PART I
Networks of Empire
Chapter 1
WEBS OF COMMUNICATION
WHEN WILLIAM T. STEAD, the British editor of the Review of Reviews, went to a watery grave with the Titanic on April 15, 1912, supporters of moral reform wept openly. It was said to be typical of his âgenerosity, courage, and humanity that Stead was last seen leading women and children to the safety of the stricken linerâs lifeboats.â1 Stead was a friend of âAmerica,â a country whose efforts on behalf of international cooperation, arbitration, and missionary work abroad he deeply admired. It was this admiration that put him on that ill-fated journey across the high seas. He was traveling to speak on âuniversal peaceâ at the Men and Religion Forward Movement Congress in New York City on April 22.2 Though well-known as the author of The Americanization of the World, he did not see Americanization as the message that the United States carried in its cultural and economic expansion abroad. Rather, his admiration of the American republic was part of a much larger story. Just five years before his drowning, he proclaimed that âThe Twentieth Century is the Century of Internationalismâ in the Review of Internationalism, edited at the Office of the Foundation of the Promotion of Internationalism at The Hague.3 He knew that diplomats, President Theodore Roosevelt, and American peace reformers had played important parts in the events leading up to the Second Hague Peace Conference (1907), and saw Americanization and Anglo-American influence as harbingers of and agents for the spread of internationalism.4
Internationalism entailed conceptually and often practically the relations between nations, chiefly as sovereign states operating on a diplomatic level. As critics have pointed out, this internationalism was Eurocentric, hierarchical, and dependent on military strength and economic power. It entailed the spread of European moral and ethical standards of civilization, an observation that should not surprise for an era of imperialism and nationalism. Internationalism was a product not chiefly of the noble aspirations that motivated Stead but of material interests. Groups of nations sought through international action protection from the arbitrary changes that accompanied a more interconnected world.5 Internationalism depended not only on the fact of nationalism but also on the ability of some powers to exert influence over others to extend higher standards of conduct between humans. In contrast, for Stead internationalism did not operate simply as a set of dealings among nation-states. It extended to a web of transnational influencesâinfluences that embraced groups, ideas, individuals, and institutions across national boundaries. The efforts of transnational reform organizations provided the cultural and intellectual context for the spread of Steadâs new internationalism. Europeans, not Americans, took the lead in the growth of International Voluntary Associations (IVAs), but quickly Americans extended and complemented this internationalizing effort with their own distinctive contribution. All this Stead understood. Americanization, reform across national boundaries, and ideologies of internationalism were closely intertwined. In turn, Stead was aware that the United States could be no island, isolated from the world. The great republic was irrevocably drawn not only into closer relations between nations but also into transnational ties through commercial, organizational, and social intercourse.
Vast networks of transnational influences impinged upon the United States in the late nineteenth century. By coincidence, American involvement in this transnational activity surged ahead in 1885, at the exact same time that Stead first burst to prominence as a journalist in Britain agitating against âvice,â particularly prostitution, in his famous essay âThe Maiden Tribute of Babylon.â The transnational activism in which Americans engaged beginning in the 1880s sprang not from thin air but from this wider context of moral reform of which Steadâs work was an important part. Material networksâ expansion in the 1870s allowed transnational institutions to flourish; an intricate web of connections facilitated and spurred reform across American national boundaries. American awareness of the nationâs interdependency with other countries was highlighted by changing patterns of trade, tourism, transport, and communications, by commercial exhibitions and worldâs fairs, and by media changes, especially in print culture. Though the missionary and moral reform surge of the late nineteenth century in the United States was a product of these influences and roughly comparable to transnational movements in Europe, the American version became distinctively global in its aspirations and highly dependant on new technologies of international communication.
