Our subject today is a world of empire. And there are a couple of very fundamental reasons why we have to start with the notion of empire. One of them is that it's necessary to understand how you get to the totalitarian visions and versions of politics that are the main subject of this class. You can't really understand how you get to Leninism, Stalinism, or how you get to fascism, national socialism without understanding the world of empire that came before.
As we go through this class, you'll be considering, and you probably already are considering given the world that we're living in, the various ways that parliamentary democracies or republics can break down and become other kinds of regimes. There are various kinds of dominant explanations of this, right? You might be thinking that one reason why this happens is that the nation itself had a certain proclivity to decline in this direction, that there's a German exceptionalism or a Russian exceptionalism or an American exceptionalism which leads people in this direction. You might be thinking that it has to do with the wrong ideology, that people get the wrong ideas in their heads and as a result of that politics changes. You might be thinking that it has to do with an economic catastrophe, that after a great depression or a world financial crisis, regimes collapse and change. Or you might be thinking that it has to do with some kind of national trauma, a defeat in war, huge numbers of casualties in war, humiliation.
I'm not saying that any of these ideas are completely wrong. What I am saying is that all of these explanations, and indeed any other plausible explanation that you might be able to come up with, have to do with a larger scale. They have to do with the global scale. All of these things, whether it has to do with international relations or the scale of the ideologies or the nature of the economic problem or the nature of the trauma, all of these turn out to be global. And so the explanations that we have, well, that was interesting. The explanations that we have, I can see my notes now. That's cool. The explanations that we have tend to focus on the national scale, but I don't think you can actually explain these sorts of transitions without a global scale involved.
All right. So all of the things that we might be trying to explain, or rather all the ways in which we might be trying to explain the rise of totalitarianism, much must have to do with the global scale. And let me just suggest some ways that these phenomena are global before we move into the substance of the lecture. These transitions tend to be connected with the imperial legacy, and we'll talk more about that. They tend to be connected with what I think is the basic question of contemporary politics, which is: what is the right form of politics after empire, or can you do democracy without empire? Those are not easy questions, and to see why they're not easy questions, we have to talk about what empire was.
Another way that the imperial past directly matters is a legacy of inequality and exploitation, which I don't just mean in the quantitative sense that empire made some people richer and other people poorer, although that's true, but also the habit of inequality, or the sense that inequality is normal, or the sense that certain kinds of people are more deserving than others, whether we say it explicitly or not, that's a legacy of empire. And then of course there's also the issue of imitation, that if there is a legacy of empire, then that can be the thing that we imitate moving into the future.
Okay. So all of that said, that's just by way of introduction, right? That's by way of explaining why in a class which is chiefly about the 20th century, and then a class in which we'll end up contemplating what could happen in the 21st, we're going to spend this entire lecture concerned with the 500 years or so that came before, with the age of empire. So the age of empire, I'm sure all of you, I have this like tech, how many of you are actually Canadian? Like, am I allowed to ask that or will I get fired? Okay. Well, I guess we'll find out soon. Some of you are like proud and some of you are like, 'Yeah, like it's okay that I'm Canadian.' Some of you like, 'Yes, I am very Canadian.' All right. I'll learn to interpret these semiotic signs, I'm sure, at some later point. I noticed that none of you raised two hands, which would have been a very American thing to do. So yes, there you go. Laugh at American jokes. That's another tell.
So I'm sure that in your Canadian or other educations, you had a terrific background in something like world history or, you know, Western civilization, which gave you the same material that I'm about to give you, but hopefully this will be useful anyway. We have to have a sense of what empire was for the reasons that I've given you, but also just because it's the dominant feature of about 500 years of world history. We can't really understand the history of the world in the 20th century without the previous five centuries or so. And I think it's not really arguable that the main feature, or at least a major feature, of the history of the previous 500 years was the empire.
Okay. So by empire what do I have in mind? And here it's very important to understand that there are different kinds of state forms. And here I'm going to fight against, and I have to fight against, and you may also have to fight against, a general lazy, lackadaisical tendency of the last, let's say, 35 years or so, which is to say that history is essentially over. There's nothing new under the sun. There are no real alternatives, like what you see is what you get. You know, for better or for worse, this is it, right? That idea that essentially the form of politics that we have is the only form of politics we can ever have, which can be an optimistic idea, it can also be a very pessimistic idea.
That idea has become very central, and it's important to just rip that away, because one can't understand the possibility of a change of internal regime unless one realizes that history contains lots of possibilities. And for the purposes of this lecture, what one has to understand is that changes of regime inside a country are very often connected to a change in world order, a change in the notion of what the world order should be, or an actual change in the world order. So if you're not clear on what I mean by that, consider the politics of the United States of America, which is, if you don't know, it's a large country immediately to the south of Canada.
And in the United States of America, just this is, I'm just opening a little bubble here. You can see that changes in the structure of domestic politics are accompanied by, let's call them, queries about the nature of the world order, right? Is it acceptable to invade other countries and abduct heads of state? Is it acceptable to talk about recolonizing other people's colonies? So there's a, let's put it very generously, there's a conversation in the United States about the nature of the world order which is directly related to the kind of authoritarian regime change which is underway inside the United States. Right? So we can't handle the question of domestic politics and radical change without having a sense of what empire is.
And this is a very classic observation. Indeed, the whole rhetoric of this question in English is phrased around the balance between a republic and an empire. Right? The notion is that, and if you have seen, okay, this is going to be an antique reference, but like you can pretend to know what I'm talking about. If you have seen the Star Wars movies, they are framed entirely around the classical question of republic and empire. It is no accident that the good guys are from a republic which falls and the bad guys are from an empire which rises. The notion is that there is an alternative between republic and empire, and that for an empire to rise a republic must fall, and that these are the two possible alternatives.
So I'm going to start with this. It's going to get a little more complicated along the way, but one intellectual binary which can be helpful is to think of a republic and an empire as being alternatives. We get this of course from the history of Rome, where republics and empires alternated, and then of course also more recently from the history of France, where the French continue to rack up high numbers of empires and republics. They're currently on republics. So that's one way of thinking about it, this binary. And in this binary you would then think of a republic as having citizens.
So again this will be more problematic later on. We'll think about it because not necessarily everybody is a citizen and so on. But in a republic you would tend to have citizens. Citizens would be the operative concept, whereas in an empire you would tend to have subjects. People would tend not to be active agents of politics but rather subject to power. Another way to think about the difference between a republic and an empire. And again, I'm setting these out as ideal types, right? So it's very easy to say that there's no republic like this or there's a blurring between empire and republic. And of course there is, right? You're living in a blurring between empire. We are all right now in Canada in a blurry area between empire and republic every day.
So of course in reality these things are blurred. But as concepts, another way to think about the difference between empire and republic is center and periphery. So in a republic, in principle, all of the areas are equal. There aren't provinces that are inferior and provinces that are superior. There isn't a metropole which is the center of everything and then provinces which don't matter. In principle the entire territory is equal. Whereas in an empire there tends to be a metropole, a big city or a central area where the wealth and power is concentrated, and an unself-consciously unequal relationship with the periphery, with the rest of the territory.
