Picturing Hegemony

A recent Vox article gives us a simple but important picture. It's a political map of the globe with three main colors for countries: countries in Europe, countries colonized by Europe and countries not colonized by Europe. Nearly everyone is in the second category.

The map is a reminder of the scope of the maritime hegemonic age from the 15th-20th centuries, however it is somewhat misleading. There are small problems, like leaving Eritrea blank because it was not conceived at the time when Mussolini very briefly occupied Ethiopia: don't Swaziland and Lesotho get similar exemptions?

There is the bigger issue of Korea, which was never an imperial possession of a Western country, but was subjected to Japanese rule much in the model of Europe colonialism.

There is the bigger issue of Iran, which though never a submitted state, foreign interests dominated so much of the economy that it was a rallying cry for revolution in 1905, much like China in 1911 and Egypt in 1919, so why are these different colors?

What these technicalities point to is a desire to see imperialism as something more clear-cut than it was. The idea that Europeans had the running of things isn't wrong, but there are more important generalities of that world and ours to put in the picture.

Sometimes in colonization, foreigners moved in significant numbers to form new dominant communities, like in Algeria and South Africa. In other cases, the number of Westerners present was negligible like in the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless, the long 19th century set up the lineaments of the modern world with distinct national borders and an interconnecting market. 

I'm reminded of the Africanist Ken Vickery, who said that while he respected the 1970s film Roots, some of his students have been misled into thinking that Atlantic slavery came about through European pirate-raids in coastal West Africa, a seamless transition into modern colonialism.

In reality, traders and raiders could seldom accomplish this because of the power of local elites who controlled the market at the time. Far from minimizing the European role in the Western-dominated slave trade, I take Vickery's observation to expand the focus of what domination could mean.

I take this observation along with one from Talal Asad that "the intrusiveness of Western power, as I see it, consists in the first place in its reshaping of the social spaces in which distinctive kinds of struggle now take place, and not simply in its being the expression of a dominant protagonist." This is difficult to picture: in some ways it is fairly depicted like above, with dominant protagonists taking things and dictating to people, but most of the time, it is not. 

In the Congress of Berlin in 1885, European powers decided what land in Africa belonged to which of them, making maps with much the same idea as the one in the article. Of course, very few European businessmen and soldiers spent long in most of Africa: that was part of the idea of economical conquest. So the idea of whole swathes of Chad and Zambia "belonging" to France and Britain was somewhat of a fiction, certainly when compared to Canada and America where Europeans displaced the indigenous population.

However, our world, shaped by the conference at Bretton Woods in 1968, is the successor to the colonial world with its norms of extraction, conscription and processing in place if not its politics. When the picture of hegemony is less about the zoning of the map than its basic set-up, as imagination and opportunity, the connections are easier to see.