Journal of Global History http://journals.cambridge.org/JGH Additional services for Journal of Global History: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Possessing the world: taking the measurements of colonisation from the 18th to the 20th century. . By Etemad Bouda. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. ix + 250. Hardback US\$85, ISBN 978-1845453381. John Darwin Journal of Global History / Volume 4 / Issue 02 / July 2009, pp 339 - 341 DOI: 10.1017/S1740022809003209, Published online: 08 June 2009 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1740022809003209 How to cite this article: John Darwin (2009). Journal of Global History, 4, pp 339-341 doi:10.1017/S1740022809003209 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JGH, IP address: 150.214.146.47 on 18 Mar 2015 j R E V I E W S j 339 offer it as a unifying theme of world and comparative history. Meanwhile, monographs are rolling off the printing presses. To some extent, this reflects a post-Cold War effort to grapple with the historical analogies for our age: do we live in a unipolar era? Is Rome the precedent? Or should we think in terms of an emerging decentred set of systems of regional emporia? Gone are the underlying idealist polarities of socialism and liberalism. What we have now, it would appear from the flurry, is the triumph of the reasons of state – a vogue for what political scientists call realism. In all this quest for new universal coordinates to make sense of the big picture, what is often left out are the histories of the colonized, who more often appear as the bit-players or stage-setters for emperors from London or Beijing. What Imperial formations sets out to do is to challenge this formulation, to insist that empires are formed out of asymmetrical relationships between social and spatial parts, and do not simply radiate from the mind’s eye or the interests of a centre. Moreover, these relationships belong to – and change – a set of belief systems about civilization, space, and race. The big-picture dichotomy of realist and idealist impulses is a false one. This book is the product of a series of workshops sponsored by the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico, and to some extent builds on the pioneering anthology Tensions of empire, edited by Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper. It goes further in important respects and does not presume that empire was a western European phenomenon: the Chinese, Ottoman, Russian, and Japanese emporia join the pantheon. What motivated the participants was a desire to grapple with ‘the degrees of tolerance, of difference, of domination, and of rights’ that inhere in empires. Indeed, as the editors argue, they prefer the coinage ‘imperial formations’, to capture the dynamic of relationships between parts, over ‘empire’ as a thing. It is certainly a suggestive proposition and should be aligned with some of the big syntheses as a challenge for how to conduct a more global history. Imperial formations is an important contribution and a corrective to propensities to see empires with core values, interests, or institutions that simply radiate outwards, with varying capacities to fill further geographic spaces as colonies. But does it work as a volume? Not really. The result is a book that is less than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it is a book of parts. There are wonderful essays, from Makdisi’s fine-grained examination of American protestants plying their bibles in the Ottoman empire, or Jane Burbank’s sweep across centuries of Moscovy’s habitus of creating flexible legal mechanisms to cope with far-flung and highly variegated regions and faiths, to a couple of essays about Chinese efforts to promote the idyll of racial homogeneity while trampling on and promoting its benevolence to near and distant parts (such as Tibet). Then there is a set of essays looking at the ways in which imperial ideologies or self-conceptions wracked their architects and rulers – from Irene Silverblatt’s study of the Spanish Inquisition in early modern colonial settings, to Nicholas Dirks’ analysis of the dust-up over Warren Hastings and the significance of scandal and moral outrage in late eighteenth-century Britain, and ending with Fred Cooper’s essay on the tension between imperial subjecthood and republican citizenry in France since the Haitian Revolution. Most of the case studies are illuminating essays in their own right. But the result is a bit of a pastiche. The essays rarely ‘speak’ to each other. Few authors bother with the concept of ‘formation’, though in spirit and execution there is some tacit consistency. The section headings are arbitrary (if well turned): what does, for instance, the title of the last cluster of essays, ‘New genealogies of empire’, really mean? In the end, this is a book that tends to particularize each case. One is tempted to ask if this reflects the nature of the collective venture: to get away from universal postulates with which we are all too familiar, and to examine the negotiated and contested features of empire, are we inevitably bound to push the analysis inwards and make the narratives much more introspective? It is telling, for example, that ‘formations’ are almost entirely endogenous: no essay, the introduction included, deals with empires in relationship to each other, as highly porous, invidious, competitive, emulative, and therefore unstable constructs; this, despite the fact that Part 2 is purportedly about ‘Rethinking boundaries, imaginaries, empires’. The result is paradoxical: a series of discrete, bounded studies that reify what the editors appeared to have sought to transcend. Possessing the world: taking the measurements of colonisation from the 18th to the 20th century By Bouda Etemad. