The 1919 Peace Settlement: A Subaltern View

As every schoolboy knows, or used to know before the rise of multiculturalism, in the early twentieth century Europe and North America dominated the world. A recent president of the American Historical Association reports that, with postcolonial studies firmly anchored in the curriculum, our students now learn that "Europe—that funny little peninsula jutting off the edge of Asia—is not the center of history."¹ So much for history wie es eigentlich gewesen. No one thought that way ninety years ago.

Europe, the United States, and other Western offshoots encompassed 33.9 percent of world population and produced 67.7 percent of world GNP at the time. Taking account of the productivity of the fifty million Europeans who had emigrated abroad and revolutionized agriculture and trade in such places as Latin America's Southern Cone, North Africa, and Asian city-states, people of European stock generated three-quarters of world income. The United States and Britain alone came close to producing half of global manufactured goods.² One analyst estimates that between 1400 and 1900 the four principal West European civilizations contributed roughly 80 percent of humankind's achievements in the realms of science and technology, art and music, and literature and culture.³ The European civil war of 1914-1918 thus constituted a tragedy of immense proportions. The statesmen who, in the midst of unprecedented economic travail and an influenza pandemic, struggled to craft the Versailles treaty in 1919 had their hands full. They had to reconstruct Europe, contain Germany, clean up the detritus left by three collapsed empires, and found the League of Nations.⁴ Could they, and should they, also have made time to address the stirrings of anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt, India, China, and Korea, the subject of Professor Erez Manela's much-praised book? If one reads history within its unfolding context rather than backward from the present, the notion seems less than reasonable.

No one will quarrel with Manela's premise that the history of anticolonialism and decolonization figures among "the most important historical processes of the twentieth century" (p. xi). But when did that process shift into high gear? Was there, as Manela asserts, a "Wilsonian moment" in 1918-19? Or is he looking through the wrong end of the telescope?

The years after World War I witnessed a vast expansion of the British Empire as well as consolidation of the French and Japanese empires. The United States had a more nuanced policy, consisting, as William Howard Taft had once said, of "substituting dollars for bullets." Still, as Woodrow Wilson discovered in the course of his frustrating dealings with revolutionary Mexico, it proved far from easy to "teach the South American republics to elect good men."⁵ Wilson found himself obliged to land troops at Port-au-Prince in 1915 after the Haitians chopped their president into small pieces and paraded the body parts around the city. He also maintained military forces in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. Washington embraced more subtle methods of control in Latin America only between 1930 and 1934, and the Good Neighbor Policy had its limits too. Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted an anti-imperialist stance and undermined the British, French, and Dutch empires during World War II, yet even he did not extend consent-of-the-governed principles so far as to renounce control of the Pacific islands that the U.S. Navy had liberated from Japan.⁶

To be sure, social movements build over a long period of time. Correlating them with political changes is an imprecise art. An abundant literature still proclaims 1848 to be the "springtime of the peoples" in Europe despite the fact that the old order triumphed and that nationalism did not percolate down to the masses for several decades thereafter.⁷ Manela likewise may exceed the bounds of permissible interpretation when he claims that the Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Korean "reformers" of 1919 were not anti-Western...