History, it is said, is written by the winners. At the dawn of the modern era, those authors were the great colonial powers. The nations of Europe, and later the United States, fired up the machines and know-how of the Industrial Revolution and carved out economic empires across the world.
A new book by Associate Professor of History Cyrus Veeser tells another side of the story.
“How did modernity look to people who were not industrial and powerful?” he asks. “They saw the West as a gigantic threat. Most people don’t realize the worldwide reaction of fear and trepidation to the rise of the industrial West. In fact, a lot of world history since 1850 can be described as nonindustrial countries playing catch up.”
Great Leaps Forward: Modernizers in Africa, Asia and Latin America (New York: Prentice Hall, 2010) centers on a small group of leaders who forcefully pulled their undeveloped nations into the 20th century. While other countries fell to the steel and steam power of Europe, four lands in particular – Mexico, Ethiopia, Turkey and China – adopted many of the West’s own tools to stay independent.
Modernization gets Defensive
Veeser’s interest in the topic sprang from researching the economics of colonialism. He became fascinated with a few key figures of the time: Porfirio Diaz (Mexico), Menelik II (Ethiopia), Kemal Ataturk (Turkey) and Sun Yat-Sen (China). All practiced what the professor calls “defensive modernization.”
“These leaders perceived the West as a mortal threat to their culture,” says Veeser, who holds a PhD from Columbia University. “Backwardness was not an option. Only by adopting Western technology and economic processes could their societies hope to resist absorption into colonialism.”
Great Leaps Forward spins out the common threads of defensive modernization: leaders who resisted Western military might while encouraging economic ties; the building of infrastructure such as rails, paved roads, irrigation and communication, to knit together a people; and quick adoption of private investment, foreign trade and other pillars of Western economies.
The leaders that Veeser describes were charismatic and foresighted – and often ruthless.
Porfirio Diaz in Mexico rose from post-independence chaos, co-opted the church and upper classes, then confiscated peasant lands to build an export economy. Menelik II united Ethiopia’s warring provinces to obliterate an Italian army, thereby winning equal treatment by European rulers. Sun Yat-Sen, a Chinese Christian who lived most of his life in the West, became the symbol of the revolution that overthrew 2,000 years of inward-looking Chinese imperial history. And Kemal Ataturk of Turkey faced down the Allies at Gallipoli in World War I, built the Turkish state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, then aggressively adopted Western social ways.
Still, developing societies did not slavishly copy the West. “Each country plays out economic modernization differently,” Veeser explains. “All development has its own wrinkles – the results of which we’re still living with in China, Turkey, Iran, Russia, Egypt and many other places. That’s part of what this book tries to show.”