US and Japan in the 19th Century PDF

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century 1. Outside Europe, the 19th century led to the emergence of two main powers, the US and Japan. Until the en...

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century 1. Outside Europe, the 19th century led to the emergence of two main powers, the US and Japan. Until the end of the century, both played just a limited – mostly regional – role. However, in this period, they laid the foundations of their future importance. European powers often looked contemptuously at the two countries (especially Japan) and sometimes tried to hamper their political rise. These efforts proved largely unsuccessful. By the end of the century, the US were the world’s main economic power, its industrial production surpassing those of both Britain and Germany. Japan, in turn, was the only Asian country that could compete with the European imperialistic powers in the regional arena and evolve into a full-fledged industrial power while largely retaining its typical social, political, and cultural features. Both countries decided to exit their self-imposed isolation at the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1894-95, the First Sino-Japanese war allowed Japan to extend its influence outside the archipelago for the first time, while in 1898, the US-Spanish War allowed the US to spread its influence over Cuba and to occupy Puerto Rico and the Philippines at Spain’s expense. In both countries, these events raised a lively debate about their respective future international role. However, they also allowed US and Japan to finally enter the ‘Great powers’ club’. After World War I, the two paths started diverging. Both looking at the Pacific as their main sphere of influence, the US and Japan became increasingly rivals to spread their control over China. In the long run, this rivalry would have forced Japan to declare war on the US, dragging Washington into World War II in 1941. 2. The US history in the 19th century can be roughly divided into two periods, before and after the Civil War (1861-65). Before the war, the country consolidated the institutions that had emerged from the Independence War (1776-81). In 1789, a new Constitution established a federal state, replacing the loose confederation established after the Independence War. The first significant territorial expansion came with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when the US bought from Napoleonic France the territories of today Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, large portions of North and South Dakota, and parts of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. Florida was ceded to the US in 1819 from Spain (which also relinquished its claims over the Oregon territory), and in 1845, the Republic of Texas was annexed, leading to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. After the war, the US obtained the northern half of Mexico’s territory, corresponding to today California, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, most of New Mexico, and some two-thirds of Arizona (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 2 Feb. 1848). In 1846, the US also settled their disputes with Britain, roughly establishing the border between British North America (today Canada’s British Columbia) and the US along the 49th parallel. Until the 1830s, high domestic birth rates supported territorial expansion, while, in the following twenty years, the first large-scale immigration mostly came from Britain, Ireland, and Germany. Enslaved Africans and their descendent accounted for a fair share of the southern states’ population (i.e., states laying south of the Mason-Dixon Line). 3. The problem of slavery gradually emerged during the century. Until the 1850s, an unwritten rule presided over the admission of new states to the Union to keep the balance between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ states (i.e., states where slavery was legal or not) unaffected. 1 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century However, the compromise proved difficult to maintain over time, and abolitionism gradually strengthened. The crisis broke out in 1860 when President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans’ political platform asked to stop slavery’s expansion. The effect was the secession of the southern states (Confederated States of America: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri) and the beginning of the civil war. The US civil war was the first modern war in terms of mobilised men, technology, and ideological dimension. Moreover, slavery was just one of its reasons, which also included the clash of two different social structures (elitarian in the South, more democratic in the North), economic models (rural in the South, industrial in the North) and institutional visions (confederalist in the South, federalist in the North). North’s final victory led to the abolition of slavery, and former slaves were granted full political rights (XIII-XV Amendments to the US Constitution). However, since the early 1870s, former slave states started introducing legal racial segregation by adopting the so-called ‘Jim Crow laws’ limiting black people’s civil rights. Another long-term consequence of the war was digging a cleavage between the two parts of the country and beginning a political hatred that lasted until the second half of the 20th century. 4. After the end of the Civil War, the US lived through a period of great economic expansion. The needs of reconstruction and internal colonisation boosted the industrial and infrastructural sectors. In 1869, the First transcontinental railroad was opened, marking a symbolic and practical turning point in the country’s history. Economic expansion was largely unregulated and negatively impacted, especially labour conditions and financial stability. Poor working conditions led to frequent outbursts of violence, which were suppressed heavy-handedly. The concentration of capital led to the emergence of monopolies and cartels, such as in the oil (J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil), steel (Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel Company, later US Steel), chemical (DuPont, Allied Chemical, Dow Chemical, American Cyanamid, Hercules Powder, Monsanto), sugar (American Sugar Refining Co.), tobacco (American Tobacco Co.), and meatpacking sectors (the ‘Big Four’: Armour, Cudahy, Wilson, and Swift). The situation was more or less similar in the bank and financial sectors, while cross-participation between banks and industries supported monopolistic positions. The first efforts to break up this system took place just in the 1890s (Sherman Act, 1890); however, on the eve of World War I, when the Clayton Act was adopted (1914), the situation had only partially changed. Large-scale immigration provided the workforce that the system needed. In the second half of the 19th century, new immigration flows reached the US. In this period, the primary source of immigration shifted from Central, Northern, and Western Europe to Southern Europe and Russia, with Jews fleeing from pogroms contributing a fair share. 