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. ix þ 250. Hardback US$85, ISBN 978-1845453381. j 340 j R E V I E W S Reviewed by John Darwin Nuffield College, Oxford, UK E-mail: john.darwin@nuffield.ox.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S1740022809003209 This book, originally published in French several years ago, should be at the elbow of every global historian and every historian of empire. In eleven pithy chapters and some twenty-eight tables, the author assembles a mass of indispensable numerical data for the study of European imperial expansion, drawing on the best available sources for all the colonial powers, including Japan and the United States but (perhaps rather curiously) excluding Russia. (The argument for this is that the book is concerned with the ‘discontinuous’ maritime colonial empires, not with empires that grew continuously outward from their imperial ‘core’ – a category that would have required the inclusion of the Habsburgs and, presumably, China.) Five chapters deal with the ‘tools of empire’ and the ‘human cost of colonial conquest’: European mortality in the tropics; the role of malaria in the Americas, Asia, and Africa; the use of indigenous troops in tropical conquest; and the losses incurred by Europeans and indigenous peoples in the course of colonial expansion. In Part Two, six further chapters present a ‘comparative study of empires’. They provide the statistics of population and land area, the ‘rate and scale of colonisation’, a set of ‘comparative portraits’ of the colonial empires divided into three longish periods: 1760–1830, 1830–80 and 1880–1938. A final chapter surveys the decolonization era after 1945. Etemad’s premise is straightforward: ‘Along with the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions, the phenomenon of colonialism is one of the major changes of direction in mankind’s history. Like both these revolutions, colonisation was a massive phenomenon . . . from the first manifestations of European colonial expansion to the last – empire spread over seventy per cent of the planet’s . . . dry land’. Of the populations of the developed world, 80% ‘have a colonial past’ as rulers or subjects, as do twothirds of the population of the ‘Third World’ (p. 1). Mass and scale is thus the key to Etemad’s story. The aim is to use the numerical data to reveal the profile and timing of the different waves of colonialism; to expose its changing techniques; to assess the profit and loss on the human account (Etemad is not concerned primarily with the conventional debate on economic costs and benefits); to display the contrasts between the different imperial systems of the colonial powers; and, at the end, to proffer a generic explanation for decolonization and the fall of empires. In Part One of the book, Etemad’s numbers offer a corrective to several entrenched historical prejudices, which will be especially useful to those without expertise in the colonial history of the tropical world. Thus the decline of European mortality in the tropics occurred well before ‘scientific’ medicine was widely practised. Instead, the use of quinine allowed an enormous reduction in deaths from disease, especially when coupled (as at the time of the Ashanti War in 1874) with the care taken to expose European troops to the West African climate for the shortest time possible. As Etemad wryly points out, the main reason why few Europeans died in the tropics was that very few went there, and even fewer for long. This was strikingly true of the European military presence. The number of Western soldiers found in tropical colonies was minimal compared to their numbers at home: proportionately some twenty times smaller. The balance was made up by the use of indigenous troops. Indeed, one of Etemad’s main points, deduced from the data, is that European expansion in Asia and Africa largely depended upon using Afro-Asian peoples to conquer themselves. That was why it was so astonishingly cheap. One of Etemad’s more striking statistics is the calculation that the roughly 150 colonial campaigns waged by European states from the mid nineteenth century up to 1913 altogether cost 0.2–0.3% of the GNP of ‘colonial Europe’. Empire on the cheap indeed. Of the (up to) 300,000 white soldiers who lost their lives in the pursuit of these colonial conquests between 1750 and 1913, three-quarters died before the mid nineteenth century. French soldiers made up some 40% of the death toll, British 36%, and Dutch 9%. These figures can be compared with the scale of indigenous losses, which Etemad computes at some 30 million, excluding those who died of famine in late Victorian India. Perhaps one million died while engaged in armed resistance, but the vast majority were civilian deaths. Etemad also insists that the data show that more advanced technology was of only marginal importance in permitting colonial conquest. In