Prof. Isaline Bergamaschi. Both class recordings combined and integrated with the session PowerPoint.
A few reminders. Office hours are after this class — please email me first before showing up. You need to read one article before class every week.
On the final exam: it is a three-hour in-class exam. You will write three short academic essays — one per question, roughly one hour each. Books are allowed. Your notes are not. The internet is not. The compulsory readings are part of the exam material. If a reading is essential to answer a particular question, I will say so in the instructions.
The PowerPoint for today is on Teams, not on the UV. I keep getting blocked out of my UV authentication — technical support and I are working on it, but it happened again this morning. I'll post it there as well once it's resolved.
This session is about the rise of Europe and its empires. The goal is not just to give you a history lesson but to analyze and deconstruct — or at least contextualise — the centrality of Europe in shaping contemporary globalization. Three questions will guide us:
The outline for the session: I. Colonial expansion in a nutshell. II. A case study on the conquest of Indonesia, drawing on a book by the historian Romain Bertrand. III. Accounting for European imperialism — why Europe, and why not China? IV. Why the rise of the US and what are its implications for globalization? (This last part is the compulsory reading by Steinmetz, which you will do on your own.)
Holton (2005): "When exactly did globalisation begin? There is no single answer to this question. The answer given depends very much on the particular type of process in question. If we see globalisation primarily in terms of free trade and price convergence in commodity markets, then the answer centres on the 19th century. But if the focus shifts to imagining of the world as a single space, then the answers project backwards in time over millennia… A final twist of the argument is that aspects of globalisation are reversible. To the extent that de-globalisation is possible, we may say that globalisation may be un-made, possibly re-made later."
This is why, when we discuss globalization, we always try to specify: which particular process are we looking at? Political integration? Free trade? Economic globalization? It is always too big a cake to discuss as a whole.
Hopkins (2002) distinguishes four phases: archaic globalization (before industrialisation and nation states, associated with empires and city-states from across the globe); proto-globalization (better management of seaborne commerce, the era of explorers, slave traders, merchants and religious actors); modern globalization (post-1800, associated with industrialisation and the rise of nation states); and post-colonial globalization (after the independence movements of the 1950s and 60s). These phases are not cleanly separated — you cannot point to a year and say we shifted from one to the next. But they are useful analytical categories.
First: it is an uneven process — think in waves, not in a straight line. There is no tabula rasa in globalization. As Abu-Lughod put it, the old parts live on and become the materials out of which restructuring and further globalization develops. Don't read history backwards.
Second: globalization cannibalizes the local, and vice versa. Appadurai, quoted in Hopkins (2002): "Globalization cannibalises localism, and localism cannibalises globalization." The local absorbs global products, references, and influences. But globalization also absorbs and transforms the local. Here is one illustration.
I wanted to show you a video from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City — I will post it on the UV. But the example is this: inside the museum there is a three-panel fresco by Diego Rivera — the husband of Frida Kahlo, a socialist painter of the Mexican Revolution. He was given a massive space and used it to tell the entire history of Mexico in three parts: pre-colonial Mexico, colonial Mexico, and the present and future. The future ends with Marx somewhere in the image, and with representations of workers and unions — Rivera's vision of a socialist future for Mexico.
But the reason I mention it is not just the painting. The historical centre of Mexico City itself is an example of this layering and cannibalism. When the Spanish colonisers arrived, they built their city on the ruins of the Aztec capital — not because they just happened to be there, but because they used the materials, the stones, the ruins of Aztec pyramids, to construct what you see today. So if you visit the historical centre of Mexico now, you are looking at a capital that is at once an independent sovereign state, a product of Spanish colonisation, and a site where Aztec materials were literally recycled into a new city. That is the idea of the concatenation of waves. You do not move cleanly from one era to the next. Some elements of the previous era are recycled into something new.
The same applies to post-colonial globalization. Many people assume that when colonial territories became independent, everything changed. It did not. Extractive economies persisted. Several former French colonies modeled their constitutions on the French one — sometimes with the help of French legal experts. The lack of public services and the presence of police and military violence in many post-colonial states is partly a legacy of the colonial state, which was never designed to provide services to colonised populations, but to ensure that extraction could take place and that minimum infrastructure existed to get resources to the sea and from there to the metropole.
