A different 1860s

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Revised Version.

A Different 1860s: Foundations of the Modern World

1861-65.

Denmark’s attempt to integrate the Duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Saxe-Lauenburg in the Danish kingdom caused the Second Schleswig War when Austria and Prussia, on behalf of the German Confederation, declared war to Denmark for its violation of the London Protocol. Sweden intervened to support Denmark out of a sense of Nordic solidarity. Even with Swedish help, the Danish army proved to be no match for the Austro-Prussian forces, thanks to the high quality of the Prussian army after its recent reforms. The German allies overwhelmed the Nordic defenses and occupied the Duchies. They conquered all of Jutland, and threatened the Danish islands. Denmark had to beg for peace and cede Schleswig, Holstein, and Saxe-Lauenburg to Austria and Prussia.

The war represented a rare moment of cooperation between the rival powers of Austria and Prussia that were engaged in a struggle for dominant position in Central Europe. Soon after the war, however, the tensions between the two powers heated again and grew worse because of disputes about the administration of the duchies. The root cause of the conflict was a contest between the two powers for leadership of the German people under the growing pressure of German nationalism. All attempts for compromise failed and both powers prepared for war. The Second Schleswig War was a serious setback for the Nordic states and cemented the notion in Scandinavia of the necessity of a conciliatory policy towards the rising German power on the continent. The wartime solidarity and cooperation between the Nordic states, however, gave a substantial boost to the Scandinavian national movement, which grew ever more popular in the following decade.

During the peace negotiations, King Christian IX went behind the back of the Danish government to contact the Prussians, offering that the whole of Denmark could join the German confederation, if Denmark could stay united with Schleswig and Holstein. Prussian Chancellor Bismarck, who feared that the ethnic strife in Schleswig between Danes and Germans would then stay unresolved, rejected this proposal. The press got a leak of the King’s diplomatic double-dealing and the negative reaction of the Danish public, combined with the unpopularity caused by defeat, forced the King to abdicate. His son Frederick VIII took the throne.

Much like his German counterpart Bismarck, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Italy’s Prime Minister and main political leader, continued to enjoy good health and hold office until old age. He implemented taxation schemes to foster public and private investments from northern Italian, British, and Prussian sources into Southern infrastructures, irrigation, industries, and tourism. He reformed the Italian army on the Prussian model. Faced with the necessity to fight Austria again to liberate Venetia, and growing estrangement from France owing to Napoleon III’s support for the Pope, Italy formed an alliance with Prussia.

In the USA, the election of Abraham Lincoln caused the American Civil War as eleven Southern states seceded from the Union to create a new Confederation dedicated to the preservation of slavery. The three-year conflict initially seemed locked into an apparent strategic stalemate; over time, however, the Union purged the dead wood in its officer corps and a more talented crop of commanders emerged. This allowed the much superior demographic, economic, and technological potential of the North to display its full effects; the resulting pressure proved irresistible for the Confederacy.

The conflict ended at the beginning of 1864 with victory of the Union, military occupation of the defeated rebel states, and abolition of slavery. The end of the war in early 1864 allowed the Union to spare a substantial amount of morale, energy, and resources that it would have spent with a longer conflict. It also allowed President Lincoln to win a second term effortlessly with a landslide victory, and the Republican Party to get a large majority in the Congress. Under Lincoln’s leadership, the Union focused its reconstruction efforts on rehabilitation and reintegration of the defeated rebel states, emancipation and relief of the freedmen, and reconciliation between the Northern and Southern sections.

While it lasted, however, the ACW provided a good opportunity for the imperialist ambitions of Napoleon III in Mexico. The French Emperor was ever eager to pursue ambitious schemes to expand the power of France and his own personal prestige. He exploited Mexico’s default on its debts with the European powers to invade the country. The French effectively turned Mexico into a client state and imposed a monarchical regime change. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg took the throne of the Empire of Mexico with the support of France, the Catholic clergy, and Mexican conservatives. The invasion however caused a massive nationalist backlash in the Mexican people that greatly swelled the ranks of the Mexican republicans and liberals. Opposition took the form of a widespread uprising.

The resulting guerrilla war turned the French intervention into a quagmire that tied down a sizable portion of the French army. The Union got strongly hostile towards this blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine and provided what help it could to the Mexican republicans. However, the necessities of the ACW limited this enough to keep the conflict a costly stalemate. The end of the ACW in 1864 allowed the Americans to turn their support to Mexican republicans into a flood of weapons, money, and volunteers that made the military situation ever more difficult for the French. The USA ultimately threatened an intervention, putting the French to a difficult choice between a humiliating withdrawal and a war with the North American republic.

The conferences to discuss a confederation of the British North American colonies bogged down in contrasts between the Maritime colonies and the two portions of the united Province of Canada. The stalemate prevented any real progress towards the establishment of a Canadian Confederation and fostered a general atmosphere of frustration and discontent in the BNA colonies. This drove an important portion of the settler population to develop pro-US sympathies, especially after the conclusion of the ACW.

The ambition of Paraguay’s dictator Francisco Lopez to gain control in the Platine Basin and his attempt to aid allies in Uruguay (previously defeated by Brazilians) triggered the Paraguayan War, the first phase of the Plate River Wars. The war involved Paraguay against an alliance of convenience between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and was the physical expression of struggle for power among neighboring nations over the strategic Río de la Plata region.

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1866-67.

Prussia and Italy declared war to Austria and its allies among the other German states. Both allies won decisive victories on land in Bohemia and Venetia respectively, effectively destroying the Austrian army. The Italian fleet decimated the Austrian one in the Adriatic. The magnitude of the success drove the Italian government and the Prussian King and generals to demand total victory and harsh peace terms. Bismarck’s wish for a lenient peace was overruled and he had to adjust his strategy accordingly. The Prussian forces occupied Bohemia-Moravia and German Austria while the Italian army and Garibaldi’s volunteers overrun Venetia, the Trent province, the Austrian Littorial, and Carniola. Prussia also decisively defeated the German states that had sided with Austria; the Prussians occupied Hanover and Saxony, and the South German states had to surrender. The Italian navy made landings in Istria and Dalmatia.

Austria had to beg for peace. The military catastrophe drove the Hungarians to renew their aspirations for independence and rise up in rebellion. Even the irregular and hastily assembled Magyar militias proved impossible to defeat for the demoralized and disorganized remnants of the Austrian army. The other nationalities of the Austrian Empire tried to follow their example with varying results. In the areas conquered by the Prussians and the Italians, the occupation forces easily suppressed the agitation of the nationalities whose aspirations they perceived as contrary to their own interests, such as the Czechs, Slovenes, and Dalmatian Croats. The Magyars’ unity of purpose for the objective of independence and territorial integrity of their kingdom allowed them to contain the unrest of most other nationalities in their lands. However, the Croats were able to get the upper hand in Croatia-Slavonia.

Sensing the imminent collapse of the Austrian Empire and fearing the formation of an independent Galicia that would act as a haven for Polish nationalism, Russia sent its troops to occupy Galicia and Bukovina. After Austria had showed its ingratitude for Russian help in 1848-49 by being a hostile neutral in the Crimean War, the Tsar and his ministers had no wish to save the Habsburg again. They had developed a good relationship with Prussia out of past cooperation to contain Polish nationalism and their main interest in the crisis was to remove Austria as a troublesome obstacle for Russian expansion in the Balkans.

The Prussian and Italian decisive success surprised the world, even if the subsequent collapse of the Austrian Empire made most neutral observers prone to justify it as an effect of Austria’s terminal decline. It worried and disturbed France since the increase of Prussia’s strength and the potential formation of a united Germany threatened French aspirations to be the dominant European power. Napoleon III had supported Sardinia-Piedmont against Austria in 1859-60 as a way to weaken Austrian hegemony in Italy and replace it with France’s influence. However, the success of the Italian unification movement had gone beyond his intentions and frustrated his plans. His need to keep the support of the French Catholics forced him to antagonize the Italians by backing Papal rule in Latium. France made pressure on Prussia and Italy to reduce their claims at the peace table, but this diplomatic action failed to sway them since it lacked military teeth. A sizable portion of the French army was still engaged in Mexico and this made an intervention against the Prussian-Italian alliance very difficult for France.

Prussia and Italy noticed the French attempt to ‘steal’ the fruits of their victory, and tensions heightened between these powers and France. The crisis in Central Europe and growing US hostility to the French intervention in Mexico drove Paris to withdraw its forces from Mexico. The French withdrawal and the trouble in Austria persuaded a reluctant Maximilian to abdicate the throne of Mexico and return to Europe, leading to a quick collapse of the Imperial forces in Mexico and the total victory of the Republicans.

Groups of irredentist Irish expatriates (the Fenians) launched raids into Canada, with the intent to conquer it and use it as a bargaining chip to force Britain to give Ireland independence. The Fenians had a significant amount of covert training and support from US private groups and sectors of the American military that aimed to annex Canada. However, the US government and the American public at large remained largely oblivious to their activities and did not support them. The Fenians scored a substantial amount of success, throwing the Canadian militias into disarray and overrunning large areas of Canada along the US-Canadian border. They also got significant support from the Canadian settlers that were unhappy with British colonial rule and had developed pro-US sympathies.

The angered British government started deploying troops in Canada, allowing the British to recover many of the lost areas, although Fenian and rebel raids continued to harass them. Britain blamed the USA for the raids and general unrest in Canada and threatened war. London demanded Washington to suppress any support in the USA for the Fenians and Canadian rebels, pay reparations, and limit US military presence on the Canadian border. The USA was still resentful for the support the UK gave to Confederate raids on Union shipping during the ACW and suspicious of European powers’ encroachment in the Western Hemisphere due to the French intervention in Mexico. Therefore, it disallowed any support for the Fenians and Canadian rebels, but remained defiant on the other British requests. The Americans declared that the British only had to blame themselves and their colonialist practices if they faced unrest in Canada. Tensions escalated and Britain declared war to the USA.

The British declaration of war angered the US public into defiance and patriotic mobilization. They saw it as an unjustified act of aggression, overreaction, and Britain venting out its own well-deserved trouble on the USA. Despite lingering exhaustion from the civil war, the USA rose into a last big effort to defeat the overbearing British Empire. The Americans quickly re-mobilized the vast army they had built to fight the civil war and staged an all-out pre-emptive invasion of Canada before Britain could deploy the main part of its own military power in North America. The British expected a quick and easy victory against the ‘colonials’ since they underestimated US power and neglected the military value of ACW experience. It was a very nasty surprise when the well-experienced and well-equipped US army overwhelmed the British troops already stationed in Canada and poor-quality Canadian militias with the help of Fenian irregulars and Canadian rebels. The US forces conquered Western Canada, Southern Ontario, New Brunswick, and the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River valley.

The Royal Navy enacted a blockade on the high seas and swept away American merchant shipping, causing significant economic damage to the USA. However, the US Navy won enough engagements in its home waters to prevent a British blockade of coastal shipping. It avoided large-scale battles with the RN but geared up for defense of US coasts and raiding on British merchant shipping. The USA felt the economic punch from the overseas blockade; however, it was not that traumatic a loss since Confederate raiding during the ACW already had substantially diminished US overseas trade. Land victories and survival of American coastal trade kept US morale up. The war in North America made Britain largely oblivious to the crisis in Central Europe. The British were largely disinterested about the contest for dominance of Germany between Austria and Prussia, and they were neutral or sympathetic to the German and Italian unification movements. Their only serious concern about the crisis in Central Europe was the collapse of Austria might pave the way to runaway Russian expansionism in the Balkans.

The peace treaty allowed Italy to acquire Venetia, the Trent province, the Austrian Littoral, coastal Dalmatia, and many Adriatic islands. Prussia annexed Schleswig, Holstein, Saxe-Lauenburg, Hanover, Saxony, Nassau, Hesse-Kassel, and the northern portion of Hesse-Nassau. Bohemia-Moravia, Palatinate as the union of Bavarian Palatinate and the southern portion of Hesse-Nassau, and Franconia became German states ruled by the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen or other German royal houses that had sided with Prussia in the conflict. The victors dissolved the old German Confederation that had failed to achieve political unity for the German nation. Prussia consolidated its hegemony across Northern and Central Germany and Bohemia-Moravia with the formation of the North German Confederation. It was a federal union (despite its name) and included all the German states except Austria, Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, Luxemburg, Limburg, and Lichtenstein.

Austria had to recognize the independence of Hungary and Croatia and became a Kingdom. Russia annexed Galicia and Bukovina. Hungary kept most of its traditional territories except Croatia-Slavonia, which became independent with interior Dalmatia, and German-speaking Burgenland and Bratislava, which Austria retained. The common objective of independence had driven the ruling elites of Hungary and Croatia to coalesce in a temporary union of purpose. Once it was achieved, political instability manifested in both states due to power struggles between rival factions of their ruling elites. The Hungarians and the Croats picked members of their own high nobility as Kings. They were compromise solutions that the victor powers supported but failed to quell their countries’ instability. Such infighting allowed the ethnic minorities of Hungary and Croatia to become restive again adding to the general levels of creeping disorder.

Prussia’s success made it the champion of national unification in the eyes of German nationalists and moderate liberals. This political shift allowed the pre-war power struggle within Prussia between liberals and conservatives to end in a compromise that backed the constitutional status quo. It also ensured the new territorial settlement of Germany arose with scarce opposition apart from a loyalist fringe that clung to the deposed dynasties. The Prussian ruling elites themselves showed a division between the ones that deemed the NGC solution optimal for Prussia’s interests and the ones that supported complete unification of Germany under Prussian leadership.

Emperor Franz Joseph abdicated and left the throne of Austria to his son Rudolph under the regency of his brother Maximilian. Defeat heightened the latent mental instability of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Therefore, he had to abdicate and his uncle Leopold succeeded him, since his brother Otto was unfit to reign for similar reasons. The war left Austria, Bavaria, and to a lesser degree the other South German states humiliated, economically weakened, and politically divided. The prestige of the Habsburg was shattered and the Wittelsbach were seriously humbled. German nationalists and liberals across the region largely switched to support complete national unification under Prussian leadership. The dynastic loyalists, anti-Prussian regionalists, and conservative Catholics opposed it and backed the establishment of a separate South German union as the opposite of the NGC. This division was present across southern Germany but as a rule, pro-Prussian German nationalism was strongest in Baden and Wurttemberg while South German regionalism got more supporters in Austria and Bavaria.

Prussia kept an ambiguous stance on the issue of full unification. It neither overtly opposed nor gave public support to plans for complete national unification, both to placate France and because its own leaders were not of one mind on the issue. However, it also quietly worked to cultivate its economic, political, and military ties with the South German states. In this it was successful with Baden and Wurttemberg, a bit less so with Austria and Bavaria. Nonetheless, the South German states formed a loose Confederation as a compromise solution. It was a system far from being as stable and cohesive as the NGC; much of the reason for its creation was the French strongly pushed for it and Prussia preferred not to challenge them yet.

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1868-69 (part I).

The 1866 war left France in a bitter and tense mood. The French perceived growth of power and stature of Prussia and Italy, collapse of Austria as a great power, and the marginal role of Paris during the crisis as a threat to France’s position in Europe and a loss of prestige for Napoleon III. The failure of the intervention in Mexico only heightened this mood. The French government adopted a stance of intransigence about the Roman Question and German unification. It started searching a way to compensate for the increased power of its neighbors or better to take them down a notch.

The Prussian leaders were pleased with Italian performance and appalled by Austrian incompetence and instability. They came to see Italy as a valuable ally and Austria as a second Bavaria, another lesser German state to dominate. Victory greatly boosted morale in Italy and emboldened its government to pursue complete national unification. Domestic political constraints made more stringent by declining prestige bound Napoleon III to protect the Pope no matter what, so reconciliation between Italy and France proved impossible. In Italy, resentment for France’s hostile attitude about the Roman Question replaced friendly feelings for its help against Austria in 1859.

Prussia and Italy confirmed their alliance by mutual interest. The Italian government started to provide covert support to the expedition Garibaldi was preparing to liberate Rome from the Pope. Russia kept a friendly stance towards Prussia and Italy thanks to the secret pact the three powers had made during the partition of the Austrian Empire. It included an agreement to keep Hungary and Croatia neutral buffer states and support from Prussia and Italy for the removal of the military limitations Russia had suffered because of the Crimean War and its expansionist plans against the Ottoman Empire.

Dissolution of the German Confederation had left Luxemburg and Limburg in a geopolitical limbo. Hoping to recoup some prestige and fulfill an old expansionistic goal of France, Napoleon III made an offer to purchase Luxemburg from the debt-ridden King of Netherlands who ruled it as Grand Duke in personal union. The move roused widespread nationalist hostility in German public opinion. Before the 1866 war, Bismarck had shown some ambiguous open-mindedness in secret talks with Napoleon III about French expansion in Belgium or Luxemburg. However, under the spur of nationalist outrage in German public opinion, the Chancellor shifted to a harsher stance. Prussia, which had kept a garrison in Luxemburg since 1815, vetoed the deal and made a counteroffer to the Dutch King for the purchase of Luxemburg.

Austria proposed to make Luxemburg a neutral state, but due to its radical loss of status after the 1866 disaster the proposal was ignored. The French pressured for withdrawal of the Prussian garrison. The Prussian government ignored them and leaked news of French expansionistic plans about Belgium to the British press. This caused the UK to take a suspicious stance towards France. A diplomatic stalemate emerged, and the Luxemburg question festered.

Garibaldi, at the head of a well-armed volunteer corps covertly supplied by the Italian government, invaded Latium, easily crushed the Papal army, defeated the French garrison with some more effort, and conquered Rome. Garibaldi declared the annexation of Rome to Italy and the Italian government accepted it. The Pope fled to France where he took residence in Avignon as a pampered host of Napoleon III. He started to issue scathing condemnations of the Italian ‘usurpers’ and their supporters and to call for an intervention of the Catholic powers to crush them. He also hastened to fulfill his plans to summon an ecumenical council and affirm the contentious doctrine of papal infallibility.

Humiliated by the stalemate in the Luxemburg crisis and the Italian seizure of Rome, Napoleon III felt he could not afford to compromise. The Emperor and his ministers were confident the French army could deal a severe lesson to the Prussian and Italian upstarts. They expected a remake of the easy victories the French armies had reaped across Europe during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Therefore, the French took an increasingly confrontational stance in both crises. Tensions rose until France declared war to Italy and Prussia. The other European powers remained neutral since they lacked interest in the conflict and largely regarded France as the aggressive troublemaker. Russia was sympathetic to Prussia and Italy; Britain was distracted by the war in North America and suspicious of Napoleon’s expansionist ambitions. In Spain, a coalition of liberals, republicans, and moderate conservatives disgusted by the misrule of Isabella II staged a coup and overthrew the Queen. The revolutionary instability that preceded and followed the regime change left Spain unable to intervene in the European crisis.

The militant attitude of the Pope polarized political climate in Europe. He showered condemnations and excommunications on the governments of Italy and Prussia, called on a crusade to unseat ‘ungodly’ rulers, and blessed the armies of France. Papal appeals spurred some serious sympathy for France’s cause in the conservative Catholic segment of European public opinion. They also helped stir up unrest in the Catholic nations that had religious and nationalist reasons to resent their rulers, such as Ireland and Poland. This resulted in serious uprisings in Ireland and Russian Poland with unrest spreading across the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Irish insurrection became a serious additional burden and distraction for a Britain already engaged in a major war with America. The Polish uprising absorbed the bulk of Russian attention and energies until Russia suppressed it after a year. In the end, however, the valiant but ill-armed and poorly organized Polish insurgents proved no match for the Russian army. France was sympathetic but unable to send any real help. The Polish rebellion spread in a limited way to Prussian Poland but the Prussians crushed it without any real difficulty. The Papal appeals also found a receptive audience among Iberian conservatives, but the state of revolutionary chaos in Spain limited their contribution to the crisis to a sizable amount of volunteers for France and an intensification of political polarization in Spain.

The ecumenical council soon split about the declaration of papal infallibility. The Pope forced it through despite the vehement opposition of the liberal bishops who condemned it as a tyrannical and heretical innovation to the traditional doctrine of the Church. These bishops set up a schismatic ‘Old Catholic’ church. The governments of the NGC and Italy reacted to hostility of Catholic clergy with a series of harsh measures, such as seizure of Church properties, limitations to use of the pulpit for political propaganda, state control of clergy education, and restriction to Catholic schools. The Old Catholic clergy was entirely exempt from these punitive measures and got state support, as well as the favor of liberal-nationalist public opinion.

The French declaration of war caused a surge of patriotic mobilization in German and Italian public opinion against domestic and foreign enemies. The conservative Catholics stood hostile but as a rule, the nationalists and liberals had little difficulty to paint them as traitors and fifth columnists in the court of public opinion. Papal support for foreign enemies unleashed a wave of patriotic indignation in German and Italian public opinion that essentially nullified the Church’s influence on the Catholic masses. There was some Catholic agitation in Germany and Italy to support the Papal cause but the Prussian and Italian governments were able to suppress it without difficulty, thanks to the atmosphere of nationalist mobilization. A few diehard Catholics went to fight in the French armies as volunteers.

The war was a reason for the SGC to split when it failed to take a united stance on the conflict. The governments of Baden and Wurttemberg aligned with the pro-German stance of their public opinion and joined the NGC and Italy in the war. Certain elements in the Habsburg and Wittelsbach ruling elites showed sympathy for France out of their resentment against Prussia and Italy and their conservative Catholic feelings but Maximilian and Leopold favored caution. As a result, Austria and Bavaria remained contentiously neutral. However their public opinion got involved in the atmosphere of patriotic mobilization and there was a sizable amount of Austrian and Bavarian volunteers who fought for the German cause.

The Pope’s militant activism and news of Fenian and US successes in Canada triggered a vast insurrection in Ireland, organized by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Well-armed and organized with the assistance of US agents and weapon-smugglers, IRB insurgents began to attack British government property, carry out raids for arms and funds, and target and kill prominent members of the British administration. Support by Catholic clergy and organizations made the rebellion popular with the Irish people and granted it a large amount of adherents and support. The IRB's main target in the first part of the conflict was the mainly Catholic Irish police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which were the British government's eyes and ears in Ireland. Its members and barracks - especially the more isolated ones - were vulnerable, and they were a source of much-needed arms. IRB attacks and, more so, popular ostracism demoralized the force as the rebellion went on, as people turned their faces from a force increasingly compromised by association with British government repression. The rate of resignation went up, and recruitment in Ireland dropped off dramatically.

Attacks on isolated RIC stations in rural areas increased, causing the police to retreat to the larger towns and abandon the countryside to the IRB. British administration collapsed across southern and western Ireland, assizes failed, and tax collection by British authorities stopped. The British government had to declare martial law and deploy the regular British Army in the country in large numbers. The British Parliament passed an act to extend the powers of military martial courts to cover the whole population of Ireland and to allow extensive use of internment without trial and the death penalty. Coroners' courts and local governments were suspended, and Britain ruled Ireland as a crown colony. The British forces, in trying to re-assert their control over the country, resorted to arbitrary reprisals against republican activists and the civilian population. An escalation between IRB guerrilla attacks and reprisals by British troops soon ensued, with a spiraling of the death toll in the conflict.

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1868-69 (part II).

Most neutral observers expected a French victory at the beginning of the Franco-German-Italian war due to France’s widespread reputation as Europe’s strongest military power. They acknowledged victory of Prussia and Italy against Austria as an impressive feat but often justified it as an effect of Austria’s decline and impending collapse. However, the Prussian army again astonished the world with an impressive sequence of victories that allowed the Prussians to crush the French armies, overrun northern and eastern France, and besiege Paris. Despite the difficult terrain of the Alps front, the Italians exploited the growing disorganization of the French army after the Prussian successes to achieve a strategic breakthrough of their own. They broke out through the Alps, overrun southeastern France, and besieged Lyon (in combination with the Prussians) and Marseilles.

The French military catastrophe triggered a revolution that overthrew the Second French Empire. A coalition of moderate and radical republicans emerged as the dominant faction and formed a provisional government. Other important factions included the radical left and the monarchist conservatives. The common imperative to fight the foreign invaders prevented too much infighting between these groups despite their fierce rivalry. The French showed some willingness in tentative peace feelings to accept a moderate amount of reparations and the cession of a few colonies. The attempt quickly collapsed when the victors demanded onerous territorial and economic concessions. The provisional government resolved for an all-out attempt to turn back the tide of defeat with mass mobilization and patriotic ‘élan’. They hoped to replicate the military ‘miracle’ of the French Revolutionary Wars.

However, the world had changed since the French Revolution and the wars of the Industrial Age were a wholly new game. Low morale, severe supply problems, and low troop quality burdened the newly assembled French armies; they were a very poor match for the well-trained and well–equipped Prussian and Italian forces. One by one, the new French armies were overwhelmed and crushed. The parallel French attempt to fight the invaders with ‘frenc-tireurs’ proved to be little more than a significant nuisance for the occupation forces. The Prussians and the Italians executed captured guerrillas and suppressed their activities with harsh reprisals. After the declaration of war, Garibaldi organized and led a volunteer corps to fight for the Italian cause that distinguished itself in the conquest of Grenoble. Despite his republican sentiments, he continued to fight even after the fall of Napoleon III out of his wish to see Nice, his birth city, and Corsica united to Italy.

A French army caused an expansion of the war when it entered Switzerland in the attempt to avoid encirclement by a Prussian-Italian pincer. The Swiss authorities proved unable to enforce the proper procedure of disarmament and internment for these troops; the French army was free to rearm, reorganize, and expand its ranks with new recruits and weapons slipping through the border. This violation of Swiss neutrality motivated Austria and Bavaria to intervene in the war on Prussia’s side, uniting the German states in a common struggle. It also gave the Germans and the Italians a justification to send their troops into Switzerland to trap and destroy the French army. German-Italian bombardment combined with creeping exhaustion, starvation, and disorganization eventually forced Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles to surrender. The French provisional government had to acknowledge its hopeless military situation and beg for peace after a futile attempt to get help from Britain or Russia. The British had their own problems, and the Russians were hostile to the French cause.

