The other powers

Even as the external policies of other powers affected the British, so those policies were affected by them. In the phase before 1870, other powers, it might be said, worked very much in a British context, at once resentful of British predominance but allowed a considerable freedom of movement. In the new phase Britain’s primacy was challenged and the arrangements it had made in the previous phase brought into question. Its adjustments interacted with the policies of other powers. Their ‘imperialism’ might well differ. Indeed the ‘imperialism’ of each power was distinctive in its origins and purposes, in its relationship to the advance of industrialisation, and indeed in its relations with Britain. The common object was ‘state-building’, but it took various forms. In France the earlier defeat at the hands of its major rival, the British, had

conduced to a politics of ‘grandeur’, but European security always had priority, and it was not consistently pursued. In the absence of an industrial revolution, moreover, French activity overseas lacked an economic context. The role of naval officers, adventurers and missionaries was all the greater. Moreover, metropolitan governments were less completely in control. After its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1870-1 – or after the payment of the indemnity and the departure of the German troops – French colonial policy again became more active. It was still without an industrial backing. But the changed position of Britain enabled it – with the support of Germany under Bismarck and later with the alliance of Russia – to make advances in areas where it had earlier established footholds, in Africa and in Southeast Asia, and it became once more a major factor in British calculations, weak though it really was. At home the support for colonial policy remained limited. For some it was too transparent an attempt to divert attention from defeat in Europe. The nature of French politics under the Third Republic, however, allowed the ‘parti colonial’ an undue influence at home, and limited attempts to contain adventurers and indeed officials abroad. Other major European powers had established no footholds in the pre-1870

phase, and indeed acquired no territory in Southeast Asia in the imperialist phase. Neither Italy nor Germany was, however, inactive. Their very emergence as unified states was itself a change, and the apprehension that they

might intervene was kept alive by rumour but also by action, not merely in Southeast Asia itself. For Britain, Germany was the more significant of these powers. It was unified in 1871; it industrialised rapidly; it adopted a protectionist tariff in 1879; it adopted a colonial policy in 1883-5; it defined a challenge of principle at the Berlin conference. Italy, weaker and not industrialised, was easier to handle, even to deny. The emergence of other powers helped to change British policy. It also

influenced the minor colonial powers, the Netherlands and Spain, the continued existence of which had been part of Britain’s own pre-1870 pattern. Resented though British dominance might be, it had been a guarantee against the intervention of others. In the new situation that guarantee might be less effective. Both powers sought to strengthen their territorial control. The fact that they acted within the more-or-less accepted frontiers of their realms does not mean they cannot be qualified as imperialist. Their activities can be compared with those of Asian states that sought to adapt to the changes after 1870, the most successful being Siam. They also resemble those of the British themselves. They were reacting to the post-1870 challenge by affirming their claims. In the course of their endeavours the shadowy international position Aceh and Sulu had enjoyed was finally destroyed. The 1890s marked something of a second instalment in the ‘imperialist’

phase. Among its features was the emergence of non-European imperialist powers. One of the colonial empires was displaced. But the American acquisition of the Philippines interposed a barrier to the Japanese.