Third: globalization has not been the creation of just one part of the world — that is, Europe, and later the United States. The world we know today was created jointly, through encounters that were not peaceful and not between equal actors, but jointly nonetheless. Holton speaks of a multi-centred set of trends that spread through centuries across continents. This is not a feel-good claim. It does not mean the process was equal or that there was no violence. It means that colonisation was not simply Europe imposing a world order on passive recipients. Local actors, local alliances, local divisions — all of these played a role. We will see this in the Indonesia case study.
One of the global encounters that shaped the dynamics between what we call "the West" and "the Orient" was the Crusades. I recommend a short, accessible book by Amin Maalouf, Les Croisades vues par les Arabes, which tells this story from the perspective of Arab archives — not of a homogeneous Arab culture, but using written documents, drawings, oral history traces — to give you a picture that is quite different from the European narrative.
The context: The Caliph al-Hakim (who ruled Egypt, Syria and Palestine, 985–1021) destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and denied access to Christian pilgrims. This triggered the Crusades. The invasion was led by the Franks — Gauls, Latins, Normans, Flemish — starting in 1096. In 1099, they took Jerusalem. Tripoli fell in 1109, Beirut in 1110. This was followed by a period of occupation from approximately 1100 to 1128.
What Maalouf shows is the rumors circulating at the time about Europeans: that they practised cannibalism, that they burned people alive, that they practised treason, that they were ignorant and disrespectful of justice, that they used torture, and that they were lagging behind in technical and scientific fields. Local archives documented the bad behavior of soldiers in villages and cities.
After 1128, the Arab counter-attack began, leading eventually to Arab victory. Damascus held in 1148, Cairo in 1221, and Jerusalem was finally recovered in 1244. There was one exception: Constantinople was taken by the Franks in 1204. The final eviction of the Franks was complete by 1291.
Why did the Franks succeed at all, given their relative technical inferiority? Maalouf's answer: political fragmentation. In Syria, each Emirate or Qadi could only count on their own forces and did not always mount direct military resistance. He quotes a local saying from the city of Homs: "If you cannot break the arm, kiss the arm and pray to God that He breaks it Himself." In other words: deal with the new power, arrange yourself around it rather than confront it head-on. This is a logic you find in many colonial encounters, including later in sub-Saharan Africa.
Occupation by the Franks could be seen as a lesser evil than a rival internal Muslim power. The Sunni Caliphate of Baghdad was opposed to the Shia Caliphate of Cairo — a divide that dated from the 7th century, as we know from the Islam course — and the Franks could be instrumentally used by one side against the other. Some Egyptian leaders were reportedly happy when the Franks arrived because they took Palestine from what they saw as a heretical power. So it was not two unified blocs facing each other. It was two fragmented blocs, with alliances forming across the religious and political lines of division.
This is a pattern you see throughout colonial history and you can find contemporary analogues. When the US threatens or attacks Venezuela, they can potentially find local allies — conservative parties long connected to Washington through education, prestigious awards, grants, foundations. The consolidation of power is far more effective when built on those local alliances. It is not just the US versus Venezuela — it is the Trump administration and parts of the anti-Chavista elite.
One important clarification: when we say "the Dutch" or "the English," it is a simplification. During the 15th and 16th centuries, these political entities were not unified states as we know them today. The colonial enterprise was always a mixture of public and private actors — monarchs, merchants, banks, churches, private companies. The VOC was a company funded by shares issued at the Amsterdam stock market and had a monopoly on trade in Asia, including the power to wage war and administer justice. That is a conflict of interest built into the structure of the enterprise itself.
The consequences for local populations were devastating. In the Caribbean: from approximately 400,000 people in 1492, to a thousand 150 years later. The Europeans then imported enslaved labour force. In the Americas more broadly: from 50–60 million people in 1492 to approximately 10 million in 1650 — a loss of 80 to 90 percent of the indigenous population.
These expeditions were not unprecedented in the sense of expansion itself — the Roman Empire, the Arab expansion, the Ottoman Empire (which took Constantinople in 1453), the Ming Dynasty in China: all expanded massively. What was specific here was the shift from trade comptoirs to colonial hégémonie. That is what changed.
There is a wonderful book — and an ARTE documentary — called Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook. The premise is a Vermeer painting from the 17th century: what does it tell us about the world at that moment?
In 1624, the Dutch Pierre Minuit founded New Amsterdam — that is why New York is New York, and why there is a New Amsterdam. European names are everywhere in North America and Latin America because settlers were not always very original — they often added "New" to the name of a place back home.