Surrender dissolved the fragile truce between the French factions and turned the final phase of the conflict into a French civil war. Radical left-wing insurrections seized Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles while the Legitimists attempted a remake of the War in the Vendee. The civil war ended when the moderate republicans and the Orleanists formed an alliance of convenience to support a new provisional government. The Germans and the Italians helped the French government crush the insurgents by releasing the prisoners of war. After a few clashes, the Legitimists reluctantly accepted to lay down their weapons while the far-left revolutionaries fought to the death. Bloody repression painfully restored order. The French elected a national assembly dominated by the monarchists since they thought of them as the best chance for peace and order and not tainted with defeat. The republican-monarchist division and the bitter legacy of the war were the heralds of serious trouble in the future. However, the provisional government got sufficient authority to sign a peace treaty and start picking the pieces of war-torn France.

In North America, the USA remained victorious on land, and its troops seized control of northern Ontario and Quebec. They pushed back and trapped the enemy forces in Nova Scotia and the British attempt to counterattack was a bloody failure. US attempts to invade Nova Scotia initially failed as well and a strategic stalemate seemed to develop in the isthmus. The British landings in North Carolina and Alabama turned into more costly failures. The effects of British high-seas blockade on US economy got worse, but the efforts of the USN contained its overall impact. At a heavy price, it repelled most UK raids in American waters; its efforts ensured continued existence for a good amount of US coastal shipping. American raiders proved rather effective against British overseas shipping, causing a substantial amount of damage to UK trade. A few US naval victories also ensured enough American theater superiority to allow a couple successful landings in Nova Scotia. This combined with renewed offensive in the isthmus broke the stalemate and caused an American occupation of Nova Scotia.

Since it faced an unexpectedly good US military performance, the UK sought to lure Mexico in the conflict. The British hoped an invasion from Mexico would exhaust the Americans with a two-front war and stir up the Southern states into renewed rebellion. Mexican President Benito Juarez kept a pro-US stance and turned down British feelers, so British agents and bribes organized a pro-UK coup that deposed and assassinated him. The Mexican government signed an alliance with Britain with a promise of British loans and support to regain the territories it had lost after the Mexican-American War. The Mexican army invaded California and Texas with the support of a British expeditionary corps; its initial drive overrun the southern portions of both states. However, the Americans again reacted much quicker and more effectively to the new threat than their enemies expected. They organized and deployed new armies in the West Coast and the Trans-Mississippi that ensured a successful defense of northern California, Oregon, Arkansas-Louisiana, and northern Texas. Timely completion of the first transcontinental railroad greatly helped successful US defense of the West Coast. Subsequently, US counteroffensives regained control of southern California and southern Texas and drove into northern Mexico.

Against UK expectations and attempts to stir up trouble, the defeated Southern states remained mostly quiet. The Union was able to keep control of the region with a fraction of its military power. Most Southerners were simply too demoralized by defeat to rise up again or too compelled by their American identity to side with foreign enemies. Actually, a sizable number of Southerners, whites and freedmen alike, fought for the Union against the British and Mexican invaders. Both sides felt substantial hardship from the Anglo-American war, although overall it weighted rather more heavily on the British. The Americans felt the painful economic effects of UK naval superiority and war effort but victories sustained their moral; the British faced their utter and costly inability to overcome US land power in the North American continent and US raiding proved to be more damaging than expected. The ongoing guerrilla war in Ireland created a serious burden and distraction for the British and intensified the demoralizing effects of land defeats and territorial losses in North America. There also was a serious concern in Britain that the strategic situation would leave Russia free to rampage in the Balkans and the Near East or threaten India as soon as the Russians suppressed the Polish uprising. The British came to realize their rule of Canada was a lost cause, swallowed imperial pride, and accepted peace negotiations based on facts on the ground.

After a fair amount of diplomatic struggling, they signed the Treaty of Stockholm. The USA annexed Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Rupert’s Land, British Columbia, the North-Western Territory, the British Arctic Territories, and Labrador. Britain kept Newfoundland, Prince Edward’s Island, and the British West Indies that the Americans had failed to conquer. It also kept Vancouver Island as a naval base in the Pacific. Residents of the Canadian colonies got three years to decide between keeping their British nationality and emigrating, or remaining in the region and becoming US citizens. The USA accepted to pay a sizable sum for the land it acquired, to indemnify all residents that chose to leave, and to cease and suppress all support to Irish nationalist groups. Britain agreed to cease all support to Mexico. The two sides also agreed to the US purchase of Alaska, which the Russian government had been willing to sell. Russia experienced financial difficulties and doubted its ability to defend the territory in a war against the USA. Both powers agreed to drop any request for war indemnities, including compensation for damages to merchant shipping, the Fenian raids, and the so-called “Alabama” claims.

US public opinion and the Congress were angry at Mexico for its aggression and ingratitude after America had helped it fight the French invasion. Therefore, they pressured the Administration into demanding a harsh peace from the treacherous Mexicans, despite the personal feelings of President Lincoln for a lenient deal. The Mexicans initially balked at US requests for a cession of all Mexican territories north of the Tropic of Cancer. However once Britain withdrew from the conflict and left its allies out to dry, US armies overrun the northern Mexican states and an American expeditionary corps landed in Veracruz and fought its way to Mexico City. The Mexicans had to beg for peace. The Second Mexican Cession gave the USA the territories of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Neuvo Leon, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas (except the southernmost Nochistlan region), and San Louis Potosi. Residents of the areas the USA annexed got two years to decide between keeping their Mexican nationality and emigrating, or to remain in the region and become US citizens.

The Franco-German-Italian War brought the German and Italian unifications to completion. Before the war, talks had started between the NGC and the South German states for re-establishment of the Zollverein and its extension to Austria. Disruption of the Zollverein due to the 1866 conflict had harmed the economy of South German states considerably; loss of Bohemia-Moravia, Trieste, and Hungary had hit Austria even worse. The war and its outcome caused a massive surge of nationalist enthusiasm across the German and Italian lands and a parallel loss of support for the Catholic reactionaries that backed anti-unionism.

Therefore talks fairly soon shifted to discuss political union of the German lands. Even the Prussian, Habsburg, and Wittelsbach ruling elites came to recognize the inevitability of complete German unification under Prussian leadership despite their misgivings. The South German states accepted to join the NGC with the provision religious policy would remain the purview of the states. The federal government would have full authority on economy, defense, trade, civil and criminal law, citizenship, post and telegraphic services, and infrastructure. Baden, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, Austria, Lichtenstein, and Luxemburg joined the NGC and the union became the German Empire. William I of Prussia became its first Emperor with a lavish coronation ceremony.

The victors imposed a harsh peace on France. Germany gained all of Alsace (including Belfort), about half of Lorraine (all of the Moselle department, including Longwy and Briey, the portion of the Meurthe department east of the Meurthe river, and the eastern border strip of the Vosges departments), and Luxemburg. Italy got the County of Nice and eastern French Riviera (the Alpes-Maritimes department and the eastern portion of the Var department), Savoy (the Haute Savoie and Savoie departments), Corsica, and a border adjustment in the Alps region (the eastern portions of the Basses-Alpes and Hautes-Alpes departments). France also had to recognize Morocco as belonging in the German sphere of influence and Tunisia and Libya as part of the Italian sphere of influence. Residents of the annexed areas got two years to decide between keeping their French nationality and emigrating, or remaining in their place of residence and becoming German or Italian citizens.

Germany and Italy were concerned about Switzerland’s failure to defend its own neutrality and the strategic risk this involved for them in case of a new war with France; they were also interested in a partition of Switzerland to complete their own national unifications and round up their western border. They used the French invasion of Switzerland and Swiss failure to defend their neutrality, as well as the prevalent German or Italian ethnic-linguistic character of the Swiss population, to justify imposing a partition of the Swiss Confederation. They divided it along the central chain of the Western Alps; Italy got Geneva, Valais, Ticino, and Grisons; Germany got the rest. Germany and Italy supported Russian expansion in the Balkans, but the Germans agreed to give further compensation to Russia for the large territorial gains of the victor powers. Moreover, the Polish uprising had made them more skeptical of keeping a sizable and troublesome Polish minority within their borders. Therefore, Germany agreed to cede most of the province of Posen to Russia; they kept the northern and western portions where most of the German population in the region was concentrated. They also transferred the vast majority of the remaining Polish population in their eastern territories to Russian Poland.

France had to pay a large war indemnity (10 billion francs); Germany got five billion, Italy got four, and the Netherlands got one as compensation for the dissolution of its bond with Luxemburg. They recognized Limburg as an integral part of the Kingdom of Netherlands. The French also had to cede their shares of the Suez Canal Company, which Germany and Italy acquired in equal parts.

[eurofed]

1870-72 (part I).

The Old Catholic schism widened, deepened, and in a few years created a split of the Catholic community only comparable to the Eastern Schism or the Reformation. Liberal and nationalist outrage for the Pope’s blatant partisanship in political matters gave momentum to the Old Catholics. The movement soon claimed the allegiance of most Catholics in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Flanders, the United States, and Argentina. Although it claimed to represent authentic Catholic doctrine against Ultramontane deviations, the Old Catholic movement attracted almost all the liberal thinkers and leaders within the Church. Consequently, it soon developed an increasingly liberal and progressive outlook in political, social, and doctrinal matters. It effectively abolished the Papacy and the College of Cardinals and developed an Episcopal structure.

Its differences with the Anglican and Lutheran denominations gradually diminished considerably, pretty much up to nothing as it concerned the Anglicans. This won the Old Catholics more and more sympathies in Northern Europe, Britain, and North America and eventually allowed them to establish full communion with the Anglicans. Old Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox propaganda successfully labeled the Ultramontane denomination as the ‘Papal’ Catholics, or ‘Papists’ in a more derogatory sense. The label stuck in secular public opinion even if its targets bitterly opposed it and claimed to be the true Church beset by yet another heresy. As a rule, the Papal Catholic denomination remained dominant in France, Iberia, Ireland, Poland, and Brazil. Over time, it became more and more reactionary in political matters and conservative in social and doctrinal ones. Other areas, such as Hungary, Croatia, and the rest of Latin America became ideological battlegrounds of the schism.

Due to the militant role of the Pope in the war and the uprisings in Ireland and Poland, the European powers (Germany, Italy, Britain, and Russia) were seriously concerned about his ability to threaten the stability of Europe. They agreed to deem him unfit to reside in any territory they controlled and there were doubts about the wisdom of letting him stay in Europe at all. There were concrete proposals to exile the troublesome high priest someplace in South America (most likely Brazil) since the USA was radically hostile to his presence in North America. Yet there were also concerns not to anger the countries that still gave him allegiance by such an extreme action. In the end, France and Spain proposed a compromise solution that the other powers accepted. It gave him administration of the Principality of Andorra under nominal Franco-Spanish co-sovereignty. Although the Pope kept claiming the Papal States, in practice he accepted the deal. Concerns about the political effects of his presence however turned out to be justified; the Holy See in Andorra soon became a powerful source of support for reactionary forces in France and Iberia.

Russia suppressed nationalist and religious unrest in the former PLC lands. It exploited France’s powerlessness and the support of Germany and Italy to denounce the clauses of the 1856 Paris Peace Treaty that bound it to military limitations in the Black Sea. After the end of the war with France and restoration of order in Poland, Germany, Italy, and Russia were free to address the chaotic situation in Hungary and Croatia. All three powers wanted to keep influence in the region, yet given their good relationship they were not ready to fight for exclusive control. Germany wanted to ensure the highest protection possible for ethnic Germans in the region, since geography made annexation of their territories troublesome. The Russians wanted to uphold the rights of the Slavs and the Orthodox as a tool to advance their expansionist agenda in the Ottoman Balkans. However, they were not much interested to pick sides for one nationality over another. All three powers wanted to prevent anything that would look like a bad example for their own subject nationalities.

Germany, Italy, and Russia eventually forged a compromise and imposed it by a joint declaration backed by the implied threat of military intervention. It affirmed the neutral status of Hungary and Croatia and their role as effective co-clients of Berlin, Rome, and St. Petersburg. It enacted a constitutional and political reform that substantially limited, but failed to eradicate, political instability in Hungary and Croatia and the infighting of their ruling elites. Germany annexed Fiume, turning it into its main Mediterranean port. Italy got a few more Adriatic islands. Croatia, Serbia, and Romania got a few border areas. Such transfers were minor in scope and Budapest and Zagreb kept most of their lands. An ethnic German principality that included southeastern Transdanubia, northern-western Banat, and central Transylvania got a large degree of autonomy and the Hungarian Germans became essentially immune to Magyar cultural assimilation policies. In comparison, the Slovaks, Serbs, and Romanians that stayed under Hungarian or Croat rule got many less concessions; Germany and Italy opposed them for various reasons and the Russians did not care enough to object.

The success of their triple intervention motivated the Germans, Italians, and Russians to sign the Vienna Pact in order to co-ordinate their future actions in the Balkans, as well as other issues like common trade or infrastructure projects. Unlike the pact between Berlin and Rome, the treaty did not establish any sort of official military alliance, in order to lull the Ottomans and the British in a false sense of security. In fact, its public version did not say anything at all about the Ottoman territories. The secret clauses allowed Russia to attack Turkey and invade the Ottoman Balkans, with a few compensations for Germany and Italy.

The war stopped construction of the Suez Canal, but after its conclusion, the new owners resumed and completed it. Despite a few initial financial and technical difficulties, it soon became an enormous commercial success, thanks to its immediate and dramatic positive effect on world trade. Combined with the transcontinental railroads that the Americans built in the same period, it allowed circling the entire world in record time. Its success greatly heightened the interest in America and Europe for building a similar inter-oceanic canal in Central America. The British got somewhat annoyed by German and Italian control of the Suez Canal Company but not radically so, since its previous French owners had been no better friends of Britain. The British government asked Germany and Italy to share control of the Suez Canal. After some negotiation, the three powers agreed to divide their shares in equal parts, with the secret provision to do likewise if any of them were to gain control of the Egyptian share in the future.

Political instability and conflicts between monarchist reactionaries, centrist moderates, and republican radicals continued to plague both France and Spain after the war. After defeat in the civil war, the French far left had to go underground or it was still licking its wounds. Defeat discredited the Bonapartists. Papal Catholic clergy and activists mobilized to try to mold France and Iberia in the conservative stronghold of the “true Church” in Europe. The Spanish elites briefly considered members of the Hohenzollern and Savoy royal families for the throne of Spain but soon turned them down due to the political effects of the Old Catholic schism and out of balance-of-power concerns expressed by Britain. Much like the parallel French situation, a fragile Spanish republic became the default solution but by no means an effective check to political instability. Problems for Spain only increased with the beginning of a pro-independence rebellion in Cuba that became a widespread uprising.

With the end of the war in North America, Britain was able to deploy the main part of its regular army in Ireland. Large-scale sweeps and internments of IRB personnel and suspected sympathizers took place, and allowed the British forces to disrupt the IRB network and score several successes in clashes with the insurgents. The end of US weapon smuggling and increasingly successful British counterinsurgency actions left most IRB units critically short of both weapons and ammunition, with a resulting reduction of guerrilla attacks. The Irish insurgency gradually died down and it was over by the early 1870s. It left a huge pool of resentment in the Papal Catholic population of Ireland against British rule and its brutal methods of repression. On the British’s part, the insurrection enhanced previous anti-Catholic prejudice into widespread fear and distrust of Papists and Irish nationalists.

After victory in the Franco-German-Italian War, the Italian government decided to change the army organization so that each battalion included men from the same region, as in the Prussian model. Up to then, they had included a mix of recruits in every unit from all over the country, to combat regionalism. Italian elites felt confident that regionalism was no more a serious political concern thanks to the boost in national self-consciousness. They thought the regional model would further improve the already good efficiency of the army, completing its transition to the Prussian model. The government decided to set up a public school system modeled on the German system and make strong investments to boost literacy and spread knowledge of national language among the Italian citizens.

After the war, Germany and Italy experienced a prevalent atmosphere of self-confidence, optimism, and fulfilment. They largely turned into satisfied powers and focused most of their energies into post-unification nation-building and economic development. Decisive success of their alliance in the last two wars, compatible and often complementary strategic interests, and persistent threat of a vengeful France drove Berlin and Rome to confirm their partnership. The two powers renewed their military alliance for 30 years. Germany and Italy established their economic integration through a series of treaties that first created a Central European free-trade area, and then gradually enhanced it with a customs and monetary union. The so-called ‘Berlin-Rome Pillar’ appeared headed to become a stable feature of European politics and diplomacy.

Like the pre-existing Latin monetary union, the Central European monetary union established a bimetallic (gold and silver) standard. It required that all contracting states strike freely exchangeable gold coins and silver coins according to common specifications. France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain had first established the LMU in the 1860s. However, it lost a lot of its importance when Italy withdrew from it and Switzerland disappeared because of the FGIW. The two systems had similar features but for political reasons they remained separate and rival. Their example was a major reason the USA stuck to bimetallism in its postwar monetary policy and hence avoided some serious economic trouble that could have otherwise manifested. Other states later adopted one or the other standard, sometimes even though they did not formally accede to the LMU or CEMU treaties. In the CEMU’s case, informal adoption might often be justified by the wish to avoid joining its customs union.

The formation of a Central European trade bloc was another reason for the late 19th century economic boom in Germany and Italy. Germany was allowing its economic potential to bloom and quickly evolving into the industrial giant of Europe while Italy was becoming an industrialized great power. The Italians reaped the fruits of economic reforms and foreign investments with steady growth of industry in the northern regions and modern agriculture and tourism in the southern ones. Only the parallel ongoing transformation of the United States into an economic superpower surpassed the frantic pace of industrialization in the German-Italian bloc.

[eurofed]

1870-72 (part II).

Military and economic achievements sustained a positive mood on both sides of the Alps. It did not mean Germany and Italy had no serious domestic issues. Besides the necessary nation-building effort, both countries faced the typical social and political tensions caused by industrialization. Reforms, economic growth, and foreign-policy successes however kept such tensions at a manageable level for the ruling elites. A pre-unification legacy of social backwardness still burdened Italy but the young nation seemed headed to cast it off in relatively short order. Conversion of most German and Italian Catholics to the Old Catholic denomination also helped foster political stability. It greatly eased a peaceful inclusion of Catholic masses into mainstream politics and toned down potential antagonism between northern and southern Germans.

German and Italian positive mood found a typical expression in the sumptuous celebrations the Italians staged for the official transfer of their capital to Rome. The Italian government had spent some serious effort to renovate the city and cancel signs of the Popes' obscurantist misrule. A social highlight of the event was the marriage of Italian crown prince Umberto with a princess of the house of Hohenzollern. The future queen won the sympathies of the Italian public with her sunny disposition and proved to be a positive moderating influence on her husband. Another iconic expression of the friendly and celebrative atmosphere in the Pillar countries was the twin set of giant statues the Germans and the Italians built in Berlin and Rome to celebrate their victories. The statues, inspired by Overbeck's painting "Italia and Germania" with a more martial pose, represented Germany and Italy as shield-maidens with swords pointing to the ground, one holding the torch of truth and the other the scales of justice. The statues soon became a popular landmark in both capitals. They became the model for a colossal and even more famous version that Germany and Italy gifted to the USA in the 1880s to stand in New York Harbour. The Statue of Liberty was to become an iconic symbol of America.

Russia was eventually recovering from its defeat in the Crimean War and its financial troubles thanks to the reforms of Tsar Alexander II throughout the 1860s. He was the most important Russian reformer and one of the greatest Tsars since Peter the Great. His greatest achievement in the first phase of his reign was the emancipation of serfs in 1861. He was also responsible for numerous other reforms including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the ‘zemstvo’ system, imposing universal military service, ending some of the privileges of the nobility, and promoting the universities. The Tsar was not an overly belligerent leader and sought peaceful co-existence with Germany and Italy. However, Alexander II acknowledged the terminal weakness of the Ottoman ‘sick man of Europe’ and deemed his duty to fulfil the long-standing aspiration of Russia to expansion in the Balkans and the Near East. Demise of Austria, eclipse of war-torn France, and friendly relations with Berlin and Rome made circumstances optimal for such an expansionist policy. Russian agents got busy in the Balkans stirring up anti-Ottoman unrest among the Christian nationalities of the region.

After President Lincoln won two wars, led the first phase of Reconstruction, and got an unprecedented third term, a fanatic white supremacist shot and killed him in the third year of his last term. By the end of his life, the American people universally acknowledged him as one of the greatest US Presidents and national heroes, the man who preserved the Union, defeated Confederate rebellion and British-Mexican aggression, abolished slavery, doubled the country’s size, charted the path to national reconciliation, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy. His assassination only enhanced his legend by adding the crown of martyrdom for his people and he was enshrined as the equal of Washington in American culture. His Vice President succeeded him to complete his term and Ulysses S. Grant, the best US general of two wars, was elected President the following year; both vowed to continue the work of the late great leader.

The USA was war-weary but reinforced and made confident in its destiny by victory against Southern secessionists and British imperialists. Albeit at a terrible price, the American republic had affirmed its national unity, ended slavery, won a lot of valuable new land, and forced the British superpower to accept US hegemony of North America. The war left the Americans proud and elated for victory in Canada and Mexico but suspicious of European (especially British) encroachment in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. They resented persistent British imperial influence in their chosen turf but understood the USA had achieved more or less the best possible result during the conflict in the light of British naval supremacy.

The American people remained wary of big standing armies, so the wartime land forces were demobilized. However, the war, lingering hostility with Britain, and distrust of Mexico imprinted the need for strong armed forces in the US public. The Americans took care to learn the lessons of the last two wars and keep military equipment, the officer corps, the regular army, state militias, and the coastal defence system at a high level of quality and efficiency. US coasts and the southern border remained much more militarized than they had been before the war. The goal of US military policy was to guarantee effective defence of North America by peacetime forces and quick mobilization of a vast army of good quality to fight anywhere in the Americas. An ambitious naval building program aimed to ensure US naval supremacy in the Western Hemisphere and build a US Navy that could fight the Royal Navy as an equal in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Americans were determined not to suffer another serious threat to their continental security or freedom of trade ever again.

Security concerns aside, America turned to focus on its own reconstruction and internal development. Soon after the peace, US economic situation turned to the better and blossomed into a boom fuelled by fast-paced industrialization. The boom quickly remedied the damage of wartime British blockade and allowed America to digest the financial burden of the last two wars. In its relationship with the Southern states and the Canadian territories, the Union tried to balance a spirit of reconciliation with a need to preserve the outcome of the conflict. The former goal found expression in a generous program of economic relief and infrastructure development for the Southern and Canadian sections as well as widespread (re)enfranchisement of Confederate veterans and Canadian settlers. They made an effort to restore the Southern states to a normal status within the Union and grant statehood to settled Canadian territories soon after pacification. Decisive suppression of all organized resistance to Union rule enforced the outcome of the war, and so did its enshrinement in the US Constitution with a set of amendments that banned slavery and guaranteed civil and voting rights of the freedmen.

The Reconstruction amendments extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States, guaranteed the Federal war debt would be paid (and promised the Confederate debt would never be paid), and stripped the right to hold office from former Confederates who had previously sworn loyalty to the US Constitution by holding federal or state offices. Most importantly, they created new federal civil rights that federal courts could enforce and protect. The most far-ranging provision was the full extension of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution to the states and the empowerment of Congress to legislate and protect these rights. They also decreed that the federal government or the states could not deny the right to vote or hold office because of race, color, ethnicity, language, creed, or previous condition of servitude or because of the failure to pay poll taxes. The amendments also prohibited establishment of a national language and guaranteed the states could keep a legal system that did not conflict with the US Constitution, as conciliatory measures for the Franco-Canadians.

Reconstruction policies also meant a military, judicial, and political effort to stop the Southern whites’ efforts to disenfranchise, discriminate, and abuse the freedmen. As time went on, a growing wish for reconciliation made the North increasingly sceptical about its attempt to force racial equality down the throat of the South. Lincoln’s assassination partially counteracted this mood by triggering a wave of fear and loathing for violent white supremacists. The Congress passed laws to suppress racist paramilitary groups and protect civil and voting rights of freedmen. It created a federal law enforcement agency to ensure effective application of the criminal laws of the United States, repression of domestic violence, and protection of the President.

The Anglo-American war dramatically showed the great strategic importance of efficient and reliable intra-continental logistics in North America and inter-oceanic connection with the Pacific. A timely completion of the first transcontinental railroad had greatly helped avoid a British-Mexican occupation of the West Coast. That line followed the so-called ‘Central’ route to California. The war persuaded the Congress to finance the building of two other ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ routes across the Northwest and the Southwest respectively. The southern transcontinental railroad pleased the Southern states and was an infrastructure hallmark of national reconciliation. It also greatly eased settlement and Americanization of the Southwest and the newly acquired northern Mexican territories.

Much the same way, a strategic imperative to get the Northwest and Western Canada settled as soon as possible to consolidate US rule over the region drove building of the northern railroad, and it was quite effective at that. It also became rather important to conciliate the Canadian section and foster its integration in the Union. For this reason, they effectively duplicated it into two parallel branches that mostly followed the old Oregon Trail and the Saskatchewan River system respectively. Because of similar strategic concerns, they also decided to build a branch of the southern railroad that would run through the Gulf Coast region and connect New Orleans with Tampico. The federal government also made an earnest effort to rebuild and improve infrastructure in the Southern and Canadian sections and ensure efficient northern-southern logistic integration across US North America.

The transcontinental railroads substantially accelerated the settlement and development of the US Frontier. This came at the price of more violent conflicts between Amerindian tribes and American settlers backed by the US army. The American effort to keep the regular army and state militias at a good level of efficiency ensured the Indian Wars were a string of US victories and American colonization ruthlessly suppressed all native resistance. All attempts of diehard British loyalists and Mexican nationalists to fight US rule in the Canadian and northern Mexican territories met the same fate.

