Far East, South-East Asia, South Asia

Imperialism in Asia
• Imperialism in Asia traces its roots back to the late
fifteenth century with a series of voyages that sought a
sea passage to India in the hope of establishing direct
trade between Europe and Asia in spices.
• Before 1500 European economies were largely self-
sufficient, only supplemented by minor trade with Asia
and Africa. Within the next century, however,
European and Asian economies were slowly becoming
integrated through the rise of new global trade routes;
and the early thrust of European political power,
commerce, and culture in Asia gave rise to a growing
trade in lucrative commodities—a key development in
the rise of today's modern world free market
economy.
• In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese established a monopoly
over trade between Asia and Europe by managing to prevent rival
powers from using the water routes between Europe and the Indian
Ocean.
• However, with the rise of the rival Dutch East India Company,
Portuguese influence in Asia was gradually eclipsed. Dutch forces
first established independent bases in the East (most significantly
Batavia, the heavily fortified headquarters of the Dutch East India
Company) and then between 1640 and 1660 wrestled Malacca,
Ceylon, some southern Indian ports, and the lucrative Japan trade
from the Portuguese.
• Later, the English and the French established settlements in India and
established a trade with China and their own acquisitions would
gradually surpass those of the Dutch.
• Following the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British
eliminated French influence in India and established the British East
India Company as the most important political force on the Indian
• Before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-to-
late nineteenth century, demand for oriental
goods remained the driving force behind
European imperialism, and (with the important
exception of British East India Company rule in
India) the European stake in Asia remained
confined largely to trading stations and strategic
outposts necessary to protect trade.
Industrialization, however, dramatically increased
European demand for Asian raw materials; and
the severe Long Depression of the 1870s
provoked a scramble for new markets for
European industrial products and financial
services in Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe,
and especially in Asia.
• This scramble coincided with a new era in global colonial
expansion known as "the New Imperialism," which saw a
shift in focus from trade and indirect rule to formal colonial
control of vast overseas territories ruled as political
extensions of their mother countries. Between the 1870s
and the beginning of World War I in 1914, the United
Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands — the established
colonial powers in Asia — added to their empires vast
expanses of territory in the Middle East, the Indian
Subcontinent, and South East Asia.
• In the same period, the Empire of Japan, following the Meiji
Restoration; the German Empire, following the end of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1871; Tsarist Russia; and the United
States, following the Spanish-American War in 1898, quickly
emerged as new imperial powers in East Asia and in the
Pacific Ocean area.
• In Asia, World War I and as regional powers. World War II were
played out as struggles among several key imperial powers—
conflicts involving the European powers along with Russia and the
rising American and Japanese powers. None of the colonial powers,
however, possessed the resources to withstand the strains of both
world wars and maintain their direct rule in Asia. Although
nationalist movements throughout the colonial world led to the
political independence of nearly all of the Asia's remaining colonies,
decolonization was intercepted by the Cold War; and South East
Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia remained
embedded in a world economic, financial, and military system in
which the great powers compete to extend their influence.
However, the rapid post-war economic development of the East
Asian Tigers and the People's Republic of China, along with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, have loosened European and North
American influence in Asia, generating speculation today about the
possible re-emergence of China and Japan
Early European Exploration
of Asia
 Medieval European exploration of Asia
• In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of Europeans, many of
them Christian missionaries, had sought to penetrate China. The
most famous of these travelers was Marco Polo. But these
journeys had little permanent effect on East-West trade because
of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of
the fourteenth century, which put an end to further European
exploration of Asia. The Yuan dynasty in China, which had been
receptive to European missionaries and merchants, was
overthrown, and the new Ming rulers were found to be inward
oriented and unreceptive to foreign religious proselytism.
Meanwhile, The Turks consolidated control over the eastern
Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes. Thus, until
the fifteenth century, only minor trade and cultural exchanges
between Europe and Asia continued at certain terminals
controlled by Muslim traders.
