deaths due to warfare among the Amazonian Jivaro Indians is known to have been as high as 60 per cent within the recent past. Rates in excess of 20 per cent have been recorded for at least five other tribes.

See Earlier Case Study: Archeology of War and Peace.

Secondly, there is reason to believe that two or three Asian tyrants perpetrated mass murder on a scale comparable with that inflicted by their twentieth-century counterparts. The exemplary violence meted out by the thirteenth-century Mongol leader Chingis (Genghis) Khan is said to have resulted in a decline in the populations of Central Asia and China of more than 37 million - a figure which, if correct, is equivalent to nearly 10 per cent of the world's population at that time. According to Muslim historians, more than one and a half million people were butchered at Nishapur in 122I. Almost as many were put to the sword at Herat and Merv. Timur (Tamburlaine)'s late fourteenth-century conquests in Central Asia and Northern India were also notably bloody, with a death toll said to be in excess of 10 million. The Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century may have cost the lives of as many as 25 million people. It is important to emphasize, however, that the majority of victims of these conquerors almost certainly died from famines and epidemics arising from their disruptive incursions. The populations of the regions affected lived perilously close to subsistence, so that vandalism of irrigation systems or destruction of harvests could have devastating effects, particularly for urban centers. Nevertheless, these figures help to set the death toll inflicted by the Japanese during their conquest of north-eastern China (which is said to have exceeded I I million) in some kind of long-term perspective. It seems likely that the hundred years after 1900 were the bloodiest century in European history, in relative as well as absolute terms. It is less certain that the same can be said for Asia, especially if wilfully causing a famine is counted as a form of bloodshed.

Thirdly, moreover, several pre-1900 Chinese rebellions and their suppression caused human suffering on a scale that may have matched or exceeded that inflicted on the people of China by twentieth-century civil wars. The eighth-century An Lushan Revolt is believed to have cost the lives of more than 30 million people. The mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) - a peasant revolt led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Christ against the Qing dynasty, which the rebels accused of capitulation to Western commercial penetration - was estimated by Western contemporaries to have claimed between 20 and 40 million lives. Also devastating to the provinces affected were the roughly contemporaneous Nien and Miao Rebellions and the Muslim rebellions in Yunnan and north-western China. Here, once again, death tolls have to be inferred from provincial and local censuses taken before and after the rebellions. In some cases the declines seem to imply mortality rates ranging from 40 to 90 per cent. At least some part of these declines in population must surely have been due to emigration from, and reduced fertility in, ravaged areas. Still, there clearly was very large-scale organized violence, not least in the way the rebels were systematically exterminated by Qing commanders. Famine was a direct consequence of the scorched earth policy used against the Taiping rebels' 'Celestial Kingdom of Great Peace' centred in Nanking. One hypothesis in The War of the World is that the worst time for an empire - in terms of the loss of human life - is when it begins to decline. This is the period when rebellions are most likely, but also when the authorities are most likely to resort to exemplary brutality. The evidence suggests that this was already painfully obvious in China a century before it became apparent in the rest of the world.

Another way of thinking about the twentieth century, then, may be to see it as a Western version of Qing China's nineteenth-century death throes.
Finally, there is reason to think that the mortality rates arising from some episodes of West European conquest and colonization of the Americas and Africa were as high as those of the twentieth century. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of victims of the European conquest of the Americas succumbed to disease, not to violence, so those who speak of 'genocide' debase the coinage of historical terminology just as much as those who call nineteenth-century famines in India 'Victorian holocausts'. However, the forcible enslavement of the Congolese people by the Belgian crown after 1886 and the suppression of the Herero Uprising by the German colonial authorities in 1904 do bear comparison with other twentieth-century acts of organized violence. The proportion of the population estimated to have been killed in the Congo under Belgian rule may have been as high as a fifth. The estimated mortality rate in the Herero War was higher still - more than one in three, making it by that measure the most bloody conflict of the entire twentieth century. (The absolute number of dead was, however, 76,000, compared with an estimated 7 million in the Congo between 1886 and 1908.) Historians have not been slow to find lines of continuity leading from this act of 'annihilation' to the Holocaust, though a more direct line of continuity might be to the earlier wars waged by the British against other southern African tribes such as the Matabele.

Perhaps, then, the twentieth century was not so uniquely bloody, when allowance is made for the century's demographic explosion and for the regional and chronological concentration of the lethal organized violence it witnessed. Yet it was undeniably unique in two respects. The first was that it witnessed a transformation in the kind of war waged by developed Western societies against one another. Throughout European history there had been social and institutional as well as technological limitations on war, which had limited the mortality rates inflicted by organized conflict. Occasional massacres occurred, it is true, but massacre did not become a routinized military method. Even the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, though they struck contemporaries as markedly increasing, respectively, the brutality and the scale of war, did not give rise to death rates like those of the mid twentieth century. What happened after 1914 was especially remarkable because of the 'long peace' Europe had enjoyed in the century that had followed Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo. Like the misnamed 'long peace' of the Cold War, this was not a time without war, but a time when most war took place outside Europe. The wars that were fought within Europe were generally waged in a quite limited way, most obviously in the case of the short, sharp wars fought by Prussia to create the German Reich.
In the twentieth century, it might be said, the sins of nineteenth-century imperialism were visited on Europeans, though retribution was sometimes sent to the wrong address (the Poles could scarcely be held accountable for the miseries of subjugated Africans). Many of the key actors of the First World War had learned the art of annihilation in colonial conflicts; the example of Lord Kitchener - the butcher of Omdurman, appointed Secretary of State for War in 1914 - springs to mind. At the same time, the twentieth century saw Central and Eastern Europe go through what China had experienced in the previous century: a crisis of imperial order spawning cataclysmic civil wars. Perhaps there was also fulfillment of those early twentieth-century fears of a new Mongol horde, except that this time the hordes were Eurasian. Hitler and Stalin proved to be worthy heirs to Chingis and Timur.