Year 3 summary, part 1 of 2
Keiko Nomura, East Asia in the Great War (Tokyo: Meiji, 1975)
… Historians often argue about whether the Japanese conflict with Russia and Korea was really part of the Great War. In some ways, it was not: Japan did not declare war on any of the FAR powers other than Russia, and never formally joined the BOG alliance. But in other respects, the Japanese-Russian war was inextricably intertwined with the global conflict. It is doubtful that Japan would have risked war with a European power so soon had Russia not been distracted and had Britain and the North German Confederation not offered subsidies and diplomatic concessions, and it took the Great War to resolve the conflict between the militarist and diplomatic factions in the imperial court in favor of the former.
Before the war, the prospect of increasing Japanese influence in Korea through expanding commercial interests and building ties with pro-Japan nobles and gentry seemed less risky than open war with Russia, and with much of the opposition to the Empress Myeongseong favoring an alliance with Japan, this strategy carried considerable likelihood of success. During wartime, however, the strategic balance shifted in favor of striking immediately while Russia was otherwise occupied, and the members of the BOG alliance, wanting to open another front against Russia, offered increasingly tempting prizes if Japan were to declare war.
The two decisive incidents happened within days of each other. In November 1895, an anti-Japanese riot swept Seoul in response to rumors of war, resulting in eight Japanese merchants and their families being killed. That same week, the British ambassador approached the imperial court with the best offer yet: immediate abrogation of all unequal treaties, most-favored-nation status in all the BOG powers, a cash subsidy, a substantial write-down of the debts that Japan had incurred as part of the Meiji modernization and the right to keep all Russian territory that the imperial army could conquer and hold. The public anger at the Seoul riots put the Japanese court in the proper frame of mind to accept the BOG terms, and on December 17, Japan declared war on both Russia and Korea.
The Japanese war aims were threefold: seize the outlying Russian islands and Siberian port cities, neutralize Russia’s Pacific fleet, and conquer Korea. The first of these was nearly an unqualified success. With the aid of local Japanese settlers, the imperial army seized the northern Kuril islands during the first week of the war and made a nearly uncontested landing on Sakhalin. Within a month, Sakhalin and the Commander Islands had fallen and, although shore batteries and strong landward defenses prevented an attack on Vladivostok, a lightning assault on Petropavlovsk was successful.
The other objectives proved more troublesome. The Russian fleet had already been softened up somewhat by the Royal Navy, and the Japanese Navy was able to hold its own, but was unable to score a decisive victory. And in Korea, the Japanese high command had accurately assessed Russia’s distraction but had seriously underestimated the strength of the Koreans themselves.
The initial Japanese landing at Busan succeeded with minimal casualties, but as the imperial force proceeded north, it was waylaid by peasant armies who were fanatically anti-Japanese and who had been made loyal to Empress Myeongseong’s government through tax reforms and half-hearted land distributions. Detachments of Korea’s Russian-trained army helped the peasants harry the advancing Japanese forces, while the bulk of the army, along with the Russian troops present on the peninsula, established a defensive line along the upper Nakdong and the Sobaek Mountains. The winter conditions made the Japanese advance difficult, and the invasion force was insufficient to defeat an entrenched enemy; by early March, the Japanese gains had stalled, and in places, the Koreans were even starting to push them back.
Japan responded by assembling a second, much larger invasion force, to land at Busan come springtime. It also, belatedly, took measures to legitimize its rule in the parts of Korea it occupied – something it had thought unnecessary during the initial stages of the war – by promising concessions to the conservative gentry and offering the Buddhist monks, many of whom opposed the quasi-Christian shamanism of the peasant armies, a role in education and government.
In the meantime, the Russians and Koreans prepared their defenses, and appealed to China for aid. At this time, the imperial Chinese government was recovering from the near-fatal weakness of the 1860s and 70s; it had largely regained control over its territory, substantially modernized its military, and undertaken real if halting administrative reforms. China was still no match for Japan on its own, and had done poorly in recent engagements against the Japanese army, but could still add considerable weight to the defending force – and if it were able to defeat Japan, even as junior partner to Russia, it would regain part of its lost prestige.