Strong interest for an inter-oceanic canal in Central America was another expression of US strategic drive for efficient and secure continental travel. A number of surveys before and after the last two wars led to the conclusion the two most favorable routes were those across the Panama department of Colombia and across Nicaragua, with a route across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico as a third option. The Nicaragua canal appeared easier to build than the Panama one and US diplomacy engaged the Nicaraguan government into talks for a deal. In this context, the Americans came to regard their exclusive control over an inter-oceanic canal as a strategic imperative. For the same reason, they got very interested in expanding their control across the Caribbean and Central America and limiting European influence in the region as much as possible.

This attitude drove the USA to ratify annexation of the Dominican Republic when its government offered it to get protection from a possible Haitian invasion. For similar reasons the Americans supported the anti-colonial rebellion in Cuba. They smuggled a considerable amount of US weapons, supplies, and money to the Cuban rebels. US support for the rebellion prolonged the conflict and kept it in a stalemate as Spanish weakness and rebel disorganization balanced each other. Interest for the acquisition of Cuba did exist in the USA but the Americans were still too war-weary to accept an intervention in the conflict. American help however made many Cuban rebels develop a pro-US stance.

The outcome of the Anglo-American war split Canadian society between a practical majority of supporters of North American continentalism and an ideologically driven minority of loyalists to the British Imperial or Franco-Canadian causes. The former sympathized for the US system out of liberal or republican leanings, deemed its unification of North America would grant greater opportunities for peace and prosperity, or at least understood US hegemony of North America was inevitable and American democracy and federalism made it tolerable. Under the leadership of this faction, the Canadian section fairly quickly made itself at peace with its new destiny as part of America and found its place in the US political game, much the same way the South did after its failed secession bid. The same pattern showed up in the religious field, since Catholics who wished to integrate in US society typically converted to Old Catholicism.

Others were too conservative, too bound to their British or Franco-Canadian identities, or too loyal to Papal Catholicism to accept the new status quo. The vast majority of them chose to immigrate to Britain, France, or South America as circumstances and their sympathies dictated. A minority of Southerners that were too loyal to the Confederate cause or too racist to accept Reconstruction in good faith joined them. Immigrants from Europe or other parts of America soon replaced them and then some. Union with the USA caused the Canadian section to experience substantial population and economic growth, easing its assimilation in the Union.

The outcome of the war in North America, the uprising in Ireland, and the 1860s changes in Europe left Britain in a wary and frustrated mood. They were able to defeat Irish separatism and the British Empire kept its top rank among the great powers. Loss of Canada meant a significant humiliation and loss of resources for Britain, but in practice, it essentially just confirmed and extended the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. North America was a lost cause for British imperialism and from its ashes, a powerful rival had arisen that seemed determined to stake its claim for supremacy in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. British interests in these areas appeared too valuable to concede victory to America without a struggle. A mix of imperial pride, fear, greed, and stubbornness drove Britain to defy the rising American challenge that loomed on the horizon.

The post-Napoleonic balance of power in Europe was experiencing dramatic changes with the demise of Austria, the lessening of France, the impetuous rise of Germany, the ascent of Italy, and the resurgence of Russia. Impetuous industrialization and modernization of the ascendant powers in comparison to the prosperous but mature and relatively static status of Britain compounded the global challenge the British Empire faced. It was still the top superpower but its power, influence, and authority were no more absolute and at the serious risk of long-term decline. Pax Britannica was over and the future would present serious challenges from many sides to British interests.

The pre-war unrest of the Canadian colonies and their failure to unite, the war with the USA, and the uprising in Ireland made the British elites suspicious of any project to grant substantial autonomy to any portion of their empire. They suppressed all mainstream political talk of Home Rule for Ireland as an encouragement to Irish nationalist and Papist subversion. The British also became largely hostile to self-rule of their remaining settler colonies. They mostly kept their pre-existing levels of autonomy and responsible government out of political inertia and precedent but further developments were frozen. Britain essentially focused its colonial policy on maintenance of central control and imperial unity, economic development and exploitation of the colonies, and defense of strategic holdings.

The killing of Lopez in battle ended the Paraguayan War. Its outcome was the devastation and utter defeat of Paraguay with the death of the vast majority of its adult male population. Re-emerging tensions between Brazil and Argentina for division of the spoils and political conflicts within Argentina and Uruguay caused a second phase of the Plate River conflict, the Second Platine War. The war between Brazil and Argentina resulted in Argentina’s decisive victory. The outcome was annexation of Uruguay by Argentina; the latter country’s consolidation as a federal union with the federalization of Buenos Aires and Montevideo; and partition of Paraguay at the Rio Paraguay line between Brazil and Argentina. The war affirmed Argentina’s dominance in the River Plate region.

[eurofed]

1873-74.

After a few years of severe political instability, a France still reeling from the shock of defeat and civil war suffered another swing of the political pendulum. With the encouragement of the Papal Catholic clergy, a compromise deal occurred to pave the way to a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The Legitimist and Orleanist wings of the monarchist movement agreed to let the Count of Chambord, the senior Bourbon branch’s pretender, take the throne with the Count of Paris, the Orleanist pretender, as his heir. The Pope’s emissaries persuaded Chambord to make an insincere pledge to accept the tricolor as the flag of France. These compromises allowed the monarchist front sufficient strength to enact a regime change in France and restore the Bourbon monarchy.

The new King Henry V was the figurehead for a coalition of nationalist officers and politicians, reactionary Papal Catholic clergy and landowners, and conservative industrialists and financers. They wanted to reshape France into an authoritarian far-right state that would do away with liberalism, socialism, secularism, and the legacy of the French Revolution but they knew they had to enact this program gradually. They desired revenge against the hated Germans and Italians, whom they reviled for ideological and nationalist reasons, but they were aware France was still too weak to challenge the German-Italian alliance again.

The Bourbon regime instead sought to bolster its strength in a different way. Spain was experiencing a situation rather similar to France’s one; there was a weak republican regime beset by severe political instability and an aggressive far right that sought to restore a reactionary monarchy with the support of Papal Catholic clergy. The French government poured support to a Spanish right-wing front that organized under the leadership of Carlos, Duke of Madrid, the Carlist pretender to the throne. To expand their support base, the Carlists promised a restoration of the traditional regional autonomies of the Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon. The Carlist forces staged an uprising that plunged Spain into civil war, the Third Carlist War. With abundant French support, backing of the Papal Catholic clergy, and support of the most conservative sections of Spanish society, the Carlist forces were able to seize vast areas of Spanish territory.

Unrest grew among the Balkan nationalities (Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks) that were still subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Various factors fuelled their malcontent including the example of Germany and Italy, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire with independence of Hungary and Croatia, the growing influence and covert support of Russia, and their own long-standing grievances against Ottoman oppression and misrule. Various incidents in Bulgaria, Ottoman Serbia, Thessaly, and Crete occurred, escalated with the help of Russian agents, and were amplified by Russian propaganda until vast areas of the Balkans went into open revolt. The autonomous states of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, still under Ottoman suzerainty, joined the conflict in order to gain independence and support their ethnic brethren. Croatia and Greece intervened as well to liberate Bosnia and the Greek areas still under Ottoman rule.

Being better organized and equipped, the Ottoman forces soon pushed back the Balkan states’ armies and defeated the insurgents’ militias, advancing towards Belgrade, Bucharest, and Athens. In doing so, they committed many atrocities against the Balkan peoples that got ample coverage in the European press. This turned European public opinion, which was already prone to sympathize with the rebels for cultural and religious reasons, wholly against Turkey. The British government wished to protect the status quo in order to prevent expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans and the Middle East. However, pressure of public opinion tied its hands against too overt a support for the Ottoman cause. Russia exploited the pretext of protecting the Christian subjects of the Sultan from Turkish brutality to declare war to the Ottoman Empire. Germany and Italy remained ostensibly neutral but gave diplomatic support to Russia and made their own preparations for military intervention if necessary.

Russian troops entered Romania and pushed the Ottomans out of it while they opened a second front in the Caucasus. They steadily pushed the Ottomans out of northern Bulgaria and western Armenia albeit at a heavy price. With Russian help, the Serbs and the Greeks were able to turn the tide and drive the Ottoman forces out of their territory. The Croats advanced to occupy Bosnia with German and Italian support.

The British government gradually phased out martial law in Ireland, although the bulk of Papal Catholic Irish population remained strongly hostile to British rule. The British parliament repealed almost all the ‘Catholic Emancipation’ laws it had passed in the late 18th century and early 19th century and reinstated the restrictions on Roman Catholics that the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts, and the Penal Laws had established. However, their application was strictly limited to Papal Catholics, and Old Catholics were entirely exempt from these restrictions. Most British came to see the Old Catholics as not different from the Anglicans. As a result, Papal Catholics suffered disenfranchisement, could not own property, hold arms, inherit land, or join the army, the learned professions, the civil service, and the judiciary. The law banned Papal Catholic clergy and schools. In practice, the British tacitly tolerated Papal Catholic services as long as they happened in private. They also tolerated Papal Catholic priests, but bishops had to operate clandestinely. Despite the many restrictions heaped on them, however, most Irish remained stubbornly loyal to Papal Catholicism, since they identified it as a core component of their national identity.

In order to improve its strategic standing against the USA, Britain showed interest in acquisition of more naval bases in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Therefore, the British exploited unrest in the Kingdom of Hawaii due to a succession and contested election dispute to land their troops and establish a protectorate on the archipelago. The British government also made an offer to Denmark to purchase Greenland and Iceland. The Danes turned down the request about Iceland since they were unwilling to cede an area with a significant Nordic population. However, they reluctantly consented to sell under-populated Greenland in order to appease Britain. British expansionism in areas the Americans deemed part of their own sphere of influence heightened US drive to acquire strategically valuable territory in the Caribbean lest it may fall in British hands. A result was a US request to Denmark to purchase the Danish West Indies. The islands had limited economic value for Denmark and the Danes did not wish to take a side in the rivalry between America and Britain. Therefore, Denmark agreed to sell the Virgin Islands to the USA. This turn of events was another reason US attitude towards the ongoing conflict in Cuba grew more and more interventionist and American support for Cuban rebels increased. Other reasons were fading of American war weariness and US awareness of Spanish weakness due to the Third Carlist War.

Threatened loss of Iceland gave further fuel to the Scandinavian national movement that had been steadily gaining political ground across the Nordic countries during the last decade. During the early ‘70s declining health of Swedish King Charles XV, lack of a surviving son, and death of his brothers threatened Sweden with a succession crisis. His daughter Louise, Queen of Denmark, was the obvious solution and potential heir apparent if succession law was changed. The Danish royal couple was popular across the Nordic countries as a living symbol of Scandinavian solidarity. They provided a way to settle the Swedish succession crisis and achieve dynastic union of Scandinavia. The parliaments of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden negotiated an agreement to change their succession laws and make Frederick VIII and his wife co-rulers of the three countries at Charles’ death. They fulfilled the project in 1874 when Louise’s father died and the dynastic union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden went into existence with strong popular support. The governments of the Nordic countries and the leaders of Iceland’s home rule movement started negotiations to transform the dynastic union into a real one with federalization of Scandinavia.

[eurofed]

1875-76.

The Russian forces pushed the Ottomans out of southern Bulgaria, Macedonia, and western Thrace with the help of their Balkan allies and pressed towards Constantinople. They gradually forced the Turks to pull back to eastern Thrace and the outskirts of their capital. In the Caucasus front, the Russians gradually penetrated deep into eastern Anatolia, overrunning most of the region. Much like the Christian Balkan nationalities, the Armenians, Pontic Greek, and Assyrians welcomed the Russians as liberators from Ottoman discrimination and misrule and protectors from the atrocities Ottoman forces committed during the war.

The collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans caused an explosion of conflicting territorial claims and ethnic-religious clashes between the various communities of the region. In many cases, they escalated into multi-sided armed conflicts between militias of opposite factions or the armed forces of rival Balkan states. This created a chaotic situation that spread to Hungary and Croatia as the local Romanian and Serb minorities rose in revolt. The Russian forces therefore faced the additional burdensome task of trying to keep order in their Balkan rearguard as they advanced towards Constantinople. Germany and Italy decided to intervene in order to protect their own interests in the region. Their troops occupied the Albanian areas and helped the Hungarians and the Croats reassert their control in their own territories and Bosnia. Italian forces also landed to occupy Tunisia, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica, while the Germans did the same in Morocco.

On the Balkan front, the Russians and their allies advanced to the outskirts of Constantinople and besieged the city. On the Caucasus front, they overrun all of eastern Anatolia, upper Mesopotamia, and northeastern Syria. Their advance triggered a few border incidents with the Persians that Russia exploited as a pretext and opportunity to expand the conflict to Persia and reap further gains. The Russian forces defeated the Persian army with ease and advanced to occupy northwestern Iran and threaten the Persian heartland. The situation made the British fearful a complete Russian takeover of the Near East was imminent that would threaten the trade routes to India and the Middle East. To try to prevent this, the British deployed the Royal Navy in Constantinople and several other ports of Anatolia and the Levant. They threatened war to keep the Russians out of the Turkish Straits, the Levant, and Mesopotamia, but it was a bluff since Britain was in a difficult position about this.

Because of its structure and naval focus, the British military was ill suited to fight a general war in Europe without the help of another great power. Germany and Italy backed Russia, even more so if France aligned with the British, and had their forces already deployed in the Med and the Balkans. France was willing to help, especially if it got British assistance against the Germans and the Italians, but was in no shape yet to fight a general European war. It was still recovering from a crushing military defeat and civil war, as well as adjusting to a recent regime change, not to mention being busy with its involvement in the Carlist war. Spain too might have been an ally because of German takeover of Morocco but it would be able to provide little help since it had its hands full with the Carlist and Cuban conflicts. Even worse, if a general conflict occurred and Spain joined it the Cuban issue might well drive America to intervene. The Ottomans and the Persians were on the verge of military collapse. It was easy to see how reckless escalation of the crisis in these circumstances might end in a total disaster for Britain and its would-be allies.

While a tense diplomatic struggle enveloped the great powers, Constantinople fell to Russian siege and its loss triggered a general collapse of Ottoman rule in the Arab lands. The Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabia fell into chaos as various ethnic, religious, and tribal factions rose up against the Ottomans, then immediately started to fight each other for the spoils. Only in Anatolia the Turk forces kept control but they were in complete disarray and powerless to stop the Russians and their allies that occupied large swaths of the region. The Persians did not face an internal collapse but experienced a military one and could not stop the Russians from occupying Teheran. Evolving situation made the British realize the Ottoman Empire was a lost cause and they had to accept the facts on the ground its collapse had created. They had to bargain the best deal circumstances allowed about a division of the Balkans, the Med, and the Middle East in spheres of influence.

Diplomatic exchanges between the great powers established the broad compromise of recognition of conquests of the Russians and their allies in exchange for Britain getting a sphere of influence in Egypt, Sudan, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. Russia gave its consent as long as Turkey and Persia were included in its sphere of influence, also because it felt the financial strain of the war. The compromise also included the principle that Britain or its allies would control the Suez Canal and Russia or a proxy it trusted would hold the Turkish Straits. Navigation was to be open in the Dardanelles in times of peace and war alike to all vessels of commerce and war, no matter under what flag, thus in effect leading to internationalization of the waters. The waters were not to be subject to blockade, nor could any act of war be committed there, except in enforcing a collective decision of the great powers. Germany, Italy, and Russia revised their previous agreement to include Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria in the Russian sphere of influence and Hungary, Croatia, and Albania in the German-Italian bloc. They would partition Bosnia between its neighbors and the three powers would share influence over Greece. Building on these basic principles, a peace conference met to work out the new territorial settlement of Southeastern Europe, the Near East, and the Mediterranean.

Russia annexed various Armenian and Georgian territories in the Caucasus, including Ardahan, Artvin, Batum, Kars, Olti, and Beyazit. The vilayets of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, Diyarbakir, Trebizond, the eastern portions of Mamuret-ul-Aziz and Sivas, and the northern parts of Aleppo, Deyr Zor, and Mosul became an autonomous Armenian-Assyrian-Pontic principality under Russian administration. Russia also annexed northwestern Iran. Romania became an independent state with a Russian prince of the Bagrationi noble family on the throne and traded the cession of Southern Bessarabia for annexation of Northern Dobruja with Russia. The Russians merged Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, together with most of Vardar Macedonia, northern Kosovo, and Thrace west of the Enos-Midia line into the South Slav Kingdom, also commonly known as ‘Yugoslavia’, with Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov on the throne. The new South Slav state was a Serb-Bulgarian union with Orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism as a common bond that the Russians created to organize their Balkan sphere of influence and keep its nationalist conflicts under control. Greece got Thessaly, Epirus, Aegean Macedonia, Crete, the Aegean islands, Ionia, and Cyprus, as well as administration of the Straits area. Croatia and the SSK partitioned Bosnia.

The other powers recognized Levant, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan in the British sphere of influence. Turkey and Persia became client states of Russia. The powers confirmed previous accords to share control of the Suez Canal Company between Britain, Germany, and Italy. However, the Germans and the Italians agreed to cede effective control of the Canal to the British in exchange for getting joint administration of Palestine and Lebanon. The powers carved out the area as a homeland and haven for those Middle Eastern Christians and Jews who missed annexation by a European state. Over time, it also came to experience a considerable amount of Jew and Christian immigration from Europe. Because of European intervention and intra-Arab conflicts, a few kingdoms, all of them British client states, arose in the place of the Ottoman Empire across the Arab lands. Syria and Mesopotamia became the Kingdom of Greater Syria under the Hashemite dynasty. The Arabian Peninsula became the Kingdom of Rashidi Arabia under the Rashidi dynasty. Egypt became a Kingdom as well and kept Sudan.

Albania with most of Kosovo and northwestern Vardar Macedonia, Tunisia, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan became Italian protectorates. Morocco became a German protectorate. Hungary and Croatia became client states of the Pillar powers and joined the Central European customs and monetary union with Germany and Italy. The ethnic German principality in Transdanubia, the Banat, and Transylvania got its autonomy confirmed and further expanded. Romania and Yugoslavia became clients of Russia; Greece was a buffer state where Russia and the German-Italian bloc shared influence.

After the peace conference finalized the new territorial settlement of the Middle East, the European powers deployed their forces across the region to enforce it. They quickly restored order and suppressed all native resistance. A vast mass expulsion of Muslims from conquered territories in Europe and the Near East occurred that the great powers supported or tolerated out of their own anti-Islamic prejudice. The vast majority of Muslims in the Balkans, the western Anatolian coast, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, Palestine, Lebanon, and eastern Anatolia (Turks, Kurds, Chechens, Circassians, and Abkhaz) suffered ethnic cleansing and had to immigrate to Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Greater Syria, and Rashidi Arabia. The mass expulsion also came to include most of the Muslims in the Caucasus region, which the Russians had eventually managed to pacify in the 1860s after a savage decades-long struggle.

They were mostly replaced by expansion of autochthonous Christian groups and nationalities (Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Georgians, Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites), resettlement of Russian, Belarusians, and Ukrainian immigrants in the Russian territories, and immigration of Middle Eastern and European Jews and Christians to Palestine and Lebanon. There were a few exceptions to this mass-expulsion pattern; they mostly involved those nationalities deemed sufficiently loyal, liable to conversion and cultural assimilation, or simply not worth the effort. These more fortunate cases included the Albanians, Azerbaijanis, and Muslim Bosnians. However, in most cases even these surviving Muslim communities ended up converting to Christianity or picking a secular and lukewarm attitude towards Islam because of European rule and cultural influence.

Negotiations for political union and constitutional reform of the Nordic countries bore fruit. They led to the unification of Scandinavia as the federal union of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland with the House of Glucksburg-Bernadotte (formed by the marriage and co-rule of Frederick VIII of Denmark and Louise I of Sweden) on the throne. The new state pursued a liberal course in domestic issues and a neutral foreign policy. Neutrality was the result of an effort to balance the different interests of various sections of the union, that were oriented towards Britain and the USA for Iceland and Norway, towards Germany and Russia for Sweden, and a mix of both for Denmark.

Over time, however, interest grew across Scandinavia for closer ties with the German-led Central European customs and monetary union, thanks to the evident beneficial effects it had on the economy of member states. However, the Northern Schleswig issue to a degree acted as a serious obstacle. Scandinavia kept a claim on the region due to its Danish character. The 1860s peace negotiations repeatedly discussed a plebiscite but in the end, they never implemented it. Another irredentist issue many Nordics held dear was the wish to incorporate Finland in Scandinavia to complete its national unification. The Nordic national movement found strong sympathies in Finland due to the liberal and federal character of the Scandinavian union. However, neither the Finns nor the Scandinavians dared to do anything that would provoke a violent response from Russia.

Tensions between the USA and Spain due to the Cuban uprising continued to grow until the Americans declared war. The casus belli occurred when the Spanish captured and executed the crew of an American ship hired by Cuban insurrectionists to land men and munitions in Cuba. The Spanish captured it and wanted to execute the men on board as pirates; many of them were American and British citizens. A court martial tried several members of the crew and put them to death. When news of the executions reached the Americans, a wave of popular outrage supported the US declaration of war. The British government decided to stay neutral in the conflict due to its focus on the Middle East crisis and since the British public turned hostile to Spain because of the execution of British subjects.

The USA kept its army and navy in good condition since the last two wars; their Spanish counterparts, already burdened by the insurgencies in Spain and Cuba, were simply no match for the Americans. In a few months, the US forces blockaded Cuba, dealt a decisive defeat to the Spanish navy, landed in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and seized control of both islands with the help of local insurgents. Spain had to ask for peace and cede Cuba and Puerto Rico to the USA. US aid to Cuban rebels before the Spanish-American War had made many of them sympathetic to union with the USA. Therefore, Cuba and Puerto Rico showed little opposition to American annexation.

The Americans abolished slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, making Brazil its last holdout in the Western Hemisphere. Much like the Anglo-American War, the Spanish-American War saw Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites fighting against a common foe, helping to ease the scars left from the civil war. The American people saw it as a “splendid little war” that helped affirm US supremacy in the Western Hemisphere, won valuable territory, required many less sacrifices than previous conflicts, and was another step on the path to national reconciliation.

For Spain, this defeat was a massive humiliation that discredited the republican government and gave the Carlists the final push they needed to seize victory in the civil war. Much like France, Spain became a reactionary Bourbon monarchy with Carlos, Duke of Madrid on its throne. France and Spain became close allies with a bond cemented by far-right ideological affinity, a yearning for lost glory, resentment against their former enemies, and Papal Catholicism. Assassination of Henry V by an anarchist gave the Bourbon ruling elites an excellent opportunity to entrench their hold on power and make the Franco-Spanish bond even closer. They exploited the assassination as an excuse to pass a series of police laws and political reforms that definitely turned France into an authoritarian regime with brutal repression of political opponents. Their counterparts in Spain did the same in the aftermath of the civil war to ‘pacify’ the country.

By dynastic coincidence, Charles VII of Spain was also the senior Legitimist claimant to the throne of France if they deemed the renunciation invalid of the French throne by Philip V of Spain, second grandson of Louis XIV. The French Legitimist government broke its previous deal with the Orleanists to give the throne to the Count of Paris after the death of childless Henry V. France and Spain agreed to declare the renunciation invalid and Carlos took the throne of France as Charles XI; the two countries joined in a Bourbon personal union. A constitutional reform soon turned the personal union into a real one and established the dual monarchy of France-Spain. The French and Spanish regions of the state got separate parliaments and prime ministers. The union preserved its existence through rule of a single head of state and common monarchy-wide ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and finance under his direct authority. The armed forces formed an integrated whole with the King as commander-in-chief. In practice, the regime was an authoritarian oligarchy with a mix of conservative French and Spanish elites bound by the same ideology and a power-sharing agreement.

The Carlist government did restore a measure of regional autonomy to various Spanish communities such as Basque Country-Navarre, Catalonia-Valencia, and Aragon. Given the authoritarian character of the regime, such measures were of limited value in political terms. Cultural autonomy and a measure of administrative and economic prerogatives however were enforced, and they played an important role in containing separatist sentiments in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Restoration of regional autonomy in Spain was also important to help the growth in popularity of Iberism since many took it as a template for a possible union of Spain and Portugal.

[eurofed]

These maps show Europe, North America, and the world in the middle 1870s. They are meant to show international borders, so internal borders may often be alt-historically inaccurate (especially in the North American map) or not shown (as for Europe). US Canadian and North Mexican territories and later states may certainly get different names and borders, even OTL Western ones may diverge somewhat, and in any case they are surely not going to have any names related to Britain.

[eurofed]

1877-80 (part I).

The Franco-Spanish regime soon displayed its authoritarian, monarchist, nationalist, militarist, and religious character in full colors. It developed almost all the typical features of fascism except an all-powerful charismatic dictator and a single-party system. These included a police state, an authoritarian political system with bloody persecution of political opponents and disliked minorities, extreme nationalism and militarism, aggressive revisionism and expansionist-imperialist urges, and an atmosphere of permanent national mobilization. There also was an effort to channel domestic tensions into hatred of foreign enemies and scapegoat minorities, a drive to build up the nation’s strength for military dual use, an idealized reinvented past as a model, and a promise of imperial greatness as an ideal.

A right-wing oligarchic clique ruled it with a venerated monarch as figurehead and a rubberstamp parliament as fig leaf. Nominally, it was a real union with a fair deal of autonomy in domestic matters to member nations; there were separate parliaments and ministers, one monarch, and a common government that managed issues such as security, foreign policy, finance, and trade. In practice, all power was concentrated in a trans-national ruling oligarchy; however, its national components reasonably balanced out in numbers and influence, and a power-sharing agreement, far-right ideology, and compatible interests bound them together. France did claim the leading role thanks to its superior power, but Spain was far too important for the French to treat it like a colony. The regime allowed a certain degree of regional devolution in administrative and cultural matters since far-right regionalists were an important component of its power base. Of course, the regime never allowed such autonomy to interfere with its interests or become an excuse for disloyalty.