Okay. So then, and now I'm slowly easing our way from concepts into history. So then we have to ask how old is this notion of empire? Has politics always been this way? And before I get into talking about empires, I just want to note in here, I'm looking ahead a little bit to the Ukraine lecture. I want to note that even though today I'm going to be talking about empires and I'm going to go through a fairly standard chain of events from Mesopotamia through Greece to the big European world empires, it's important to remember that these are not the only forms of politics possible.
Okay? So we're about to go through 3,000 years of history very quickly and then 500 years of history less quickly. And when we follow a narrative line like this, you could get the impression that all there was in the world the entire time that I'm talking was empire, and that the only form of politics that is possible therefore must be this unequal form of politics. And so I just want to say before we start that that is not necessarily the case, that alongside the forms of politics that I'm talking about there were other kinds of political organizations as well, and that right from the beginning of politics, right from the very beginning, there were alternatives to the kinds of systems that I'll be talking about.
I'm about to start with ancient Mesopotamia very quickly, but I want you just to remember, and we'll talk more about this when we get to the Ukraine lecture, that even as in Mesopotamia there were forming city-states and then empires, walled cities with huge temples and concentrations of power, there were also at the same time other people, for example north of the Black Sea in what's now Ukraine, who seem to have much more decentralized forms of politics without visible centers of power, and where the relations between men and women, for example, seem to have been very different. I'm going to say more about this later, but I just want to mark it now.
And the reason I want to mark it now is that there's a danger in the kind of story that I'm about to tell. It's not that it's not true. It's that when you follow one narrative arc, right, then you might, like if you're on a roller coaster, okay, you guys know what a roller coaster is, right? Roller. Yeah. Okay. So I never know when something has a different name in Canadian. Like it sneaks up on you. It's like every 10,000th word it turns out to be a different word, right? And so it sneaks up on you. So I never know, like in roller coaster it's an obscure word. So like maybe you call it something else, right? I mean maybe you call it an up-and-downy or something, you know? Who knows? All right. Apparently not.
So if you're on the roller coaster, right, your eyes are in front of you, but you're just like, you're following the ride, right? You're on a ride, right? A narrative is like that. So you're following a line. And while you're on that line, it's not that the line isn't real. It's that there may be other things to the side of you that you're not seeing. So the line that we're following now is the history of empire. And I just need you to remember that there are other things to the side that we're not going to be seeing, right? There were alternative ways to do politics that this lecture isn't about, but that they are actually there.
Okay? So let's move on to actual empire then. So in the beginning, so to speak, in the beginning the first kinds of polities we know about look pretty imperial. They are the city-states of Mesopotamia, today's Iraq, a bit into Iran. The first major empire that we know about is called the Akkadian Empire, with two Ks. It arises around 2300 BC. That empire is paradigmatically the sort of thing I was just talking about. Major cities, cities asserting unequal relations over other cities, cities exploiting the countryside, cities able to extract wealth from people who are working in very unequal relationships in the countryside.
And here comes another very important feature which is directly connected to empire from the beginning, and that is writing. So in the ancient Mesopotamian city-states and then in the Akkadian Empire, or well in Sumeria and the Akkadian Empire, and then in the Persian and Assyrian empires that followed, there was writing. Okay. And so I've just made a big pitch about how you need to write. And so now this is going to sound a little bit tense with that, okay? But writing seems to be directly implicated in imperial forms of rule from the beginning. The more pastoral, nomadic, decentralized contemporary kinds of political entities, contemporary to the moment I'm talking about, were illiterate or had very limited forms of written communication.
Whereas writing seems to have allowed for not only more complicated commercial relationships, which is where it seems to have begun, as a way to record debts, but also to allow for an imperial bureaucracy. Um, so, okay, I'm assuming that's a personal, not a general emergency. All right. Um, okay. No, I mean, you give lectures in Ukraine and like that's the app that goes off and then you, okay, then you have to go underground and continue the lecture. But we're not going to have to do that, which is good because I'm assuming there's no bomb shelter under this place because you live in happy, you know, innocent Ontario. All right.
So writing allows for the creation of an imperial bureaucracy. Writing allows for imperial organization. It also allows for the creation of a class of scribes or bureaucrats because of course not everybody is literate. You don't get to situations where very many people are literate until the 20th century. And jumping ahead a bit and removing the inconsistency that appears to be there in my account of writing, it's when writing and reading become general, arguably, that something like mass politics or even democracy in a mass sense become possible. Literacy has existed for, you know, 5,000 years plus. But for almost all that 5,000 years it has been the property of a very, very small number of people: scribes, bureaucrats, priests.
Okay. So writing allows for the creation of organizational power. It also allows for the creation of symbolic power. So for example in Mesopotamia what you could do, and you know you would have done it if you could, don't fool yourselves. If you had been a ruler of Mesopotamia and you'd conquered somebody else's kingdom, you put up a huge stele. You put up a huge monument to yourself in which you are twice as big as everybody else.
Okay. So, like you're Canadian. You're pretending this doesn't sound like fun. I appreciate that. That represents a morally superior attitude towards this question. I'm learning from you all. Okay. So maybe you wouldn't have done this. Maybe you wouldn't have enjoyed it. All right. Possible. In any event, this is what they did. They put up these, and you've seen them in museums, I'm sure, they put up these enormous monuments to yourself in which you are figured as very large. Your opponent is very small. You're standing on top of them. They may have a spear through their throats. And then you have writing explaining why your victory was just and why your victory was eternal.
And these monuments are meant to be forever, right? And they come pretty close to being forever in some cases. If you write in stone and you write in clay as people did in the ancient world, then those writings can in fact be recovered by 19th century German archaeologists or later on English archaeologists, and then you know your legacy actually is in some sense real. Or consider, taking a step to the side, the Egyptian pyramids and the writing inside Egyptian pyramids, right? That writing, right, the first time I ever came to this city was because of an Egyptian pharaoh, and we knew something about the Egyptian pharaoh because of pyramids and because of writing on stone, right? So writing also creates the possibility of an emperor who lives beyond his own lifetime in some sense, right? Without writing, you can't have that.
And one dimension of empire is economic. It's about exploitation. Empire is organizational. It's about a center that is organizationally superior to the places it conquers. But it's also about legacy. There's a symbolic aspect to empire. Not that everyone is going to live forever necessarily, but that the person on top may think that he has some sort, or she, we'll get to some important she's, that he or she has some kind of afterlife which can be secured by writing.
Okay. So there was a powerful antique notion of the translation of empire, translatio imperii, where the notion was that there was one empire, it was replaced by another empire, it was replaced by another empire. So you would have an Akkadian Empire and then you might have, you know, then you might have a Persian Empire and then we get to the Greeks. And the Greeks, so again I don't know how you all were taught about the past, and I assume that we weren't all taught about it in the same way. But for many people, the Greeks would be the contrast, and this is of course how the Greeks saw themselves. The Greeks would be the enlightened contrast with these early empires.
Whereas these early empires, you know, from the Greek point of view were barbarian and despotic and their learning was limited. The Greeks, the fifth century, especially the fourth century Greeks, the Greeks were something else. The Greeks were democrats. The Greeks were the founders of science and math and so on. Now upon inspection, this breaks down pretty quickly. It was the Mesopotamians who did much of the heavy lifting when it comes to math and astronomy. But there's a very specific point with the Greeks which I want you to grasp. It is true of course that in some of the Greek city-states there was democracy. It's a cliché, but there's a reason why we use a Greek word for democracy.