 Oceanic voyages to Asia
• Western European rulers determined to find new
trade routes of their own. The Portuguese
spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that
would provide cheaper and easier access to
South and East Asian goods. This chartering of
oceanic routes between East and West began
with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese
and Spanish sea captains. Their voyages were
influenced by medieval European adventurers,
who had journeyed overland to the Far East and
contributed to geographical knowledge of parts
of Asia upon their return.
• In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southern
tip of Africa under the sponsorship of Portugal's
John II, from which point he noticed that the
coast swung northeast. Although his crew forced
him to turn back, he was pleased with the
prospect of soon finding a sea route to India and
named the tip as the Cape of Good Hope. Later,
starting in 1497, Portuguese navigator Vasco da
Gama made the first open voyage from Europe to
India. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese
navigator in the service of Spain, found a sea
route into the Pacific Ocean.
 Portuguese and Spanish
Trade and Colonization in
Asia
 Portuguese monopoly over trade in
the Indian Ocean
• Early in the 16th century Afonso de Albuquerque emerged as the
Portuguese colonial viceroy most instrumental in consolidating
Portugal's holdings in Africa and in Asia. He understood that
Portugal could wrest commercial supremacy from the Arabs only by
force, and therefore devised a plan to establish forts at strategic
sites which would dominate the trade routes and also protect
Portuguese interests on land.
• In 1510, he seized Goa in India, which enabled him to gradually
consolidate control of most of the commercial traffic between
Europe and Asia, largely through trade; Europeans started to carry
on trade from forts, acting as foreign merchants rather than as
settlers. In contrast, early European expansion in the "West Indies,"
(later known to Europeans as a separate continent from Asia that
they would call the "Americas") following the 1492 voyage of
Christopher Columbus, involved heavy settlement in colonies that
were treated as political extensions of the mother countries.
• Lured by the potential of high profits from
another expedition, the Portuguese
established a permanent base south of the
Indian trade port of Calicut in the early 15th
century.
• In 1510, the Portuguese seized Goa on the
coast of India, which Portugal held until 1961.
The Portuguese soon acquired a monopoly
over trade in the Indian Ocean.
• Portuguese viceroy Afonso de Albuquerque
(1509-1515) resolved to consolidate Portuguese
holdings in Africa and Asia, and secure control of
trade with the East Indies and China.
• His first objective was Malacca, which controlled
the narrow strait through which most Far Eastern
trade moved. Captured in 1511, Malacca became
the springboard for further eastward
penetration; several years later the first trading
posts were established in the Moluccas, or "Spice
Islands," which was the source for some of the
world's most hotly demanded spices.
• By 1516, the first Portuguese ships had reached
Canton on the southern coasts of China.
• By 1557, the Portuguese gained a permanent
base in China at Macau, which they held until
1999.
• The Portuguese, based at Goa and Malacca, had
now established a lucrative maritime empire in
the Indian Ocean meant to monopolize the spice
trade.
• The Portuguese also began a channel of trade
with the Japanese, becoming the first recorded
Westerners to have visited Japan. This contact
introduced Christianity and fire-arms into Japan.
• The energies of Spain, the other major colonial
power of the 16th century, were largely
concentrated on the Americas, not South and
East Asia. But the Spanish did establish a footing
in the Far East in the Philippine Islands.
• After 1565, cargoes of Chinese goods were
transported from the Philippines to Mexico and
from there to Spain. By this long route, Spain
reaped some of the profits of Far Eastern
commerce.
• Spanish officials converted the island to
Christianity and established some settlements,
permanently establishing the Philippines as the
area of East Asia most oriented toward the West
in terms of culture and commerce.
 The Decline of Portugal's Asian
empire since the 17th century
• The lucrative trade was vastly expanded when the
Portuguese began to export slaves from Africa in 1541;
however, over time, the rise of the slave trade left
Portugal over-extended, and vulnerable to competition
from other Western European powers. Envious of
Portugal's control of trade routes, other Western
European nations — mainly Holland, France, and
England — began to send in rival expeditions to Asia.