Over time, Classicalism became the common name for the political system the Franco-Spanish regime embodied. It harassed and persecuted liberals, republicans, left-wingers, Jews, Muslims, and all the Christian denominations but the Papal-Catholic state religion. Despite its agrarian ideals, it made an earnest effort to build up the industrial power and infrastructure of France and Spain as a way to increase the military power of the Bourbon Empire. For the same reason it engaged in an extensive land and naval rearmament program and attempted to boost the declining birth rate of the French people. Its foreign policy was based on ideological suspicion and revanchist resentment of the liberal powers, especially the German, Italian, and American former enemies, aggressive yearning to recapture the faded glory of France and Spain, and a wish for imperialist expansion. It based its identity on reactionary Papal Catholicism, a romanticized memory of the Ancient Regime French and Spanish monarchies, and an idealized pre-Roman past. It combined these features in the notion of an authoritarian ‘Gallic Empire’ of Western European peoples.

Despite their aggressive rhetoric, the Franco-Spanish leaders were not yet confident enough to risk a war of revenge against Germany and Italy. Therefore, they initially channeled their expansionist urges by other means, such as colonialism. France-Spain aggressively continued the colonization of Algeria and made it remarkably ruthless with brutal suppression of Arab and Berber resistance despite frequent rebellions, persecution of Islam, and an effort to Europeanize the colonies. They strived to absorb their corner of North Africa through a mix of French and Spanish settler colonization, forced conversion and cultural assimilation of collaborationist natives, and extermination or ethnic cleansing of rebel elements. The Franco-Spanish authorities encouraged European settlement by means of economic incentives and extensive land confiscation. Another major target of Franco-Spanish colonialism in this period was Southeast Asia with a steady expansion from pre-existing French colonies in Cochinchina and Cambodia to Annam and Tonkin. Franco-Spanish efforts to impose a protectorate on northern Vietnam caused increasing tensions with China, which regarded the region as part of its sphere of influence.

Besides its claims on German and Italian territory, France-Spain also had serious expansionist ambitions on Belgium and Portugal, but it did not yet dare enact them by military means. Therefore, it attempted to destabilize its neighbors and increase its international influence by supporting pro-Gallic forces across Europe and Latin America. Political vehicles for this effort were Papal Catholicism, ethnic and cultural ties, and sympathetic far right and nationalist movements. The Bourbon Empire thus sent support to sympathetic right-wing radical nationalists across the developed world, and was able to cultivate important ties with disgruntled nationalists in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. This however seriously got in the way of periodic Franco-Spanish attempts to court Russia as an ally, which they acknowledged as ideologically affine despite religious differences. Over time, Gallic feelers for collaboration seemed to be more fruitful with Britain. Justifications for this development included shared concern for the vast, growing power of Russia and the German-Italian bloc, the apparent overall solidity of these powers’ friendship, and mutual dislike of America. Ideological differences and British concern for the vast ambitions of France-Spain and its brutal attitude were an obstacle, but not an impossible one.

In sharp contrast to the political course of France-Spain, the late 1870s and the 1880s were a period of liberal reforms and democratic political evolution in Germany and Italy. The assassination of Kaiser William I in 1878 by an anarchist gave the throne to his son Frederick I, a liberal-minded reformer that admired the British political system. During his two-decade reign, he supported the efforts of German liberals for a political reform of the German Empire into a parliamentary democratic monarchy to a remarkable degree of success. With these reforms, declarations of war and peace treaties now required the assent of the Reichstag. Members of the government could now simultaneously be members of the Reichstag. The Reichskanzler and the Secretaries of State now required the confidence of the Reichstag. They were accountable for the conduct of their affairs to the Reichstag and to the Bundesrat. The Reichskanzler was now responsible for all political actions of the Emperor. The Emperor's rights to appoint, promote or reassign military officers were now limited by requiring the co-signature of the Reichskanzler or the Minister of War responsible for the contingent. The Ministers of War were now accountable to the Bundesrat and Reichstag for the management of their contingent.

However, even the German liberals disliked a wholesale adoption of the British model with its ceremonial figurehead monarch, given their historical experience of Germany’s weakness and division; they preferred the head of state to remain an influential figure with important executive powers. Therefore the Kaiser kept the power to nominate and dismiss the Chancellor and the ministers, the supreme command of the armed forces, and responsibility for foreign and security policy. Likewise, the military kept a high degree of influence and autonomy in its own field. Other important political reforms established a periodic reapportionment of Reichstag districts and Bundesrat seats to account for population changes, merged the small German states into federations-within-federation (Verbande) for purposes of representation and common affairs, and enacted several minor adjustments of state borders to make them more functional. The new Verbande included Thuringia (federation of the Thuringian states), Mecklenburg (federation of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Neustrelitz), Lippe-Waldeck (federation of Lippe, Schaumburg-Lippe, and Waldeck), and Anhalt-Brunswick (federation of Brunswick and Alhalt). Since their annexation, the imperial government had administered Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland as territories with limited autonomy. Now Alsace-Lorraine got statehood by merger with other German states: most of Alsace merged with Baden, Palatinate got northern Alsace and eastern Lorraine, and Luxemburg absorbed western Lorraine. Switzerland likewise got autonomy by becoming a Verbande of the restored Swiss cantons.

The only important measures the Emperor and the liberals were unable to approve were a radical reform of the Prussian three-class franchise and a liberal reform of the Prussian constitution on the model of the federal one. Conservative resistance proved too strong, and only allowed for a few watered-down changes. Abolition of the three-class system and a liberal reform of the Prussian constitution were not to occur until the end of the 19th century. Nonetheless, another tragedy in the Imperial family consolidated the liberal course of the German Empire. Erratic and egotist Crown Prince William died in a horse accident in 1880, leaving his level headed and humble younger brother Henry to succeed their father and continue many of his policies. Bismarck tried to stifle the liberal course the Kaiser favored, but eventually had to step down as Chancellor. Despite their dislike of his domestic policies, however, Frederick and the liberals greatly admired Bismarck for his role as Germany’s unifier and wished to keep his advice, especially in foreign affairs. Therefore, Bismarck was able to remain a powerful Minister of Foreign Affairs with an influence on the government that often rivaled the Chancellor himself. His continued presence, in turn, helped tone down the conservatives’ hostility to the new political course.

The foreign policy Frederick and Bismarck pursued continued to include a close alliance with Italy, preservation of Germany’s Central-European trade bloc and sphere of influence, and an effort to keep France-Spain diplomatically isolated. To the latter goal Germany tried hard to keep good relations with Russia, Britain, and the USA; it avoided taking too much of a side in the Anglo-American family feud and in the ‘Great Game’ rivalry between Britain and Russia. The balancing act between Britain and Russia also was the result of a compromise between the Kaiser’s and the liberals’ pro-British sympathies and Bismarck’s and the conservatives’ pro-Russian attitudes. Over time, political pressure within Germany for acquisition of a colonial empire kept growing, and the German government had to give way. However, Bismarck was careful to orient German colonial expansion to avoid antagonizing the interests of friendly powers such as Italy, Britain, Russia, and the USA too much. For this reason, Morocco and Central Africa ended up being the focus of German colonialism.

Another important political development was the formation of a Pan-Germanic movement that advocated the creation of a Greater Germanic Reich to unite most of the Germanic peoples of Europe within it under the leadership of Germany. The project would include peoples such as the Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the Flemish, with the likely exception of the British. The Kaiser and Bismarck avoided giving the Pan-Germanics too much support since they acknowledged it would harm Germany’s good relations with its neighbors and Britain. Besides, there was not too much mainstream support for the idea in the other Germanic nations.

Nonetheless, the Pan-Germanic ideal did get some serious genuine popularity beyond Germany’s borders, especially in the Netherlands and the Flanders, thanks to economic and cultural ties with the Germans, the vast prestige of Germany, and the perceived threat of France-Spain. Pan-Germanicism met more resistance in Scandinavia, since the development of a Nordic national identity partially acted as an ideological barrier. Nonetheless, Germany did try to absorb Scandinavia and the Low Countries in its trade bloc and sphere of influence. Its diplomatic efforts were partially successful when the Netherlands and Scandinavia accepted to join the Central European customs and monetary union. However, it happened at the onerous price of a plebiscite that returned Northern Schleswig to Scandinavia. The Dutch and the Nordics grew diplomatically closer to the Pillar bloc but ostensibly kept their neutral stance and avoided alliance commitments. German attempts to bring Belgium in its trade bloc were much less successful, because of domestic resistance from pro-French Walloons and the opposition of Britain and France-Spain. Inclusion in the CEMU did spur the industrialization of the Netherlands and Scandinavia just like the rest of the trade bloc.

Italy followed a political course very similar to its German ally and model. Since the adoption of the Albertine Statute, the Italian political system had gradually developed the customs and practices of a parliamentary monarchy. A series of constitutional reforms similar to the German ones codified them into law. Electoral reform substantially widened suffrage to include anyone who was literate or could pay a moderate tax. This fell short of enfranchising the illiterate lower classes and Italy did not adopt universal suffrage until the end of the 19th century. However, the good quality of the public education system and the effects of industrialization were steadily improving the Italian literacy rate, indirectly widening the suffrage more and more in the long term. Italy enacted regional and local devolution by granting a fair deal of political autonomy to its regions, provinces, and municipalities. It changed its official name into the Italian Empire and King Umberto I took the title of Emperor. Reasons for the name change included an affirmation of Italy’s growth into great-power stature, celebration of imperial expansion in the Mediterranean, cherished ties with the Roman past, and imitation of Germany and Russia.

Italy kept pursuing a foreign policy in its own sphere that was aligned with, and similar to, the one of Germany in most regards, with the obvious difference of Pan-Germanicism. A broad analogue of the latter manifested with Italy’s celebration of its Roman past and its sympathy for re-creating a modern equivalent of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Expressions of this drive included Italian enthusiasm for colonization of North Africa, cultivation of ties with Greece and sympathetic Spanish dissidents, and a proffered wish to ‘rescue’ Spain from corrupting French and Classicalist influence and bind it in a Neo-Latin community of Mediterranean peoples. Mutual hostility between the French and the Italians was so great that the Pan-Latinists typically did not include France in their projects. Besides North Africa, the other focus of Italian colonialism was East Africa.

Despite their political difference and fierce antagonism with France, Germany and Italy ended up enacting more or less the same ruthless kind of colonial policy in North Africa, although in the case of the liberal powers there was a significantly lesser degree of indiscriminate violence. Reasons for this included Germany’s wish to secure control of access to the Mediterranean and Italy’s drive to absorb its ‘Fourth Shore’. The Germans in Morocco and the Italians in Tunisia and Libya applied more or less the same ruthless mix of settler colonization, forced assimilation of collaborationist natives, and extermination or ethnic cleansing of rebel elements to accomplish Europeanization of their North African colonies. Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya became the target of extensive European settlement the colonial authorities encouraged with economic incentives and infrastructure development. However, in comparison to Gallic practices German and Italian colonial policy as a rule displayed more of a genuine acceptance and respect of collaborationist natives that showed willingness to assimilate. Despite desperate Arab and Berber resistance, it looked like Northwest Africa was bound to become an extension of Europe in a few decades, much the same way Islam had largely ceased to exist in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and large portions of the Middle East.

[eurofed]

1877-80 (part II).

The late 19th century definitely looked like a very dark period for the Muslim world that succumbed to European colonialism as the harsh price of its failure to modernize and keep the pace with Europe. Large portions of its lands appeared lost to the Umma for all time because of the demographic changes imposed by the European powers. The conquerors carved up what remained in a series of colonies and puppet states as their imperialist playground. The once proud and mighty Ottoman and Persian empires were mutilated, humiliated, and beaten down into subservience. Of course, European ambition and rapacity was far from the only explanation for this dramatic turn of events. The downtrodden Muslims had much to blame for their misfortune in the long spell of misrule, conservative stagnation, despotic rule, and backwardness of the Islamic states. Moreover, as brutality went, the Ottomans down the centuries had racked up a long and impressive record of atrocities against Christians and European peoples, up to and including the last conflict, which European public opinion had neither forgiven nor forgotten. The vast majority of the Middle East thus fell to colonialism in the aftermath of the last conflict; Egypt followed soon afterwards.

Albeit nominally remaining an Ottoman territory state, Egypt became an autonomous vassal state (khedivate) under the Muhammad Ali dynasty and later an independent Sultanate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the 19th century, the ruling dynasty of Egypt had spent vast sums of money on infrastructural development of Egypt – most notably the building of the Suez Canal – and wars with the Ottoman Empire to affirm its autonomy. However, in keeping with its own military and foreign origin, the dynasty's economic development was almost wholly oriented toward military dual use goals. Consequently, despite vast sums of European and other foreign capital, actual economic production and resulting revenues was insufficient toward repaying the loans. As a result, the country teetered toward economic dissolution and implosion by the mid-late 1870s. In turn, the European powers took control of the treasury of Egypt, forgave debt in return for taking control of the Suez Canal, and reoriented economic development toward capital gain. Britain, Germany, and Italy seized the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal Company and split them in equal amounts.

However, Islamic and Arabic Nationalist opposition to European influence in Egypt and colonialism in the rest of the Muslim world led to growing tension amongst the natives. The most dangerous opposition came from the Egyptian army that saw the reorientation of economic development away from their control as a threat to their privileges. A large military demonstration forced the Sultan to dismiss his Prime Minister and rule by decree. Many of the Europeans retreated to specially designed quarters suited for defense or heavily European settled cities such as Alexandria. Consequently, Britain, Germany, and Italy sent warships to Alexandria to bolster the Sultan amidst a turbulent climate and protect European lives and property. In turn, Egyptian nationalists spread fear of invasion throughout the country to bolster Islamic and Arabian revolutionary action.

The Sultan moved to Alexandria for fear of his own safety as nationalist army officers began to take control of the government. Egypt soon was in the hands of nationalists opposed to European domination of the country and the new revolutionary government began nationalizing all assets in Egypt. Anti-European violence broke out in Alexandria, prompting an Anglo-German-Italian naval bombardment of the city. Fearing the intervention of outside powers or the seizure of the canal by the Egyptians, London, Berlin, and Rome decided to crush the nationalist revolution by force. In a parallel development, a religious leader proclaimed himself the Mahdi ("guided one") and began a war to unify the tribes in western and central Sudan. Taking advantage of conditions resulting from Ottoman-Egyptian exploitation and maladministration, the Mahdi led a nationalist revolt culminating in the fall of Khartoum. Insurgents massacred many of the city’s inhabitants.

The British led an Anglo-Indian expeditionary force at both ends of the Suez Canal. Simultaneously, German and Italian forces landed in Alexandria and the northern end of the canal. These corps joined and maneuvered to meet the Egyptian army. The combined Anglo-Indian and German-Italian forces easily defeated the Egyptian army and took control of the country putting the Sultan back in control. Following his victories in Sudan, the Mahdi sent an army to invade Egypt, but the European expeditionary force defeated it. The British became aware of the Mahdist threat from Sudan, and decided to crush it. An Anglo-Indian army invaded Sudan, easily defeated the Mahdist forces, and killed the Mahdi in fighting. Sudan returned to Egyptian rule. The Sultanate itself, however, became a British client state. Britain rewarded the Germans and the Italians for their help in the Egyptian campaign by ceding Heligoland to Germany and Kufra to Italy. Moreover, it pledged to support German and Italian colonial claims in Africa that did not interfere with British strategic interests.

In the USA, the Reconstruction Era ended during the late 1870s as the Union phased out military rule in the South and Southern whites mostly reasserted their political dominance. White supremacists strived to use violence and intimidation to keep the freedmen away from the ballot box and gain control of state governments across the South. The North had supported use of military force to contrast this for a good while, but eventually got tired of the effort since the South apparently accepted national unity and end of slavery. The Southern supremacists tried to exploit their political dominance to impose a system of racial discrimination and segregation on the freedmen.

They were partially successful since racism in the South remained rampant and supported a pattern of individual but systematic discrimination of blacks in housing, employment, and education. Most freedmen became a discriminated and exploited lower class with de facto limited rights. Effectiveness of their votes was often diluted by such devices as gerrymandered redistricting plans and at-large/multimember elections and their participation to elections got somewhat restricted by felony disenfranchisement and selective application of literacy or comprehension tests, moral-character tests, and record-keeping requirements. However Northern economic investment and vigorous action of the federal government to oppose segregationist activities allowed a sizable middle class of freedmen and ‘poor whites’ to form in the South and act as a partial political and social counterbalance to the white supremacists. Although politically and socially dominant, the racists were unable to exclude their opponents from politics altogether or enact a system of legal segregation, also thanks to the influence of the federal government. Military occupation ended, but federal courts and law enforcement acted to suppress and punish blatant acts of supremacist violence and activities of violent groups. Enforcement however often proved difficult due to Southern non-cooperation, especially in lynching cases.

Federal legislation guaranteed blacks equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and prohibited exclusion from jury service. It also prohibited discrimination in voter registration because of race, color, ethnicity, language, creed, previous condition of servitude, or failure to pay any poll tax and it banned interferences with a person’s right to vote. It gave federal courts and law enforcement the power to enforce the act. The Supreme Court banned voting-rights restrictions based on property qualifications or extensive residency requirements. It ruled the Reconstruction Amendments gave the Congress the power to protect the federal and state rights of citizenship and outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations when they acted as “a sort of public servants”. It also declared anti-miscegenation statutes and state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities were unconstitutional. This effectively frustrated the intent of state officials in the South to enshrine individual practices of racial segregation into law and give legal sanction to treatment of blacks as second-class citizens. Individual adherence to the practice of racial segregation however remained widespread in schools, housing, employment, and at the workplace.

As it concerns restoration of political unity and entrenchment of national identity, Reconstruction was an unqualified success. Its record about the civil rights of the Blacks was more questionable. One positive socio-economic feature was a remarkable amount of infrastructure development that repaired the damage of the civil war and allowed a substantial degree of industrialization. Economic development of the ‘New South’ narrowed the gap with the industrial North and allowed the growth of a Black and ‘poor White’ middle class, even if the divide remained significant and the rural component strong.

A shared national narrative gradually developed about the Civil War that was acceptable to the northern and southern sections. It held slavery was a wicked, outdated system, antebellum Southern society had wrong and unsustainable foundations, and a group of power-hungry extremist politicians and slaveholder planters that refused to accept the verdict of history and democracy staged a coup to perpetuate it. They misled a naive and misguided South to fight for the wrong cause of rebellion and slavery’s preservation by means of misunderstood regional patriotism, lies, and coercion. The Union cause was righteous and the North won on its own merits. However, the valor, suffering, and tragic heroism of the Southern soldiers and officers that followed the laws of war and behaved chivalrously warranted acknowledgment and respect. The Confederate political leaders were despicable traitors and there was no tolerance for overt apology of their cause or nostalgia of antebellum South. Therefore, there was little room to use them as an indirect show of support for segregation. However, the judgement was the South had redeemed itself by accepting the outcome of the war and fighting for America in the wars against Britain, Mexico, and Spain. In this narrative, Lincoln and Grant were the heroes, Lee and Johnston the tragic heroes, and Davis and Stephens the villains.

In the rest of the USA, the North continued its massive industrial growth and the Americans gradually settled the Western territories. The Canadian territories and later states easily assimilated in the American society and became in almost all regards northern extensions of the US regions they bordered, New England, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Great Plains, and Pacific Coast respectively depending on geography and logistics. The presence of a sizable French-speaking community more or less became the only distinguishing feature. Much the same way, the Caribbean territories and later states of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico gradually assimilated in American society with integration of their elites in the US political system. In the process, they became a Spanish-speaking portion of the South in most aspects. US rule brought remarkable political stability and economic development for the region’s standards and this secured a success of the assimilation process.

Their presence in the Union unfortunately meant their Black population became subject to the same discrimination system that prevailed in the Southern states. On the other hand, their example and the legal constraints Southern racism worked under influenced US notions of race to make the Southern whites more tolerant of Spanish-speakers and racially mixed persons. A social attitude towards racial classification gradually developed in the USA that was similar to the one prevalent in Latin America. A person of racially mixed origins could be identified as White, Black, Amerindian, or multi-racial depending on appearance, ancestry, financial status, class, education, and self-identification.

Pretty much the same way, the northern Mexican territories gradually assimilated in the American nation. The region’s population was relatively scarce, especially in the northwestern portion, and much like the US Greater Antilles, most Mexican inhabitants came to appreciate the political stability and economic development brought by US rule, so they accepted integration in American society. Most Spanish-speakers in US territories also converted to Old Catholicism. The people that remained hostile to American rule, out of nationalism or loyalty to Papal Catholicism, typically immigrated to Latin America. Most northern Mexican territories and later states became an extension of the Southwest region; the Rio Grande area (Coahuila, Neuvo Leon, and Tamaulipas) became a broad copy of Texas in most regards.

In South America, a border dispute between Bolivia and Chile about the ownership of the resource-rich region of Antofagasta caused the War of the Pacific. Peru honored its alliance treaty with Bolivia. Argentina regarded Chile’s actions with suspicion, due to its rivalry with the Chileans for Patagonia. However, it was happy to exploit the situation to engage in the undisturbed conquest of Patagonia from the Mapuche natives. The Chilean army invaded the disputed territory. Bad luck made Chile lose both of its ironclads and this allowed Peru to seize the upper hand in the naval war. The Peruvians destroyed the rest of the Chilean navy and severed the supplies to the Chilean army. Desert conditions made both sides critically reliant on sea routes to supply their forces. The Peruvian and Bolivian armies were thus able to push the Chilean forces out of the disputed area with ease.

[eurofed]

1881-90 (part I).

Franco-Spanish drive to seize control of Annam and Tonkin caused increasing tension with China that regarded northern Vietnam as part of its sphere of influence. Diplomatic attempts to negotiate a compromise failed because of ambiguities in the agreement and the belligerent attitude of local commanders on both sides that caused armed clashes. A state of war between France-Spain and China ensued. The Franco-Spanish navy easily destroyed the Chinese southern fleets, bombed several South Chinese ports and imposed a blockade of the Yangtze River. With some more difficulty, the F-S army defeated the Chinese and their Vietnamese allies in Tonkin and landed in Hainan.

To add to China’s troubles, a group of pro-Japanese reformers briefly overthrew the pro-Chinese conservative Korean government in a bloody coup. However, the pro-Chinese faction, with assistance from Chinese troops, succeeded in regaining control in an equally bloody counter-coup. These coups resulted in the deaths of a number of reformers, but also caused the burning of the Japanese legation and the deaths of several legation guards and citizens. China had long held Korea as a tributary state. Japan had engaged a very successful program of modernization and industrialization during the last two decades. It wished to increase its influence in Korea, both to use its mineral and agricultural resources for its own growing economy and population and to eliminate the threat a Korean Peninsula in the hands of a hostile foreign power represented for Japan. Escalation to war between China and Japan was the result.

The war with China dramatically showed the positive effects of the modernization process in Japan. The Japanese navy crushed the Chinese northern fleet, while Japanese armies landed in the Korean Peninsula, pushed Chinese forces out of it, overrun Korea, and imposed a pro-Japanese government. China’s troubles further increased when Russia joined the conflict to fulfill its own expansionist ambitions on the northern borderlands of the Chinese Empire. The Russian government picked the excuse of border clashes in Xinjiang to declare war. Mid-19th century ethnic and religious rebellions and conflicts with European powers had seriously weakened China’s ability to keep control of distant Xinjiang, leaving the region in a chaotic state. Russia had exploited the situation to occupy part of the province, and Qing attempts to restore their control led to armed clashes.

The Russian intervention fostered an agreement between Russia and Japan to define their respective strategic interests in Northeast Asia. The Russians recognized Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kuril islands in the Japanese sphere of influence, and the Japanese acknowledged Manchuria and Mongolia as a Russian interest. Russian armies penetrated deep into northern Manchuria and western Xinjiang, defeating Chinese forces. In the meanwhile, the Franco-Spanish consolidated their hold of Tonkin and expanded their occupied area in Hainan. The Japanese advanced in southern Manchuria and northern China, and a Japanese landing seized control of the Pescadores islands.

As powerful enemies encircled China and sent its armies on the run on multiple fronts, the Qing dynasty decided to beg for peace after an unsuccessful attempt to get help from other European powers. China recognized the Franco-Spanish protectorate on Annam and Tonkin and ceded Hainan to the Bourbon Empire. The Franco-Spanish had to spend several years to entrench their control on northern Vietnam and Hainan in a pacification campaign, but were ultimately successful. Russia annexed Manchuria, Xinjiang, and western Mongolia and engaged in a successful multi-year attempt to pacify the conquered regions. China recognized Japanese control of Korea and ceded Formosa to Japan. Pro-Chinese Formosan notables attempted to create an independent republic but Japanese forces swiftly crushed them.

Japan quickly moved to make Korea a protectorate and in a few years turned it into formal annexation. It also annexed Formosa and Sakhalin (renamed Karafuto by the Japanese). The Japanese strived to integrate Korea in the Japanese Empire and to enact the same modernization and industrialization program that had been so successful in their homeland. Japanese rule faced the opposition of nationalist scholars and the Confucian conservative elites that had thrived under the Joseon dynasty. Its modernizing reforms and the social progress and economic development they brought won it the support of progressive members of the upper and middle classes and many commoners.

The Japanese government strived to integrate the Korean economy and society fully with Japan. Thus, it introduced many modern economic and social institutions, invested heavily in infrastructure, including schools, railroads and utilities, and it fostered parallel industrialization of Japan and Korea. It promoted mediatization and intermarriage of the Korean royal household and Yangban elite in the Japanese royal family and peerage. Cultural assimilation efforts, such as support for adoption of Japanese-style names during transition to a modern family registry system, balanced with respect for Korean cultural heritage. The Japanese administration introduced a public education system modeled after the Japanese school system. The public curriculum focused on western knowledge, patriotic moral and political instruction, and a hybrid system of Korean and Japanese history and language studies.

Official Japanese policy promoted equality between ethnic Koreans and ethnic Japanese and the notion of racial and imperial unity of Korea and Japan. Many Koreans could sympathize since they came to associate the Korean kingdom, which had utterly failed to modernize on its own, with backwardness, the Confucian caste system, and poverty, while the Japanese Empire meant modernity, social progress, and economic development. As a result, they gradually came to focus their political aspirations as a community on equality with the Japanese or autonomy rather than independence; otherwise, they usually aligned with the ideological agendas of like-minded Japanese.