However, democracy in Greek city-states where they had it was a matter for the citizens. And there are two points about the citizens that I want you to think about when we think about blurring now the notion between a republic and an empire, or when we think about this larger historical problem, which is our problem today, not just in this lecture but in the world, the larger historical problem of how you do a democracy which is not imperial.
So the first thing to think about is that inside a Greek city-state, not everybody was a citizen, right? The women obviously not. The slaves obviously not. And not even all of the non-slaves. So the citizens were a minority. They were a voting minority. They did in fact have debates. They did in fact model and exemplify some of the things that we think of as positive about democracy. But the citizens were a limited class of the population of a city-state. That's the first thing I want you to notice.
The second thing I want you to notice is that to be a citizen meant that you were allowed to colonize other places. So one of your rights as a citizen was to colonize places beyond your own city-state. And of course from your point of view as a citizen that is a very important right. That could be a very nice thing for you to do. However, it illustrates very nicely the connection between democracy and empire, right, or the possible connection between democracy and empire. The people who have the right to vote are the same people who have the right to take land when there's conquest, right? And those things in Greece were integrally, organically connected.
Okay, which we're doing the translation of empire very quickly here. But this brings us to Rome. So Rome is, at least in the English-speaking world, Rome is the paradigmatic empire. Rome is what brings us this binary opposition between republic and empire which is so important in our language and perhaps in our practice. And Rome also brings us, okay, what other very important idea does Rome bring us, students? Don't worry, just the back of your head will be on camera, so like nobody's going to, you hadn't even thought of that. Okay, what other important idea would we get from Rome? Yeah.
Okay, bigger, grander. Yes, definitely true. The Senate, yes, multi-chambered parliaments, absolutely. Coup d'état, daggers in the back, all kinds of things we get from Rome. But very broadly, when I say Rome, what do you think of? Yes.
The Roman Empire doesn't actually cease to exist until it's conquered by the Ottomans, when Constantinople is conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. So roughly a thousand years on. All right. So what happens with Rome? Okay. So now let's take a step back. In these classical empires that I've been talking about, think about the bodies of water. Okay. In these classical empires we've been talking about, the bodies of water were the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
And the world ended at what we now call the Persian Gulf, or they were the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The Atlantic, which was just called ocean, was terrifying and unknown. Right? So when the Romans conquered Britain and they went across the English Channel, they were touching ocean, and that was thought of being something which was incredibly courageous, like to the point of being foolhardy, because the Mediterranean everyone knew, and the Black Sea was very difficult but it was familiar, but ocean, the Atlantic, was terrifying and unknown. It was known that it was there, but it was thought to be infinite, which is actually a perfectly reasonable thing to think.
And I'm noting this because this is going to be a major difference between the Romans, the Greeks, and everyone before, and then what is going to come next. Okay. So when Rome breaks, oops, when Rome breaks, there's an Eastern Roman Empire which continues for another thousand years, and then there is the emergence of Islam and Islamic states. And what that means is that the North African part of the Roman Empire breaks away and becomes something else. So Rome was an empire around the Mediterranean and further east.
Christianity in Europe is something different because the Roman Empire converts to Christianity. But then after the Roman Empire ceases to control Western Europe, the northern African part becomes Muslim mostly. There are big exceptions, of course, Christians in Egypt, Jews of course, but in general northern Africa, which had been part of Rome and securely Christian, becomes something else. And so the story of European empire, or the story really of the creation of Europe, is the story of north of the Mediterranean.
And I mention this just because it's a huge historical break. This whole notion of Europe, which may seem permanent and age-old and so on, has to do with the break between Islam and Christianity, which happens around the time that Roman power is ceasing to function. So after Roman power ceases to function, Christianity continues. Christianity has a chance at all in the world because the Roman Empire made Christianity its official religion in the 4th century. That's the only reason, by the way, that Christianity is a major world religion. But Christianity continues to spread northward into Europe even when Roman power is no longer a factor. And that is a major step in the creation of this thing that we call Europe.
Okay. And this leads to the creation of a number of early medieval European kingdoms. The most important of them is the kingdom of the Franks, so otherwise known as the Carolingian Empire, otherwise known as the domain of Charlemagne, which is established in a certain formal sense in a nice round number of the year 800. Okay. The creation of these European states, which were in rivalry among one another, led to a reaction in the north on the part of the people that we call the Vikings.
And the Vikings are the people from Europe who carry out the first, let's call it, mini globalization. It gets overshadowed by the globalization that follows, but it's still quite impressive. The Vikings, from roughly the year 750 to roughly the year, let's say, 1100, are present, barely, in North America. I know they really, they barely got here, but they did get here. Present in Greenland, Iceland of course, Scandinavia where they're from, all the way through Europe and into much of Asia and the Middle East, and also a bit in Northern Africa.
In one way or another, for those 400 or 500 years, Scandinavians with their maritime technology are able to spread around the world, found states, conquer states in the Mediterranean. They control France, their descendants control England, they found a state in Kiev, as we'll be talking about later. So the Vikings, in reaction to the land power of continental Europe, expand using their own boats, their maritime technology, over much of the known world, and indeed expand the boundaries of the known world. So an interesting thing, for example, happens in Greenland, which is...
That the the the Vikings represent people who, after the end of the last ice age, so you know, come into come up from Africa and and go into Europe and so to speak remain or turn left. Whereas after the last ice age, there were also people who came up from Africa and turned right, went all across Asia, crossed the Bering Strait, went across what's now Canada and ended up in Greenland. Okay, so those two groups of people, which were separated more than 10,000 years before, met in Greenland. The Inuit and the European Vikings, the people who turned left and the people who turned right after the last ice age, met in Greenland because because Viking exploration brought them into contact with with Inuit. Just one way to think about the the drama and the scale of what the Vikings were able to do.
Okay, so that that is the the the the forerunner of the major European age of exploration, which the difference between this and the the previous empires is that in the coming European age of exploration, the coming European age of empire, exploration is going to go across ocean, across the Atlantic Ocean, across the Pacific Ocean. That's going to be the main that's going to be the main difference. And the the primary causes of this are have to do with disease and technology. So there disease, technology, and and the Ottoman Empire. So the the the black the the period of the Black Death begins in 1346 and wipes out roughly a third of the European population. And in the recovery from the Black Death, there is there's also a major economic revival and economic transformation.
The the the second thing which happens has to do with the year 1453, which we've already which we've already mentioned. Um, the in in in 1453, the the Ottoman Empire takes Byzantium. Um, and this mean this has a huge effect on world trade. So up until that time, I mean with major interruptions, but just imagine this in general. Up until that time, the main way that Europeans could trade with the world was a land route which would go from Europe in various ways across um across the Near East or across the steppe into into China, into East Asia. When the Ottoman Empire takes Constantinople in 1453, um, Constantinople is of course today Istanbul, right? So as of 1453, it becomes Istanbul. There's a whole They Might Be Giants song about this which you can use, you know, if you're having trouble. Um, but it so after 1453, it becomes Istanbul. But when the Ottoman Empire takes Constantinople, what this is this is one of the last steps in the creation of a vast Near Eastern and European empire which now controls the trade routes to China. Okay, so 1453 is a turning point in economic history for this reason as well.