• In 1642, the Dutch drove the Portuguese out of the
Gold Coast in Africa, the source of the bulk of
Portuguese slave laborers, leaving this rich slaving area
to other Europeans, especially the Dutch and the
English.
• Rival European powers began to make inroads
in Asia as the Portuguese and Spanish trade in
the Indian Ocean declined primarily because
they had become hugely over-stretched
financially due to the limitations on their
investment capacity and contemporary naval
technology. Both of these factors worked in
tandem, making control over Indian Ocean
trade extremely expensive.
• The existing Portuguese interests in Asia proved
sufficient to finance further colonial expansion and
entrenchment in areas regarded as of greater strategic
importance in Africa and Brazil. Portuguese maritime
supremacy was lost to the Dutch in the 17th century,
and with this came serious challenges for the
Portuguese. However, they still clung to Macau, and
settled a new colony on the island of Timor.
• It was as recent as the 1960s and 1970s that the
Portuguese began to relinquish their colonies in Asia.
Goa was invaded by India in 1961 and became an
Indian state in 1987; East Timor was abandoned in
1975 and was then invaded by Indonesia.
• It became an independent nation in 2002; and Macau
was handed over to the Chinese as per a treaty in
1999.
 Dutch Trade and
Colonization in Asia
 The rise of Dutch control over Asian
trade in the 17th century
• Portuguese decline in Asia was accelerated by
the attacks on their commercial empire by the
Dutch and the English, which began a global
struggle over empire in Asia that lasted until the
end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. The
Netherlands revolt against Spanish rule
facilitated Dutch encroachment of the
Portuguese monopoly over South and East Asian
trade. The Dutch looked on Spain's trade and
colonies as potential spoils in war. When the two
crowns of the Iberian Peninsula were joined in
1581, the Dutch felt free to attack Portuguese
territories in Asia.
• By the 1590s, a number of Dutch companies
were formed to finance trading expeditions in
Asia. Because competition lowered their
profits, and because of the doctrines of
mercantilism, in 1602 the companies united
into a cartel and formed the Dutch East India
Company, and received from the government
the right to trade and colonize territory in the
area stretching from the Cape of Good Hope
eastward to the Strait of Magellan.
• In 1605, armed Dutch merchants captured the
Portuguese fort at Amboyna in the Moluccas,
which was developed into the first secure base of
the company. Over time, the Dutch gradually
consolidated control over the great trading ports
of the East Indies.
• Control over the East Indies trading ports allowed
the company to monopolize the world spice
trade for decades. Their monopoly over the spice
trade became complete after they drove the
Portuguese from Malacca in 1641 and Ceylon in
1658.
• Dutch East India Company colonies or outposts were later
established in Atjeh (Aceh), 1667; Macassar, 1669; and
Bantam, 1682. The company established its headquarters at
Batavia (today Jakarta) on the island of Java. Outside the East
Indies, the Dutch East India Company colonies or outposts
were also established in Persia (now Iran), Bengal (now
Bangladesh and part of India), Mauritius
(1638-1658/1664-1710), Siam (now Thailand), Guangzhou
(Canton, China), Taiwan (1624-1662), and southern India
(1616-1795). In 1662, Zheng Chenggong (also known as
Koxinga) expelled the Dutch from Taiwan.
• Further, the Dutch East India Company trade post on Dejima
(1641- 1857), an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki, was
for a long time the only place where Europeans could trade
with Japan.
• In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established an
outpost at the Cape of Good Hope (the
southwestern tip of Africa, currently in South
Africa) to restock company ships on their
journey to East Asia.
• This post later became a fully-fledged colony,
the Cape Colony (1652-1806). As Cape Colony
attracted increasing Dutch and European
settlement, the Dutch founded the city of
Kaapstad (Cape Town).
• By 1669, the Dutch East India Company was
the richest private company in history, with a
huge fleet of merchant ships and warships,
tens of thousands of employees, a private
army consisting of thousands of soldiers, and
a reputation on the part of its stockholders for
high dividend payments.