By the early 1880s, Russia effectively completed its conquest of Central Asia north of Persia and Afghanistan. This expansion and the division of the Middle East in British and Russian spheres of influence enhanced the ‘Great Game’ imperial competition between the two powers in Asia. The arrival of an uninvited Russian diplomatic mission to Kabul, which the Afghan Amir unsuccessfully tried to keep out, and his refusal to accept a British mission too prompted the British to invade Afghanistan. The Anglo-Indian forces occupied most of the country. The Amir had to sign an agreement that relinquished control of Afghan foreign affairs to Britain. The British installed their representatives in Kabul and other locations. Soon afterwards, however, an uprising in Kabul led to the slaughter of the British representative, along with his guards and staff. This prompted the second phase of the Anglo-Afghan war. Anglo-Indian forces invaded Afghanistan again, defeated its army, deposed the Amir, and crushed the uprisings of various Afghan governors and warlords.

Britain decided to make Afghanistan a protectorate and partition it between multiple rulers. Afghanistan thus became part of the British Raj as various princely states, although it was one of the most lawless areas of the British Indian Empire, unrest was frequent, and British control on the region was always much looser than in the Indian subcontinent. In a parallel move, the British also consolidated their control on Baluchistan by imposing their suzerainty on the princely states and tribal areas of the region. Parallel British and Russian expansionism in Central Asia caused a series of border incidents that brought the two great powers on the brink of war.

German mediation defused the crisis with an agreement to establish the Oxus River as the main border between Russian Central Asia and the British Raj. The agreement allowed the formal Russian annexation of Armenia-Assyria. Greece also annexed the Straits Zone, although the powers confirmed previous agreements about internalization of the waterway. Germany and Italy organized the area of the Levant (Palestine and Lebanon) they administered as an autonomous state by reviving the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, with a branch of the House of Savoy, which held a claim on the title, on the throne. Over time, the area got a considerable amount of Christian and Jew immigration from Europe and the Middle East to replace the expelled Muslim population. The Germans and the Italians granted the Kingdom autonomy in most domestic matters, although they managed its security, foreign affairs, finance, and trade.

With the partition of Central Asia between the two empires, the Great Game had a temporary lull but in the long term remained as fierce as ever. It now spread its purview from the Eastern Mediterranean to East Asia where the growing weakness of the Qing dynasty made China a tempting prize for the imperialist appetites of the great powers. To affirm British imperial rule on the Indian subcontinent, the British Parliament officially recognized Queen Victoria as Empress of India.

Tsar Alexander II kept dodging the revolutionary assassination attempts that felled various other heads of state, royals, and ministers across Europe in this period and ruled until the end of the 1880s. His like-minded eldest son Nicholas then succeeded him and continued his liberal agenda, while his conservative second son Alexander had become King of Yugoslavia. After the emancipation of the serfs, Alexander’s other greatest domestic achievement was the concession of a constitution. Thanks to his efforts, Russia shed off autocracy and became a constitutional monarchy like the rest of Europe. To be fair, the Russian constitution was much more authoritarian than the liberal model of Britain, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia. It was more similar in spirit and character to the Franco-Spanish system.

The new constitution provided for a bicameral Russian parliament, whose approval was necessary to enact a new law. This legislature was composed of an upper house, known as the State Council, and a lower house, known as the State Duma. Members of the upper house were half appointed by the Tsar, while various governmental, clerical and commercial interests elected the other half. Members of the lower house were to be chosen by various classes of the Russian people, through a complex scheme of indirect elections — with the system being weighted to ensure the ultimate preponderance of the propertied classes. While the Duma held the power of legislation and the right to question the Tsar's ministers, it did not have control over their appointment or dismissal, which was the exclusive right of to the monarch. Nor could it alter the constitution, save upon the emperor's initiative. The Tsar retained an absolute veto over legislation, as well as the right to dismiss the Duma at any time, for any reason he found suitable. The emperor also had the right to issue decrees during the Duma's absence — though these lost their validity if not approved by the new parliament within two months.

Besides political reforms, the Russian government also pursued economic development. It made heavy investment in an ambitious program of railway construction, most notably the Trans-Siberian Railway, to bind the vast domains of Russia together. It pursued and encouraged industrialization by means of protective tariffs, a currency reform, a commercial treaty with Germany and Italy, the creation of an educational system to train personnel for industry, reformed commercial and industrial taxes, and state capitalism. Agrarian reforms introduced the unconditional right of individual landownership, abolished the ‘obshchina’ system, and replaced it with a capitalist-oriented form highlighting private ownership and consolidated modern farmsteads. They included development of large-scale individual farming, introduction of agricultural cooperative, development of agricultural education, dissemination of new methods of land improvement, and affordable lines of credit for peasants. Their aim was to lay the groundwork of a market-based agricultural system for Russian peasants.

Creation and expansion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and other railroads east of the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea considerably increased internal immigration to Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far East, ensuring these regions got a substantial degree of development and Russification. The agrarian reforms included resettlement benefits for peasants who moved to the regions east of the Urals. The economic reforms were expected to bring significant economic development in due time. The wars in the Balkans and Asia however left Russia with a considerable debt, despite a few measures to increase revenues such as the establishment of a lucrative state monopoly on alcohol. Given the successful precedent of the Alaska Purchase, they conceived the idea to sell a portion of the Russian Far East to the USA. With cession of Alaska and acquisition of Manchuria, Kolyma and Kamchatka had lost much of their economic and strategic importance for the Russian Empire, and their mineral wealth was still unknown. On its part, the USA was skeptical about the economic value of the area, but interested in the acquisition of Kamchatka to extend its strategic and economic influence in the Pacific region. Not without some controversy in America about purchasing another “icebox”, the USA and Russia agreed upon and ratified American purchase of Kolyma and Kamchatka.

The Peruvian and Bolivian armies invaded northern Chile. Argentina completed the “Conquest of the Desert” and annexed Patagonia. Having discovered some evidence of Chilean aid to the Mapuche, Argentina intervened in the War of the Pacific against Chile. Hoping in an advantageous rematch of the Second Platine War, Brazil attacked Argentina and invaded Banda Oriental. However, the well-armed Argentinean army soon defeated the Brazilian invaders and pushed them back. Being trapped in a two-front war and losing, Chile begged for peace. The Chileans had to recognize Bolivian sovereignty on the disputed region and Argentina’s ownership of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and the Straits of Magellan. To a degree, the War of the Pacific also became a proxy war between the USA and Britain, since the Americans supported Argentina and Peru-Bolivia, while Britain backed Chile and Brazil.

The Argentinean forces invaded and overrun Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná. Brazil asked for peace and had to cede Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and the territory between Rio Paraguay and Rio Paraná to Argentina. Bolivia gained a western portion of the Amazons. Victory in the War of the Pacific drove allied Peru and Bolivia closer and they decided to restore the Peru-Bolivia Confederation for mutual support and protection against Chilean and Brazilian hostility. The war considerably boosted the economic fortunes and political stability of Argentina thanks to acquisition of several valuable territories and entrenchment of its hegemony on the River Plate region. Immigration and economic development allowed Argentina to assimilate the conquered territories without excessive difficulty.

The war and economic growth consolidated Argentina’s role as the strongest South American power. Defeated Chile and Brazil spiraled into political instability, suffering coups and civil wars. However sheer demographic and economic power allowed Brazil to keep its stature as Argentina’s middle-power rival in the continent, while Chile slid into obscurity. Political integration of the Andean region and US investments also granted Peru-Bolivia some welcome economic development. The successful examples of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation and Argentina’s unification of the River Plate region revived considerable interest across Latin America for the regional unification experiments of the independence era.

In Central America, American diplomats secured favorable terms from Nicaragua for an agreement about construction of an inter-oceanic canal. After the Anglo-American War, the Americans adopted a policy of exclusive control on inter-oceanic canals in their continent. The status of the Mosquito Coast however stood as a major obstacle. Although Britain has given up its protectorate rights in 1860, the area remained a self-governing entity under British influence, which the Americans found an intolerable threat for their canal project. To a lesser degree, the Americans also saw British Honduras as a serious issue.

Tensions about the status of Mosquito Coast and British Honduras, already heightened by the War of the Pacific, run high, and Britain and the USA came to the brink of war. The two powers painfully achieved a compromise with the Treaty of Managua. The Mosquito Coast lost its autonomy and Nicaragua absorbed the territory. Guatemala annexed British Honduras. The USA gained the right to build the Nicaragua Canal under its exclusive control. The Americans reluctantly recognized Britain the right to build an inter-oceanic canal under its own control in the Panama department of Colombia. They added the provision the British would not occupy, colonize, or assume any dominion or protectorate over the region or any other part of Central America.

The USA persuaded the Nicaraguan government to agree to an annexation treaty thanks to American support for Nicaragua on the Mosquito Coast issue and promises of generous investments. The Nicaraguan elites noticed the Spanish-speaking Greater Antilles and North Mexican territories that the USA had annexed prospered under American rule, so they were agreeable to follow the same path. The Congress ratified the annexation treaty and immediately financed the construction of the Nicaragua Canal. The Americans completed building of the Canal in a decade.

The French had begun work on the Panama Canal, but had to stop because of engineering problems and high mortality due to disease, leading to bankruptcy of the French company. The British bought its assets, changed the project from a sea-level canal to a more realistic lock and lake canal, and re-started construction. The Colombian government proved recalcitrant to grant Britain the terms (renewable lease in perpetuity on the land proposed for the canal) it sought, so the British supported Panamanian separatist rebels with weapons and money. Separation of Panama from Colombia took place under protection of the Royal Navy and the new Panamanian government granted Britain control of the canal under the terms it wanted. The British built the Panama Canal in a decade like its sister project. The USA did not intervene because of its previous accords with Britain, but the status of the Panama Canal became another source of tension between the two powers. The Americans blamed Britain for the establishment of Panama as a British client state, which in their eyes violated the Monroe Doctrine and the Treaty of Managua. The British retorted the Americans had broken the treaty in the first place with their annexation of Nicaragua.

British intervention in Panama made the Americans nervous about the security of the Nicaragua Canal, so they got interested in securing a buffer between that territory and Panama. They offered the government of Costa Rica similar terms in exchange for annexation to the ones Nicaragua had gotten, including US financial support for a much-needed railroad to transport coffee, Costa Rica’s main export, to the Caribbean ports. The Costa Ricans accepted and the state became another US territory in Central America. By the end of the 19th century, US public opinion became confident that Spanish-speaking territories with valuable resources or strategic importance and a friendly or relatively scarce population were a gainful acquisition and easy to assimilate. A new row of US-UK tense diplomatic exchanges and reciprocal accusations predictably followed American annexation of Costa Rica.

After being re-elected two times, President Grant died in 1885, soon after leaving office, of throat cancer. Because of his foreign policy achievements, his vigorous and mostly successful pursuit of Reconstruction, and general prosperity during his administration, he got a lasting reputation as a good President and one of the best American generals. Public opinion was prone to forgive him for the corruption that plagued his administration. They mostly blamed it on circumstances beyond the President’s control, such as the flaws of the US party system and civil service, or excused it as the consequence of his excessive trust in his associates, a non-damning trait in a national hero. Lincoln shattered the two-term precedent Washington established and replaced it with a three-term one. Grant further entrenched it, so it became traditional for successful and popular Presidents to seek and often obtain two re-elections.

[eurofed]

1881-90 (part II).

European colonization of North Africa marked the beginning in earnest of the Scramble for Africa. Up to the 1870s, the European powers directly controlled only a tiny portion of Sub-Saharan Africa, essentially in the form of coastal outposts, and exercised ‘informal imperialism’ by military influence and economic dominance. The latter years of the 19th century saw a transition to direct rule with the invasion, occupation, colonization, and annexation of African territory by European powers. In a few decades, almost the entire continent got under European control, with only Liberia still being independent.

Sub-Saharan Africa offered industrial powers like Britain, Germany, France-Spain, and Italy an open market that would garner them a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the colonial power than it sold overall. In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap materials, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, such as copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent.

The scramble for African territory also reflected a concern for the acquisition of military assets and naval bases for national prestige, strategic purposes, and the exercise of power. The growing navies, and new ships driven by steam power, required coaling stations and ports for maintenance. The Europeans powers wanted defense bases because they were useful for the protection of sea routes and communication lines; colonies with large native populations were also a source of military power. In the age of nationalism there was pressure for a nation to acquire an empire as a status symbol; the idea of ‘greatness’ became linked with the sense of ‘duty’ that many European nations used to justify their imperialistic ambitions.

The opening act and formalization of the Scramble for Africa was the Berlin Conference. German Foreign Minister Bismarck called it with the support of the British and the Italians to prevent armed conflicts from incompatible claims on African territory. The representatives of Britain, Germany, Italy, France-Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Belgium, Netherlands, Russia, Hungary, and the United States took part in the conference to work out a joint policy on the African continent. The outcome (the General Act) fixed the following points: international prohibition of slave trade by African and Islamic states; freedom of navigation on the main rivers of Africa; division of the African continent in spheres of influence; and a principle of effectivity (based on "effective occupation") to stop powers setting up colonies in name only. According to this doctrine, a fresh act of taking possession of any portion of the African coast would have to be notified by the power taking possession, or assuming a protectorate, to the other signatory powers; regions were defined where each European power had an exclusive right to pursue the legal ownership of land.

The principle of effective occupation stated that powers could acquire rights over colonial lands only if they possessed them or had "effective occupation". In other words, if they had treaties with local leaders, if they flew their flag there, and if they established an administration in the territory to govern it with a police force and military garrison to keep order. The colonial power should also make use of the colony economically. This principle became important not only as a basis for the European powers to acquire territorial sovereignty in Africa, but also for determining the limits of their respective overseas possessions. Effective occupation served in several instances as a criterion for settling disputes over the boundaries between colonies.

The combination of the principles of effective occupation and spheres of influence was the result of a compromise between the position of Germany and Italy on one hand, and Britain and France-Spain on the other hand. The Germans and the Italians, being latecomers to the colonial game, believed that as far as the extension of power in Africa and Asia was concerned, no colonial power should have any legal right to a territory, unless the state exercised strong and effective political control. Britain and France-Spain already had large territorial possessions outside Europe and wanted to keep them while minimizing their responsibilities and administrative costs. The compromise allowed the European powers to conquer Africa with the minimum effort necessary to control and administer it. It guaranteed them the ability to do so gradually without excessive concern a rival power might pre-empt them by encroaching in their sphere of influence.

Definition of spheres of influence took some serious effort, but eventually occurred on the simple basis of dividing Africa in four areas for Britain, France-Spain, Germany, and Italy. The British got Southern Africa and the lower two-thirds of the Nile basin. France-Spain took Madagascar and most of the northwestern corner with Algeria, the Sahel, and West Africa up to the upper half of the Niger basin. Germany got Morocco and the central portion of the continent with Central Africa, southern East Africa, and the lower half of the Niger basin. Italy took Tunisia, Libya, the Horn of Africa, northern East Africa, and the upper third of the Nile basin. In certain cases, a power already controlled coastal outposts in other powers’ sphere of influence. The conference established they could sell them to the sphere owner or keep them as military bases and minor trade outposts. However, they could not use them to expand in the hinterland or control the region’s economy.

Britain, Germany, Italy, and France-Spain soon got busy turning the lines they drew across the map of Africa into effective possession. In a few decades of effort, they got remarkably successful. Sometimes they experienced some setback, such as the occasional lost battle in a sequence of colonial wars and repression of native rebellions, but overall European expansion was relentless. Britain experienced the greatest difficulty when it tried to annex the Boer republics. The Boer settlers proved quite an effective foe with their guerrilla tactics. The British suffered heavy casualties and were only able to reap ultimate success by ruthless counterinsurgency tactics. In comparison, the other European powers experienced much less difficulty in their colonial wars, such as when a well-equipped Italian expeditionary force crushed the Negus’ armies and conquered Ethiopia without much difficulty.

The other European states got nothing. This had scarce political consequences for Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Hungary since they had limited interest in African colonies and little wish to challenge the great powers’ ambitions. Likewise, the USA and Russia had their strategic interests in other areas of the world and no appetite for territorial expansion in the African continent. Their main concerns at the conference, which they got satisfied, were to obtain an international recognition of the Monroe Doctrine and of Liberia’s independence for the USA, and re-affirmation of the right to intervene in an extra-European state if Europeans or Christians were in danger for Russia.

The conference’s outcome was a massive blow to Portugal’s national pride with severe consequences. The General Act forced the Portuguese to give up their cherished ‘Pink Map’ plans for colonial expansion across Southern Africa. Moreover, the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique encroached in the German and British spheres of influence and the two powers picked the excuse of Portugal’s debts to remove a threat to their interests. Portugal had amassed a serious amount of debt beyond its ability to pay, and acting in concert, London and Berlin forced Portugal to cede its possessions in Angola and Mozambique to Germany and Britain respectively as collateral.

This humiliation caused massive outrage and political destabilization in Portugal, the collapse of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, utter discredit for the Braganza dynasty, the assassination of several members of the royal family, a republican revolution, and a bloody civil war between monarchists and republicans. The Franco-Spanish poured support across the border in weapons, money, and volunteers for the Portuguese monarchists, allowing them to reorganize and gain the upper hand. The victorious monarchists invited Franco-Spanish troops in to help them “restore order” – i.e. enact a brutal repression of republicans and liberals.

Assassinations, accidents, and executions before and during the civil war had claimed the lives of all the male members of the Portuguese royal family. The Portuguese Cortes gave the throne of Portugal to the Bourbon King of France-Spain with the Pope’s blessing. Portugal and Spain merged in the new state of Iberia, a part of the Franco-Iberian union. Portugal got a measure of regional and cultural autonomy much like Catalonia-Valencia, Aragon, and Basque Country-Navarre. Long national decline, British betrayal, and civil war made many Portuguese skeptical of Portugal’s ability to thrive as a separate nation and fearful of civil strife. Iberism had genuine appeal to many Spanish and Portuguese, and the Papal Catholic clergy strongly supported the union. Britain, Germany, and Italy protested Portugal’s annexation by the Bourbon Empire, but refrained from taking military action since Britain was busy fighting the Boer War and the brutality of Portuguese republicans during the civil war had made their cause unpopular in Europe.

Industrialization continued to grow across most of Europe and North America during the 1870s and the 1880s. Its main centers were Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, France, Italy, and the USA. To a lesser but still quite important degree, it also spread to Scandinavia, Hungary, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and the Japanese Empire. It brought economic development and social progress, but also many social problems tied to inequality and poor living conditions of the lower classes. The consequences were social unrest, the spread of progressive ideas, and left wing - in the conservative countries, liberal too - agitation. The answer of the elites varied, including liberal reforms and extension of the suffrage, the world’s first experiments in social legislation, and repression combined with intensification of nationalism as a scapegoat.

Examples of reform included rudimental social-welfare legislation in Germany and Italy, Britain’s adoption of universal male suffrage, and transition of Japan and Russia to constitutional monarchy. However, such reforms were often partial or incomplete: all attempts of British reformers to enact social reforms, grant devolution to Ireland, give self-government to the settler colonies, and enfranchise the Papal Catholics failed. The Russian and Japanese constitutions provided for an elected parliament but left power concentrated in the hands of the Emperor and suffrage restricted in favor of the wealthy classes.

The Meiji constitution gave the Emperor of Japan the right to exercise executive authority, and to appoint and dismiss all government officials. The Emperor also had the sole rights to declare war, make peace, conclude treaties, and dissolve the lower house of Diet. He also could issue Imperial ordinances in place of laws when the Diet was not in session. Most importantly, command over the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy was directly held by the Emperor, and not the Diet. The Meiji Constitution provided for a cabinet consisting of Ministers of State who answered to the Emperor rather than the Diet, and to the establishment of the Privy Council. Not mentioned in the Constitution was the genrō, an inner circle of advisors to the Emperor, who had managed the modernization process and retained considerable influence.

The Meiji Constitution established a legislature with two Houses. The Upper House or House of Peers consisted of members of the Imperial Family, hereditary peerage, and members appointed by the Emperor. Direct male suffrage (with property qualifications) elected the Lower House or House of Representatives. The Emperor and the Diet shared legislative authority, and they had to agree in order for a measure to become law. On the other hand, the Diet got authority to initiate legislation, approve all laws, and approve the budget.

Despite the authoritarian character of the Russian and Japanese political system, Russia and Japan stood as successful examples of conservative modernization, as shown by their transition to constitutional monarchy, ongoing industrialization, and foreign-policy successes. Despite its failure to modernize on its own, and the consequent loss of its independence, Korea was ultimately able to share the successful modernization and industrialization process of Japan thanks to its integration in the Japanese Empire. Their achievements sharply contrasted with the failure of other states such as Turkey, Persia, Siam, and China to embrace the same path. The typical outcome was backwardness, stagnation, political instability, a widening gap with the Western world, and European imperialist encroachment resulting into national humiliation, territorial losses, up to and including colonial subjugation in many cases.

During the 19th century, the Chinese Empire and the Qing dynasty suffered a steady process of decline. Humiliating defeats in several wars with European powers and Japan, destructive rebellions, famine, widespread social unrest, and growing unpopularity of the dynasty highlighted the process. The Qing were forced to cede the control of many ports and land concessions, concede onerous economic privileges, and lose China’s peripheral territories and tributary states bit by bit to the European powers, the USA, and Japan. Foreign powers asserted a right to promote Christianity and imposed unequal treaties under which foreigners and foreign companies in China got special privileges, extraterritorial rights and immunities from Chinese law. This deal caused much resentment and xenophobic reactions among the Chinese people.

The dynasty tried to rally with the “self-strengthening movement”, an effort to create modernized armies, develop military industries, and promote government-sponsored industrial enterprise. However, since they shunned any real attempt to pursue political, social, and institutional modernization, such efforts mostly failed. China engaged in technological modernization only, buying modern weapons, ships, artillery, building modern arsenals to produce these weapons, and only giving their soldiers modern weapons without institutional reform, all the while refusing to reform the government or civil society according to Western standards. The flaws of Qing government, such as nepotism, corruption, bureaucratic infighting, and lack of initiative, burdened government-backed projects and enterprise. As a result, the ‘new’ Chinese armies remained radically inferior to modern foreign military and government-backed enterprise failed to promote economic development. To the degree they worked, these programs increased the growing power and influence of regional leaders and officials. The conservative faction remained largely dominant in the Manchu court and stifled any real attempt for more radical reforms.

European colonialism almost entirely overrun Southeast Asia as Britain gradually annexed or imposed its protectorate on Upper Burma, the Malay Peninsula, and northern Borneo. Siam had to cede Laos to France-Iberia after a brief colonial war and survived in an increasingly precarious position trapped between the British and Franco-Iberian colonial empires.

In Brazil, defeat in the War of the Pacific discredited the Imperial regime and the slavery issue destabilized it. At the death of Emperor Pedro II, the controversial attempts of the liberals (backed by the Imperial family) to enact abolition of slavery and a succession dispute (the Emperor had no surviving sons and his daughter Isabel’s succession to the throne faced strong opposition) unleashed a civil war. Initially the conflict was multi-sided but it gradually turned into a fight between abolitionist liberals and conservative monarchists. The latter grew considerably in strength thanks to the support of slaveholding wealthy landowners, a faction of the army with ambitions of a military dictatorship, and reactionary Papal Catholic Church. The conservative faction that became dominant aimed to turn Brazil into a Classicalist authoritarian monarchy similar to the Gallic Empire with a branch of the Bourbon on the throne. They eventually won the civil war thanks to the generous support of France-Iberia (that backed them out of ideological sympathy and imperialist ambitions) and to a lesser degree Britain (that regarded them as a lesser evil than the alternative of a pro-US progressive Brazil).

Much to its later regret, the USA failed to provide enough aid to the Brazilian liberals to compensate for Anglo-Gallic support to the conservatives. The new Brazilian regime reorganized the country according to the Franco-Iberian authoritarian model; it nominally abolished chattel slavery but in practice replaced it with a harsh segregation and peonage system for Black freedmen, which was pretty much the same thing. The new regime brutally persecuted Brazilian liberals, abolitionists, republicans, leftists, and freethinkers. The example of Brazil drove Chile, which had also suffered political instability since its defeat in the War of the Pacific, into a coup that established a Classicalist authoritarian regime. Both Brazil and Chile aligned with the Gallic and British empires in international relations. The USA and Argentina perceived this spread of Classicalism in the Western Hemisphere as a serious security threat, due to the alliance alignments and barely-concealed revanchist ambitions of Brazil and Chile.

A wave of instability swept the Balkans. In Yugoslavia, the autocratic rule of King Alexander I caused his assassination and a coup that soon degenerated in a power struggle between different factions. The faction that got on top had Classicalist leanings and embraced a pro-Gallic Pan-Slav agenda. It tried to stabilize its grip on power by enforcing Yugoslavia’s irredentist claims on the lands of its neighbors, stirring up unrest among the Serbs of Croatia and Hungary and pushing a claim on Greek Macedonia. In Romania, a peasant uprising occurred and revolutionaries assassinated the King and his heir. These events destabilized the kingdom, eventually bringing a pro-Gallic ultra-nationalist government in power. It pressed its claim on Transylvania and picked a fight with Hungary and Croatia in concert with Yugoslavia. Fearing Yugoslav ambitions and having designs of its own on Thrace, Greece joined the fray.

Dreading a complete collapse of their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe to Gallic encroachment, Germany, Italy, and Russia decided to intervene, first by giving support to Hungary, Croatia, and Greece, then by directly committing their own forces in the region to ‘restore order’. Yugoslavia and Romania aligned with France-Iberia and expected its aid. The Gallic Empire was more than willing to provide it, but realized it needed support of its own, so it appealed to Britain. The world narrowly averted a general war this time since the British, who were engaged in a war scare of their own with America, hesitated and eventually preferred to bargain with the Eastern powers for a few compensations elsewhere. The frustrated Franco-Spanish had to back down and leave their Balkan proxies high and dry. Yugoslavia and Romania were defeated, their Classicalist and nationalist regimes toppled. Alexander’s son, Nicholas, took back the Yugoslav throne with a conservative constitution akin to the Russian one. The Russians decided direct rule might be a better option to keep the unruly Romanians into line. Therefore, they annexed Moldavia and Russia partitioned Wallachia with Hungary.

