Empire in Asia: A New Global History by Brian P. Farrell Donna Brunero

Author:Brian P. Farrell,Donna Brunero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The Imperial Frontier and the Asian States System

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the established Asian-based “Great Power” empires, Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Qing, shared one crucial problem: they were being existentially challenged by European-based power. The Mughal, indeed, were subsumed. They were displaced by the British Raj, created in 1858 when the British government disbanded the English East India Company (EIC) and established a Government of India to govern its territories directly, answering through the India Office, a department of the British government, to the British Crown. This expressed an established fact: British power was paramount in South Asia. But the British took pains to act in many ways that indicated they saw themselves as assuming the mantle of Mughal imperium, not destroying it: governing both directly and indirectly, through layers and hierarchies, differentiating between interests, peoples, and regions, maintaining alliances, assuming obligations, adopting inherited positions and challenges. Two of the most troubling emanated from the wider region. The so-called Eastern Question became pressing when in 1854 it provoked war, pitting the Russian Empire against the British, French, and Ottoman Empires. The question was understood to mean the problem of what would happen to the European states system if the Ottoman Empire could no longer govern its territories and peoples; now it directly connected British concerns about the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean with Indian concerns about the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, it became increasingly obvious that the Qing Empire, which in the previous century reordered vast regions of Inner Asia by flexing impressive military and administrative muscles, now struggled to cope with growing internal and external pressures. Agents of empire were concluding, by mid-century, that the huge region from the Bosphorus to the Mongolian heartland was not governed by entities that could cope with the challenges, or meet the expectations, of their expanding “modern” Great Power state system, with its global vision. There appeared to be a vast arc of political and military “instability.”19 The crux of the matter was always clear: the viability of the state.

If an existing state could maintain enough control of its peoples and territory to protect both from invasion, prevent its peoples from invading, harassing, or subverting others, and protect and promote wider commerce and movement—if it satisfied general norms—then it could be accepted. But norms changed. Drastically. The real trigger was Russian territorial expansion, the project of Russian empire—because the uniqueness of the one now made the other decisive. Geography, history, and grand strategy combined to persuade Russian agents of empire that their core territories faced what they saw as an existential challenge which no other great power confronted: either physically dominate the territories around them or else suffer constant incursion and harassment at best, invasion and disaster at worst. By the mid-nineteenth century this perception focused eastward: ranging from long-established expansion across the northern forest lands into newer projections, south into the Caucasus and southeast into the Kazakh steppe-lands. Russia was a cornerstone Concert of Europe Great

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