Part Two of the book, the main focus is upon the changing area and population of the colonial empires over the three chronological periods. Although the overbearing size of British possessions is not unfamiliar, it is still a surprise to find that, in 1880, the British ruled some 90% of the world’s colonial subjects and some 80% of its colonial zones. Moreover, for all their takings after 1880, j R E V I E W S j 341 the British expanded more between 1830 and 1880 than they did in the age of scrambles that followed. Tables showing the growth of colonial acquisitions by the various colonial powers are accompanied by a summary account of their course and causes. For Anglophone readers, much of this will prove very useful, although the coverage of British expansion will strike them as less satisfactory. Joseph Chamberlain appears rather oddly as an ‘internationalist’ and the son of a ‘shoe manufacturer’, and, while French acquisitions after 1918 are mentioned, those of the British are not. The treatment of decolonization is necessarily brief. Its ‘basic cause’, we are told, was ‘insufficient settlement’. Discuss! Despite minor cavils, the great value of Etemad’s book is to allow European colonization to be measured over the longue durée and along several dimensions. It will certainly make it enormously easier to attempt useful comparisons between periods and powers. Anglophone readers will be particularly grateful for the data assembled from French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Belgian sources. For these reasons, it will be an essential teaching aid for global and imperial history. My copy will remain close to my elbow. A global history of modern historiography By Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, with the assistance of Supriya Mukherjee. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008. Pp. xii þ 436. Paperback £22.99, ISBN 978-0-582-09606-6. Reviewed by John Tosh Roehampton University, UK E-mail: J.Tosh@roehampton.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S1740022809003210 Now that global history has become an established genre, it is high time that historiography itself should be analysed from a global perspective. Reference works by many hands provide a useful point of departure, but the work under review is the first coherent global synthesis of history-writing. Georg Iggers is a leading and long-standing authority on the Western historical tradition; Q. Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee contribute their expertise on China and South Asia respectively. The resulting narrative is seamless and well organized. The initial survey of non-Western history-writing, extending from the dynastic histories of China and Japan to the imperial historiography of the Ottoman empire, is masterly. By emphasizing the evidential modes of learning already established within these societies before their exposure to the influence of European historiography, the authors give an intelligible account of the intellectual syncretism that characterized the Eastern development of the historical profession. However, the book is harder going than it might have been. Little impression can be gained of the character of the many historiographies described because hardly any passages of actual history-writing (as opposed to programmatic statements) are reproduced: a few well-chosen extracts would have brought vitality to the somewhat lifeless summaries of national schools of historiography. But this is a formidable work of scholarship, whose bibliography and references are an achievement in themselves. It is to be welcomed as a genuine attempt to see historiography in a global perspective. The authors conclude by characterizing the theme of their book as the ‘globalization of history’. It is a question-begging phrase. Is ‘the globalization of history’ anything more than an acceptable way of referring to Western intellectual hegemony, just as globalization in an economic context denotes the global reach of Western capitalism? At one level this book is the record of the uneven but unstoppable dissemination of Western modes of historical thinking to the rest of the world. Japan’s invitation of the Rankean scholar Ludwig Riess to inaugurate the history department of Tokyo University in 1887 might be regarded as the emblematic moment in this story. The growing global reach of nationalism, Marxism, history from below, the cultural turn, and postmodernism is documented in a varied range of sites. Women’s and gender history has made progress in some unlikely quarters, notably the Middle East. Iggers, Wang, and Mukherjee demonstrate that Western historical paradigms were mediated though local conditions that modified their character in significant ways. But the structure of the book – in which paradigms are first analysed in their Western countries of origin and then followed through to the periphery – makes plain the derivative status of historiography in societies as sophisticated (and politicized) as China and Japan. In the case of China, the authors’ account concludes with the recent ascendancy of historians indebted to postmodernism and postcolonialism. Regardless of the merits of these perspectives, it is hard to avoid regret that, on the showing of this account, Chinese historians have not developed a more original perspective.