5. From a political perspective, the Republican party dominated the period, with the Democrats ruling the former slave states. The only democratic Presidents were Andrew Johnson (1865-69) and Grover Cleveland (1885-89 and 1893-97). No remarkable political figure assumed the presidency between Abraham Lincoln’s killing (15 April 1865) and Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration (14 Sept. 1901), and business cliques dominated Congress’ life. Foreign policy was inspired by the ‘Monroe doctrine’’s principles (1823), which envisaged a separation between European and American affairs, focused US attention on the Western hemisphere and called for European powers to refrain from meddling in its affairs. Things changed between 1898 and 1912, with the new US leadership pushing the country into imperialistic competition. In 1898, the US-Spanish War allowed the 2 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century US to spread influence over Cuba and occupy Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In the same year, Hawaii was annexed to the US. In 1900, a US military contingent participated in the suppression of the Boxer revolt in China, together with those of the European powers and Japan. In 1904, the building of the Panama Canal began to ease the link between the US East and West coasts. In 1905, the US mediated the peace of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War. In 1907-1909, a group of US Navy battleships (the ‘Great White Fleet’) completed a journey around the globe to make courtesy visits to numerous countries while displaying US naval power to the world. After 1912, these policies were mostly abandoned, with (Democratic) President Thomas Woodrow Wilson reverting for a certain period to more traditional isolationism. 6. The evolution of Japan’s international role was even more striking. In 1600, the county had entered a period of self-isolation (sakoku) that lasted until 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry, US Navy, forcefully opened the country to international intercourses. In the same years, British victories in the two Opium wars (1839-42 and 185660) also opened China to foreign influence and paved the way for the Machu ruling dynasty’s irreversible decline. In Japan, the impact of the US influence triggered radical political changes. The Tokugawa dynasty, which expressed the shogun (the country’s military and political leader) since 1603, was ousted from power in 1868. At the same time, the emperor was restored in its political functions, and a swift process of political and economic modernisation took place (‘Meiji Restoration’) along Western lines. By the end of the century, this process led to the abolition of the ‘unequal treaties’ imposed after the Perry mission. Roughly in the same period, Japan started its territorial expansion with the First Sino-Japanese war (1895); in 1900, a Japanese contingent participated in the suppression of the Boxer revolt, while in 1904-1905, the country was engaged in the RussoJapanese war for the control of Manchuria. Russia’s crushing defeat triggered the 1905 Russian revolution (which the tsarist authorities harshly repressed) and pushed Japan to the forefront of international politics. European power contemptuously reacted to Japan’s rise largely due to the dominant racist stereotypes. Another reason was that Japan’s rise made the country a potentially dangerous competitor for both the spoils of the declining Chinese empire and the control of the Pacific region. 7. Japan’s main rival was the US, which, since the 1850s, has looked at China and the Pacific region as its ‘natural’ sphere of influence. One of the reasons why President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to mediate the peace of Portsmouth was precisely to limit the size of the benefits that Japan could accrue from its military success against Russia. Japan’s new status was confirmed by the alliance treaty the country signed with Britain in 1902 and renewed in 1905. This treaty is especially important because, from the British perspective, it marked the beginning of a retrenchment that World War I sped up. Until then, Britain had focused its attention on its colonial possessions more than on Europe and avoided entering any formal alliance either with European or non-European powers. Since the end of the 19th century, Germany’s increasing political and military strength and growing ambitions pushed its government to reverse these trends, refocusing on Europe and reducing its imperial engagements. Within this framework, the British cabinet conceived the alliance with Japan as a way to ‘delegate’ its task to preserve regional stability in Eastern Asia. The alliance survived until the end of World War I. However, Japanese interests were quite divergent from British ones. Due to Japan’s small dimensions and limited natural endowment, part of its political, economic, and military elite considered territorial expansionism the only way to support the country’s growth. Expansionist 3 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 05 – The US and Japan in the 19th century feelings became increasingly widespread over time, evolving into a source of tension with both the neighbours and the Western powers and laying the foundation of the estrangement that would have emerged in the 1930s. 8. Japan’s rise to regional preeminence and its ability to integrate into the great powers system (albeit with a secondary role) contrasted with China’s parallel decline. Just like Japan, China had decided, during the 17th century, to sever its links with the outside world. However, since the mid-19th century, it was forced to increasingly open to foreign influence and to sign a long string of ‘unequal treaties’ granting special economic and legal rights to the European powers. Among other, European concession benefitted from the extraterritorial status, and foreigners were not subject to the competence of the Chinese courts. Growing European privileges were widely resented among both the elite and everyday people, and Christian proselytism – sometimes carried out aggressively by Western missionaries – was another source of tension. The consequence was periodic outbursts of xenophobic violence, the most famous being the Taiping rebellion in 1850-64. The decline of the Crown’s influence also fuelled separatist ambitions. In the coastal regions, separatism was a by-product of Western territorial control; in the internal regions, it was a product of Crown’s inability to control local powers or even its same governors. China, too, tried to start a modernization process along Western model. In this case, too, the military was the most affected field. However, these efforts were only partially successful. Instead, the Crown preferred siding with the most conservative elements and feeding people’s xenophobia: a strategy that, in the long run, antagonised the Western powers and speeded up the Machu dynasty’s downfall. 4