The documentary uses the painting to track the colonisation of what would become New York. The Dutch merchants were there partly to hunt beavers — beavers were going extinct in Europe, but North America had them in abundance, and beaver felt hats were one of the most coveted luxury goods among the European elite at that time. That hat on the man in the painting represents a global commodity chain: colonisation, resource extraction, indigenous labour, and Atlantic trade.
The documentary also shows how the development of global finance and stock markets is directly linked to the history of colonisation. The money needed to fund colonial expeditions required pooling capital from multiple investors — public and private — based on the promise of future wealth through the exploitation of nature and human beings on other continents. This is the preliminary form of the stock market as we know it. The Bourse in Amsterdam, and then the stock market in the City of London, developed in direct connection with the colonial economy.
Centre of gravity displaced: The centre of economic and political gravity shifted from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. The Crusades were very much a Mediterranean story — fighting over the Holy Land and trading routes of the Med. Then it moved: first the Italian city-states (Venice, Genoa) opened the North Atlantic; then Spain and Portugal leveraged their strategic position on the Atlantic coast. England consolidated later.
Slave trade: Up to 14 million Africans were enslaved and transported (Rediker), of whom approximately 5 million died during the crossing.
1776: Independence of the United States. The Americans colonisers rebelled against the British over taxes and self-rule. The two countries nonetheless maintained very strong economic links, and England started its industrial revolution precisely as this process was unfolding.
British hegemony and the industrial revolution: The English hegemony was based on exploitation of and then tight economic links with the US, a powerful merchant fleet and navy, and ultimately sealed by the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.
Decolonisation in Latin America, expansion in Asia: In the early 1820s, new autochthonous social classes emerged across Latin America, influenced by new ideas and the example of the United States. England did not support Spain, and Spain lost its colonial empire except Cuba. The US established the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, contesting European hegemony on the continent and establishing close dependent links with the newly independent Latin American states.
Africa ignored until the 19th century: This is important. The colonisation of Africa is very late — the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. Earlier, the Portuguese had some establishments, the Dutch had a colony at the Cape in South Africa, and slave trade on the West African coast was massive. But it was a light-touch approach in terms of physical presence — extremely destructive in terms of exploitation, but not yet the systematic territorial colonisation that comes later.
Migration flows (1840–1940): 60 million Europeans left Europe in one century — considered the golden age of emigration, mostly to North America, Argentina and Brazil. The causes: the Irish famine (1840s), pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, the prosecution of insurgents after the 1848 revolutions, the agrarian crisis in Italy in the 1870s. The American Dream was based on stolen land and the promise of private property. Enabling factors: reduced transport costs, steamships, the railroad, and the assistance of earlier migrants in helping new arrivals settle.
There is an important distinction between colonies of settlement — where people actually migrated and built long-term lives (the US, Australia, Algeria for the French, South Africa) — and colonies of extraction — where the goal was to extract resources without large-scale European settlement. This distinction explains a great deal about how these territories were governed and why independence in many settlement colonies had to be won by war.
I am drawing here on the book L'Histoire à parts égales by Romain Bertrand, a French historian who reads several Asian languages and used European and Indonesian archives equally — hence the title, "history on equal terms." The book uses paintings, drawings, letters, notebooks, pocket diaries, from both sides.
Key finding 1: slow and irregular pace. There was never a grand plan shared by Lisbon's ruling class. In fact, a large fragment of the Portuguese elite in the 1500s opposed these large overseas expeditions — they were deemed too expensive and risky. They would have preferred to focus on the North African islands closer to home. The very principle of sustainable settlement in Asia was debated.
Key finding 2: pre-existing divisions shaped everything. When the Dutch arrived in Java, they found a complex political society. Jayakarta (Jakarta) was a city as large as Leiden or Amsterdam. The economy was integrated into vast webs of trade from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. Chinese traders held the ports. There was no "Asian despotism" — it was a dynamic system of graduated authority.
Two main factions were in competition:
Colonisation was only made possible thanks to Asian collaboration — the Portuguese and especially Dutch formed alliances with sultans, using divide-and-rule politics.
The Battle of Jakarta (1618). Bertrand says this was "une affaire javanaise" — a Javanese affair. It was about Jakarta versus Banten. The British were allied with the pangeran; the Dutch played the British, got caught in a bigger Javanese conflict, and survived only thanks to the troops of the pangeran who came to their aid. Resistance lasted months after the battle.
