John Darwin - Unlocking the World

1. PART ONE :
   Making Global Connections
2. PART TWO :
   The Dominion of Steam

John Darwin was until his retirement last year Professor of Imperial and Global History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of After Tamerlane, Unfinished Empire and The Empire Project.

In Memory of Jan-Georg Deutsch

: Sailing ships moored on the Hooghly River, from Views of Calcutta and Barrackpore, 1860s, by Samuel Bourne. ( British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images)

: Barrels of molasses, West India Docks, London, from Wonderful London, 19267, by Arthur St John Adcock. (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Wapping, Elevated View of the Dock, 1803, by Thomas and William Daniell. ( British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Bridgeman Images)

An ocean-going junk with listings of the sea route from China to Japan, c. 1850. (Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images)

A cog, depicted on a stained-glass window, fifteenth century. Muse de la ville de Bourges. ( Leonard de Selva/Bridgeman Images)

The Hongs at Canton, c. 1835, Chinese school. Taylor Gallery, London. (Bridgeman Images)

Great Eastern on the stocks in John Scott Russells yard at Millwall, 1857. Chromolithograph after a painting by J. Carmichael. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Coaling a cruiser, St Lucia, West Indies, early 1900s. (Chronicle/Alamy)

A Birds-eye View of New-Orleans, c. 1851, by J. Bachmann. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC)

Victoria Terminus, Bombay, late nineteenth century. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Matthew Dontzin, 1985 (Acc. No. 1985.1168.11))

The harbour of the Singapore River crowded with junks and automobiles, c. 1930. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Princes Dock, Liverpool, mid-twentieth century. (Stephen Shakeshaft/Liverpool Echo/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

Evacuating Smyrna, 1922. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Slow Boat from China

British Shipping in the Age of Sail

Sailing Routes in the North Atlantic

Routes to India and China

North Atlantic Trade Routes: Newfoundland Fisheries and West Indian Sugar

The Slave and Sugar Trades

Approaches to Canton

Gibraltar to Bombay

Cape of Good Hope to Canton

The South Atlantic Ocean in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Shipping Routes and Submarine Cables, 1910

The Louisiana Purchase, 1803

The Cotton Kingdom in 1860

Approaches to New Orleans

North American Railways in 1860

The Hinterland Ambitions of Montreal Merchants

Montreal in the 1860s

New York Harbour

India c.1920

Bombay

Calcutta

Nanyang and China c.1900

Singapore in 1910

Shanghai in the 1860s

The Growth of Shanghais International Settlements

St Petersburg in 1910

Marseilles in 1910

London Docks in the 1860s

Liverpool Docks in the 1860s

Overlapping Hinterlands in Northern Europe

Antwerp in 1910

Hamburg

There are five keys that lock up the world, declared Admiral Jacky Fisher, grand strategist of the Edwardian Royal Navy: Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. Under Britains control, they would guard the sea lanes between Europe and the rest of the world and keep them safe from the fleets of any enemy power: a plan soon to be tested to destruction by U-boat warfare. Stationing the British Grand Fleet in the Orkneys completed Fishers design and sealed the last exit from the North Sea into the open ocean. In this book, we reverse Fishers image and change most of his places. The nineteenth century was the great age in which the coasts and ports of the world were freed from exclusions and closures; vast continental interiors were unlocked from the seclusion imposed by the costs of overland transport; and rivers whose hazards and currents made upstream traffic a toil (this included the River Seine until the 1840s) were opened by improvement and steam navigation. By the end of the steam century in 1930, regular, scheduled, travel by steamship and railway was possible to almost every closely inhabited part of the world, and so was the exchange of bulky low-cost goods. This was a revolution in world history with whose consequences we now live.

It had been a great technological achievement, the triumph of steam. But it was also a geopolitical trauma. The opening of continents in China, India, Australasia, the Americas, and in North and Central Asia, was consolidated by steam. But the doors had been forced by the armies, navies, settlers, serfs, slaves and indentured labour of the European empires and their American progeny the settler republics of Anglo- and Hispanic-America and the Empire of Brazil. Coercive diplomacy, military conquest, and the driving out (or enserfment) of indigenous peoples cleared the way for merchants, administrators, tax collectors, miners, planters, and yeoman or peasant farmers, closely followed by the teachers, priests and missionaries of different religions, the agents of cultural upheaval. By the time that steam was being properly harnessed to the carriage of people and goods over land and sea, a vast new terrain had been annexed to the commercial, administrative and settler empires of the emerging West.

This book had its origins in curiosity about the history of globalization, and of steam globalization in particular. It is framed by a number of key assumptions: that our globalization since 1990 is not unique, but only the latest in a series; that we can best understand its distinctive features by a knowledge of earlier versions; that globalizations are cumulative, but also subject to crises and reversals; that globalizations must be understood not (as we tend to do) as narrowly economic phenomena, but as the conjuncture of technological, commercial, cultural, ideological, geopolitical and environmental change, all of which give them their distinctive character. For what we exchange in globalization is not only goods, but also money, people, ideas, information, habits of consumption and biota: plants, animals and microbes. It is through their complex interaction that the quality of each globalization is formed. It follows logically from this that the catalyst of globalization, its regulator (to use a term from steam technology), is mobility the ease and speed with which things tangible and intangible can cross the wide spaces from one side of the world to the other.

Of paramount interest, historically and today, is the impact of globalization: what does it do to the people caught up in its toils, or to those left on its margins? Even to a casual glance, it is clear that it produces winners and losers, often reversing the fortunes of previous winners. Gain and loss might be felt in relative living standards, in cultural self-confidence, and in freedom or not from external domination. At its best it brings an all-round improvement in material well-being; at its worst, it might be a matter of life and death. Much historical debate has turned on the question of why some regions of the world were once prosperous but then sank into deep relative poverty. Just as intriguing is the question of how far globalizations have imposed greater cultural conformity or undermined the coherence of traditional cultures, sometimes with tragic effects. These questions can be asked of any era of globalization, but the focus of this book is on the steam century, when the spread and intensity of globalization offers the closest comparison to our own. It is also the period in which the sources and resources available for enquiry are richer than in any previous age.