Um, and so at at the same and then the final thing which happens is that um the Hundred Years' War, the Hundred Years' Wars, which I don't have time to get into in Europe, come to an end in in 1453 as well. Okay, so in 1453, Europe is recovering from war. Europe is recovering from from plague, and the major trade route to the rest of the world has been blocked apparently permanently by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Those are the factors, um, in addition to the technology of improved ships and navigation. Those are the factors which allow for the exploration of the world and the age of empire or the age of exploration, which is our which is our major subject.
Okay, so to to jump ahead to what this means, the our our the main thing which happens now is that five quite small European countries come over the course of the next 400, 500 years to control or to at least dominate, establish some kind of form of economic or political hegemony over much of the rest of the world. Um, five territories which in their Europe which in their in their European um in their European domains are much smaller than a can any Canadian province you care to name. Well, except maybe for some of those on the east, but you know, much smaller than than Ontario. Tiny countries come to control huge swaths of the world um by way of of maritime power. And the important and the what's different about these empires from previous empires is that they depend upon they depend upon ships crossing oceans and they are not contiguous.
So the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Portuguese Empire, these are not that the domains that are controlled don't necessarily touch one another. Okay, that may seem like a small thing, but it's it's it's something which is which is enabled by the global scale. Now, when I say this, I'm not saying that there are no longer land empires, and we'll come back to them. The Ottoman Empire, of course, is a land empire in southeastern Europe and in the Near East. Um, Russia will become a land empire. Um, Japan later on will become um will become a land and sea empire. Other empires are going to join this, but um but the the our the main players here are going to be these small European countries.
This all begins with an attempt, as I said, to reestablish trade. Um, and by the way, just just a small note, trade and this like in the like in our digital age when so much of what we spend money on is stuff that we Okay, I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound preachy, so forgive me if I do, but so much of what we spend money on is stuff that we want, right? That rather than stuff that we need. The the digital age brings this to a point, but it's always been true. So the the the things that the trade routes were about were not necessarily in fact generally not things that people needed, but things that humans really liked. And we you can't actually do human history, the history of empire in particular, without taking into taking into account this particular aspect of human nature, which is there are things that we really like to the point that we'll go to a lot of trouble and in fact cause all kinds of harm in order to get them. And those things are things like spices.
Okay, so spices admittedly also have utilitarian properties like they they they can keep they can keep um they can keep food good for longer, but also people just really like them. And then we get into things like like like coffee, right? Coffee like how many of you you know like how many of you like had coffee before you how many of you drinking coffee right now because it's a long lecture. Exactly. So the um so so like that was not a human need, right? Like we didn't even know that stuff existed. But then once we knew it existed, once Europeans knew about coffee, right, suddenly you had to have coffee. Um, uh, chocolate, right, that the species went on for a million years, you know, without chocolate. But once once people figured out there was a thing like chocolate, they were willing to go to a lot of trouble and kill a lot of other people along the way in order to get chocolate, molasses, other sweeteners, right? All of these things we don't again forgive me for sounding preachy, but we don't actually need this stuff, but boy is it pleasurable. And so and those pleasurable things, right?
And so like again like consider consider the current 21st century American like the the the pretense of the of of the intervention in Venezuela or other south like we talk about drugs all the time. Yeah, the Americans are using a lot of drugs. I mean we do we use a lot of do we need them? Whose fault fault is it, right? I mean from an imperial position you can say oh it's somebody else's fault, right? And so then rather than like going so so simultaneously while you're while you're getting it from other countries you're also attacking them because like somehow it's their fault that you have these desires. But I guess it's that word desire which I just wanted to make sure I got into the lecture because when I say things are economic I don't want you to think oh it's all about rationality and things that we need and things that are easily calculated, right? People human beings also are motivated highly motivated by pleasure um and by by things by by new pleasures they can get used to. And the age of of European exploration is also the age of Europeans encountering pleasures which they hadn't had before and those pleasures coming to seem like a normal part of life or like or like a necessity.
Right? So for I mean it's it's a banal point, but many of us on our way to this lecture would have indulged in you know products made from sugarcane and products made from um from uh from from uh from coffee beans, right? And that's that's just a trivial example of how pleasures get integrated into daily life. Okay, close that parenthesis. So the so the trade so the the the two main ways that people tried to get to Asia were and now we're talking about the 15th century, the late 15th century after 1453. Think about it logically, okay? And it's an incredibly interesting problem. You don't know much about the rest of the world. Your written history, the history that you have is about the Mediterranean, right? What do you do to get to Asia if you can no longer so walk or take a horse? How do you get to Asia? Well, there are two possible ways. You can go down around Africa, which is what Vasco da Gama does um in 1494, or you can head west across ocean, right, across the Atlantic, thinking that since the world is round, and people did know the world was round, since the world is round, that will eventually get you to Asia. And that's what Christopher Columbus did in in 1492.
In both cases the motivation was trade. It was to get to markets that people already knew existed in Asia. In both cases the consequence was um was was the creation of empires in the New World as it was called, because what we now call North America and South America were not known to Europeans, and also in Africa as as Europeans go around Africa and also in in in Asia. So the first two countries who were successful in this are the Portuguese number one and and then and the Spanish. The Portuguese and the Spanish both control reach and control large parts of what's now South America. Um, an incredibly interesting story that we don't have time for, unfortunately. Spain destroys other empires, the empires of the of the Aztecs and and the Incas. Um, the in these there were roughly 10 million people in these domains and roughly 90% of them are killed. The Portuguese control what's now Brazil and other parts of Latin of South America. But the Portuguese also because they go around the Cape um they they they go around Africa. They make their way to India. They manage to establish colonies and trade presence in in Africa and in in in Asia as well.
The next big step, and we have to do this very clo very very quickly, is the rise of the Dutch. Um, in the in the late 16th century and 17th century, um, the Dutch and their East India Company largely supplant the the Portuguese in um in in Asia. And for a time it's the Dutch who are the major maritime power in the world, and that is reflected in Dutch painting. Okay, that means it's 10 o'clock, right? Yeah. Okay. I look at it and it's like I have 10 minutes left. She has another sign which says 60 minutes left. Okay. Um, so the uh the the so so the Dutch, and this by the way is is an example of a phenomenon which I'm going to mention now in case I forget to mention it later. There are a lot so so there are lots of nice little European countries now, and you know like Belgium or like the Netherlands, and like they're in Europe now and they're very small and they're very nice and they may not remind you in the first conversation that they used to have incredibly advanced and exploitative imperial relationships with much of the world.
Um, and I'm just noting that right because like in in the in this in this post-imperial world one of the things which happens in Europe in general is that all the European countries um go go back to oh yes well we've always been like little tiny countries in Europe and mainly you know we've been nice to each other except for those world wars. Um, and the world wars were a bad thing but we've learned from them. And what doesn't happen very often in European history and what we're trying to do a bit today and the rest of this class is connect those world wars to a world of empire of which they were the last stage. Incidentally, um, the two world wars were called world wars chiefly because they had to do with powers that were world powers fighting each other, and they were world powers because of the age of empire, right? In the First World War, it was everybody's imperial subjects against everybody else's imperial subjects.