Key finding 3: the Dutch arrival was not a big deal locally. When you look at Dutch paintings and archives from 1599, the arrival in Indonesia is depicted as a massive historical event. When Bertrand looks in the Indonesian archives: it took him some time to find significant sources even mentioning these new arrivals. They were slightly blonder than the others — "OK, new guys." It was not a significant political event. Java had already seen Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and Indian ships. Not a single Javanese text mentions the Dutch arrival as politically significant.
Key finding 4: the Dutch were not technologically superior. There were Arab, Chinese and Malay pilots. The Javanese used cannons with as much precision as the Dutch — they simply lacked bullets, which later became a problem.
Key finding 5: identity was performed and manipulated. Some VOC traders pretended to be diplomats sent by Dutch provincial authorities — which they were not. Globalization, and colonisation in particular, involved bluff, lying, performing an identity away from home that was not true. The Portuguese offered gifts and then attacked Java at night and without warning — which was seen as dishonest and rude. In local depictions, the red and blond hair of Europeans became a synonym for lack of intelligence, anger and evil, corruption of justice and decency, ugliness of face and soul.
Key finding 6: no coherent European bloc. The VOC won at Jakarta only thanks to a métis army — mercenaries, descendants of freed slaves, Chinese, Danish and German people, Japanese soldiers. The European bloc in that story was not European at all.
Conclusion from Bertrand: "The encounter was not between homogeneous civilisations or religions, but between instable fragments of these." The Dutch never truly grasped the Javanese — their moral and political language, their trading practices, their ways of being in the world. Their presence remained, as he puts it, like flies on the surface of a glass of milk: they moved on it, but only at the surface. They floated over the depth.
Sources: Goldstone (2002), Wesseling (2004), Abu-Lughod (1989), Appadurai in Hopkins (2002), Steinmetz (2005), Reynolds in Hopkins (2002).
Abu-Lughod (1989): "The usual approach is to examine ex post facto the outcome — that is, the hegemony of the West — and then to reason backward, to rationalise why this supremacy had to be. I want to avoid this. There was no inherent necessity that shifted the system to favour the West rather than the East, nor was there any inherent historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern region from becoming the progenitors of a modern world system."
Goldstone (2002): "The fact that the West won in the 16th century cannot be used to argue convincingly that only the institutions and culture of the West could have succeeded."
What did China actually look like during the period that concerns us?
By the mid-18th century, nutritional consumption in China was comparable to that in Britain. Life expectancy was comparable — roughly 34 to 39 years. (Which means I would already be dead.) Cities were bigger than European ones. Trade networks across Asia were fast and dense. Levels of science and technique were in many respects higher than in Europe: paper, gunpowder, printing press, compass and navigation, prospered ships.
During the early 15th century, the Chinese launched seven expeditions in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago. They had explored vast areas of Asia and reached the East African coast. They brought back a giraffe for the Emperor.
And then they stopped.
Why? This was not principally a lack of capacity. It was a lack of will, or rather a different set of priorities shaped by internal politics. The challenge for the Chinese empire was consolidation and centralisation — of money, the military, the administration, the tax system across a vast multi-ethnic empire. China was trying to do what Weber called establishing the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of violence, to unify an immense territory containing populations of enormously different languages, religions and cultures.
The White Lotus Rebellion (1796) is one example: uprisings of linguistic and religious minorities required the transfer of enormous resources — financial, human and otherwise — from the coast towards the interior. Several times in history, China could have expanded beyond Asia, from a technical standpoint, and sometimes even did begin to, but was pulled back by the need to wage wars, manage internal rebellions, and unify the empire.
The decision was made to slow down construction of large ocean-going ships and to forbid leaving Chinese territory on ships with more than one mast. It was not a civilisational failure — it was a political decision shaped by the weight of governing a continental land-based empire.
By the early 19th century, after the war against Japan, the Qing had borrowed heavily from British-dominated banks. Roughly one-third to one-half of national revenue went to servicing debt. Abu-Lughod (1989): "Europe pulled ahead and filled the vacuum because the 'Orient' was temporarily in disarray."
Hopkins (2002): "Capitalism was emerging in many parts of the world by 1500 and the rise of the West stemmed primarily from the ability of military-fiscal states to create colonies overseas."
Several factors:
Different motivations. Europeans fantasised about the resources of the Orient — spices, luxury goods. That fantasy did not work in reverse: China could source most of what it needed regionally. Religion also played a significant role in European motivations that simply had no equivalent in China.