 Decline of the Dutch in Asia and the
rise of the British
• The company was in almost constant conflict with the English;
relations were particularly tense following the Amboyna Massacre
in 1623. During the eighteenth century, Dutch East India Company
possessions were increasingly focused on the East Indies. After the
fourth war between the United Provinces and England (1780–
1784), the company suffered increasing financial difficulties. In
1799, the company was dissolved.
• The East Indies were awarded to The Kingdom of the Netherlands
by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. After the Napoleonic Wars, the
Dutch concentrated their colonial enterprise in the Dutch East
Indies (Indonesia) throughout the nineteenth century. The Dutch
lost control over the East Indies to the Japanese during much of
World War II. Following the war, the Dutch fought Indonesian
independence forces after Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945.
The British in India
 Portuguese, French, and British
competition in India (1600-1763)
• The English sought to stake out claims in India at the
expense of the Portuguese dating back to the
Elizabethan era. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I
incorporated the English East India Company (later
the British East India Company), granting it a
monopoly of trade from the Cape of Good Hope
eastward to the Strait of Magellan. In 1639 it
acquired Madras on the east coast of India, where it
quickly surpassed Portuguese Goa as the principal
European trading centre on the Indian Subcontinent.
• Through bribes, diplomacy, and manipulation of
weak native rulers, the company prospered in India,
where it became the most powerful political force,
and outrivaled its Portuguese, and French
competitors. For more than one hundred years,
English and French trading companies had fought
one another for supremacy, and by the middle of the
eighteenth century competition between the British
and the French had heated up. French defeat by the
British under the command of Robert Clive during
the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) marked the end of
the French stake in India.
 The Collapse of Mughal India
• The British East India Company, although still in direct competition with French
and Dutch interests until 1763, was able to extend its control over almost the
whole of India in the century following the subjugation of Bengal at the 1757
Battle of Plassey. The British East India Company made great advances at the
expense of a Mughal dynasty, seething with corruption, oppression, and revolt,
that was crumbling under the despotic rule of Aurangzeb (1658-1707).
• The reign of Shah Jahan (1628-1658) had marked the height of Mughal power.
However, the reign of Aurangzeb, a ruthless and fanatical man who intended to rid
India of all views alien to the Islamic faith, was disastrous. By 1690, when Mughal
territorial expansion reached its greatest extent, Aurangzeb's Empire
encompassed the entire Indian Subcontinent. But this period of power was
followed by one of decline. Fifty years after the death of Aurangzeb, the great
Mughal empire had crumbled. Meanwhile, marauding warlords, nobles, and
others bent on gaining power left the Subcontinent increasingly anarchic.
Although the Mughals kept the imperial title until 1858, the central government
had collapsed, creating a power vacuum.
 From Company to Crown
• Aside from defeating the French during the Seven Years'
War, Robert Clive, the leader of the Company in India,
defeated a key Indian ruler of Bengal at the decisive Battle
of Plassey (1757), a victory that ushered in the beginning of
a new period in Indian history, that of informal British rule.
• While still nominally the sovereign, the Mughal Indian
emperor became more and more of a puppet ruler, and
anarchy spread until the company stepped into the role of
policeman of India.
• The transition to formal imperialism, characterized by
Queen Victoria being crowned "Empress of India" in the
1870s was a gradual process. The first step toward
cementing formal British control extended back to the late
eighteenth century.
• The British Parliament, disturbed by the idea that a
great business concern, interested primarily in profit,
was controlling the destinies of millions of people,
passed acts in 1773 and 1784 that gave itself the
power to control company policies and to appoint the
highest company official in India, the Governor-
General. (This system of dual control lasted until
1858.)
• By 1818 the East India Company was master of all of
India. Some local rulers were forced to accept its over
lordship; others were deprived of their territories.
Some portions of India were administered by the
British directly; in others native dynasties were
retained under British supervision.
