BRUCE DALBRACK

Dozens of pressing questions swirled around the world in 1900. To pessimists of the time, of whom there were plenty, each proved in some depressing way George Bernard Shaw’s sneering claim that humans learn from history only that humans learn nothing from history. Even with hindsight sifting some optimistic wheat from chaff remains difficult, which is a point made most easily by the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. Ending 64 years on the throne, she was Britain's longest-reigning and seemingly grimmest monarch, her passing symbolized to many a cataclysmic fork for Britain, the British Empire, and all things decent. News of President McKinley’s assassination in September of the same year bloated worries among those cherishing Victorian stability. Yet the post-Victorian cataclysm only appeared in isolated pockets and sometimes so subtly as to be invisible. Already within a few months of the pompous state funeral and unquestionably within a few years the deceased Victorian era ebbed from the front pages and from concern. A reasonably new, or at least new-look, generation of Westminster politicians polished themselves and their superior’s shoes with a more liberal sheen now flowing from the court of Edward VII.

Despite the difficulties of identifying important developments two broad insights surface from the 1900s. Each stand as opposite dimensions to a unifying global challenge: public administration, or simply how rulers rule and how the ruled respond. Surveying the world in 1900 it is clear elites and other addicts to the imperial status quo whispered something like this: was there enough lustre around imperialism to dodge or at least delay change? Might the convenient, never mind the claustrophobia, imperial patina continue? Underpinning this passion for colonial inertness lurked deep and genuine hopes that loved or loathed, and both emotions fluttered through the 1900s, European imperialism that bestrode the world still packed enough punch not to budge. Leaders of rich countries could continue as is.

Not so, reckoned many of the governed, and grasped hope for change where they might. That this change was not easy explains why photography grabbed so much attention. Both sides saw in the new persuasive power a chance to advance their cause. While rich and powerful people instinctively believed photographs helped capture the merits of stable and prosperous societies. Poorer and usually disenfranchised masses looked on photographs as what they had long wanted, a cheap and global tool to expose the iniquities of imperialism and other crimes. Plus, a prod to inspire people to end it. Of all the useful strides in photography the most central and strikingly important proved to be the launch of a small and simple camera called the Kodak Brownie (Decisive Day #01, 08/02/1900). The new photographs it produced were often fuzzy, almost a surrealist painting. But they also contained a persuasive and compelling form of fuzzy logic that through the power of images helped promote thoughts about what might transfer from rich societies to poor starting with, say, the reigns of power. Sold for only one dollar, the simple camera travelled widely around the world even though imitations were widespread.

For sure there were limits to the new technique. By itself photography was not enough to solve illiteracy, for example, or the challenges of capturing fast-moving events on film. But it did lift the cruelty and crimes of leaders into sharper and often sizzling focus. In 1800, in an era long before cameras where tiny numbers of oil painters and illustrators defined most broadcast images of public administration, Britain had ruled around 20 million people outside the British Isles. By 1900 this had expanded twentyfold to 400 millions or roughly a quarter of world population and not by always praiseworthy methods. The entire European imperial imprint had similarly expanded from controlling in 1800 just over one quarter of the world’s surface to controlling in 1900 just under three-quarters – nothing less than the biggest swath of geographical conquest in human history. Only parts of central Asia and the rump of China remained unconquered – with China herself under large pressure on her eastern and southern seaboard. Only the republican United States to Europe’s west and monarchist Russia to the east could count themselves immune from European imperial jackboots. For everyone else reality was a few elite Europeans from elite European cities stamping around huge tracts of land and stomping on hundreds of millions of people.

In short, imperialism in 1900 was Pareto principle on steroids. It was also not a pleasant reaction either. During the 1850s the British picked up local punishment practices and blew rebels to pieces after lashing them to the mouth of cannons. Considering the huge expanse of imperialism Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902 in Heart of Darkness, set deep inside a colonized Africa where white elites cared not a fig for the majority black population: ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much.’

Atop this concentrated oomph stood three of the world's wealthiest and largest cities, London and Paris in Europe and New York in America, each connected through the North Atlantic Ocean. Kodak Brownie photographs soon appeared of France’s modern Eiffel Tower. In 1900 this was the world’s tallest building at 320m, double America’s Washington Monument (170m, finished in the 1880s) and triple America’s tallest skyscraper, the Flatiron building (90 meters and opened in 1902). Westward emigration from rural Europe into urban America glued the eminent industrialized countries together. New immigrants might rarely settle in to the luxurious parts of the New World for Robber Barons and other elites had imprinted American wealth for too long for that to happen. President Woodrow Wilson captured the reality of Europe to American emigration thus in 1902: ‘The unlikely fellows who came in at the eastern ports were tolerated because they usurped no place but the very lowest in the scale of labour.’ But regardless of their immediate future most new immigrants saw some hope on reaching the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour (opened in 1886) and its promise: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ The tablet held by the statue shows July 4, 1776, the date when America declared independence from arch French rival, Britain. In a nod to liberty and the French Revolution the statue faced west towards France (who paid for most of it) and Europe. In some years during the 1900s a million immigrants arrived at Ellis Island or nearly three thousand a day and across the new country overall a third of Americans called another land their birthplace or had foreign-born parents. All fitting enough given the seven spikes on the statue’s crown symbolically represented the seven seas or the seven continents of the world.

