The First Age of Industrial Globalization by Maartje Abbenhuis Gordon Morrell

Author:Maartje Abbenhuis, Gordon Morrell [Maartje Abbenhuis, Gordon Morrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century, World, Political Science, Globalization, General
ISBN: 9781474267113
Google: hgOpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-10-17T22:31:36+00:00

7

A world of war after 1850

From ‘satanic mills’ to colonial outposts, the growth of nineteenth-century industrialization involved significant amounts of human suffering as well as enduring environmental damage. Globalization’s primary impact, namely the ‘threading together of human communities’ in a complex web of interconnections,1 was seldom achieved by peaceful means, nor was it left uncontested. The expansion and building of the century’s industrial empires, be they formal or informal, also came with considerable and ongoing degrees of discord, protest and resistance ‘from below’, including by colonial subjects. Governments were rarely restrained in using military power to suppress such resistance, whether it occurred at home or abroad. Warfare and state violence (as conducted by soldiers, the police or by other agents of the state) were a marked feature of the nineteenth-century world and a clear characteristic of this ‘age of empire’.

This chapter focuses on the period of ‘industrial and imperial consolidation’ that came in the second half of the nineteenth century. It makes a case for the global interdependence of wars and military actions in the period and argues that in consolidating their imperial and economic dominion over others, the industrializing governments relied both on strategies of war avoidance and war mongering. Above all, it acknowledges Antoinette Burton’s powerful conceptualization of armed revolt as ‘endemic’ to nineteenth-century imperialism. The foundations of nineteenth-century imperialism were built not only on the technological, economic and systemic advantages offered to the industrializing powers but also relied heavily on the repression of resistance. Dissidence and disruption pervaded all nineteenth-century empires.2 In many respects, then, the ‘age of revolution’ did not end in 1848, as resistance ‘from below’ to power wielded ‘from above’ remained a dominant feature of the late nineteenth-century world as well.

There were a lot of wars conducted in the nineteenth century and they had some telling characteristics.3 First and foremost, it was generally understood that the use of violence by a government (be it to conduct a formal war against another state or to police a population) was both legitimate and expected. In the 1830s, the influential Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz described the right of governments to go to war as follows: warfare is a ‘continuation of politics by other means’.4 The choice for war, be it against enemies within the state or as a campaign waged against another state, was made by a government based on a range of considerations and interests. The choice for war was almost always constrained in some way by the international environment (a government’s relationship with other governments and the range of imperial, diplomatic, economic and political interests at play), although these limitations rarely meant that a particular instance of warfare was in any way restrained in terms of its violent impact. The technological advances made in the weaponry of war – be it the quick-loading rifle, iron- or steel-clad warship or the invention of dynamite and the aeroplane – also had the potential to make warfare more destructive and, thus, to provide particular advantages to the wielders of these industrial weapons.

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