• Until 1858, however, much of India was still officially the dominion of
the Mughal emperor. Anger among some social groups, however,
was seething under the governor-generalship of James Dalhousie
(1847-1856), who annexed the Punjab (1849) after victory in the
Second Sikh War, annexed seven princely states on the basis of lapse,
annexed the key state of Oudh on the basis of misgovernment, and
upset cultural sensibilities by banning Hindu practices such as Suttee.
• The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, or Indian Mutiny, an uprising initiated by
Indian troops, called sepoys, who formed the bulk of the Company's
armed forces, was the key turning point. Rumor had spread among
them that their bullet cartridges were lubricated with pig and cow
fat. The cartridges had to be bit open, so this upset the Hindu and
Muslim soldiers. The Hindu religion held cows sacred, and for
Muslims pork was considered forbidden, Haraam. In one camp, 85
out of 90 sepoys would not accept the cartridges from their garrison
officer.
• The British harshly punished those who would not by jailing
them. The Indian people were outraged, and on May 10, 1857,
sepoys marched to Delhi, and, with the help of soldiers
stationed there, captured it. Fortunately for the British, many
areas remained loyal and quiescent, allowing the revolt to be
crushed after fierce fighting. One important consequence of
the revolt was the final collapse of the Mughal dynasty. The
mutiny also ended the system of dual control under which the
British government and the British East India Company shared
authority. The government relieved the company of its political
responsibilities, and in 1858, after 258 years of existence, the
company relinquished its role. Trained civil servants were
recruited from graduates of British universities, and these men
set out to rule India. Lord Canning (created earl in 1859),
appointed Governor-General of India in 1856, became known
as "Clemency Canning" as a term of derision for his efforts to
restrain revenge against the Indians during the Indian Mutiny.
When the Government of India was transferred from the
Company to the Crown, Canning became the first viceroy of
India.
 The rise of Indian nationalism
• The denial of equal status to Indians was the immediate stimulus
for the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress, initially
loyal to the Empire but committed from 1905 to increased self-
government and by 1930 to outright independence. The "Home
charges," payments transferred from India for administrative costs,
were a lasting source of nationalist grievance, though the flow
declined in relative importance over the decades to independence
in 1947.
• Although majority Hindu and minority Muslim political leaders were
able to collaborate closely in their criticism of British policy into the
1920s, British support for a distinct Muslim political organization,
the Muslim League from 1906 and insistence from the 1920s on
separate electorates for religious minorities, is seen by many in
India as having contributed to Hindu-Muslim discord and the
country's eventual Partition.
France in Indochina
• France, which had lost its empire to the British by the end
of the eighteenth century, had little geographical or
commercial basis for expansion in Southeast Asia. After the
1850s, French imperialism was initially impelled by a
nationalistic need to rival the United Kingdom and was
supported intellectually by the concept of the superiority of
French culture and France's special mission civilisatrice—
the civilizing of the native through assimilation to French
culture. The immediate pretext for French expansionism in
Indochina was the protection of French religious missions
in the area, coupled with a desire to find a southern route
to China through Tonkin, the European name for the
northern region of northern Vietnam.
• French religious and commercial interests were established in
Indochina as early as the seventeenth century, but no concerted
effort at stabilizing the French position was possible in the face of
British strength in the Indian Ocean and French defeat in Europe at
the beginning of the nineteenth century.
• A mid-nineteenth century religious revival under the Second Empire
provided the atmosphere within which interest in Indochina grew.
Anti-Christian persecutions in the Far East provided the immediate
cause.
• In 1856 the Chinese executed a French missionary in southeastern
China, and in 1857 the Vietnamese emperor, faced with a domestic
crisis, tried to destroy foreign influences in his country by executing
the Spanish bishop of Tonkin. Under Napoleon III, France decided
that Catholicism would be eliminated in the Far East if France did not
go to its aid, and accordingly the French joined the British against
China in the Second Opium War from 1857 to 1860 and took action
against Vietnam as well. By 1860, the French occupied Saigon.
