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Dr Malcolm Cooper, Z/Yen Associate
Two great powers stand at the cross-roads.
Their economies are still growing, their political institutions are well
imbedded and challenged only by a minority of discontents, their populations are
growing, and individual citizens are getting progressively better fed and
healthier. Their trade networks span the globe, all connected by a
communications system which allows decisions in the capital to be implemented
almost immediately on the other side of the globe. Everything should be
wonderful, but policy makers are worried about the future.
Both powers are heavily dependent on imports – imports which they are now
struggling to pay for as their own exports are squeezed by import substitution
abroad – and the balance of payments seems to be heading inexorably in the wrong
direction. The tax burden continues to move up, partially because popular
expectations of state provision of services are more and more demanding, and
partially because the defence systems required to protect the realm are becoming
more complex, expensive and vulnerable to early obsolescence. Worst of
all, two new economic powerhouses are pressing relentlessly forward on the other
side of the world, supported by rates of economic and population growth far
higher than those of the established powers. If these latter are to
maintain their primacy, decisive action is required across the policy spectrum.
This all sounds very familiar. There are just three problems: the two
established powers are not the United States and the European Union, the
emerging competitors are not China and India, and the date is not 2007. I
am actually talking about Britain and Germany in the first instance, and the
United States and Japan in the second – and the dateline is the summer of 1914.
A tubercular assassin was about to fire the “shots heard round the world” in
Sarajevo, and precipitate a rapid, and all but incontrollable slide into war.
At this point, the author needs to step from behind the curtain and admit that
he is a professional historian by training. This said, the aim of this
article is not to trot out the old truism that failure to understand the
mistakes of the past results in the same mistakes being made again in the
future. Rather it seeks only to illustrate that globalization is not a
recent phenomenon, and suggest that the “global” challenges of today can best be
understood and handled by seeing them as accelerations of long-term trends
rather than as an entirely new sets of paradigms. History does not repeat
itself, but futurists would do well to study it before constructing brave new
worlds. Notwithstanding the blurring of the past by conflicting or missing
evidence, the big picture for the 20th century is pretty clear, and will re-pay
careful study as we face the 21st.
This point can be illustrated by a quick survey of the global stage on which
Herbert Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral Tirpitz
commenced their deadly waltz in the late summer of 1914.
Britain was importing 4 million carcasses of refrigerated beef and 13 million
carcasses of refrigerated sheep or lambs, most of them from New Zealand,
Australia or South America. She was also importing 10 million tons of
cereals, half of it from North America; and Minnesota wheat could be delivered
to Liverpool for only five shillings a ton more than that grown in Yorkshire.
A million European emigrants were crossing the Atlantic every year to North
America alone. British tramp steamers were carrying 77 million tons of
coal abroad per annum, two thirds of it to fuel fires and factories from
Capetown to Colombo, and from Callao to Constantinople; and a third of it for a
global network of coaling stations which held the world economy together.
The industrial and military might of Germany was supported by food imports
equivalent to 25% of domestic consumption, including one and a half million tons
of wheat from North America to feed the human population and three million tons
of barley from Russia to feed farm animals. The USA supplied all of
Germany’s cotton and 60% of her sugar, while 50% of the potash, phosphates and
nitrates necessary to grow 40 million tons of potatoes in the sandy soil of
Saxony came from the west coast of South America.
Foreign, mostly British, capital had financed large rail networks across the
Americas, India and from the Cape to Cairo in Africa. The Panama Canal was
about to open, cutting 23 days off a steam-driven passage from Cardiff to
Valparaiso. The whole trading network was held together by long deep-sea
cables which could allow a ship-owner in Bremen to send a ship from Australia to
Hong Kong, or from Yokohama to Seattle as quickly as increasingly mechanized
loading facilities could get the coal into her holds and bunkers. The same
network allowed the British and German Admiralties to move their warships around
the seven seas like chess pieces.
This must surely have been a global economy and a global world. While
there is a trend among modern historians to re-classify the First World War as a
largely a European event, it is important to understand the wider context.
On the declaration of war in August 1914, the Royal Navy immediately dredged up
and cut Germany’s three long-distance undersea cables where they passed under
the English Channel. At the same time, the British army, simultaneously
calling up its reservists and raising a vast New Army of volunteers from mines,
shipyards, shops and farmers’ fields, was embarrassed to discover that its sole
source of khaki dye for uniforms was a large German chemicals producer.
The first British shots of the Great War were not actually fired in Europe but
in the German colony of Togo by a black regimental sergeant-major of the West
African Frontier Force. As the business of mass slaughter got underway on
the Western Front, a large Russian army was cut to pieces in Eastern Europe, the
Japanese laid siege to and captured a major German naval base in North China,
while in East Africa a German-led corps of African soldiers repulsed an
attempted landing by British-led battalions of Indian soldiers. Before
1914 was out, the Royal Navy had suffered its first major defeat in more than a
century off Coronel in Chile, and had avenged it just south of the Falkland
Islands. In the Indian Ocean, two German cruisers had set fire to oil
storage facilities at Madras and sunk a Russian cruiser in Penang harbour and a
British one at Zanzibar, before one was blockaded in the Rufiji Delta and the
other run aground, a blazing wreck on the Cocos Islands.
Before the Great War ended, British soldiers had fought and died in Italy,
Turkey, Russia, Palestine, and modern-day Macedonia, Iraq and Tanzania.
The last shots, like the first, were fired in Africa. And even before one
global crisis had ended, another of a quite different sort was sweeping away
millions more lives. In a chilling echo of today’s fears of a global
pandemic, “Spanish Influenza” killed more people than the war itself, ranging
from the author’s great aunt, a military nurse in Tottenham, to at least 160,000
inhabitants of the Protectorate of British East Africa.
To put it crudely, war and death took place across the globe because the world
of 1914 was connected on a global scale in both political and economic terms.
Even these connections were not new arrivals, but the product of trends
stretching along trade routes, colonial wars and journeys of exploration into
the post-medieval world. Arguably, it was advances in technology, the
technology of communication and travel as well as the technology of mass
industrial and agricultural production, which provided the real burst of
acceleration in the 19th century.
The only major elements missing from the 1914 global equation were oil, air
travel, and digital communication. Even these, however, are not quite the
novelties they are often portrayed to be. The foundations of the
international oil trade were already in place in the early 20th century, but
more importantly, the world economy already depended on the mass extraction,
transportation and consumption of another hydrocarbon – coal. On the
travel front, tourism was by train to a seaside resort rather than charter jet
to Ibiza, and a transatlantic journey on the Mauritania would take as many days
as Virgin Atlantic now takes hours, but the mass movement of people and of goods
had been a 19th century innovation. Finally, there was no real equivalent
to the internet or to the satellite, but at the state or corporate level,
long-distance communication was already a given – business empires were built
and military campaigns directed by telegraph.
Arguably, there is less difference between the world today and that which went
to war in 1914 than there was between the latter and its predecessor a hundred
years before. Rather than consign the world of our grandparents to
pre-globalization obscurity, it would surely be better to study its global
dimensions, stresses and strains. Doing so can only illuminate our
understanding of our own “global” future.
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Dr Malcolm Cooper spent 20 years in
the City managing research projects for an accountancy professional
body, three investment banks and finally the City of London Corporation.
His academic background is in the field of history: he holds a DPhil
from Oxford University and was a Research Fellow at Cambridge
University. He has published across a wide spectrum of subjects,
running from maritime history to international relations. His
current work relates mostly to the use of historical analysis to provide
fresh insight into major contemporary issues such as globalization, the
energy debate and regulation. |
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