The Chinese court, like its Japanese counterpart, was divided, but the Emperor – who,
unlike his Japanese counterpart, held ultimate power – favored war. He saw military victory not only as a way to regain prestige for China but also to prove the superiority of reform and modernization, and to overcome conservative opposition to his administrative program. What proved to be the deciding factor was Russia’s offer to restore Korea’s nominal vassalage to China in exchange for Chinese help in beating back the invasion…
Raden Mas Suwardi Suryaningrat, Scholars, Sultans and Dutchmen: The Indies in the Great War (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada, 1946)
… In the Dutch East Indies, matters went from bad to worse for the colonial power during the third year of the war. In the spring of 1895, they were confronted with a full-scale rebellion in the Boni sultanate, which had put the fortress of Makassar under siege, and faced demands for reforms from a coalition of nationalist leaders in Java itself. [1] Had the Dutch made concessions to the Javanese and freed their remaining colonial forces to attack Boni, they might have brought both situations under control within a relatively short time. But instead, they did the opposite: they responded to the Javanese demands with panic and military force, and found themselves with little to spare for the outlying parts of their empire.
The Javanese leaders hadn’t planned for an armed rebellion against Dutch rule. Instead, the nationalists, who came mainly from the educated
santri class and the Hadhrami merchant community, demanded administrative reforms such as their counterparts in India advocated: equality under the law, an elected legislature, local control of government and education, and an end to repressive taxation and land policy. The Dutch reaction caught them by surprise, and the mass arrests that accompanied the declaration of martial law in Batavia neutralized much of the nationalist movement’s leadership. Those who remained at large, however, were the hard-liners who had called for revolt in the first place, and who had declined to attend the reformists’ congress. These men – also
santri, but with roots among the
abangan peasants due to the Islamic education networks that had been established over the past half-decade [2] – retreated to central Java and mobilized a peasant army to resist the Dutch.
The
abangan were at first reluctant to revolt, but the savage Dutch reprisals swayed many of them to the nationalist side. They could not stand against the Dutch forces in a pitched battle, but under the leadership of the
santri, they harassed and ambushed Dutch patrols and mounted a campaign of disobedience against colonial taxes. By late 1895, they had tied down many times their number of Dutch troops – many more, in fact, than the colonial authorities could really spare. The increasing need for troops in the mountains of Java meant that there were not enough to relieve Makassar, and in October 1895, it fell to the Boni army and nine hundred Dutch soldiers were taken prisoner.
Throughout this time, the Netherlands appealed to Britain for help, requesting that, since the war in the Southeast Asian theater had ended, drafts of Indian troops be sent to help put down the rebellion. Britain did provide arms to the Dutch authorities, and granted them permission to recruit volunteers, but it needed its Indian regiments to fight in Europe and East Africa and to defend the northwest frontier of India itself; moreover, given the delicate state of relations between the Raj and the Congress, it was uncertain whether Indian regiments would even agree to serve in a colonial war. The Dutch were able to recruit a brigade or two of Indian volunteers, many of them refugees from the political struggles within India, and about the same number from Siam and Indochina. But beyond that, they had to fight on their own – a situation which would sour Dutch-British relations for decades.
Faced with little choice, the Dutch made concessions to the outlying islands in order to concentrate on Java. In December 1895, they signed treaties with the Boni sultanate, and several other kingdoms on Sulawesi and Borneo. These kingdoms remained nominal Dutch vassals and agreed to pay an annual tribute, but the colonial government recognized their full internal autonomy and their right to control their ports and internal trade. The settlement made the outlying islands the equivalent of the princely states in British India and Africa, a status they would hold for the remainder of the colonial period.
1896 thus began with Dutch troops withdrawing from much of the outlying Indies and mounting a renewed offensive in central Java, aiming to root out all traces of resistance. This was a time that would be remembered in Javanese nationalist legend, and it was also the time that the armed rebellion was joined by an unarmed one. This would be called the “Revolt of the Women,” because the
santri women who had gone into the countryside as Islamic teachers would be its organizers, and the peasant women the ones who carried it out…
Parvati Temaru, Parceling Out Paradise: The Stockholm Conference (Royal Hawaiian Univ. Press, 2011)
… In February 1896, representatives of Britain, France, Spain, the North German Confederation, Japan and the United States gathered in one of the few remaining neutral capitals. Their meeting was remarkable not only for the fact that France was at war with two of the other participants, but also for what, in the middle of global conflict, it hoped to achieve. The Stockholm Conference represented a second attempt at what the great powers had failed to do at Brussels: to set rules to the game of colonialism and to remove an entire region as a source of conflict between them. In Brussels, the subject had been Africa; at Stockholm, it was the Pacific.
The immediate catalyst for the conference was the “Honolulu Incident” of 31 December 1895, in which British and French naval crews combined to defeat a coup attempt against the Hawaiian monarchy. Both captains involved in the incident were sternly reprimanded by their respective nations, neither of which cared to have its frigate captains conduct freelance foreign policy or forget that they were at war. But the circumstances of the coup – and especially the fact that it was financed and armed by wealthy American interests – made the warring powers realize that their distraction put their Pacific holdings in danger of being seized. The result was the hastily-organized conference, with the aim of including the United States in a mutually-agreed diplomatic and administrative framework rather than having it act as a rogue power.