Immigration into America by 1900 looked increasingly varied. Earlier decades traffic sucked in millions from the economically disadvantaged Celtic fringes of Ireland and Scotland. But by the 1900s the flow had much widened and included non-English speaking countries like Italy and Germany. In fact by 1900 one quarter of America’s foreign-born population were from non-English speaking Germany. The demographic shift in what some considered an Anglo-Saxon nation continued throughout the century. By 2000 most foreign-born Americans were not from European country but from neighbouring and Spanish-speaking Mexico. Additionally, two of the world’s largest cities were now in Latin America, Mexico City and Sao Paulo. The third massive conurbation was also not in Europe but in Asia, where Greater Tokyo in Japan was home to a staggering 26 millions. Shanghai in China was not much smaller. Mexico City and Bombay and Sau Paulo each homed 18 millions. Of the big three cities in 1900 New York kept most pace with such global developments and in 2000 it was home to a diverse mix of 17 millions. But in 2000 Paris was home to 10 million and London to 7 million, both having plummeted down the urbanization rankings.

In 1900 Britain as the pre-eminent European imperialist concentrated colonial wealth around two prominent thoughts: the single nation of India hewn from an entire subcontinent plus a tapestry of nations and regions controlled or influenced in Africa. While none were adjoining as in India all the main African regions had some British presence. Moving so quickly and so aggressively doubtless explained why democracy was still fragile across-the-board and where it did exist was unsustainably male oriented. In 1900 only one British Empire country, the largely white dominion of New Zealand, allowed women to vote. But during the 1900s that started changing. Another white dominion, Australia, granted women votes in 1902 after which in Britain calls for universal rights swelled notably – suffragettes succeeding by the 1920s.

Outside white dominions, though, democracy had not even seeded let alone withered on the vine. By 1900 Britain and her native allies had endured repeated wars since whipping Napoleon in Egypt during the 1800s. Anglo-French tension focused on the north-eastern tip of Africa, best shown by France’s play for the Suez Canal during the 1860s. Britain’s response had been a protectorate over all Egypt in the 1880s, though the canal itself remained Anglo-French. In West Africa a medley of traders and officials and regiments bullied and blustered and bulldozed through a series of military triumphs. British wins over the Ashanti tribes dated back to the 1820s and had reappeared in the 1870s and twice in the 1890s. In the 1900s Britain imposed a crowning presence on an expanded Gold Coast (later Ghana). Admittedly not all British-African relations involved greed. Antislavery pushes defined Sierra Leone as much as it delighted Liberal politicians in London. As far back as 1808 Freetown became a formal British Crown Colony for freed slaves. By the end of the century, 1896, the commitment to the freedom cause was still energetic enough to make the interior of the country a further British protectorate.

East of Egypt stood mighty India where elites in the remarkable country had greedily consumed the English language for approaching seventy years. The tongue first appeared as the official language of law and unofficially of large-scale commerce during the 1830s. During the 1850s Westminster wrestled legal control of India from the miserly British East India Company and started long-needed public works. English was usually the chief language not just of law but of construction. British-engineered and newfangled railways proved strikingly influential in transporting cargo – both inventory and ideas – and soon pierced most profitable coast regions and much more inland. British Viceroys deftly used trains to negotiate a brace of rebellions like the Sepoy Mutiny of the 1850s, suppressed in part by troops moved on lengthy train journeys. Undoubtedly railways proved double-edged, helping among others the India National Congress Party emerge in the 1880s, a significant driver of ending British rule some decades later.

So 1900 saw much European pride in foreign possessions. Yet skulking among the smugness was growing recognition that not just British but all European empires had formed from questionable gluttony as much as quixotic gallantry. Cherry-picking lands from agrarian and pre-industrial societies had been easy, far too easy, and while return-on-investment might not have focused all minds at the point of takeover it focused many more minds at the fork of retention. Such growing disappointment at imperialism connects three striking clues from the 1900s on how the imperial proposition would adapt – or more accurately retract.

A first principal clue to seeping imperial energy arrived not in Europe but almost as faraway as you could travel without coming back on yourself. On New Years Day, 1901, an amalgamation of half-a-dozen British colonies formed into one unified country occupying an entire continent of 7.7 million square kilometres dotted with sheep farms bigger than Belgium and plentiful cricket pitches. Christened the Commonwealth of Australia (Decisive Day #02, 01/01/1901) it was not as some British imperialists wished the ‘British Crown Colony of Australia’. Or even the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Australia’.