And I mean if you if there's like when there's color when there's color photography um of that this becomes much clearer later on, right? But it's not it's not native Europeans against native Europeans. It's everybody's subject peoples against everybody's subject peoples. That's one of the reasons why it's a world war. And in the second the Second World War um we'll talk much more about this, but the Second World War is in large measure an attempt to recreate something like an empire, right? Um, on these on these models. So the so I'm just I'm I'm the Dutch are just a wonderful example of this because if you go to and I recommend this if you go to the Netherlands and you go to art museums you see you see the spectacularly good art which is largely about trade and ships and the nice things that bourgeois households get because of this trade and the lovely sons and daughters that the traders families have who get portraits and so on, right? It's all a result of this moment um and that amazing art is all a result of this moment. But it's now within a national framework somehow, right? It's a Dutch art museum. It's not a it's not a museum of the Netherlands and the world. It's a Dutch art museum.
The same goes, you know, for Belgium. Like what what what could the Belgians have possibly done wrong? Well, they they established the most we'll get to this, but they established one of the most extraordinarily exploitative relationships in the history of the modern world with Congo. Um, and and but when you get to a Belgian art museum, everything is framed in a national way and it's hard to understand what these relationships actually are. Okay, end of parenthesis. So the Dutch are the next stage in the 17th century. They're the most impressive maritime power. Um, they um they push they they push the Portuguese to a large extent out of Asia. They become the dominant presence in Japan. Okay.
Slavery. Now, now slavery, it's so slavery is not an unfamiliar subject, I realize, but it's important to understand that so long so far as we can tell, slavery has been present from the from the beginning and that political organizations, bigger or smaller, have tended to be in the business of enslaving people and selling them. It's uh we're trading them for something shiny. This goes back way before the world empires that I'm talking about. So there will be changes in slavery which I'll talk about be when it be when it becomes a global phenomenon. But in order to understand the global phenomenon, it's also important to recognize that slavery is present essentially everywhere you look in history until quite recently. And sadly, even in the modern world, it's much more present than one in I mean, today is much more present than one would like to think.
But in in in the histories of smaller states and larger states, um, including in some of the the histories of even East European states that we'll talk about later, you see you see that there's a very distinct moment often where some sort of clan finds a way to enslave people around them and to sell them for something that they want. And this is a fairly universal tendency in modern in modern in in in world history. Um, and so and then what happens then is that sometimes these these these enslaving relationships become more profitable when someone else comes into the picture who who creates an external demand for slaves. So a um a ve a a very important example of this which we'll talk about later um and I'll just mention it now because it's probably unfamiliar to most of you is um is the case of of Eastern Europe in the 700s and 800s and 900s when uh the the Vikings from Scandinavia who I already mentioned they were they made they made a tremendous amount of profit by going into what is now northwest Western Russia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine and enslaving people at scale and selling them southwards um by way of intermediaries to Islamic empires who had demand for slaves, right? And so they traded off Europeans, you know, but people there was no Europe at the time, right? But my point is that the people who we might now see as Europeans were trading other Europeans to into Asia in for for silver. And the the evidence of all this is in the huge silver hoards which one can find on along these trade routes and also in Sweden and especially on the island of Gotland.
So this is just one example though of a general phenomenon. If my clan is enslaving your clan and then it turns out that there's a lot of money to be made, I will keep enslaving your clan and I will do it more ambitiously in order to make that money. And this is just a this is a pattern um unfortunately which is which is general. What happens with let's call it globalization right as trade as trade is is the is the technology of movement becomes more impressive then the technology of the slave trade also becomes more impressive and people are carried for longer and longer distances to make these profits. Um, and so the the Viking example, which involved a lot of enslavement, um, the Viking example involved a lot of enslavement in part because the Vikings had superior maritime technology and they were able to carry people along rivers for long distances. So, for example, down the Dnieper River, they would carry enslaved people in their in in wooden boats and then when they reached the rapids, they would take the boats out of the Dnieper and then the slaves would carry the boats, right? And then they put them back into the river and that's and by that route you would get southward and you would so the better your technology is the the further you can trade slaves.
So I say all of this because if we don't understand that slavery was already a well-established form of human activity um before we get to the age of empire, we can't really understand how slavery becomes so important because these are these are these are transitional stages. So what happens? So so now we're going to get to So now we'll get to the global point the global history of of slavery which largely has to do with with Africa and uh and the the New World. So as as everywhere else um okay a couple of things about Africa. So the first thing is that in Africa in the 19th century there was a state system. Um, and that state system had largely survived the first few centuries of European colonialism. Um, and that state system like other state systems this is normal, right? Okay. Because like one move I'm just going to like go meta on you for a minute now because in contemporary discussions of slavery what often happens is people say oh the Europeans they did this terrible thing and they enslaved Africans and yes they did a terrible thing they enslaved Africans but you can only understand that if you know that slavery had been part of human history before that it's not like they invented it. They just did it at a much larger scale.
And then one of the counterarguments is oh no it was the Africans' fault because look the Africans enslaved one another. Yes, the Africans did enslave one another and so did everybody else pretty much over the course of human history, right? So, one has to understand that like things get bigger. They get they grow to a larger scale and the transatlantic slave trade is, you know, from a contemporary ethical point of view an atrocity on a on a much larger scale than previous forms of slavery. But it can only exist because of of the traditions and the political possibilities that were already there. Okay. So what what happens then is that these these uh slavery which had been a Black Sea phenomenon, a Mediterranean phenomenon um suddenly becomes an Atlantic phenomenon as the technology changes and as the possibilities change and much of the slaving uh takes place in Africa um with some Africans exploiting other Africans or with um often Arab slave traders organizing things. But for what is now a much larger economic demand which is in the New World.
And again to return to the point many of the things which are coming from the New World and for which human beings will be enslaved on the scale of millions are not strictly speaking necessary right for anyone. They're things that we enjoy. And I just mentioned this because like enjoyment and pleasure are always important factors in human history and they're not necessarily the ones that we're the most self-aware about, right? And uh and so like the things that we're addicted to, the things that we really like or the things that we're brought into like the things that start to seem necessary to us, those may be those may be the engines of dramatic changes even though we don't necessarily notice it because oh this is just something that I like. This is a thing which brings me pleasure. Okay. Um, again, sorry if I'm being preachy and like it's okay. It's okay to enjoy your lives. I've just it's a but it's it's it's in order to see how this all works.
The the cruelty and and and the cruelty um and the oppressiveness and the mass death and trauma involved in slavery has to do with trade in things like sweeteners in large measure, right? Trade in things which didn't necessarily not artificial sweeteners, I mean like sugar, right? Molasses things things that made life more pleasant but which weren't necessarily strictly speaking necessary. Okay. So with the Atlantic slave trade um with the with the opening of the Atlantic and with all of the money which could be made in the New World, slavery then becomes a much larger phenomenon. Um, it becomes a much more African phenomenon. Uh, it's uh and the and the key centuries here and forgive me if I misspoke earlier the key centuries here are the 17th and the 18th century.