• By the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, the Vietnamese emperor
ceded France three provinces of southern Vietnam to form
the French colony of Cochinchina; France also secured
trade and religious privileges in the rest of Vietnam and a
protectorate over Vietnam's foreign relations. Gradually
French power spread through exploration, the
establishment of protectorates, and outright annexations.
• Their seizure of Hanoi in 1882 led directly to war with China
(1883-1885), and the French victory confirmed French
supremacy in the region.
• France governed Cochinchina as a direct colony, and
central and northern Vietnam under the protectorates of
Annam and Tonkin, and Cambodia as protectorates in one
degree or another.
• Laos too was soon brought under French "protection."
• By the beginning of the twentieth century, France had created an
empire in Indochina nearly 50 percent larger than the mother
country.
• A Governor-General in Hanoi ruled Cochinchina directly and the
other regions through a system of residents. Theoretically, the
French maintained the pre-colonial rulers and administrative
structures in Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos, but
in fact the governor-generalship was a centralized fiscal and
administrative regime ruling the entire region.
• Although the surviving native institutions were preserved in order
to make French rule more acceptable, they were almost completely
deprived of any independence of action. The ethnocentric French
colonial administrators sought to assimilate the upper classes into
France's "superior culture."
• While the French improved public services and provided
commercial stability, the native standard of living declined and pre-
colonial social structures eroded. Indochina, which had a
population of over eighteen million in 1914, was important to
France for its tin, pepper, coal, cotton, and rice. It is still a matter of
debate, however, whether the colony was commercially profitable.
Russia and "The Great Game"
• Tsarist Russia is not often regarded as a colonial
power such as the United Kingdom or France
because of the manner of Russian expansions:
unlike the United Kingdom, which expanded
overseas, the Russian empire grew from the
centre outward by a process of accretion, like the
United States.
• In the nineteenth century, Russian expansion
took the form of a struggle of an effectively
landlocked country for access to a warm water
port.
• While the British were consolidating their hold on
India, Russian expansion had moved steadily
eastward to the Pacific, then toward the Middle
East, and finally to the frontiers of Persia and
Afghanistan (both territories adjacent to British
holdings in India).
• In response, the defense of India's land frontiers
and the control of all sea approaches to the
Subcontinent via the Suez Canal, the Red Sea,
and the Persian Gulf became preoccupations of
British foreign policy in the nineteenth century.
• Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Middle East and
Central Asia led to a brief confrontation over
Afghanistan in the 1870s.
• In Persia (now Iran), both nations set up banks to
extend their economic influence.
• The United Kingdom went so far as to invade
Tibet, a land under nominal Chinese suzerainty,
in 1904, but withdrew when it became clear that
Russian influence was insignificant and when
Chinese resistance proved tougher than
expected.
• In 1907, the United Kingdom and Russia signed an agreement
which — on the surface —ended their rivalry in Central Asia.
• As part of the entente, Russia agreed to deal with the
sovereign of Afghanistan only through British intermediaries.
In turn, the United Kingdom would not annex or occupy
Afghanistan.
• Chinese suzerainty over Tibet also was recognized by both
Russia and the United Kingdom, since nominal control by a
weak China was preferable to control by either power.
• Persia was divided into Russian and British spheres of
influence and an intervening "neutral" zone.
• The United Kingdom and Russia chose to reach these uneasy
compromises because of growing concern on the part of both
powers over German expansion in strategic areas of China
and Africa.
• Following the entente, Russia increasingly intervened in
Persian domestic politics and suppressed nationalist
movements that threatened both St. Petersburg and London.
• After the Russian Revolution, Russia gave up its claim to a
sphere of influence, though Soviet involvement persisted
alongside the United Kingdom's until the 1940s.
• In the Middle East, a German company built a railroad from
Constantinople to Baghdad and the Persian Gulf.
• Germany wanted to gain economic influence in the region
and then, perhaps, move on to Iran and India.
• This was met with bitter resistance by the United Kingdom,
Russia, and France who divided the region among themselves.