American commerce abroad grew, and not just with its traditional Atlantic trading partner, Britain. Though American exports to Europe remained an important driving force for the American economy, American trade was taking on a global reach. Approximately 72 percent of American exports went to Europe in the late nineteenth century, but imports from outside Europe increased to one half of the total at the turn of the twentieth century. The biggest increase was not from Latin America but Asia, from which imports nearly doubled from 1860 to 1901â5, reaching 15.4 percent of the total. Asia also became an increasingly important export market, from just 2.4 percent in 1860 to 11.3 percent of the total by 1921â25. Much of this increase concerned Japan,6 but the United States also drew on more diverse international sources for its raw materials and exotic goods. Not only was the United States becoming more commercially interdependent with Asia;7 closer to home Americans scoured Central America for resources and began to export capital. Railroads, mines, sugar, and fruit plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean became new outlets for American business investment. Cuba and Mexico were especially important targets.
Americans were journeying abroad more often; but they were also living in many foreign countries as businessmen and expatriates, thus raising for the Department of State issues of extraterritoriality. Through their sheer presence, missionaries, traders, businessmen, and even prostitutes widened the American external footprint in the 1870s and 1880s, producing trouble for diplomats and complications for the American legal system on the rights of sojourning citizens.8 The nation was becoming enmeshed in new transnational flows that were global, not merely transatlantic, and its people were increasingly entangled in circumstances beyond national borders.
As a key element in these changes, the global spread of communications proceeded apace. From the time of the practical demonstration of the Morse code in 1844, enterprising businessmen worked to link nations with the aid of the telegraph. Cables were laid across the English Channel in 1851 and, after earlier failures, a transatlantic cable was successfully completed in 1866. When an experimental and temporary cross-ocean cable was first laid some years earlier, the New York Times reported that the infrastructure was âthe greatest enterprise of the nineteenth centuryâ; it promoted a âclose union of nations in the mutual bonds of interest and amity.â9 At first Europe and North America were brought into closer connection for speedy and reliable information on shipping, trade opportunities, prices, and business conditions. By 1870, rapid European communications had been extended as far as Singapore, and by 1903 trans-Pacific cables linked the United States directly to its new colony, the Philippines, and then on to Hong Kong and Shanghai.10 Transport timetabling and hotel bookings were thereby made much easier. The expansion of canals, railroads, and steamship lines nicely complemented the growth in telegraph communications. The sprouting of transport networks was most intense across Europe, where rail track mileage trebled between 1870 and 1914, bringing countries closer together and allowing missionaries and tourists to travel more speedily to Asia, especially when coupled with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The Atlantic was shrinking with equal rapidity in travel times and costs, a development that helped integrate Anglo-American moral reform networks. The first steamships, the Sirius and the Great Western, had arrived in New York from London as early as 1838, heralding the future means of ocean travel that would cut travel times and make for more certain passage. Nonetheless, until the Civil War most crossings were by sail, then competition and technology combined to slash the one-way cabin fare by half to less than $100 between the 1850s and 1900.11 By the early twentieth century about a dozen steamship lines worked the North Atlantic in regular, speedy services and prompted extensive international travel among an elite of Americans. Foreign oceanic travel by Americans reached one hundred thousand passengers per year in 1885. By that time, steamship services across the North Pacific had been working for eighteen years, and the distant South Pacific destinations of Australia and New Zealand were connected to San Francisco by a mail service that became an all-steamer route in the early 1880s.