The notion of inviting France was controversial, especially since its prewar Pacific colonies were by then under British occupation. But others pointed out that France had extant treaties of friendship with several Pacific monarchies, and that even if it had lost its political hold on New Caledonia and Tahiti, it still had large commercial interests – and tens of thousands of citizens – there and elsewhere. And the Honolulu Incident, for all both participants disavowed it, was a reminder of the French Navy’s value in helping to keep the peace. In the end, the French diplomats, in neutral transport and under safe-conduct granted by the British and North German navies, departed from Bilbao and went to join their enemies at the Swedish capital…
… The proposals made at Stockholm were informed by the aftermath of Brussels and the bitter experience of the Great War. Rather than trying to divide the uncolonized Pacific into zones of influence, it was proposed that this region be owned by none and open to all. The powers would guarantee the independence of those Pacific islands not yet part of any empire, and all signatory nations would have freedom of trade and navigation there, as well as the right to use each other’s depots and coaling stations as long as they were not at war with each other.
This was not done out of regard for the Pacific islanders’ sovereignty. To the contrary, the powers would have extraterritorial rights in the Pacific monarchies similar to those they had in China and had but lately given up in Japan, and the draft treaty called for the signatories to cooperate in forcing the Pacific states to grant such concessions. The parties also agreed, without the formality of consulting the Pacific kingdoms, that citizens of each could own land anywhere in the Pacific and could import laborers from their respective empires. But for all that, the formal independence of the remaining Pacific states was preserved, and the powers committed themselves to end blackbirding and its related abuses.
In the end, Britain and France accepted these proposals without much controversy, as did the Japanese and Germans, whose Pacific ambitions were still notional, and Spain, whose Pacific empire was unprofitable and which had little ambition to expand. The sticking point was the United States, which had repudiated the Hawaiian coup attempt but which still had influential factions that considered Hawaii a
de facto American possession and wanted to expand the manifest-destiny policy into the Pacific. When news of the Stockholm negotiations inevitably leaked, they became a subject of controversy, and – along with the incident that would soon unfold in Tonga – would become one of the defining issues of the 1896 election…
William Chang, The Imperial Question and the Rise of the Fourth Party System (San Francisco: Golden Gate, 2004)
… In 1896, the conflict between the progressives, populists and traditionalists within the Democratic and Republican Parties finally came to a head. The Republican Party was the more cohesive of the two; as the party in power, it was able to buy off many dissidents with plum assignments or programmatic concessions, and the reforms of the Chandler administration [3] had gone some way toward mollifying the more moderate reformists. The United States had prospered from the wartime trade, Chandler’s administration was relatively scandal-free, and the president was widely considered to have steered an astute diplomatic course. But even so, the more radical of the populists and progressives realized that they had little chance of dictating the party platform at the 1896 convention, especially since they were often at odds with each other. And in the Democratic Party, where four years in opposition had accentuated factional differences, the infighting between the reformists and the traditional party establishment reached even greater heights.
The dissidents in both parties had crossed the aisle for years to vote together on their pet issues, and had occasionally talked about creating one or more new factions. By late 1895, these discussions had become serious, and in January 1896, a group of congressmen, state legislators and appointed officials from both major parties announced the formation of the Progressive Party. The following month, a similar bipartisan caucus – this time of populists – declared that they would contest the election as the People’s Party. The two parties had become four, with the conservatives and traditionalists leading the rump Democrats and Republicans into the election season.
And at that, the fracturing was not complete, because events in Hawaii and the Amazon, as well as Samuel Clemens’ celebrated antiwar journalism, had made imperialism a key electoral issue. The Populists and Republicans – the latter of which was at heart a conservative party of farmers and businessmen, and looked askance at international entanglements – were mostly against American entry into the war, but there were exceptions in each. The Democrats, who had positioned themselves during the past three years as the party of renewed manifest destiny, had become the home of the war party, funded by powerful industrialists. The Progressives were split, with some advocating a “moral imperialism,” although more had swung to the antiwar side as the peace movement continued to expose the motives of the pro-war faction.
Many in the peace campaign didn’t trust any of the four – and, more to the point, they realized that all of them, except possibly the Democrats, would campaign primarily on domestic policy. At a meeting in New York in early March 1896, they resolved to form a party of their own – the National Peace Party – that would make opposition to the war the centerpiece of its campaign, and which would guarantee not to compromise its antiwar stance in exchange for domestic concessions. The new party scheduled its convention for June, but it was already clear that Clemens would be its presidential candidate.
