Beyond the shining seas
may 29, 2000. The practice of empire forms the
rubric for the world's history during the past 500
years, dominated by the four horsemen of modernity:
colonizing, war, slavery, and racism. Columbus's diaries
from about 1490 to 1500 prefigured remarkably what was
to come. Among nations, I would say the history of India
reveals the most about the process as it engages almost
every aspect of imperialism. And the pivotal moment
would be the Carnatic Wars, Anglo-French wars fought in
India from 1743 to 1763. From a global point of view,
they set forth a sequence of events as significant as
the American revolution in the decade following. For
example, the Opium Wars in China (1839–42 and 1856–60)
as well as France's interest in colonizing Vietnam both
stem from the Carnatic Wars.
One might set up an evolutionary scale
of the various national empires. First the Portuguese
and Spanish, which were superseded by the Dutch. England
and France next became dominant. At the beginning of the
20th century the United States, Japan, and Germany
entered the lists.
A powerful critique of our own empire
comes from the renowned scholar Chalmers Johnson in his
new book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire. It is significant that this work
comes from an Asianist and a conservative. Among
Asianists there is a significant level of resistance to
the conventionally accepted terms and values of
Eurocentric diplomacy discourse. Hence, a strong
critique of empire exists in the Asian field.
Conservative anti-imperialism is a proud American
tradition that was submerged in the anti-communist
crusade. The mission of Buckley's National Review was to
persuade conservatives to give up their international
conservatism (mis-named isolationism) for the crusade,
of which the Asian wars have been a major part. The
death toll in these wars is not trivial and needs to be
responsibly computed. For example, if Khmer Rouge
members are tried for war crimes committed after 1975,
how shall we assess the role of the American bombing of
Cambodia 1969–75?
An excellent study of the origins of
conservative anti-imperialism is Robert Beisner's Twelve
Against Empire: The Anti-imperialists, 1898–1900.
Many 1960s arguments against U.S. aggression in Vietnam
were prefigured by major national figures opposed to the
Philippine War. William James, Charles Eliot Norton, and
Benjamin Harrison are among Beisner's Twelve. American
cultural propagandists work hard to make us think that
our wars are noble reruns of World War II, but is it not
actually the Philippine Annexation War of long repressed
memory that we have condemned ourselves to keep
re-fighting?
For a glimpse of the contemporary
rampaging of the horsemen, take Haiti, the United
States's little neighbor. The Washington Post National
Weekly Edition for May 1 has a piece by Michael Dobbs,
"The Price of Global Reforms: The Push to Free
Markets Can Devastate the Local Economy." Swamped
by rice imports forced on Haitians by the United States,
rice farmers have been driven from their livelihoods
into the cities. "Throngs of women seeking jobs at
30 cents an hour in sweatshops owned by US clothing
manufacturers." "Roughly 50% of Haitian
children younger than 5 suffer from malnutrition."
Over the past 40 years per capita GNP has fallen from
almost $600 to $369.
As a consequence of WWII, the U.S. had
an opportunity to inherit the empires of the early 20th-century
powers. Unfortunately, our leaders took that opportunity
and turned their back on Roosevelt's anti-colonial
commitments. Would we have taken this wrong turn had FDR
lived? I'd like to think not; but maybe it was
overdetermined by the momentum of all those centuries.
Moss Roberts is
a professor of Chinese at New York University. This is a
slightly edited version of a message that appeared on
the H-Diplomacy list.