Not only did middle-class and elite travel across the Atlantic flourish; global trips also became fashionable and newsworthy. Among those who traveled around the world were the inevitable tourists and businessmen, but reformers and missionaries joined in as well. The global excursion was more than an American trend. Thomas Cook, the famous English tour operator, did so in 1872â73, taking 223 days. Gospel revivalists from Britain crossed the Atlantic westward, just as Americans sailed to Europe, and British evangelicals toured the empire, covering vast distances, as did the Glasgow-based Rev. Alexander Somerville. In 1877â79, for example, the Scot âset out for our Australian colonies.â In eighteen months of travel from Britain âhe journeyed 34,000 miles and spoke to 610 audiences.â12 He also roved across South Africa, Europe, and the Middle East in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the prominence of Americans within the new itinerant style of transnational preaching increased, and reformers and journalists joined in the fetish not just for round-the-world travel but for speedy passages that could gain press coverage and popular acclaim. The obsession with these feats suggested a heightened American interest in the linking of global perspectives and technological achievements in communications. The trend began in 1870 with the exploits of the aptly named American George Francis Train; his speedy circumnavigation allegedly became the basis for Jules Verneâs Around the World in Eighty Days. An increasing number of intrepid women travelers were among those going abroad and winningâin the case of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (writing as Nellie Bly) through her newspaper account of her round-the-world-tripâtemporary fame, praise, or influence.13 Blyâs Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890) was marketed heavily in Joseph Pulitzerâs New York World.14 So much of a fetish had this travel bug become that, by the 1890s, going around the world once was not enough. The temperance reformer Jessie Ackermann eventually managed eight trips, but others eclipsed her efforts as the pattern of missionary and moral reform involvement grew. In the new world of speedier and more predictable communications, changing the world for moral reformers became almost a matter of cumulative circulation; reform-minded travel became, in part, a means of demonstrating global awareness and global reach.15
The wider experience and awareness of tourism was reflected in the growing interest in travel literature. Returning missionaries gave magic lantern presentations highlighting the exotic places they visited, and missionary magazines became littered with lush images of tropical placesâthe âpalmy plainsâ and âcoral strandsâ that evoked the memorable phrases of the Reginald Heber hymn familiar throughout the Anglo-American world.16 More secular clubs developed âtravel-by-proxyâ programs, provided advice, heard travel talks, watched slide presentations of foreign lands, and promoted âthe rise of a tourist mentality.â Many of these clubs were founded after 1900 and reflected Progressive Era flexing of womenâs institutional presence through the Womenâs Club movement, but some went back a generation or more.17 Before 1890, missionary outlets were vital in structuring knowledge of foreign places, but secular travel literature was also significant. Of 1,765 travel books published in the United States from 1830 to 1900, 81 percent appeared after 1860.18 On top of this came the intimidating number of periodical accounts. Thus National Geographic became a âdominant force in establishing American impressions of the world, its inhabitants, and the scientific enterprise.â With about four-fifths of the magazineâs circulation going to such people as businessmen and professionals in the 1880s, it represented the interests of the influential but moved increasingly in the direction of popular middle-class taste. Though geographical information available to Americans from this and other sources did not necessarily dissolve ill-informed representations of exotic cultures, it did multiply the amount of information and whetted the appetite for things foreign. Through newspapers, magazines, and personal tourist contacts, the 1870s to 1890s saw Americans of the middle to upper-middle classes becoming interested in the fashions, food, art, and domestic decorative styles of foreign lands.19 Exhibits on East Asia at the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and Worldâs Columbian Exposition of 1893 excited interest. Japanese decorative art styles penetrated through European fashions, while musicals featuring non-Western themes also flourished. Gilbert and Sullivanâs operetta The Mikado had an enormously successful New York season in 1885.20
From a European perspective, the mid- to late nineteenth century was marked by relative peace in the international arena. Bookended by the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary period before it, and the Great War of 1914â18 that succeeded it, the era experienced no world wars. This image of a peaceful world was partly an illusion, to be sure. The American Civil War was but one of many bloody conflicts on the periphery of Europe. Numerous âsavage wars of peace,â as Rudyard Kipling called them, occurred on the boundaries of empires as they expanded and as Europeans sought to suppress the resistance of colonized peoples in Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, conditions existed for more frequent collaboration and negotiation among the political and commercial elites of the European powers in ways that inevitably involved the non-Western world. This process entailed humanitarian, religious, and moral entanglements, and the United States became involved.
Most notably the Congress of Berlin (1884â85) met to organize the commercial development of the Congo Basin and preserve the trading rights of all nations, but American and British missionaries and anti-slavery societies, such as Britainâs Aboriginal Protection Society, pressed successfully for action against the still surviving international slave trade as part of the deliberations. Though it suited the British governmentâs political and economic objectives to use this moral opinion to provide impetus to the Berlin congress, the signatories thereby set prece...