And the presidential election was by no means the only one affected by the shakeup. Among the announcements made at the National Peace Party’s founding meeting was that Harriet Tubman would run for Congress under its banner in South Carolina’s lowland First District. That made her, at a stroke, the first woman to seek a House seat and the first African-American candidate to seek office in South Carolina as anything other than a Republican. And with the state party itself – one of the few that hadn’t split – divided into multiple factions, it was clear that the campaign there would be a dramatic one…
Aminatou Salazar, Africa’s Twentieth Century (Univ. of Sokoto Press, 2010)
… By the third year of the Great War, the transformation of all but one of the Great Lakes kingdoms and part of the eastern Congo into peasant-herder-religious commonwealths was well under way. Ankole, and that part of southeastern Buganda held by the Eighth King [4], had already adopted this model before the war; in 1893, they were joined by Samuel the Lamanite’s emergent state at Boyoma [5] and in 1895 by Rwanda. Burundi and Bunyoro, and two smaller regions in the eastern Congo basin, would follow by war’s end.
These states came from a bewildering variety of religious traditions – charismatic Christianity in Ankole, Islam in Rwanda, heterodox Mormonism at Boyoma, radical Catholicism in Burundi, traditional animism in Bunyoro and a syncretic pan-Abrahamic prophetic tradition in the Eighth King’s realm. But these traditions would lead them to some strikingly similar places. In each of them, the old monarchy and herding aristocracy, discredited by a decade and a half of repression and endemic conflict, would be replaced by a tripartite power structure of the upper peasantry, the chiefs of livestock collectives, and a religious-based civil administration. All of them succeeded in eliminating pre-existing caste distinctions, and all embraced some form of communal ownership of land, water and livestock. The founding leader of each claimed prophetic authority, and a radical “liberation theology” would be would be a major part of each one’s state ideology.
In other ways, their paths were very different. In Ankole, the new order was supported by an indigenous religious hierarchy, was compatible in many ways with pre-existing animist traditions, and enjoyed close ties to the Swedish Carlsenists of the Omani empire and the Masai among whom they lived. These internal and external ties lent it support and cohesion, and by the 1890s it had developed into a stable, consensual and relatively egalitarian republic, albeit not a fully democratic one. The Eighth King, as well, was steeped in indigenous tradition and had a loyal professional army, and was able to implement his social transformations without great trouble.
The Army of Samuel, in contrast, was a minority faith in the area it ruled, and many of its soldiers were migrants from other parts of the Congo; as such, it found itself in control of a restive population that resisted many of its social prescriptions. Its initial response to this was harsh. In early 1894, Samuel decreed that anyone who did not accept his faith must be expelled, and the result was many forced conversions and more pogroms. This policy would last only a short time before Samuel recoiled at its cruelty; it is said that he visited a village that his army had destroyed, looked upon the bodies of its slain children, and said, “I have sinned.” After that, people of other faiths were allowed to stay and their property was protected, although they were denied a vote in the affairs of the republic.
This still left Samuel in a precarious position, and his attempts to rectify that situation ranged from the practical to the quixotic. He sent expeditions throughout the Congo basin to offer sanctuary to oppressed Mormons, and he dispatched emissaries to Salt Lake City to invite American Mormons – who he addressed as “godly Nephites” – to settle in his state. He also offered autonomy to the remaining non-Mormons, allowing the upper peasantry and wealthy herders to act as judges in internal matters and unwittingly creating a social structure very similar to that in the Great Lakes republics. But the memory of the expulsions remained, and while he had earned some gratitude by eliminating the forced labor that had prevailed under the rubber companies’ rule, his hold over his realm remained far from certain.
The new regime in Rwanda encountered different problems. The revolutionary leader, Mélisande – she had no known surname – was a nineteen-year-old visionary with no political or administrative experience. She was backed by an indigenous religious structure, but it was a minority (albeit a substantial one), non-hierarchical, and after a decade of persecution, disorganized. It was unable to support her rule as strongly as the Eighth King’s priesthood or the Brotherhood Faith Assembly in Ankole, and many of the old herd-chiefs and land-chiefs were able to keep their power for lack of an effective check. The mainline Christian missionaries who remained in Rwanda, and who had supported the monarchy, and they became the focus of opposition to Mélisande’s Islamic civil government.
It was already clear by the spring of 1896 that the new government would face a struggle in implementing its reforms. What Mélisande did to break the stalemate would prove just as revolutionary as her original jihad had been…
_______
[1] See post 1893.
[2] See post 1310.
[3] See post 1219.
[4] See post 1044.
[5] OTL Kisangani.