All right, for the colonization of Africa though there's an irony of the slave trade which one also needs to grasp and that is this: in the 17th and 18th centuries um when the slave trade becomes tremendously important for the Spanish, the Portuguese and then later for the English colonizers of the New World. Um, during that period the trade with Africa in human beings is largely on the coasts. So it would be on the coasts that the Europeans would interact with whoever was providing them with the slaves. Right? This did not require any penetration of the African continent. So during the slave trade, of course, slavery exacerbated, worsened, in some cases brought down interior African political units, but the contact points were on the coast. And I have to set this up because there's an irony which I need you to understand.
Now, over the course of the 18th century, some of the important European states um abandoned slavery and the slave trade. France in 1794. Um, the British in a longer process from 1807 to to 1833. Um, the the Ottoman Empire in the third quarter of the 19th century. Um, over the course of the 19th century, most European powers cease to allow the slave trade and then eventually emancipate slaves or make slavery illegal. Um, an exception is the US, which I'm going to which I'm going to get to in a moment. What happens then is that the European trade with Africa which had been enslaves on the coast becomes a penetration of Africa for other goods. So it's the end of the slave trade which is a precondition for what becomes the race what's called the race for Africa or the contest for Africa in the last quarter of the 19th century where Europeans become aware of other resources again not necessarily things that people need. Ivory is not actually something that you need. Um, but the ivory trade was hugely important in all of this. Um, but also palm and so so it's not palm but also um oils uh and so things that things that people need but also things that people things that people wanted become the subject of a more and more thorough European penetration of Africa over the course of about two decades the 1880s and the 1890s at the end of the 19th century and this is post-slave trade it's what it's what it's what happens after the slave trade is over.
Okay, so this brink has been radically reduced. Um, this brings us to Britain and France. So, Spain and Portugal, the Netherlands, and then the last two major world powers in temporally, the last two in order, in chronological order, are the British and the France. The French, they come they come last. And of course, Canadian history is all about the contest between the British and the French and how that turns out. So the first English colonies are quite late um relatively speaking in North America uh 15 the 1580s or so. Um, the the British are in the shadow of the Dutch until pretty deep into the 17th century. The um the main point of and you'll all know this I'm sure but like the the main the point where British and French preponderance was decided was the Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763, after which Canada and India both shift to being chiefly under under British hegemony.
And then it's also in North America where you have um in in the American War of Independence in 1776 the the first European on European anti-colonial struggle. There will be others after that, but this was the the American Revolutionary War is an is is an interesting example of European settlers who are revolting against the main European power, which is Great Britain. Um, using what we would now call an anti-colonial line of argumentation. And it's it's it's interesting and important because it reveals I mean it's not just important because it begins the history of the United States and um and and and uh with the British removed so after not so much the Revolutionary War but after the War of 1812 um which you know Canadians will remember because you got to go burn Washington and do other fun things. Um, the uh the the um after the War of 1812, the British are essentially removed from the American the the United States part of the North American continent, which allows the Americans to proceed very quickly westward, right, over the course of the 19th century, very quickly westward across to the Pacific.
So it's important for that reason but it's also important for the re for the uh for the reason that I mentioned um earlier with respect to the Greeks. So the the the American founders were students of Greece and Rome. They were Enlightenment thinkers. They were students of Greece and Rome. And you can see in the early American state uh the same tension broadly speaking that one sees in Athens or in the Greek city-states. Namely that yes um unlike the British Empire, the the United States of America was established as a constitutional republic where the predominant um political condition was meant to be a condition of citizenship. However, it reproduces um it reproduces the the the the roughly speaking it reproduces the condition that one finds in ancient Greece which is yes, we are citizens, we're not subjects of a king, but not everybody is a citizen and there's slavery.
And indeed, this is not, you know, a subject that you have to pursue very far unless you're interested in US history. But the arguments that Americans made on behalf of slavery were very often precisely that the Greeks had slaves and the Romans had slaves and it's an integral part of having a republic or a democracy to have slavery and that the debates in the 1840s and 1850s leading up to the Civil War, those kinds of arguments were very often made and they were made after the Civil War and in fact they're being made today as well. Um, that so yes, it's a republic and there are citizens but not everybody is a citizen. Women obviously can't vote. Um, people without property can't vote. And of course, slaves can't vote. That's the that's the starting condition of of the American republic. And I say this because it's it's it's important to see this and to be able to ask the question of okay, can you if if a republic so republic and empire are they bi it's a binary conceptually, but it's not necessarily a binary in history. You can be a republic and you can also have imperial tendencies, right? And so the question is, can you actually get I mean I think this is the question for today, but can you actually get all the way to a republic? Can you and and and and if so, like doesn't that require you understanding your own imperial history?
So, I mean, again, I'll just toss this out as a as a possible connection to the events of the day, but when um when ICE is invading American cities now, right, when ISIS is in Minneapolis right now, does this not look like some kind of late-stage imperialism? Does it not look a little bit like an empire which um is in addition to, you know, considering other countries it might invade and so on, is also having it out against its own history? Um, where the the the the people who identify themselves with the original settlers, um, which is what the word American can often mean in a white supremacist environment, that where the people who identify themselves with the original settlers are saying well the rest of you are not American or the rest of you don't belong here, right? Um, and is I mean it raises these questions, right? I mean these are fresh things and so there aren't clear answers but might that not be one answer to the question of what happens after empire which is is that you just keep doing it, but you do it on your own territory, right? Okay, I just close that bracket.
Okay, so um so that's that's the that's the British. Now I want to move I want to move to the European continent and we're now we're now reaching the point where some of this will start to have some some more obvious relevance to what happens in the totalitarian 20th century. The the French Revolution also bears within it a very obvious tension between the notion of a republic and an empire. And not to make fun of the French too much because I I love them of course um or you as the case may be uh but that tension is expressed in French history in the alternation between the state forms of republic and empire explicitly or implicitly. And from the beginning, it's expressed in the in the immediate transition from a revolution made in the name of the French Republic into the Napoleonic Wars. Um, and and the particular way that it comes out in in in French history, it's much more intellectually sharp than it is in American history, is the notion that we are simultaneously liberating the entire French nation. And as we do that, we are bringing liberation to other people abroad, right? Which is of course a very attractive idea. Um, that you know you can simultaneously free yourself and part of freeing yourself is you create a mass army and then that mass army goes out and defeats the noble feudal limited armies of other countries and then what you're bringing to them is liberation.
That's an I mean let's admit it like that okay don't have to admit it. Um, but that is an appealing political idea and it's a slightly different way that republican empire can be connected from the very beginning that if I have done such a wonderful job of liberating myself I have had a I have had a national revolution that makes me the lodestar the example for everyone else um and if I'm invading them I cannot possibly be doing anything else besides liberating them because I have this political knowledge which no one else has. And so the early 19th century the Napoleonic Wars um reveal that particular way of doing a politics of republic which can also feel like a republic a politics of empire. Napoleon of course said that he was out to clear empire away from Europe and he did defeat empires and he did destroy ancient entities like the Holy Roman Empire in the middle of Europe which had existed for centuries and centuries. He
did do those things and then he had put his brothers and his brothers-in-law in charge. There may be other examples of putting your brother-in-law in charge, but I mean I think it may bespeak an unusually healthy relationship between Napoleon and his brothers-in-law. It may bespeak, you know, an atypical unhealthy relationship. You need to get them out of his sight somewhere. But in any event, putting your brother-in-law in power is not exactly the same thing as liberating people, right? And okay, thank you for that. I realize you're probably too young to have brothers-in-law. I just wanted to be on the record that I love my brothers-in-law since this is being recorded. You're both wonderful people. Okay.