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These maps show Europe, North America, and the world in the late 1880s. They are meant to show international borders, so internal borders may often be alt-historically inaccurate (especially in the North American map) or not shown (as for Europe). The Nicaragua and Panama Canals are being built by the USA and the UK respectively.

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1891-1900 (part I).

The last third of the 19th century, commonly known as the “Gilded Age”, witnessed the flourishing of the Second Industrial Revolution in America and Europe, and its spread to Russia, Japan, and the Southern Cone. Its consequences included rapid economic and population growth, establishment of a globalized modern industrial economy, social changes and tensions, and the imperialistic division of the world between the great powers. The socioeconomic issues created by industrialization eventually ushered in the Progressive Era, a period of social activism and reform that occurred between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, while growing imperialistic tensions between the great powers resulted in the Great War.

The Gilded Age got most remarkable for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. The bourgeois elites of the Second Industrial Revolution grew into a powerful and proud upper class who led a lifestyle of opulence and considerable leisure (which also caused the first development of the tourism industry). This was most noticeable in America, where the super-rich industrialists and financiers enjoyed full social dominance. A bit less so in Europe, where the bourgeois upper class shared the apex of the social ladder with the portion of the traditional landed elites that successfully weathered transition to industrial economy. Critics greatly resented the upper class’ wealth who believed the wealthy elites cheated to get their money, lorded it over the common people, and ruthlessly exploited the workers. The power and luxury of the ruling elites contrasted with the plight of the lower class that suffered poor working and living conditions.

This contrast triggered the growth of labor union movements and left-wing political parties that tried to improve the lot of the working class. It also drove the growing middle class to seek an improvement of their own living conditions and share of wealth through a series of social reform movements and progressive political movements. To be fair, the wealth of the period was not just highlighted by the upper class’ opulence, but also by the rise of philanthropy (especially common in America, but also known in Europe) to endow thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphony orchestras, and charities.

As it concerns the US political system during the last third of the 19th century, its main features included intense voter interest, routinely high voter turnout, unflinching party loyalty, dependence on party platforms and nominating conventions, hierarchical party organizations, and the systematic use of government jobs as patronage for party workers. Cities developed ward and citywide "bosses" who could depend on the votes of clients, especially recent immigrants. Newspapers were the primary communication system, with the great majority closely linked to one party or the other. In politics, the two parties engaged in very elaborate get-out-the-vote campaigns that succeeded in pushing turnout to very high levels. The "spoils system" financed it whereby the winning party distributed the majority of local, state and national government jobs and many government contracts to its loyal supporters. Large cities were dominated by political machines, in which constituents supported a candidate in exchange for anticipated patronage — favors back from the government, once that candidate was elected — and candidates were selected based on their willingness to play along.

The Republicans remained politically dominant and in control of the Congress and the Presidency during the Reconstruction Era and the first part of the Gilded Age. The American people were grateful to the Republicans and kept them in power for the successful leadership they had provided the nation during its time of trial in the Civil War and the Anglo-American War. Economic growth, foreign-policy successes, and the mostly positive outcome of Reconstruction were other reasons for the prolonged political dominance of the Republicans. Throughout the Union, capitalists, shop owners, skilled artisans and workers, clerks, and professionals favored the Republicans, as did more modern, commercially oriented farmers. In the South, the Republicans also won strong support from the newly enfranchised freedmen and the Black and ‘poor White’ middle class created by the Reconstruction reforms. The party kept pursuing its established agenda of protectionism, government intervention in the economy to foster modernization and industrialization, vigorous defense of American national security and US interests abroad with a powerful military, and a strong federal government. Nonetheless, as time went on, a growing amount of dissatisfaction emerged in several sectors of society about the Republican dominance and its policies.

Many came to perceive the ruling party as excessively subservient to the upper class and its advocacy of government intervention in the economy as bent towards favoritism of business interests and matched by a “laissez-faire” attitude towards the social inequalities and injustices created by industrialization. The scandals associated with the Gilded Age shocked the Americans' sense of civic virtue: corrupt state governments, massive fraud in cities controlled by political machines, political payoffs to secure government contracts, and recurring evidence of government corruption. There was a sense that excessive ties between the government and the business elite (the “invisible government”) inevitably led to favoritism, bribery, kickbacks, inefficiency, waste, and corruption. Reaction to these issues gradually split the Republicans into two different factions, the pro-business conservatives and the pro-reform Progressives.

The latter faction gradually took a distinct identity and gained strength towards the end of the Gilded Age, merging with a vaster array of social reform movements that emerged in American society towards the end of the 19th century. One main goal of the Progressive movement was purification of government, as Progressives tried to eliminate corruption by exposing and undercutting political machines and bosses. A second theme was achieving efficiency in every sector of society by identifying old ways that needed modernizing, and emphasizing scientific, medical, and engineering solutions. Many people led efforts to reform local government, education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and many other areas. Initially the movement operated chiefly at local levels; later it expanded to state and national levels. Progressives drew strong support from the middle class, and supporters included many lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers, and business people.

The Progressives strongly supported scientific methods as applied to economics, government, industry, finance, medicine, schooling, theology, education, and even the family. The Progressives had a complex relationship with the US political system: many of them clustered within the Republican Party, whose main ideology of government intervention in economy and society was compatible with their own aims; however, they also loathed the subservience of the conservative faction to business interests and party machines and its frequent corruption. Consequently, Progressive activists at times made up the pro-reform wing of the Republican Party, in other moments they took the character of a distinct political faction and even supported a separate Progressive Party.

As it concerns the Democrats, they remained the political underdog during the Reconstruction and the early Gilded Age, their appeal tarnished and crippled by their association with the old slaver elites that had betrayed the nation. They only gradually managed to rebuild their image and reorganize a broad-based political coalition. The latter was made up of pro-business conservatives, hardscrabble old-stock farmers, the conservative middle-class, Southern segregationist Whites, and unskilled laborers. The party stood for agrarianism, a free market, low tariffs, low taxes, states’ rights, less spending, and, in general, a laissez-faire and decentralized, limited government. The conservative wing generally dominated the party during the first part of the Gilded Age; however, as time went on, a competitive pro-reform faction grew out of agrarian unrest for falling commodity prices and high railroad rates. This new faction, the Populists (so named because People’s Party was the most common label they used when they organized as a separate political movement), advocated the interests of the small farmers and the rural middle class against the economic elites. Much like the similar case of the Republicans and the Progressives, the relationship of the Populists with the Democrats was complex and variable during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Sometimes it was more like the Populists making up the pro-reform wing of the Democrats; sometimes it was more akin to being a distinct political movement and even a separate political party.

Yet another political faction took shape out of the reaction of the industrial working class to the poor working and living conditions that prevailed during this period. Such a reaction initially manifested in the form of craft-oriented labor unions that grew strong in the USA since the 1870s. These unions often used strikes as a method to attain higher wages, shorter hours, and union control over working conditions and hiring. The first major manifestations of this strategy on a national level were a series of strikes in the railroad sector that took place in the 1870s and 1880s. These often took a violent character and were suppressed by the government or resulted in ultimate failure. These failures and revulsion at use of violence led to the decline of the radical labor movement and the rise of more moderate labor unions.

They instead advocated gradual improvement of working and living conditions through organization and cooperation with political movements that supported social reforms. The unions especially wanted restrictions on judges who intervened in labor disputes, usually on the side of the employer. Union activists and left-wing pro-labor social reformers often cooperated or even merged with sympathetic Populists and Progressives, but eventually coalesced in their own political faction. The latter took a variety of names, but most often, they identified it as the Labor party. It got support from trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers, and unskilled workers. The moderate wing of this movement often cooperated with the progressive wings of the other parties, but the rest of the political spectrum largely marginalized and ostracized the radical wing.

The three main reform-minded factions of the US political spectrum kept a relationship that wavered between effective cooperation on issues of common interest and antagonistic competition fueled by ideological differences, such as the interventionist vs. libertarian divide between the Progressives and the Populists, and the more radical left-wing character of the Labor movement vs. the rest. The late Gilded Age and the Progressive Age saw the rise of manifold single-issue reform movements that addressed many domestic issues. These included government regulation of railroads and large corporations ("trusts"), the protective tariff, the role of labor unions, civil service reform, child labor, the need for a new banking system, corruption in party politics, primary elections, direct election of senators, and efficiency in government. Other important issues were women's suffrage, government regulation of working and living conditions of the middle and lower classes, a graduated income tax, and abolition of national banks. Typically, one or more of the reformist political movements espoused these issues as part of their own platforms.

During the first part of the Gilded Age, the Republicans maintained the political dominance that it had enjoyed since the Civil War. However, trouble was brewing for the Republicans under the facade of success. During the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s, dissatisfaction was brewing up in the public opinion about the policies of the ruling party and its corruption, while the Democrats got new life through the growing influence of the Populist movement. This allowed the Democrats to seize control of the Congress in 1884 and win the Presidential election of 1888. They approved a landmark civil service reform that gradually curtailed the spoils system to senior positions, freeing up most of the jobs for a nonpartisan merit-based evaluation. They also created a regulatory agency for interstate railroad travel, although its powers were initially limited. The influence of the conservative Democrat faction however stalemated other reforms in the Congress, to the frustration of public opinion.

The Progressive movement was increasingly getting into shape and it acquired growing influence both in US society and within a Republican party reeling from defeat. The 1892 election saw the victory of a Progressive-Republican candidate for the Presidency and a pro-reform coalition of Populist and Progressive candidates seized control of the Congress. They passed several measures that produced a sizable array of reform legislation, including the first peacetime graduated income tax, increased powers of the railroad regulatory agency, an anti-trust act to prevent large firms from controlling a single industry, laws to ensure the safety of foodstuffs and drugs, a child labor regulation act, and a federal job safety code. The Supreme Court, however, struck down some of these measures as unconstitutional. Frustration for this obstacle helped the President be re-elected with a strong majority and the pro-reform coalition to expand its majority in the Congress. This in turn opened the way to a new age of constitutional reform since the Reconstruction.

The Congress approved constitutional amendments to enforce direct election of senators and women’s suffrage and allow an income tax. When the Supreme Court struck down the child labor and the job safety laws, the Populist-Progressive majority of the Congress reacted by passing two other constitutional amendments. They empowered the Congress to regulate child labor and education without prejudice for the free exercise of religion and to enact regulations of business, property, and labor for the sake of public health, safety, general welfare, and protection of the environment. Frustrated with what they perceived as the slow pace of ratification due to the increasingly large number of states in the Union and obstructionist attitude of some state legislatures, they also passed another amendment that lowered the ratification threshold to 2/3 of the states and allowed to use state referendums to ratify constitutional amendments. The Progressive and Populist movements combined into a vast and successful lobbying effort to get the threshold referendum ratified by state conventions. This also provided momentum to have all the other Progressive amendments ratified in relatively short order through a mix of state conventions and referendums. The Congress subsequently passed laws to regulate child labor, establish a graduated federal income tax and inheritance tax, and set up a federal job safety and health code.

A similar effort at the state and local level mirrored Progressive-Populist activism at the federal level. Many states created the initiative, referendum, and recall processes for citizens to directly introduce or approve proposed laws or amendments to the state constitution, and to give voters power to recall elected officials. The use of state and national primary elections to reduce the power of bosses and machines spread across the nation. The Progressives worked hard to reform and modernize local and state governments and the education system, professionalize medicine, law, and social sciences. Although controversial, the vigorous reform effort of the reformist movements met the favor of the majority of the US public opinion, allowing them to keep control of the Congress and the Presidency throughout the 1890s and pursue further reforms.

The President’s assassination in 1897 by an anarchist enabled Theodore Roosevelt, one of the leaders of the Progressive faction of the Republican Party, to succeed him. He rose to national prominence and got the Vice Presidency because of his charismatic and exuberant personality, vast range of interests, many accomplishments (political leader, author, explorer, soldier, naturalist, and reformer), and his heroism during the Big Swords war. Once he became President, he strongly pursued enactment of the Progressive platform with the Congress into a sizable array of reform legislation and executive regulation. Conservation of the nation's natural resources and beautiful places was another high priority for Roosevelt, and he greatly raised national visibility of the issue. The result was strengthened anti-trust and railroad regulation legislation, a ban of federal injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, a workers’ compensation law for work-related injuries and diseases, minimum wage and maximum workday laws. Other reforms included a postal savings banks system, a low-interest credit system for farmers, campaign reform laws, a program of conservation, reclamation and irrigation of American land, establishment of a national park service, and creation of the Federal Reserve.

Roosevelt pursued a foreign policy of vigorous defense of US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and expansion of US military power. His vast popularity and the success of his reform program allowed him to win an effortless victory in the 1900 election. Efforts also grew to set up seminal welfare systems to provide coverage for sickness and pension plans, although those efforts kept a patchwork character. Calls to set up large-scale welfare plans by legislation failed for the time being. Another progressive reform that floundered was prohibition of alcoholic beverages by constitutional amendment. Although a few Christian denominations and the women’s suffrage movement strongly backed prohibition, it also met fierce opposition by many Old Catholics and immigrant communities that eventually stalemated it. Personal opposition of the President also helped kill the momentum for prohibition.

In Europe, background social issues driven by the Second Industrial Revolution were very much the same as in America. However the more conservative and hierarchical character of European society kept the transformation of the political and cultural landscape a bit more subdued. In the long term, the radical scope of ongoing socioeconomic changes would largely, although not entirely, smooth out the difference between the two sides of the Atlantic. The business upper class created by industrialization still rose to the apex of the social ladder, but they shared it with those elements of the landed elites that had successfully adapted to an industrial society. Those two elements gradually merged to form a unified ruling elite, with the “nouveau riche” bourgeois element being prevalent the economic field. The aristocratic and “old money” element was more frequent in the professional officer corps and the upper echelons of the civil service. Of course, plenty of contrary examples existed; the officer corps and the civil service saw an increasing influx of bourgeois upper and middle class elements due to the vastly increasing complexity of administration and size of the army in the Industrial Age. Industrialization was also creating a middle class of ever-increasing size that pressured to better its lifestyle and its share of power, and a vast number of industrial workers that were eager to ameliorate their poor working and living conditions.

In the liberal constitutional monarchies of Britain, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia, the political system became sufficiently democratic to be stable and allow peaceful expression of those social issues. As a rule, in these countries a party system of 3-5 major parties or factions gradually took form. These typically included the conservatives, the liberals, the Christian democrats, and the left-wingers. The conservatives drew most of their support from the business and landed elites, the right-wing nationalist element of the middle class, and the non-politicized farmers. The urban middle class and the skilled workers mostly backed the liberals. The rural middle class and the politicized farmers formed the main support base of the Christian democrats. The left-wing labor movement drew power from the trade unions and the unskilled workers. Since in these countries the political system and the constitution had already evolved to be liberal in character, the tug-of-war on social issues between conservatives and progressives mainly characterized the political struggle. One side sought to maintain the status quo favorable to the upper class, the other pressured for various social reforms that would satisfy the concerns of the middle and working classes.

Democratic European countries did enact a few of those reforms, especially in the last decade of the 19th century, when progressive mass parties gradually swelled in following and influence. These included a graduated income tax and inheritance tax, job safety laws, reduction of working hours, regulation of child labor, and an end to government interference in peaceful labor disputes to back the employers. For those European countries that had established them (Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia), this also included expansion of their basic welfare systems, although they remained quite partial and limited by modern standards. The landmark political reforms that occurred essentially sealed the transition of Germany and Italy to parliamentary democracy. These included abolition of the three-class suffrage and reform of the constitution of Prussia and the other German states to match the liberal character of the German federal system, and adoption of universal male suffrage in Italy.

Despite this general course, the British political system remained dominated by conservatives that failed to enact much-needed reforms to ameliorate the burden of the British lower classes or the festering Irish problem. They also failed to appease the growing unease of Australasian settler colonies and India about their political status. After brutal repression of the nationalist insurrection in the 1860s-70s, Ireland remained quite restive and ever more resentful of British rule, simmering ever close to the brink of rebellion, even if police pressure and the support of the Protestant minority managed to keep the situation under control. Over time, would-be reformers attempted to try to pacify the island by granting it self-rule and emancipation of the Papal Catholics. However, dominant conservatives with the support of a ‘unionist” faction of liberals defeated pretty much all these efforts except for a few minor measures that slightly lessened (but not radically changed) the second-class status of the Papal Catholics. Much the same way, the British Parliament stalemated all attempts to enact most of the social reforms that occurred in America, Germany, and Italy.

In Oceania, the British colonies in Australia and New Zealand continued their development at a brisk pace. Gold rushes and agricultural industries brought prosperity and parliamentary governments with limited autonomy were set up throughout the colonies from the mid-19th century. European explorers went deep into the interior and British settlers continued their expansion across the continent and the islands into the lands of the Indigenous Australians and Maori. A series of land wars increasingly marginalized the natives. The development of railways and the telegraph brought the disparate settlements closer together and a stronger sense of national identity emerged. A Federal Council was set up in the 1880s to coordinate the activities of the various colonial governments. In the 1890s, a movement for the seven colonies to come together in a self-ruling federation on the model of the USA and Argentina gathered strength and momentum.

However, there was still strong resistance in the British Parliament to grant extensive self-rule to any portion of the British Empire, since they feared it might become a gateway for disloyalty and separatism. It did not help to lay British suspicions to rest that the proposed Constitution of Australia largely used the US one as a model. The colonies voted to unite and submitted the draft of their Federal Constitution for the Commonwealth of Australia to the British Parliament. The British government however derailed the whole process by insisting that British courts retain their jurisdiction over Australia, which the Australians refused to accept. Frustration with stalemated self-rule drove several Australians to question their imperial loyalties, embrace the more radical vision of a separate nation or turn their sympathies to America, and agitate accordingly. The British remained largely oblivious to the danger of history repeating itself; however, growing unrest for autonomy in the Australasian colonies and its increasing pro-US character did not escape notice in America, where it drew important sympathy and support.

In comparison, there was much less discontent and potential unrest in the British settler colonies of Southern Africa, even if they had aspirations of their own to autonomy and federal union. As a rule, Southern African settlers were rather more content with the colonial status quo than their Australian counterpart was. This mainly occurred because the British government supported their brutal treatment of the Blacks and their extensive confiscation of valuable native lands, and helped them destroy or subjugate hostile African tribes. Over time, the practical benefits of British support for rapacious settler colonialism even helped lessen lingering bitterness of the Boer community for loss of their independence.

During the last third of the 19th century, Russia and Japan clung to a course that pursued modernization and a hybrid path between the liberalism of Britain, America, and Central Europe and the authoritarianism of France-Iberia. The Alexandrine reforms introduced constitutionalism with important liberal elements in the Russian political system and granted the Duma (parliament) a significant deal of power and influence. However, the Tsar kept direct control of the civil service and the army, and the throne and the legislature shared authority over the government in a constant tug-of-war. This dualism remained unsettled in an uneasy but apparently stable equilibrium throughout the Gilded Age. The economic reforms passed in this period started a modernization process in the Russian agrarian sector towards a market-based model. In the long term, this was bound to substantially ameliorate the backwardness of the Russian peasantry and indirectly boost industrialization. Education levels were steadily increasing, to close the embarrassing literacy rate gap with Europe and America. Agricultural productivity was on the rise. The excess rural population released by modernization moved in the cities to boost the ranks of the industrial workers, settled the new Asian lands made available by expansion of the Russian Empire, or immigrated to the New World.

Much like the other industrial powers, Russia also faced the social tensions created by ongoing industrialization. In comparison to the democratic great powers of America and Europe, the Russian political system was able to address them in a much less prompt and extensive manner, since it still largely focused on dealing with the incomplete transition to liberalism. Nonetheless, the power-sharing agreement between the Tsar, the traditional aristocratic elites, the business upper class, and the conservative middle classes was strong enough to keep Russia stable for the time being. The main exceptions were Poland-Lithuania and after its annexation Romania as well. The lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Danubian Principalities remained a hotbed of resentment, unrest, and latent rebellion against their Tsarist overlords, even if the Russian security apparatus was able to keep discontent from exploding.

More or less the same way, the Japanese Empire enjoyed domestic stability thanks to the Meiji reforms, modernization with vigorous industrialization, foreign policy successes, and fostering of patriotic loyalty through propaganda and the education system. Pretty much the only issue that caused considerable unrest was restricted suffrage. However, the end of the century witnessed a settlement of the issue when the ruling elites relented and allowed establishment of universal male suffrage. The Japanese government extended the electoral reform to the overseas territories of Korea and Taiwan, and enfranchisement further eased ongoing political and cultural integration of the Koreans in the Japanese Empire.

Due to its authoritarian political character, France-Iberia was much less able to ease the political and social tensions caused by industrialization through reforms. The regime did adopt a few measures of social protection when they seemed useful to reinforce popular support for the empire or improve its economic and military power. Propaganda typically depicted them as paternalistic care for the welfare of the masses. The regime otherwise doubled down on its repressive character and increased its efforts to vent domestic tensions through nationalist and imperialist policies and propaganda. This was remarkably effective to a degree but it had the side effect of significantly increasing international tensions. All great powers were strongly imperialist in the late 19th century but the Gallic empire became especially notable and infamous for its aggressive and destabilizing drive to spread its own power and Classicalist influence and weaken its rivals. Typical examples of this included (failed) Gallic meddling in the Balkan crisis and (successful) involvement in the Brazilian civil war; another example was the Franco-Iberian effort to destabilize Belgium and the French-speaking border areas of Germany and Italy.

[eurofed]

1891-1900 (part II).

As it concerns the state of ethnic issues in Europe and America by the end of the 19th century, certain areas (e.g. Ireland, Poland-Lithuania, Romania, the Balkans, and the Middle East) harbored serious nationalist tensions that might easily explode again in favorable circumstances. In others (e.g. Bohemia-Moravia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Albania), minorities were content with the status quo and/or sufficiently liable to ongoing cultural and political assimilation in the dominant nationality. This was typically the result of a mix of a liberal political regime, sufficient equality and autonomy for the minority, economic prosperity and strong prestige of the state, cultural influence of the dominant nationality, and lack of serious bloody clashes in the past.

The western border areas annexed by Germany and Italy after the war with France showed a mix of both cases. The French-speaking areas (western Lorraine, Romandy, and Savoy) remained vulnerable to the siren song of French nationalism and incessant Gallic efforts to stir up trouble, even if German and Italian authorities were always on the lookout to suppress any sign of overt disloyalty or subversion. On the other hand, the German-speaking and Italian-speaking areas (Luxemburg, eastern Lorraine, Alsace, most of Switzerland, Nice, and Corsica) had thoroughly integrated in the German or Italian nations. This however did not stop the French from having an overwhelming and overbearing revanchist-expansionist complex about their neighbors’ lands if they felt entitled to claim them because of historical possession, a drive to achieve ‘natural borders’, or various other far-fetched pretexts. They disdainfully ignored the actual wishes of local population when they did not comply with the assumptions of Gallic ambitions and propaganda. Depending on circumstances, such claims might go so far as to assume everything France or Spain had historically owned or seriously tried to conquer in the past rightfully belonged to the Gallic empire.

The Low Countries were another main target of Gallic expansionism, where the Classicalists tried hard to pursue destabilization as a gateway to conquest, much the same way they had previously done with Spain and Portugal. The most vulnerable area in this regard was Belgium because of its ethnically composite character and since its national identity was always fragile to begin with. Most political, cultural, and religious factors that drove the success of the Belgian Revolution a few generations ago declined in importance or even reversed to create increasing alienation between the Flemish and the Walloons. By the end of the century, the national unity of the Belgian Kingdom seemed in serious danger as increasing political polarization fueled by ethno-linguistic and religious conflicts and unsatisfactory economic performance took root between the Flemish and Walloon communities. As the ethnic division got deeper, it looked like only political inertia, the monarchy, a ruling elite of declining size and influence invested into national unity, and the influence of Britain allowed Belgium to continue existing. Peaceful partition of Belgium between the Netherlands and France-Iberia seemed a natural solution to the crisis. However, enmity between the Gallic empire and the German-Italian alliance was so vicious it was quite doubtful division could take place without triggering a general European conflict.

In comparison, the Netherlands was rather more stable in normal circumstances, if still divided about foreign policy alignments. On one side of the debate, various factors including the Gallic threat, cultural and religious bonds, and prosperity resulting from economic ties with the CEMU bloc made Pan-Germanism and ever-closer cooperation with Germany and its allies considerably popular. On the other side, Dutch nationalism made its partisans fearful of ultimate absorption in Germany from too close collaboration with the CEMU and supportive of pro-Pillar neutrality and reliance on Britain for support. Over time, however, drifting of Britain away from ‘splendid isolation’ and towards a deal with France-Iberia made the latter option less appealing and feasible. When the choice seemed to become between German liberalism and French tyranny, however, it was no choice at all for the Dutch and Flemish. In such circumstances, they would cling like dear life to the Pillar bloc for protection and oppose Gallic ambitions down to the wire, even at the price of compromising their independence from Germany.

More or less the same basic pattern applied for Scandinavia, although in its case different geopolitical circumstances made the supporters of separate Nordic identity and neutrality rather more popular and influential than in the Low Countries. Even supporters of neutrality, however, often divided between the ones that sympathized more for Britain and the ones that preferred the Pillar bloc. As a rule, the Nordics tended to show a definite dislike of the Gallic Empire and resentment of Russia. Commitment to neutrality however did not stop Scandinavia from participating in the CEMU. The economic benefits thereof were one important reason for the relative popularity of Pan-Germanism and sympathy towards the Pillar powers.

In the Gallic empire, the Franco-Iberian union was surely stable in normal circumstances but in all likelihood, its welfare was critically reliant on the fortunes of the right-wing regime that created it. On the other hand, there were good chances Iberian unity might well survive a hypothetical fall of Classicalism, barring an extreme catastrophe. Regional autonomy and lingering shock from Carlist and Portuguese civil wars had considerably lessened potential popularity of regional separatism across Iberia. Even many liberal and leftist opponents of the Bourbon regime supported national unity of the Iberian Peninsula with a federal system, so it was getting solid non-partisan roots of its own. Such dissidents in many cases looked at the liberal powers (especially Italy, Germany, and America) as an alternative model; Italy was especially popular in this regard, because of its many affinities with Iberia. The neo-Roman ambition of a community of Mediterranean peoples the Italians often supported reaped some sympathy among Iberian dissidents.