Political competition between fragmented European proto-states. Europe had no single sovereign. Charles V — Charles Quint — was sovereign of Austria, Germany and Spain and ruled the biggest empire that had ever existed at the time, the first one on which the sun never set. But his power overseas was more symbolic than real and was never to be taken for granted. Unlike the Chinese Emperor who in 1551 could decide to stop and enforce that decision, no single European authority could tell the French, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish to stop expanding. Competition between European proto-states made colonial conquest a source of strategic advantage, and it also served as a safety valve — projecting conflicts onto other continents rather than fighting them out on European land (though that projection was made entirely at the expense of overseas populations).
Strategic location. Spain and Portugal were strategically located on the Atlantic coast at precisely the moment when the centre of economic gravity was shifting from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Italian city-states (Venice and Genoa) opened the North Atlantic, but Italy did not play a major subsequent role. The Netherlands was crucial in the early stage. But the climax of empire comes with the colonisation of Africa, which is very late — late 19th century, early 20th century — and that is where England's hegemony is fully established.
Goldstone (2002) argues it was not broad European civilisational traits that explain English industrialisation — it was a peculiar path and an unusual conjuncture. Contingent circumstances.
The industrial revolution is generally dated between 1760 and 1830. It was based on the combined use of steam power and iron construction, which enabled the factory-based textile industry and overcame the limitations of traditional land-based, rain-dependent agriculture. The transformation was from an agricultural to an industrial economy — the key is where the added value is created: in transforming raw materials (cotton into textile, for example) rather than just extracting them.
By 1850, English people had ten times the amount of energy available to people elsewhere — as much in volume as in China, but with a much smaller population. That is where the gap becomes visible. But this was the outcome, not the precondition, of industrialisation.
Why this engineering culture in England and not France or Germany? The authors argue it came down to religious prejudice and the preference for abstract logic on the continent. British science became experimental and applied to production and trade during the 17th century. Continental science became more abstract, deductive and formal. The Anglican Church was the first to embrace Newton and his groundbreaking conclusions on gravity and mechanical laws, allowing science to become something that the wider society could appropriate and enjoy. Newton himself was one of the leaders of the anti-Catholic opposition in Cambridge.
And this could not have happened without the Glorious Revolution of 1688. If that revolution had failed and England had aligned with Catholic France, it would have followed the path of abstract science, which would not have allowed such rapid technical advancement. The diffusion of Newtonian ideas — les idées de Newton — was contingent on a political outcome. Timothy Brook (1999) speaks of the rise of the West beginning to look more like a local English phenomenon rather than a global civilisational destiny.
Economic motivations, demographic pressure (migration), political (power), ideological (the "civilising" mission — which is ideology used to make sense of and provide greater purpose to what were fundamentally economic and military interests). Transformations within Europe — capitalism, strategic interests, ideologies, lobbies — all of these played a role.
The competition between European powers produced colonial encounters that were not between two unified blocs. The Fashoda Incident in East Africa in 1898 almost triggered a war between France and the UK. The Boer War at the beginning of the 20th century was a literal war between the British and the Dutch in South Africa, fighting to control the country. And that competition between the two European powers is one of the root causes of the establishment of apartheid and racial segregation in South Africa — because dominating the majority Black population was how the British and the Dutch dealt with the problem of their own competition.
Wars, genocide, barbaric practices, displacement of populations, slavery and forced labour. The impact on the economies and societies of Africa — covered in the reading by Rodney — was profound and long-lasting. The legacy of colonialism is debated and variable, but globally positive for the colonisers and deeply destructive for the colonised. Long-lasting categories and inequalities shaped by colonial encounters persist to the present.
This section is for your own reading — Steinmetz (2005) and Reynolds in Hopkins (2002). The key ideas:
Steinmetz (2005): The US is imperialist — but perceived greater advantage in informal and indirect imperialism rather than formal territorial colonisation. It applies generic models — democratic tutelage, neoliberalism, post-Fordist approaches, human rights — which present themselves in the universalising languages of Economics or human nature.
Reynolds in Hopkins (2002): "Europe's recessional moment was America's moment." 20th-century US globalism was an extension of 19th-century national integration, which was itself connected to earlier patterns of globalisation. What made it distinctive was not intrinsic American values, but the multiplier effect of modern mass technologies. "The 20th century was neither the beginning of globalisation nor the end of history, but it was conspicuously American."
Next week: the invention of race and racism. We move from the big historical movements to one specific, focused object. The session will be denser in theory but the argument will be more concentrated. The objective — as always — is not to accumulate detail for its own sake, but to understand the legacies and implications of what we have covered today for how we understand and experience globalization now.