So, but the point though is the tension here that a republic is created and the very first thing or one of the very first things that republic does is that it liberates other countries — liberation in quotes — and over the course of the 19th century the French pioneer a version of politics which will be called Bonapartism, not after the first Napoleon, but after one of his successors, his grand-nephew, where Bonapartism means... And this is very interesting and now we're moving into how the legacy of empire, the history of empire and the history of democracy, or the legacy of empire and the practice of democracy work together. Bonapartism means: okay, I have come to power and democratic reforms maybe are desirable, but they seem very difficult to me. Like there are, you know, there are interests that work against them. You know, the people who own the land don't necessarily want land reform. You know, mass education, that also seems hard. Maybe we should just let the elite get it. I came to power in the name of something like democracy, but now that I'm in power, democracy seems difficult to me. But I have an idea and that is I'm going to invade another country.
Okay, so I'm putting this a little bit cynically, but what Bonapartism means — and the specific historical context is French intervention in the unification of Italy after 1859 — what Bonapartism means is that you take the force of democratic politics, right? You take the attraction of democratic politics, but rather than going through the painstaking process of the democratization of your own society, you direct that energy at some other country. And by a kind of logical magic, the fact that you're intervening in another country in the name of democracy must mean that you yourself are a democracy, right? Because if you weren't, you wouldn't be intervening in their country in the name of democracy, right?
Okay, there's a flaw in that logic, but it's a very powerful political logic and it's pioneered by the French, but then it's taken up about a decade later in a slightly more cynical but interesting form by the Germans. And now we're moving to European territory. What's special about the Germans? Okay, don't answer. What's special about the Germans historically is that you'll notice they weren't on the list of those small European countries which had major world empires. The Germans do in the 19th century have a presence. They have a presence in the Pacific. They have two zones of colonization in Africa, but they do not take part in this major wave from the let's say the 1490s to the 1890s of European colonization of the New World, Africa and Asia. There is no German state until January of 1871, when the Germans defeat the French and when they take this Bonapartist logic to the next level.
In the Bonapartist logic I say — and this is going to be a subtle difference but it's important — in the Bonapartist logic, I say we are a democracy, we are a republic, and therefore we're going to help other people become a democracy or republic. What Bismarck does is that he takes the democracy part out. What he says is: we are a nation, and therefore it is our destiny to bring together everyone who belongs to our nation inside Europe. Okay. And so that again it can seem progressive because you're saying I'm bringing the nation together, right? And the nation is a subject of politics. But interestingly, what's missing from it is any notion of equality. The Bismarckian solution to German unification was to say by way of military power and dramatic military victories, I'm going to solve the national question. And the victories were dramatic. The defeat of the Hapsburg monarchy first, the defeat of the French later on. These were dramatic military victories which allowed one German state, Prussia, to become the center of a larger unification project which is completed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in January 1871.
I just mention that because maybe like you have a big event, like you know maybe you're getting married and you're thinking like where can I do this? Like what would be dramatic — the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, right? Something you have something big planned. I mean you should probably make your reservation now because a lot of people have heard of this place. So the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Okay, you're going to remember this now. And you're also going to remember that when the French win the First World War, where are they going to make the Germans come? Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Okay.
So the point is that what Bismarck does, and this is his major innovation and this is also very pregnant with consequences for the future, is that he says I'm going to unify the nation by way of military force and it's the military force which becomes the crucial thing. There's actually no notion that it has anything to do with democracy for anybody. It's just the nation. So the category of the nation replaces the category of the republic or of a democracy. Bismarck doesn't claim to be founding a democracy, he's against it. It didn't work. We're against that. What he's doing is he's establishing a Reich. He's establishing an empire. But it's an empire for the German people. Right. So the German word for empire, which is Reich, becomes the name of the German state. It's a Kaiser. It's an empire of the emperor or something. It doesn't even pretend to be a republic or to be a democracy.
So that is as it were the imperial logic coming home and it's coming home in a very important place which is Germany because Germany by the end of the 19th century is surpassing the English to become the most important industrial power in the world. And so the logic of German unification is also partly a logic of markets and the logic of German imperialism after German unification is also going to be partly a logic of markets. Okay. Now I don't want to leave out before I come to the conclusion, I don't want to leave out the existence of the land empires. They're still there. Of course what we have followed and again remember like what I said about the roller coaster, we've been on one line of history. There are other lines of history the whole time, right? There are alternative forms of politics. There are forms of resistance. There are the people who are already there. There's all of that, right? We have not been on that. We've been on one line of history. And when you're on one line of history, it's important to remember to look to the side, right? And say, 'Okay, there are other things going on.' But the line of history we've mainly been on is the line of the maritime empires, the European powers which establish control, economic and political, over much of the world.
If you look off the roller coaster you'll see a hill which is very close by and that is the land empires which are there the entire time. I mentioned the Ottoman Empire which of course will exist until the First World War. Another empire which forms and will be a major subject in the Ukraine lecture a couple weeks from now is the Russian Empire which from a 13th century core around Muscovy will become the largest land domain in the world by 1821. The Pacific is a Russian lake all the way down to California.
Another empire or another imperial unit which of course we'll be considering at greater length as we move along is the American one. Over the course of the 19th century this American republic manages to provoke and defeat the Spanish and then it has a civil war which is about the principle of slavery chiefly. There's a complicated story about how exactly they get to the war, but it's fundamentally a war about slavery and it ends with the abolition of slavery. And again we'll talk more about this, but because the abolition of slavery in the United States was so late and because there were so many human beings of African origin on the territory of the United States, when that happens, the political legacy of slavery is going to be very important and I think intimately connected to this question of what kind of regime the United States had and will have. But we'll spend more time talking about that later.
Okay. But the point is this, just to note that there are land empires at the same time. These land empires like the Americans may have their origin in an earlier maritime empire, right? And this is part of the magic of the American story, which I realize that, you know, as non-Americans, most of you are not Americans, you all see through immediately, but the magic of the American story is that since you rebelled against a maritime empire, that means that you're not an empire, right? But before you laugh too much, this is not just an American story, it is largely the story of decolonization in general. So this is not just a story that Americans tell themselves. As decolonization proceeds in the course of the 20th century, and we'll have occasion to talk more about this, it will very often happen that as people liberate themselves from a maritime empire, the next step is to say, well, whatever we're doing now domestically couldn't possibly be exploitative or imperial because we've gotten rid of the imperial powers, right? So laugh at the Americans, you know, the appropriate amount, because this is actually unfortunately normal. When the maritime empire is removed, it is very tempting to say, 'Okay, now that the French, the English, the Portuguese, the Dutch, whoever is gone, what must follow must be some sort of equality and fair form of politics,' which isn't of course necessarily the case at all in the post-imperial world.