In the Russian Empire, certain areas (e.g. most of Ukraine and Belarus, the Caucasus, Central Asia) were not as vulnerable to potential nationalist destabilization as they might have been in different circumstances. This occurred because of less autocratic policies, greater prosperity, ongoing settler colonization, or past ethnic cleansing. Things were a little more troublesome in the Baltic region since the attractive force of successful Nordic and German unifications countered factors favorable to Russia. Many Finns, Latvians, and Estonians on principle disliked Russian rule and wished for independence or more realistically union with Scandinavia or Germany. In practice, however, they mostly remained quiet. They would not act on their feelings unless a favorable opportunity showed up. Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and the western portions of Belarus and Ukraine where former PLC influence remained strong were the main nationalist trouble spots and hotbeds of national opposition to the Russian Empire. In these areas, anti-Russian activists enjoyed widespread following, and they were always on the lookout to shake off the Tsarist yoke off the back of their nations at the earliest opportunity.

In the Balkans and the Near East, the collapse of Ottoman rule had caused important demographic changes in certain areas due to substantial population transfers (usually to the detriment of Muslims) but left things mostly unchanged in others. Even so, new facts on the ground would not necessarily stop an ambitious regional player from ignoring them in favor of its own claims, or planning to alter them forcibly with their own brand of demographic changes. As a rule, the change got far short of eliminating or radically ameliorating the region’s infamous potential for factional instability and ethnic-religious strife. The vast pool of frustration and resentment the Muslims experienced due to their losses, humiliation, and condition of colonial subjugation certainly intensified latent regional instability.

In North America, the outcome of Reconstruction and acquisition of several important Spanish-speaking territories caused US society to develop an attitude towards racial issues that was similar to the Latin American one. They based racial identification on a mix of appearance, known ancestry, class, wealth, education, and self-identification. If you looked like a White, and/or you had the typical financial status, education, and mindset of a White, society treated you like a White. Few really cared about the one-drop rule notion and the idea never developed any mainstream support in American society.

Therefore, US hostility to, and brutal repression of, Amerindians got essentially focused on the ‘Wild Indians’ that violently opposed American colonization and were assumed to wastefully hoard valuable land to support a barbaric lifestyle. Few cared to discriminate Europeanized mixed-bloods and even ‘Civilized Indians’ that embraced Christianity and a European lifestyle got relative tolerance. Southern racists were certainly an important factor in regional politics but less influential on a national level than they would have otherwise been, due to the development of a significant Black and ‘poor White’ middle class to oppose their political dominance and their failure to impose their segregationist agenda. Successful integration of Canada, Northern Mexico, the Greater Antilles, and part of Central America in the Union and conversion of most American Catholics to Old Catholicism worked as a compelling precedent against WASP prejudice and in favor of assimilation of Romance-speaking areas.

Consequently, there was relatively little prejudice against further US territorial expansion in the Western Hemisphere. Successful assimilation, stability, and prosperity of the portions of North America under US rule persuaded many US citizens and Hispanic Americans alike that ’Manifest Destiny’ unification of North America by the USA was inevitable, economically and politically beneficial, or necessary for security reasons. The most ambitious supporters of US expansionism even added at least part of South America, Australasia, and the Pacific region to this agenda. British Australasia made an especially enticing prize in this regard, because of its cultural, ethnic, and political affinities with the USA, its economic and strategic value, its similar level of socio-economic development, and its apparent restiveness under British colonial rule.

Realization of this agenda essentially was a matter of opportunity, getting an excuse, and thinking the prize was worth the effort or the land was an asset instead of a burden. It was also an issue of no other great power, especially the British Empire, getting in the way. However, this was becoming less of an insurmountable obstacle every year due to growth of US power. Even that section of the American public opinion that opposed continental political union often supported Pan-Americanism, a movement for closer ties and cooperation among the states of the Americas, through diplomatic, political, economic, and social means. Political instability of Latin American states, their recurrent conflicts, suspicion of US power, and polarization caused by Anglo-American rivalry represented important obstacles to its fulfillment. Nonetheless, growing popularity of Pan-Americanism and the successful examples of the USA and Argentina were among the reasons by the end of the century a drive for regional integration mostly reorganized the political map of South America in a few large states. Another outcome of the movement was the formation of the Pan-American Conference, an international organization for inter-American economic and political cooperation.

Due to the great-power status and general success of Italy and Russia, no sane WASP or Northern European would dare regard Southern Europeans or Eastern Europeans as racially inferior. Thanks to friendly relations between America and the German-Italian bloc, German and Italian immigrants were usually welcome and highly regarded in the Americas. However, thanks to general prosperity at home and opportunity to immigrate in the colonies, not so many went to the New World. Nonetheless, demographic growth ensured a significant number still made the trip. A significant number of liberal-minded French and Iberians went to the USA or Argentina to escape political oppression at home. For similar reasons, a sizable amount of Irish, Poles, Jews, Romanians, and other Eastern European nationalities also immigrated to the New World.

In the American public, sympathy for the plight of Ireland and Poland contrasted with strong antipathy for Papal Catholicism, so acceptance of these immigrants usually required conversion to Old Catholicism. Most Catholic immigrants to the USA or Argentina were willing to compromise on this issue for the sake of assimilation; the ones that wanted to cling to their religion mostly went to Brazil instead. Demographic growth and agricultural reforms ensured many Russian peasants that were unsatisfied with their status and could not or would not find employment as industrial workers in the cities or settlers in the Asian territories became immigrants to the New World. There also was a large number of Asian immigrants, and although they suffered some serious prejudice, the vast size of the Union and relatively limited levels of racism for 19th century standards ensured America never established legal barriers to Asian immigration.

American Blacks continued to suffer a lot of socially tolerated individual racism and socio-economic inequality, but no equivalent of Jim Crow-style legal segregation or one-drop rule. Many Blacks remained a discriminated, exploited, and abused underclass, but Reconstruction reforms had allowed the growth of a sizable Black middle class that was not limited by legal segregation. Schools were mostly de facto, but not de jure segregated. Individual racial discrimination was frequent and tolerated by law in housing, employment, and at the workplace, but not in public accommodations. Society usually accepted racially mixed people as Whites that fit the appropriate mix of appearance, class, education, wealth, and self-identification criteria. This made life relatively easy for racially mixed couples of Whites and Caucasian-looking mulattoes. Couples of White and Black or African-looking mulatto people faced much social hostility, especially if the African-looking member was the male, but miscegenation was legal.

Europeans and Americans had grown accustomed to use ethnic cleansing and settler colonization to entrench their control of valuable territories if people of a different race or religion inhabited them. Their imperialist brutality might escalate to genocide because of extensive military repression, scorched earth policies, large-scale deportation, severe exploitation, or unsustainable living conditions combined with callous or culpable neglect of their humanitarian consequences. A few notable cases in the past had been colonization of the Americas, post-Ottoman ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Europe and the Near East, and ongoing European settler colonization of Northwest Africa. Many other similar cases, perhaps individually less extensive but frequent enough for their sum to be equivalent in scope, occurred in a patchwork pattern throughout the Scramble for Africa.

European and American public opinion as a rule remained almost entirely uncaring or unaware of these tragedies, due to a combination of racist prejudice, imperialist greed, distance, and lack of media coverage. A partial exception occurred for the Franco-Iberian Empire since its colonial policy became infamous and often caused humanitarian disasters due to its extreme violence, ruthless exploitation of resources, and mistreatment of indigenous peoples. Widespread international criticism occurred but the Franco-Iberian government was usually able to counter and withstand it by propaganda, suppression of evidence, censure for the domestic public, marginal reforms, and sheer refusal to bow to foreign pressure.

In this period, a widespread sense of inherent superiority of European civilization and ethnicity was part of normal worldview for an average White person. European economic, technological, political, and military dominance of the world was sufficient reason in the eyes of most Whites to justify a supremacist mindset as a plain fact. The less prejudiced usually framed European superiority in cultural terms, so they were willing to treat assimilated non-Whites as equals. They usually justified imperialism as the Whites’ right and obligation to rule over, and encourage the cultural development of, people from other cultural backgrounds until they could take their place in the world and assimilate in European civilization. They might also be willing to acknowledge valuable aspects and ideas from other civilizations, especially the most sophisticated ones such as China or India.

The more prejudiced typically assumed the inborn inferiority of other ethnic groups, justified their indefinite dependence and subjugation, and in extreme cases accepted their gradual but inevitable disappearance by attrition to be replaced by expansion of ‘superior’ peoples. They also saw almost nothing of value in other cultures. Very few opposed imperialism; almost nobody accepted other cultures as inherently equal or did not regard the least advanced ones as savage, barbaric, and entirely devoid of value. Exoticism did create a few important exceptions of relatively widespread appreciation of non-Western ideas, but usually only in such niche fields as art, design, and occultism.

Racism was thus widespread, plainly accepted, and created a powerful ideological and psychological justification for imperialist domination of non-Whites, their colonial exploitation, and brutal use of force to crush their resistance. At the same time, it universally acknowledged all Europeans as equals. Rival or hostile European nations might, and often did, frame their bad relations in terms of chauvinism and jingoism, never as the kind of racist prejudice shown for non-Whites. Apart from patriotic pride and national stereotypes, European cultures and ethno-linguistic groups widely recognized each other as similar enough to belong in the same category and bickering family. Just like Europe’s global dominance created a widespread perception of superiority, the achievements of great powers that belonged to different European cultural groups were similar enough to make them widely seen as equal.

Prejudice against Jews was long-standing but usually Western culture interpreted it in religious and cultural terms, and conversion and assimilation often might nullify it. On the other hand, Islam was widely seen as alien and hostile enough to get Arabs and Berbers typically classified and mistreated as non-Whites regardless of common ethnic roots, except perhaps in the case of conversion and cultural assimilation. Europeans had often regarded Muslims as hostile and wicked but worthy of respect in past centuries but with the rise of Europe's global dominance and the decline of Muslim powers this had been mostly replaced by contempt. On the other hand, Europeans and Americans that were knowledgeable about Asian affairs often acknowledged the Japanese Empire’s modernization achievements as impressive enough to classify the Japanese and Koreans in a different and superior category as other Asians.

An unspoken but strong cultural and psychological barrier existed against using the kind of extreme brutality with fellow Europeans that the great powers routinely employed against non-Whites. Nobody had yet made the mental leap to use large-scale ethnic cleansing to settle a persistent and intractable nationalist conflict in a developed country, apart from the special case of Muslim minorities. It would likely take a sufficiently radical shock, such as another general war or revolutionary wave, to make it happen. Mass murder of Whites in 'civilized' Europe or America seemed outlandish unless something went terribly bad in a war or revolution. The only case people seriously contemplated this possibility to fear or advocate it was a repetition of the Jacobin Reign of Terror because of a leftist revolution.

Western powers usually heeded the laws of war as commonly understood in their armed conflicts, even if their explicit codification into international law was an ongoing process at the end of the 19th century. On the other hand, they typically treated insurgents as bandits, rebels, and traitors and punished them as the worst kind of felons in the best of cases, summarily executed them if caught in the worst of cases. In this regard, the American Civil War was a noticeable exception since the Union and the Confederacy in practice treated each other as belligerent nations during the conflict. Repression of neo-Confederate paramilitary groups during Reconstruction instead followed the usual pattern, albeit the mildest portion of the spectrum.

Police repression was widely used to suppress leftist and nationalist disturbance of public order everywhere in the Western world and other kinds of political dissent in authoritarian countries. Terrorism in the form of assassination and bombing did exist as an unwelcome novelty of late 19th century. Just like impromptu rioting when favorable circumstances happened, it was a favorite tactic of radical nationalists in such turbulent places as Ireland, Poland, and the Balkans. Moreover, militant leftist groups across the Western world that believed in bloody ‘propaganda of the deed’ and revolutionary violence often used it. In both cases, it made the users widely feared and reviled outside their sympathizers' circles.

Unfortunately festering ethnic conflicts, serious social inequality, and poor living conditions of the lower classes made the sympathizer crowd large enough for the problem to be infrequent but persistent. States were never slackers, inefficient, or gentle in the repression of leftist or nationalist terrorism and rioting. They often used laws they created for this goal against the labor movement and nationalist dissent as a whole. For this reason, a growing portion of the left and the labor movement gradually became increasingly critical of violence as a disastrous and counterproductive tactic. They instead advocated peaceful, gradual, and systematic organization of left-wing parties and unions.

In the face of a clear and present existential threat, Turkey at last underwent a serious final effort to reform and modernize to avoid its own extinction as a state. This came thanks to the efforts of the Young Turks, a political reform movement that arose in Ottoman society at the end of the 19th century and favored replacement of the absolute monarchy of the Sultan with a constitutional monarchy and a series of modernizing military and political reforms. The movement arose in the aftermath of Turkey’s disastrous defeat and huge territorial losses in the Russo-Turkish war. It slowly gained strength and organization during the following two decades although for a while all its efforts to impose a constitutional reform ultimately failed. At the end of the century, it eventually gained irresistible momentum thanks to widespread perception Turkey faced imminent destruction because of its own weakness and backwardness combined with the ambitions of stronger foreign powers.

The Young Turk revolutionaries gained the support of vast sectors of the army and were able to force the Sultan to establish a constitutional monarchy. They defeated the attempt of the conservatives to seize power and exploited the Sultan’s support of the counter-coup to depose him and put a relative on the throne that was willing to collaborate with the revolutionaries. The victorious Young Turks engaged in an ambitious program of modernizing reforms according to their ideology of liberalism, secularism, and positivism. However, they split in two factions that respectively favored liberalism, democracy, and regional autonomy, or supported authoritarian constitutionalism, centralization, and nationalist unity. The latter faction won out and established a centralized regime that concentrated power in the hands of a small ruling clique, limited the powers of Parliament, and kept the Sultan as a figurehead.

Initially their movement had supported a platform of creating a common citizenship irrespective of ethnic and religious differences for all the peoples of the Balkans and the Middle East, and reuniting the former lands of the Ottoman Empire under the aegis of a secular federal union. However, this ambitious project found a serious obstacle in the new geopolitical status quo of the area. It got some support from reformist Arabs and Persians that like the Turks found themselves exposed to European colonialism and wished for an alternative. However, the Christian nationalities of the Balkans and the Middle East that had cast off the Ottoman yoke and Muslim supremacy showed no sympathy for their possible return under a new guise. They either were satisfied with their new status quo under the rule of some Balkan state or European power, or at least deemed the neo-Ottoman project a worse alternative. The Balkan states and the European powers that had gained independence or territorial possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean region after the Ottoman collapse were also radically hostile to the Young Turk ambitions for obvious reasons. Only France-Iberia, despite religious differences and its own brutal colonization policy, showed some serious sympathy for the new Turkish regime, since it was always on the lookout for opportunities to expand its own international influence.

Faced with these conditions, the Young Turk ruling elites for a while still showed some nominal adherence to liberalism and neo-Ottoman civic patriotism as their ideology, but in practice, they gradually shifted their focus to a mix of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Islamism that greatly privileged the Muslims to solidify their own power base. The regime also got increasingly authoritarian in character, and often shaped many of its policies according to the Franco-Iberian model, which it came to perceive as a good template for national rebirth. However, they still strongly supported secular modernization policies since they deemed them essential to a successful strengthening of the state. These policies granted them a sizable amount of support from the Turk people at home and to a lesser degree from Arabs and Persians abroad, since they perceived them as a viable alternative to European domination, but it drove the neighbor non-Muslim states and communities into fierce opposition. Such a policy shift drove the Turkish government into increasingly harsh treatment of its remaining minorities and liberals, although it also repressed conservative opposition to its modernization program.

The Young Turk government sought support from friendly European powers for their plans to modernize their army, economy, and transportation network. They found France-Iberia and to a lesser degree Britain were willing to grant them a generous amount of investment and support, both because they expected to profit and expand their influence and since a strong Turkey would be a useful regional ally against Russia and the German-Italian alliance. To be fair, the British initially were wary of the Young Turk regime because they were concerned its Pan-Islamist leanings and revanchist ambitions might destabilize their own sphere of influence in the Middle East. However, Britain’s alliance alignment with France-Iberia and its imperial antagonism with Russia drove it to accept Turkey as a proxy.

This alignment of Turkey soon drew the ire of the Russians that perceived it as a serious violation of their sphere of influence and threat to their imperial ambitions. It also met the hostility of Germany and Italy. The Pan-Islamist leanings of the Turkish regime and British colonial domination of large numbers of Muslims made Anglo-Turkish cooperation more than a little uneasy. Their mutual interest to gain allies and undermine Russian power as well as Franco-Iberian mediation, however, was sufficient to stabilize their alliance of convenience. By unspoken agreement, the Turks toned down their Pan-Islamist destabilization activities in British-held areas and focused them on the Russian sphere of influence.

Although the Young Turks very much wished to regain many of the areas the Ottoman Empire had lost in the last few disastrous wars, they acknowledged it would be suicidal to pick a fight with Greece or worse Russia itself without strong military support from other great powers. So they first engaged in an effort to expand their own power base in the Middle East. Instability in Persia first provided them with a good opportunity. Late 19th century Persia had been suffering pretty much the same problems (backwardness, weakness, military defeat with territorial losses, inability to counter foreign penetration and influence) as the Ottoman Empire. Although it enjoyed a less disunited society in ethnic and religious terms, crippling financial woes made worse by royal extravagance still burdened it.

The unsustainable situation came to a head through a constitutional revolution backed by a coalition of merchants, ulema (Islamic clergy), and radical reformers. The revolutionaries won and forced the Shah to grant a constitution and parliament to the people. However, a new crisis soon surfaced due to conflicts between the conservative and radical wings of the revolutionary movement that allowed the Shah to regain part of its power base. Instability worsened because of the meddling of the Turks and the British, who saw an opportunity to expand their influence, and the Russians, who sought to preserve their interests in the region, already threatened by the realignment of Turkey.

Thus, a three-way civil war ensued between the Shah’s backers, the conservative constitutionalists, and the radical reformers. It gradually got simplified to a conflict between a conservative-monarchist coalition backed by Russia, Germany, and Italy, and a radical nationalist and Pan-Islamist front that organized itself according to the Young Turk model and was supported by Britain, France-Iberia, and Turkey. The Persian civil war threatened to expand in a general war between the great powers. It only barely became frozen into an instable cease-fire that split Persia between a monarchist-conservative North and a nationalist, Pan-Islamist, and ‘Young Persian’ South. The Persian crisis and the international alignments of the warring factions became another flashpoint that increased tensions and polarization between rival great powers and their alliance systems.

Apparent resurgence of Turkey as a regional power however could do little to prevent the Muslim world from suffering severe territorial losses by the end of the 19th century. A mix of ethnic cleansing, settlement of European immigrants, Europeanization and conversion of collaborationist natives, and expansion of neighbor autochthonous Christian communities, tore away several regions from the Umma and turned them into largely Christian and European areas. These included Northwest Africa, the Balkans, coastal western Anatolia, Cyprus, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, Palestine and Lebanon, and Russian Central Asia. Barring a radical overturning of the international order and an inverted pattern of vast demographic changes, these changes seemed permanent for the foreseeable future. Pan-Islamists did harbor ambitions to accomplish just that kind of drastic reversal of fortunes, and gambled on enacting it through mobilization of the Muslim peoples under their leadership and their victorious participation in a general war, but the feasibility of their hopes was up in the air.

[eurofed]

1891-1900 (part III).

In India, the decades following the Sepoy Rebellion were a period of growing political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and emergence of Indian leadership at both national and provincial levels. British colonial rule stepped up its Westernization efforts after the Sepoy Rebellion, in the belief that surviving traditional social structures had been one of the main sources of support for the rebels. This took the form of a fairly extensive land reform, infrastructure development with the construction of roads, canals, bridges, and vast railroad and telegraph networks, various social reforms (e.g. allowing the remarriage of Hindu child widows), and vigorous enforcement of the “doctrine of lapse” (transfer to direct British rule of those princely states that lacked a male biological heir). The relative success of British modernization policies had other effects, too: by the 1880s, a new educated middle-class had arisen in India and spread thinly across the country, with a growing solidarity among its members. Increasing self-confidence of this class due to its success in education and irritation at the limitations with Indian participation in provincial legislative councils and Indian access to civil service jobs led to the creation of the Indian National Congress. Its members were mostly members of the upwardly mobile and successful Western-educated provincial elites, engaged in professions such as law, teaching, and journalism.

At its inception, the Congress had no well-defined ideology, and during the first few years of its existence, it was primarily a debating society that passed numerous resolutions about less controversial issues such as civil rights or opportunities in government (especially in the civil service). By the 1890s, reform movements had taken root within the Indian National Congress, which criticized various aspects of British policy towards India such as unfair trade policies, the restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and the use of Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India. A rift began to appear in the Congress between the moderates, who eschewed public agitation and lobbied for legislative reform, and the new "extremists" who not only advocated agitation, but also regarded the pursuit of social and economic reform as a distraction from nationalism. The moderates saw themselves as loyalists, who wanted reform within the framework of British rule. They advocated an active role of Indians in governing their own country, albeit as part of the British Empire, to get representation in the bodies of government, and to have a say in the legislation and administration of India. The radicals resented the denial of freedom of expression for nationalists, and the lack of any voice or role for ordinary Indians in the affairs of their nation. They embraced Swaraj (self-determination) as the natural and only solution, and advocated civil agitation and direct revolution to overthrow the British Empire and the abandonment of all things British.

A somewhat far-reaching revision of administrative subdivisions in British India by colonial authorities led to a widespread row of protests, predominantly in the form of a boycott campaign of British goods, but also sporadically —but flagrantly— political violence, with bombings of public buildings, armed robberies, and assassination of British officials. The violence, however, was not effective since most planned attacks failed or the British were able to preempt them. The boycott movement was rather more successful, and it became a spur for indigenous industrial progress in India. The British authorities remained drastically opposed to any serious reform of India’s political status towards self-rule. They vigorously suppressed the activities of the radical Indian nationalists and did not flinch from ruthless use of force whenever they turned violent or seemingly threatened public order. However, they failed to quell the growing popularity of Indian nationalism, also because of the negative backlash from repeated episodes of brutal British repression of unrest.

In the wake of the protest movement, the British authorities however took some token steps to appease Indian nationalists, primarily by a reform of the legislative councils. The first steps toward self-government of British India in the late 19th century involved the appointment of Indian counselors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members. The British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the creation of Municipal Corporations and District Boards for local administration; they included elected Indian members. The new reforms gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures, known as legislative councils. The central legislative councils had previously included Indian appointed members as well, but after the reforms, there were a few elected ones. However, the majority of council members continued to be government-appointed officials, and the viceroy was in no way responsible to the legislature. At the provincial level, the elected members, together with unofficial appointees, outnumbered the appointed officials, but there was no responsibility of the governor to the legislature.

The Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization but the growing Indian nationalist movement had a predominantly Hindu character. Therefore, its singular failure to attract Muslims, who felt their representation in government service was inadequate, undermined this achievement. Muslim concerns of minority status and denial of rights if the Congress alone were to represent the people of India, with the fear of reforms favoring the Hindu majority, led the Muslim elite in India to an organization effort of its own. This culminated in the founding of the Muslim League, which demanded proportional legislative representation and separate electorates for Muslims. The Muslim League insisted on its separateness from the Hindu-dominated Congress, as the voice of a "nation within a nation." The British recognized a few of the Muslim League's petitions by increasing the number of elective offices reserved for Muslims. Britain made it clear in introducing the reforms that parliamentary self-government of India was not the goal of the British government. The nationalist movement regarded this as insufficient, and there was an increase in the activities of revolutionary groups. The British authorities were, however, able to suppress them swiftly, also because the revolutionaries lacked the support of mainstream politicians in the Congress and the League.

The last part of the 19th century dramatically highlighted the decline of Qing China. A host of ever-growing problems that had been evident for decades beset the once proud empire, including ineffectiveness of its government, its failed policies, corruption of its administration system, and the decaying state of the Qing dynasty. Besides the domestic problems, a paramount concern was foreign encroachment, which throughout the 19th century the Qing dynasty was unable to prevent. The sorry state of the empire prompted many patriotic members of the Chinese educated elites and popular masses to make calls for reform and to defend China from the foreigners. The programs and solutions they advocated wavered between nationalist reactionary entrenchment in traditional Chinese systems and values, and modernist reform-minded embracement of Western ideas and solutions. The imperial ruling elites themselves showed a division between would-be reformers and traditionalist conservatives, even if the latter appeared to have the upper hand.

This kept the government trapped into stasis and China into its spiral of decay, as the conservatives opposed the reforms that would have threatened their privileges. The ineffectiveness of the Qing dynasty was making it more and more unpopular, and this was creating a split between the ruling Manchu elite and the Han that made up the vast majority of the Chinese people. Centuries of Qing rule had seemingly smoothed the division, but the ineptitude of the late Qing was reawakening anti-Manchu resentment among the Han. China was in dire need of action to try to solve its problems; unfortunately for the country, militant xenophobes got an opportunity to act first.

The “Big Swords Society” was a Chinese martial-arts association that in the chaotic atmosphere of late 19th century China morphed into a millennial proto-nationalist and xenophobe secret society and eventually a political movement. They opposed foreign influence and the presence of Christianity in China. Their grievances at foreigners included political invasion, economic manipulation, and missionary evangelism. There existed growing concerns in the Chinese people that missionaries and Chinese Christians would use the decline of Qing China to their advantage, appropriating lands and property of unwilling Chinese peasants to give to the Church. The Big Swords believed that they could perform extraordinary feats through training, diet, martial arts, and chanting Taoist and Buddhist incantations, such as flight and invulnerability against guns and cannon. Further, they claimed that millions of ‘spirit soldiers’ would descend from the heavens and assist them in purifying China of foreign influences.