Most tellingly the new Australian Commonwealth was unlike the American Republic squirted into life after 1776. There, a British rump in Canada sandwiched the United States between a Spanish rump around Mexico and the Caribbean. No such buttery squeezes influenced the Australian continent in 1901. Instead, British colonies mercurially formed one united dominion with a fresh political and cultural identity – or at least the potential for such distinctiveness. Some ties with Britain did remain, God naturally enough remained an Englishman, but Anglo-Australian bonds wrapped mostly around symbolism like shared laws, monarchs, and church leaders. Little political power extended from this communal trio of Law-King-God. Direct control of a Westminster-governed colony was not imposable from the Australian view and not desirable from the British view.

While imperial logic kept up elites at night it also prodded plotting revolutionaries up in the morning and strikingly so in China. The sorry saga of the Middle Kingdom, regrettably ascendant in its attachment to pre-industrial life, granted neither males nor females votes and confined much of the population in slave-like circumstances. But during the 1900s, inspired in part by new photographs of freer and more advanced societies, the collective Chinese rebel megaphone grew louder. Of all the turbulent events the most momentous was the failed Boxer Rebellion (Decisive Day #03, 07/09/1901) – a failure despite support from the raging ego of an unelected monarch.

While the turmoil of China unfolded in Europe a special science prize appeared (Decisive Day #04, 10/12/1901). Their scientific focus and widespread photographs of winners cued, snooker-ball like, a further line of thought. Never mind the Eiffel Tower or other buildings in the capitals of imperial powers. What did western laboratories and other places of science look like? By the 1900s many colonised peoples had experienced first-hand European science although not always in pleasurable ways. Almost everyone who survived the experience of war, European-style, complete with advanced munitions and electronics, accepted its eminence. But what did places making such evil look like? As photographs revealed scientists in white coats and army technicians in trench coats suddenly modernization didn’t look that mysterious. Unfathomable in their motivations, perhaps, but not mysterious. Maybe indeed the poor could mimic European accomplishments without matching their failures. Such intensifying global curiosity about science helps to understand the enduring and emphatic popularity of Nobel Prizes not only in the 1900s but in all decades of the twentieth century.

A further signal about imperial retraction popped up in the following year, 1902, also in the southern hemisphere (Decisive Day #05, 31/05/1902). During the 1830s Boers of Dutch heritage had launched their Great Trek from British coastal colonies such as around the influential port of Cape Town. Entering the African hinterland fired up Dutch secessionist tension with English commerce and liberal attitudes to native Africans. Ill will defined Africa for over half-a-century until the Boer War of 1900-1902. London won that crowning clash, just, but only with a stretched battery of British regiments and adjunct militia. British victory may have blended several smaller colonies into a more malleable Union of South Africa, which officially appeared in 1910. But the win disguised with the flimsiest chiffon the underlying face of British geopolitics etched by the Australian arrangements: London easily tired at imposing not just victories but views too.

On the scientific front one final invention that did not receive a Nobel Prize but made a critical difference, that of powered flight (Decisive Day #06, 17/12/1903). The first powered flight in America happened in a crisp winter day in 1903 and almost instantly produced a whole range of animated babble on quicker postal services and better newspaper delivery. Improved communications was not to be the aeroplane’s destiny. But in 1900s, for a short while anyway, there was an awareness that suddenly the great bulk of the population connected in new and fresh ways that significantly improved what existed before.

Meanwhile Asia also threw up a critical reminder that sagging imperial energy defined not just Britain. Towards the opposite end of the imperial oomph scale Russia clarified brilliantly if bumblingly that other imperialists were also tiring. Russia’s decisive loss to Japan in 1905 at the Battle of Tsushima (Decisive Day #07, 05/09/1905) also exposed the reserved and distant role Britain now gravitated towards in mediating global brawls. Rather than steam in with Anglocentric ideas or impose military, predominately naval, solutions and perhaps grab some sneaky spoils on the way the Conservative administration of Balfour let matters unfold through others. This happened despite concerns, voiced for example by Arthur Balfour who warned ominously in 1906 of where this new and alarming zigzagging would end: ‘What is going on here is a faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna, and socialist processions in Berlin.’

British distance slotted rather nicely with London’s growing affinity towards alliance over aggression. Already the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 reduced friction with a potential competitor, conveniently for the Royal Navy but as it turned out not too conveniently for the Second Russian Pacific Squadron. Soon afterwards Westminster signed the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904. To some views this confirmed early signs of how the more Francophile Edward VII could influence both the Elysee Palace and Buckingham Palace plus an influential difference from the King’s more German-oriented mother Queen Victoria. All this explained why Britain looked content to leave America’s Republican President Roosevelt (the elder, in power from 1901-09) to arbitrate between the barons of the Russo-Japanese war. Teddy’s solution was the simple if sordid recognition of Japan's control of all of Korea at the Treaty of Portsmouth – significantly not the British naval port but the Portsmouth in New Hampshire, America.

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