Okay, so land empires continue. And then I also want to mention the very special case of Japan, where we don't have much time for this, but I just need you to know that Japan manages to throw off Portuguese and then Dutch imperial power and then in the second part of the 19th century manages an industrialization which is largely commensurate with European industrializations. And then in a crucial moment, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to 1907, we see a non-European empire — because whatever Japan is, it's not a European empire — a non-European empire militarily defeat a European empire. So Russia of course is mostly in Asia, but its centers of power are Petersburg and then later Moscow and it's considered a European empire. So that's just a moment I want you to note: 1905 to 1907, the defeat of a European empire by a non-European empire.
Okay, closing thoughts and then we'll have your closing thoughts in Q&A. There are a few things that I want you just to catch from all of this. The first is that, and I've already said this, but this has largely been a history of small European domains who for a period controlled large parts of the globe. And that period was a long period, 400, 500 years depending on how you're counting. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England, Belgium to some extent. These countries end up controlling for quite a long time much of the world. And second point, slightly more abstract. This is how globalization happened. So when we say globalization, we often think like it's a word that summons up abstractions, right? When you say — I mean maybe it's different, you can correct me, but I think in general when we say or hear the word globalization we think of something universal or we think of something out of time, we think of just a state, a neutral state, we live in a globalized world. Okay, but this globalization was a historical process which took roughly half a millennium and that is the globalization that we had. We can't go back and make a different globalization. The globalization that we had and have was an imperial globalization. That is how it happened and it's the one from which we work when we start in the 20th century or the 21st.
Third point, and again I've said this but I'm going to say it again. I want you to notice the difference between the land empires and the sea empires. They tend to be different structurally because in a land empire there's usually a center and then you have a gradual spread or a gradual decline of prestige and wealth as you go away from the center. So the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul is the center. In the Russian Empire, Petersburg is the center. There's a center and then there's a kind of fading away and that fading away also concerns identity. So I mean in the Ottoman, the Ottomans have a terrible time deciding, or the Turks have a terrible time deciding after the end of the Ottoman Empire what a Turk is and who a Turk is. And this is typical. Who is a Russian, right, is a question that the Russians have a terrible time with. In fact, have not figured out. And part of that has to do with the legacy of a land empire where the changes from one tribe, one clan, later one nation to another can seem more gradual.
That's a difference. In a maritime empire, that's not the case. Right? If you're the Dutch East India Company, you have a fairly clear idea who the Dutch are, who the people are you're cooperating with, and then there's a much larger everybody else. If you're the British later controlling India, you have a very clear idea who you are, who you're cooperating with and educating, and the much larger everybody else. It's not a gradation. It's not gradual the way it is with a land empire. And this also means that practically — and I'm getting closer to the next point — practically when a maritime empire breaks up it has a kind of clarity that a land empire breaking up might not have. So when the British and the French, when we get into the 20th century as we will, when they lose their possessions, those possessions are gone. I mean there might be a moment of struggle for them, right? When the Dutch lose Indonesia after the Second World War they fight, they try to keep it, right? But once they've lost it, they've lost it.
Whereas in a land empire, if you lose some territory in the border regions, there's always the thought that perhaps we could get those back, right? Because it's just right next door to us. Whereas like when you're the French and you lose Vietnam, the notion that you'd go back to Vietnam seems pretty distant, right? Algeria is kind of a middle case, but you get my point. When it's a maritime empire and you're pushed out, it's a much more distant prospect that you're going to return. Whereas with a land empire, you're always thinking, well, you know, it's just right there. I can see it and it was just ours. Okay, so that's a structural thing. And that structural thing brings me into a contingency which I want you to understand because it's crucial for what happens in the history of the 20th century. And that is the nature of the First World War.
So I said, and this is important, the First World War is a world war because the contestants are world powers. The war itself, or almost all of it, takes place on the European continent. But the horrifying scale of destructiveness of the First World War has to do with the fact that the powers concerned are able to gather wealth and also to a considerable extent humans from all over the world. And then in a terrible four years they bring that wealth and those humans together and they fight this war on a very small bit of territory. And that's a general description of the horror of the First World War. But in terms of the outcome of the First World War, notice this, and this is just a contingent fact. It didn't have to be this way, but what happens in the First World War is that land empires lose and maritime empires win.
So, in one way or another, the land empires involved, they lose. The Germans lose, the Ottomans lose. The Russians, although they are on the other side of the war, they're on the side of the British and the French, they also lose in the sense that their state breaks up and they have a revolution. So the land empires are defeated or in one way or another fall apart and the maritime empires, the British and the French, they win. Okay? And that's just a contingent fact because it's an important contingent fact because it means that while you have one kind of decolonization, right? What happens to the Ottoman Empire? What happens to the Russian Empire on land? The question of decolonization for the British and the French possessions doesn't really arise until later, until after the Second World War. And the fact that the land empires lose, the fact that Germany loses is relevant to the rise of National Socialism, the fact that the Germans lose. And we'll return to exactly how that works and why it matters.
And so this is I think where I wanted to leave you except with one final thought. This lecture has lasted for about 90 minutes and in some way or another we've covered about 4,000 years, or we've covered four or five hundred years of imperialism, and I want you to take in that sense of time. So you may live in a world where it seems like we're constantly in the present or where history is over. The past may not seem to matter, but however that may be, in the late 19th century, in the world in which Hitler was born, Lenin was born, Stalin was born, Churchill was born, in the world in which that generation of people was born, empire was all but totally unquestionable.
It was the way things were and it was the way things had been for centuries. It was normal. So whatever sense of normality you have about this thing that we have now, try to empathetically imagine that they had that sense about empire and perhaps in a much more deep-rooted way because whatever we have now has not lasted for very long whereas a world of empire had been going on for half a millennium and arguably longer, right? And so that means that if you think about — and we'll get to this, we'll talk more about it — but if you think about the life trajectories of let's say a Hitler, it's not surprising. I mean, the incidental facts are incidental, but overall, it's not surprising that Hitler grew up reading fictional stories about the American West. It's not surprising that Hitler imagined that Germany should be a world power the way that the British were a world power because that was normal. That was the way that things were.
It's also not surprising that when Lenin thinks about communism, he thinks about it not on a national scale but on a world scale because that was a perfectly logical way to approach the problem. Right? What you might think — like we'll have — I mean I'm not asking about your political views, but you know I can usually tell them anyway just by the way you respond to various jokes and things. But when we talk about revolution in Canada, you're probably thinking about revolution in Canada, right? But there's a reason why — and we'll talk more about this — but there's a reason why Lenin thought that if there was going to be a revolution it could be and indeed had to be a world revolution, and that was because globalization had been created by four or five hundred years of empire.
So the world of empire — so the very different kinds of ideologies that we're going to be contemplating in the period after the First World War, they're not just ideologies which are self-consistent or contradictory or different from one another or mirroring one another. They also have to do with a biographical experience. And the biographical experience is growing up in the 1880s or 1890s, early 20th century, in a world of empire, in what, so to speak, had always been a world of empire, and then passing through the First World War and seeing many of those empires come down and then imagining what could come next. And there are different answers to that question of what could come next after empire, right? Equality is one answer. Another empire is another answer. There are different kinds of empire answers, but to see the 20th century and the 21st we have to set the stage in this way.
Okay. So that's the end of the lecture and now whatever questions you have, let's talk about them. And I think we're just going to do this in an organized way with a microphone because otherwise people can't hear. Do we have that microphone? Oh, look at that. Okay. Thank you.