The members of the BSS consisted of local farmers/peasants and other workers that were made desperate by poverty, disastrous floods, and widespread opium addiction, and laid the blame for their problems on Christian missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Europeans colonizing their country. They arose as a self-defense society to protect peasants from bandits, but soon expanded their activities to attacks on Christian churches, which in their perception sheltered the bandits. Differently from other secret societies, the Big Swords did not set themselves in opposition to the Qing dynasty, and that granted them a measure of benevolence from imperial officers. International tension, domestic unrest, and natural disasters fueled the growth and spread of the Big Swords movement, causing attacks towards Christians, missionaries, and other foreigners to multiply, to the growing concern of the great powers.

In the late 1880s, the xenophobe conservatives gained a firm control of the Imperial Court, which reversed its previous policy of suppressing the BSS, and issued edicts in their defense, causing protests from foreign powers. In the early 1890s, the Big Swords movement spread rapidly across eastern China into the countryside near Beijing. Big Swords burned Christian churches, killed Chinese Christians, and intimidated Chinese officials who stood in their way. A small military force from seven countries deployed to set up defensive perimeters around their respective diplomatic legations, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Chinese government. Increasing incidents between the Big Swords and foreign soldiers led to the killing of some foreign diplomats, a large BSS mob entering Beijing, the destruction of many Christian churches and cathedrals in the city, and further nudged the Qing government toward support of the Big Swords. There were two factions in the Chinese government: the conservatives who wished to use the BSS to remove foreigners from China and the moderates who feared the retaliation of the great powers. As an effect of this division, some Chinese soldiers were quite liberally firing at foreigners from the very beginning of the crisis. The conservative faction prevailed and drove the commanders of some Imperial Chinese forces to attack foreigners. Returning fire by foreign forces intensified the clashes with government troops.

The legations of various foreign powers, including the United Kingdom, France-Iberia, Germany, Italy, the USA, Russia, and Japan, were located in the Beijing Legation Quarter south of the Forbidden City. The Chinese government ordered the diplomats and other foreigners to depart Beijing under escort of the Chinese army. The diplomats feared Big Swords mobs would murder them if they left the legation quarter and they defied the Chinese order to leave. The legations were hurriedly fortified. Most foreign civilians, including a large number of missionaries and merchants, as well as many Chinese Christians took refuge in the legation quarter. In response, the Chinese government declared war against all the foreign powers that defied its order to leave. The Chinese army and the Big Swords irregulars besieged the Legation Quarter in earnest. About 800 foreign civilians, 600 soldiers from 7 countries, and 6,000 Chinese Christians took refuge there.

The defenders put a heroic resistance for a month, but suffered heavy casualties especially from lack of food, mines that the Chinese exploded in tunnels dug beneath the compound, and fires set by the besiegers near to the quarter. Eventually the Chinese resolved to use their advantage in numbers and staged a direct assault on the legation quarter that overwhelmed the defenders. An allied force had landed in China and was pressing to relieve the legations. However a defensive battle fought by a Chinese army at Tianjin and destruction of a railway by the BSS delayed them and emboldened the besiegers in attempting a direct attack. The Big Swords stormed the legations quarter and massacred the near-totality of the surviving foreign soldiers and civilians, and most of the Chinese Christians; some of them and a handful of foreigners managed to slip away in the confusion and hide in the capital until the allied army arrived. They gave news of the massacre to the would-be rescuers.

The role of the Chinese army and the Imperial government in the massacre was to become a subject of controversy: some argued that they lost control of the Big Swords and failed to contain them, while others were of the opinion they remained passive observers and accomplices. Unaware of the tragic fate of the besieged, the allied army pressed on to Beijing, defeating Chinese troops and Big Swords irregulars on their way, and a month later reached the capital. Not all imperial forces cooperated with the BSS and fought the foreigners. Some generals and governors fought the Big Swords and did not implement the anti-foreign and anti-Christian policy. Others did, and they killed about 400 foreigners and as many as 42,000 Chinese Christians in a patchwork fashion throughout eastern China. When the allied army reached and conquered Beijing, the Imperial Court fled the city. After weeks of travel, the party went to Xi'an in Shaanxi province, beyond mountain passes where the foreigners could not reach, deep in Chinese territory and protected by the Imperial army. The foreigners were unable to pursue, and had no orders to do so, so they decided to take no action. This was to change quickly, however.

When news of the massacres of foreigners reached the great powers, there was an immense wave of outrage in public opinion directed at “barbaric” China, and widespread calls for harsh punishment of the Big Swords butchers and the conniving Chinese government. The foreign powers’ governments had imperialist ambitions of their own about China and popular outrage at the massacres perpetrated by the Big Swords gave them solid support for decisive military intervention. The governments of America, Europe, and Japan shifted their plans from a limited action to relieve the legations and deal a hash lesson to the Chinese government to a large-scale punitive invasion of China. When the siege of the legations had started and China had declared war to the foreign powers, the great powers put their usual imperialistic bickering aside for a while and joined in a rare united front. This was the Seven-Nation Alliance (UK, USA, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and France-Iberia). After news of the massacres in China shifted public opinion into a crusading anti-Chinese mood, the great powers confirmed and strengthened their anti-Chinese alliance.

In the first phase of the war, the SNA forces built up their presence along the northern China coast and fought their way into Tianjin and Beijing. Subsequently, a large number of reinforcements deployed from Europe, America, and Japan. They landed in the foreign-controlled port concessions and other locations across the coast of China, starting a large-scale invasion of eastern China. The Russian army massed at the border and invaded northern China. The British Indian army invaded Tibet. Chinese Imperial troops and Big Swords irregulars fought the invaders courageously, but the foreign armies had an overwhelming technological superiority and their soldiers were emboldened with a crusading spirit by propaganda that cast the Chinese as bloodthirsty barbarians that slaughtered civilians. In the following months of fighting, the European, American, and Japanese forces occupied all the major Chinese ports and fought their way into the interior to conquer the eastern provinces of China from Guangdong to Hebei. The Russian army occupied large swaths of northern China. The British Indian army occupied Tibet and vast chunks of southeastern China, in combination with Franco-Iberian forces invading from Indochina. Allied fleets destroyed the Chinese navy. The SNA expeditionary corps that had gone to rescue the legations got reinforcements and occupied Beijing, Tianjin and the Hebei province.

Unfortunately, it was a very brutal war, and atrocities on both sides were common. The foreign powers generally recognized the rights of prisoners of war to Chinese Imperial troops, but they deemed the Big Swords bandits and terrorists, so they often gave no quarter to BSS forces or otherwise made them subject to mass summary execution when caught. Even Chinese civilians suspected of being Big Swords or aiding and harboring them were subject to brutal reprisals and indiscriminate massacres. On their part, the Big Swords usually slaughtered captured foreign soldiers and civilians. The foreign armies used scorched earth tactics to quell Chinese resistance in the occupied areas. Franco-Iberian troops in particular distinguished themselves for their ferocity and bloodthirsty enthusiasm in carrying out a ruthless “crusade” against the Chinese. Extensive looting and frequent rapes by foreign troops were common in the occupied areas at the hands of expeditionary corps of all Western powers. The Japanese troops largely abstained themselves from rapes, since the Japanese had brought their own "regimental wives" (prostitutes) to the front to keep their soldiers from raping Chinese civilians. They however indulged in widespread looting and brutal reprisals the same way as their allies.

After the allied forces had entrenched their control of vast swaths of northern, eastern, and southern China, the Chinese government petitioned for a beggar’s peace. The Qing dynasty had first sued for peace when the SNA took control of Beijing, but the Imperial government balked when the foreign powers notified that China would have to make onerous territorial and economic concessions. Many Qing advisers then insisted to carry on the war; they argued that China could defeat the foreigners since the invaders had only conquered Beijing and Tianjin because of disloyal and traitorous officers that sabotaged the war effort, and the interior of China was impenetrable. The war had then expanded; the SNA had occupied vast swaths of China and repeatedly defeated Chinese armies. There seemed to be no hope of pushing them back, and China had no friends in the world due to the Big Swords’ atrocities and the united front of the great powers. Conquest and occupation of whole China was a huge undertaking even for the SNA coalition, but the Chinese government was terrorized that instability created by the foreign invasion could lead to the fall of the Qing dynasty. Therefore, the Imperial government accepted that China was to cede territory and pay substantial reparations. They decided that the terms were generous enough for them to acquiesce when got assurances about the continuation of the Qing dynasty’s rule after the war.

The Qing court agreed to sign the Big Swords Protocol, also known as Peace Agreement between the Seven-Nation Alliance and China. The protocol ordered the execution of several high-ranking officials linked to the BSS outbreak and other officials who were guilty for the slaughter of foreigners in China. China ceded Tibet to Britain and Greater Mongolia to Russia. Tibet became a British protectorate and another of the British Raj’s princely states. Britain and Russia also partitioned Qinghai and the western portions of Gansu and Sichuan. The coastal provinces of China proper were set up as ‘special concessions’, de facto protectorates of the foreign powers where their authority was supreme, with several ports being annexed or permanently leased by the great powers. These provinces however stayed a nominal part of China and the foreign powers allowed Imperial officers to keep managing the administration in a subordinate role since they found convenient to use the officers as intermediaries. The USA got Hebei, Shandong went to Germany, Italy got Jiangsu, Zhejiang went to Japan, Britain got Fujian, and Guangdong went to France-Iberia. Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin were to be under the joint control of the foreign powers. Shanghai and its hinterland were to become an international zone governed by representatives of the powers, and open to trade and commerce of all nations. China’s major rivers were internationalized.

China was fined war reparations of 450,000,000 taels of fine silver (one tael = 1.2 troy ounces) for the loss that it caused. It had to pay reparations within 39 years. To help meet the payment it agreed to double the existing tariff, and to tax hitherto duty-free merchandise. The sum of reparation was estimated by the Chinese population (roughly 450 million in the 1890s), to let each Chinese pay one tael. The treaty enlisted Chinese custom income and salt tax as guarantee of the reparation. The indemnity of 450 million taels of silver was a large burden on the Chinese, who had to finance it with increased taxes. The Qing government was to allow the foreign powers to base their troops in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin on a standing basis, and to deploy their forces throughout their ‘special concession’ areas as needed to protect their interests and resident foreigners, and quell anti-foreign agitation. They were to rebuild the Legation Quarter in a defensible form as a special area where the Chinese would not have the right to reside. A strong garrison would protect it and it were to be under exclusive control of the foreign powers.

BSS members and government officials would get harsh punishment for crimes or attempted crimes against the foreign governments or their nationals. Many were sentenced to execution, commit suicide, life imprisonment, deportation to remote interior areas, or suffer posthumous degradation. The Chinese government was to prohibit forever, under the pain of death, membership in any anti-foreign society. It would suspend Civil service examinations for 5 years in all areas where massacres or cruel treatment of foreigners had occurred. Provincial and local officials would be personally responsible for any new anti-foreign incidents. China was to guarantee open trade relations to all foreign powers in all the areas not otherwise governed by the peace treaty. The victors set up a permanent oversight group of the seven signatory powers in Shanghai to manage enforcement of the treaty.

The great powers stopped short of finally colonizing China. This occurred part because the Big Swords rebellion made them concerned about the resistance of fiercely nationalist Han to direct foreign rule, part because their divisions went too deep to establish a functional partition scheme. The anti-Chinese united front that had existed during the war soon dissolved in vicious squabbles that increased tensions between the powers when division of the spoils became the issue on the table. A broad principle was largely accepted to make China’s interior areas the sphere of influence of the power that controlled the closest ‘special concession’ if they were directly bordering them, or otherwise to leave them open to trade of all nations. Even so, many contested areas existed and many disputes to control valuable resources occurred. Further tensions arose between the powers when Britain and France-Iberia established a separate agreement of their own to partition Siam. The western portion of the Kingdom became a British protectorate and part of the Raj, while the eastern portion merged with Franco-Iberian Indochina. The other powers contested this action as a violation of the spirit of their agreement about China.

In successive conflicts during late 19th century, the foreign powers annexed the islands of Taiwan and Hainan and the non-Han border areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria, but they resorted to indirect rule in China proper. From the Big Swords uprising, they learned that the best way to govern densely populated Han China was through the Chinese dynasty and Imperial officers, instead of direct dealing with the Chinese people. As a saying went “The people are afraid of officials, the officials are afraid of foreigners, and the foreigners are afraid of the people". Eventually, as an unwritten agreement, the Qing dynasty was allowed to stay in power, since it was expected a collaborationist Qing government could use its influence to suppress Chinese anti-foreign sentiment better than direct rule by the foreign powers.

Humiliating defeat in the Big Swords conflict drove the reluctant Chinese government to start a few reforms despite its previous conservative view. It abolished the imperial examination system for government service, and as a result, it replaced the classical system of education with a European liberal system that led to a university degree. Reforms modernized the army according to Western standards. The modernization and professional quality of the Chinese army impressed many in the gentry to join the officer corps and introduced militarism to China. However, these efforts seemed too late to save the Qing. The revolutionaries within the Han community could not wait. The Imperial government's humiliating failure to defend China against the foreign powers contributed to the growth of nationalist resentment against the "foreigner" Qing dynasty, who were descendants of the Manchu conquerors of China.

Defeat in the Big Swords war and the onerous peace treaty were a further mighty blow to what little integrity and prestige the Qing government still possessed. Many people in China were already dissatisfied with the corrupt and inefficient Qing government, and this only proved that their sentiments were well founded. They became convinced that the Qing government was utterly incapable of ruling or protecting their country, and believed that a revolution was the only way they could restore China to peace and prosperity. Many of these would-be revolutionaries came to embrace republican sympathies, while others still showed some attachment to the traditional Imperial system, if not with the discredited Qing on the throne. The humiliating failure of the Big Swords to stem the tide of foreign invasion discredited conservative attachment to traditional Chinese social and cultural structures as a vehicle for nationalism. Many Chinese turned to look at the successful example of Japan and deemed that in order to save China from foreign domination, it was necessary to master the achievements of Western civilization.

The net effect of the Big Swords conflict on China was a weakening of the dynasty as well as a weakened national cohesion and defense. The foreign powers spared and partially propped up the Imperial system as a collaborationist proxy, but the process further increased decentralization of power in China, from the central government to the provinces. Provincial officers came to control powerful armies with the military reforms, and the Qing central government was dependent on their loyalty to stay in power or exercise any effective control on the periphery. A serious latent rift also took form between the pro-reform monarchists more influential in Northern China and the anti-Qing republican revolutionaries prevalent in Southern China. The situation seemed ripe for China to slide into another period of chaos and division, as soon as a random spark would turn the flames of revolution ablaze.

[eurofed]

1891-1900 (part IV).

China was far from being the only crisis area in the world that drew the attention of the great powers and ultimately increased tensions between them. In Belgium, ethnic polarization between the Flemish and Walloon communities fueled by relentless agitation of pro-French separatist groups supported by France-Iberia drove the country ever closer to revolution, civil war, and a likely violent demise, drawing the alarm and ire of Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. In the Americas, a long-standing border dispute existed between Venezuela and the British Empire about the territory of Guayana Esequiba, which Britain claimed as part of British Guiana and Venezuela saw as Venezuelan territory. The dispute became a crisis in the 1890s when Venezuela persuaded the US government to back its claim. The US intervention forced Britain to accept arbitration of the entire disputed territory. The arbitration tribunal largely ruled in favor of Britain. However, Venezuela and the USA refused to accept the verdict since they claimed (not without reason) that it was the product of British bribes and pressures on the members of the board.

Mexico too fell into chaos and became an international flashpoint. The country never entirely recovered from the humiliating defeat vast territorial losses it suffered because of its intervention in the Anglo-American War, remaining vulnerable to recurrent bouts of political instability and factional strife. This disheartening pattern was only broken for a while by the rule of Porfirio Diaz, whose regime brought a measure of internal stability, modernization, and economic growth. This was in part due to heavy investment in mining, railways, and agriculture from American and British business. However, the Diaz regime grew unpopular due to civil repression and political stagnation. His economic policies furthermore helped a few wealthy landowners and capitalists acquire huge areas of land and control vast areas of the economy, resulting in a shortage of jobs and depressingly low wages for the Mexican peasantry. Moreover, American and British investments in Mexican economy heightened Anglo-American competition for prevalent influence in the country. Diaz’s assassination triggered a series of coups, rebellions, and counter-coups that soon degenerated into a multi-faction civil war. The USA, Britain, and France-Iberia attempted to cultivate ties with various factions and sent them supplies in order to pull the country closer to their sphere of influence; moreover, the fighting caused several border incidents with the USA that alarmed and angered the American government and public opinion.

Civil war in Mexico worsened the Caste War, an insurgency of Mayan people that had been ongoing since the middle of the century in Yucatan and had caused the rebels to take over vast portions of the state. It spilled over in Guatemala and this, combined with recurrent military conflicts between the Central American nations, significantly increased instability in the region. Civil war in Mexico, Classicalist takeover in Brazil and the revisionist attitude of the new regime, the success of the US, Argentinean, and Peruvian-Bolivian federal experiments, the secession of Panama, and the Venezuela border dispute were among the factors that persuaded the governments of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador to seek stability and mutual protection through a restoration of Gran Colombia. Negotiations for federal union got successful also thanks to growing popularity of Pan-Americanism and strong support of US diplomacy.

Similar attempts in Central America for a merger of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador failed because of excessive tensions between the Central American states. This persuaded the governments of Honduras and El Salvador to petition the USA for annexation under the same terms (American investment in infrastructure development of the region) Nicaragua and Costa Rica had gotten. The US government accepted since American business had developed strong interests in Honduras. Gran Colombia, Peru-Bolivia, and Argentina joined the Pan-American Conference with the USA and took a pro-US stance in international relations. These events deepened the division of the continent into rival blocs split by their own regional disputes and further polarized by their alignment with the USA, Britain, or France-Iberia. Latin America, however, was far from the only reason for heightened tensions between the British and Gallic empires and the USA. The two sides also clashed because of opposed strategic and economic interests in the Pacific region, such as conflicting territorial claims over certain Pacific islands, various disputes in China, and US sympathies for Australasian separatism.

The turn of the century was the apex of European and American imperialism and the great powers (USA, UK, France-Iberia, Germany, Italy, and Russia) dominated the world. Their infrequent consensus defined and wrote international law; their ever-present power plays shaped international politics, now and in the foreseeable future. Japan and Argentina stood as junior candidates to join their august ranks; Brazil had some long-term potential that appeared less than realized in the near future. Turkey was a fallen power that wavered between teetering on the brink of extinction and the possible promise of rebirth. China was another fallen great that faced most severe trouble in the near future and but had great potential in the long term. It had a good chance of surviving complete colonial subjugation thanks to sheer size and population, but it had already suffered brutal losses and humiliations and more of that was on the way due to its failure to modernize. India groaned under the weight of British colonialism, but might do as well as China in the long term.

In the last decade of the 19th century, a pattern of rising international tensions between the great powers (and a few ambitious or desperate middle powers) was relatively easy to discern for perceptive observers. A significant hallmark of growing imperialistic rivalry between the great powers were the recurring international crises that intermittently marked the last third of the 19th century and were getting more frequent and increasingly difficult to settle peacefully over time. Often the powers were only able to get them frozen for a while with unsatisfactory compromises or an instable status quo. The last notable cases of relatively stable settlements achieved by diplomatic deal making were the international conferences that dealt with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (until the Young Turk revolution destabilized it) and organized the Scramble for Africa. Pretty much the same way, the last major example of genuine international cooperation was the joint intervention to crush the Big Swords uprising, and in its aftermath, the great powers proved unable to establish a stable settlement for China. The naval and land arms race that spanned and steadily intensified during the last third of the 19th century was another major manifestation of imperialistic rivalry between the great powers.

These tensions were the ultimate expression of the imperialistic competition for economic and political dominance of the world, which gripped all the great powers during the 19th century as an effect of industrialization. With few exceptions, political and strategic factors just happened to align and channel this chaotic competition into a few relatively stable polarities, including the enmity between France-Iberia and the German-Italian alliance in Western Europe and the colonies, the ‘Great Game’ imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia in Asia, and the Anglo-American rivalry in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. For a few decades, European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia, and American focus on settlement of North America, acted as a powerful “safety valve” for imperial competition. As long as the great powers could grab new markets and resources, and satisfy their ambitions for glory, in a much safer and easier way by conquering the pre-colonial states and colonizing the underdeveloped areas of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, the impulse to fall on each other and rob their rivals was substantially diminished and kept in check.

The colonial outlet however could not work to defuse imperialistic hostility forever. By the end of the 19th century, the great powers had mostly partitioned the world between their empires. The Scramble for Africa was over and it had entirely turned that continent into European colonies, with the lone exception of Liberia, a de facto US protectorate. The partition of Africa in regional spheres of influence had produced a noticeable rationalization of European colonization and relative borders, even if some important friction remained in contact areas, especially between hostile powers. Much the same way, imperialism had carved all of Asia but China, Turkey, Persia, and Japan into European colonies. The Japanese Empire had joined the winning side, absorbed Korea, and risen as an emergent power thanks to its modernization, but China and Persia stumbled at the same task and so were hard-pressed to resist imperialist onslaught. These states only kept an increasingly precarious nominal independence with an impending threat of dissolution because of sheer size or by lying on a fault-line of the Great Game.

Turkey had long been trapped into seemingly terminal decline and so bound to share the same fate; only at the end of the century a last-minute modernization drive appeared to show some promise of reversing the course, but timing and circumstances made its eventual success an open question. All the other European and Latin American minor and middle states in practice were more or less clients of one great power or another. The only partial exception was Argentina thanks to its growth into an emergent power, although it still sported close ties with the USA. Brazil also had some potential thanks to size and natural resources but its ability to fulfill it was into question.

The pressure to expand their own power and influence remained as high as ever for the great powers, due to the socio-economic effect of industrialization and an international order that had carved the world into a few big protectionist blocs. However, their very 19th century success had left the great powers with scarce further room to expand, short of falling on each other, or accomplishing the complete colonial partition or joint colonization of China. It was an impressive task, which at the very least required more effective cooperation than the great powers were seemingly able to muster.

Anglo-Gallic cooperation to prop up Young Turk nationalists and Brazilian far-rightists were but two of the signs of growing closeness between the British Empire and France-Iberia during the 1890s. Despite mutual distrust fueled by their radically different political character, the two powers gradually aligned closer and grew friendlier out of their common strong wish to get a powerful partner to stand against their established enemies. Britain wanted a strong ally to improve its standing in the two-front rivalry with Russia and the USA. France-Iberia wished to secure its back and gain British support against its German-Italian enemies. This drive eventually proved stronger than any ideological difference and the British and Gallic empires first signed a non-aggression pact combined with a trade treaty (the so-called “Entente Cordiale”) in the middle 1890s, then a military alliance by the end of the decade. The Anglo-Gallic agreement guaranteed mutual support for Franco-Iberian claims in Western Europe and British claims in Asia; a secret protocol established guidelines for the partition of the Low Countries and German-Italian colonies as well as a mutually agreed settlement for Asia in case of war.

Formation of the Entente caused a general realignment of the alliance system for the great powers. Germany and Italy strengthened their long-standing close partnership and dropped any pretense of amicable neutrality in the Great Game. They started talks with St. Petersburg to enlarge their military alliance to Russia. The Russians too were interested in the offer. Talks proceeded quickly since Russia and the German-Italian bloc had kept friendly relations for a long time. Negotiations soon led to the formation of the Triple Alliance between Germany, Italy, and Russia. Observers also commonly called this bloc the Eastern Powers. Russia stopped short of joining the CEMU, mostly out of a wish to preserve some protection for its less developed industry from German and Italian competition. However, it signed a commercial agreement with Germany and Italy that considerably increased trade with the CEMU countries as well as German-Italian investment in Russia.

The USA did not establish any alliance bonds with European powers due to its traditional policy of non-entanglement in Old World disputes. However, the formation of the Entente and Anglo-Gallic encroachment in Latin America and the Pacific were good reasons for the Americans to combine hostility towards France-Iberia (already distrusted because of its repressive regime) with their long-established enmity towards Britain. The USA kept friendly relations with the Eastern powers, and it was easy to expect America would at best be a true or hostile neutral towards the Entente in a European conflict. However, the British and the Franco-Iberians expected their combined power would be enough to intimidate America into good behavior, and traditional American isolationism would keep the USA away from any Old World conflict where its interests were not directly at stake. Therefore, they were confident their alliance would be able to deal with the Eastern powers and the USA separately and at its convenience. Soon, the land and naval arms race between the great powers heightened to frantic levels, as each player either prepared for a pre-emptive war or reacted to the perceived threats of alliance system realignment and the rearmament of their potential enemies. Of course, this in turn increased tensions even further.

Turkey quickly took its place as an unofficial member of the Entente bloc. Japan avoided any alliance entanglements and stuck to its policy of cautious neutrality, keeping the option of opportunistically supporting any side if circumstances were favorable and promised rewards good enough. Hungary and Croatia kept a solid alignment with the Eastern powers out of their close bond with the Pillar bloc. Yugoslavia aligned with the Eastern powers due to its ties with Russia, but its loyalty to the alliance was in serious doubt because of domestic instability and its ambitions on its neighbors’ territory. The Netherlands and Greece were officially neutral as well, but everyone expected they would side with the Eastern Powers in a general conflict.

Scandinavia had important economic and political ties with the CEMU bloc, but it would most likely cling to true neutrality because of its complex relationship with Britain, Germany, and Russia. Belgium was so instable and divided that neutrality became the default to try to survive. The Irish, the Poles, and the Romanians were almost certainly going to exploit a general conflict to try another bid for independence. Argentina, Gran Colombia, and Peru-Bolivia aligned with the USA, while Brazil and Chile did so with the Entente powers. The Mexicans were too busy fighting each other, and China too weak and in dire need of setting its own house in order. Once they did so, however, the Chinese would side with the devil if it promised any decent hope of casting off the foreigners’ yoke.

[eurofed]

These maps show Europe, North America, and the world at the end of the 19th century. They are meant to show international borders, so internal borders may often be alt-historically inaccurate (especially in the North American map) or not shown (as for Europe).