The Riches of the World
The Saga of Anglo-American Dominance (1799-2025 CE) - Part 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
The First World War began as a series of miscalculations by the European powers. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which appealed to fellow Orthodox Russia. When Russia entered the fray as an ally of Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia. Fear of German dominance brought Great Britain and France into the war. They, in turn, dragged in their colonies with them.
The Ottoman Empire was a hesitant partner in the Great War. Militarily weak, mauled in the Balkan wars by the combined armies of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria, divided by a recent revolution of the Young Turks who had overthrown the monarchy, the Ottomans entered the war out of their desire to recover their Balkan territories and the lure of 1billion gold kroner from Germany.
The war was a disaster for the Ottomans. The empire was dismembered, divided up between Britain and France by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1919 CE. So arbitrary and outlandish were the partitions that the resulting peace has been called “A peace to end all peace”. Britain occupied Palestine and promulgated the Balfour Declaration (1917 CE) for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Turks fought a desperate War of Independence to drive out invading armies from Greece (1922-24) and carve out a homeland for themselves. Turkey transformed itself from a monarchy to a secular, national state and abolished the Khilafat (1924 CE).
Germany lost the Great War. The victorious allies imposed such harsh reparation terms that within a decade it pulled the German economy to its knees and brought Hitler to power. Hitler’s war was a continuation of the First World War. Imperial Japan, after it had occupied eastern China, attacked Pearl Harbor which hurled the United States headlong into the conflict. The War ended with the devastation of Europe, Japan and China, the killing of over thirty million civilians, the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.
The two World Wars so weakened the European colonial powers that they could no longer hold onto their colonies.
India and Pakistan won their independence in 1947. The Dutch, aided by the British navy, tried to hold on to their Indonesian colonies but lost the war (1947-48). The French went back into Vietnam but were driven out after the surrender of Dien Bien Phu (1954). The Americans tried to pick up the pieces after the French only to be humbled and expelled (1975). The days of colonization in Asia were over.
The Second World War unleashed political forces of galactic proportions in Asia. The communists led by Mao Tse Dung drove out the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek and founded the People’s Republic of China (1949 CE). The Revolution turned the Chinese society upside down. Centuries of neglect was forcibly overcome. Rule by the warlords gave way to rule by the peasants. Dope addicts were exterminated. China built a strong army and fought the Americans to a stalemate in a protracted war on the Korean Peninsula (1950-53).
Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908 and has since dictated the history of the Middle East and North Africa.
Oil changed the way work was performed and machines operated. It could be used in place of coal on board ships, in railroads, automobiles and industrial engines. Subsequent oil finds in Arabia catapulted it from the back waters of history into the center of the world stage. Other significant finds were made in Iraq, Libya, Qatar, the Gulf sheikdoms, Kuwait and later in Indonesia and Nigeria. Oil was the black gold of the twentieth century and global geopolitics revolved around a mad scramble for the control of oil production and distribution. Muslim lands, long thought of only as desert sand dunes, suddenly came alive and became the object of political maneuverings and military control.
The Second World changed the balance of power in the world. The Soviet Union emerged as the strongest military power on the Eurasian continent while the United States, its industrial machinery strengthened by the war, emerged as the richest and the most powerful country in the world accounting for almost forty percent of the world’s productive capacity. A cold war emerged between the socialist soviets and the capitalist Americans giving some room for the newly emerging countries to play off one against the other for political or military advantage.
The socialist Soviet Union found itself arrayed against the capitalist West. A vigorous confrontation ensued. Ultimately, it collapsed under the weight of its own centralized bureaucracy, a victim of structural inefficiencies inherent in a centralized system.
The United States emerged from the Second World War with its productive infrastructure unscathed. In 1945 it produced almost 40 percent of the world’s goods and services. It soon found itself in conflict with a socialist world headed by the Soviet Union, and it fought major wars in Korea and Vietnam. Victorious in the cold war in the 1980s, it was the sole superpower for over a decade. But it neglected its industrial base and overextended itself, borrowing money to fight long and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Internally, excessive greed sapped the system, accentuated by deregulation which gave rise to speculative and fraudulent markets in derivatives, the supply of cheap money and the resultant housing bubble, plus a tax code that favored the rich. It spent more than it took in and found itself in a financial ditch. A hundred years from today a scribe will write that without the kind of vision and grand leadership required at this historical juncture to reinvent itself, the United States wasted its existential potential and foreswore its tryst with destiny as the land of the free, picking unnecessary fights with third rate countries or inventing props like Islamic terrorism to keep its population distracted.
Meanwhile, a resurgent China reformed its economy and taking its lessons from Japan and the West, industrialized itself. It soon dominated the world with its productive engine and became the global creditor nation. Other nations such as India and Brazil also benefited from the information revolution brought on by the Internet and became principal players on the global stage.
The end of colonization after World War II did not necessarily mean economic independence. Many of the newly independent countries found themselves dependent on the rich countries, often their former colonial masters, for development funds. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were established by the banking elite, presumably to provide stability to the world financial structure and provide development assistance to the poorer countries. They did some good but often their demands for structural reform resulted in increased poverty and deprivation in the world’s poorest countries. The result was increased concentration of the riches of the world in the hands of a few and the impoverishment of billions. It created a few more billionaires and billions of poor.
It was in this world that Islam played its role, as a faith practiced by one quarter of the human race. But its adherents could not come together to evolve a coherent and unified response to the changing dynamics in the world, or have a decisive impact on the struggle of man. This world spent most of its time fighting off the aggressive onslaught of the West or coming to terms with the tensions within its own social and religious fabric.
It is a grand attempt to capture this fascinating period of human history in a brief paper. We will savor a taste of it through Muslim eyes, taking as milestones four discrete events: the Tobacco Revolution of Persia (1906), Musaddeq and Iranian Oil (1954 CE), the Suez Canal Crisis (1956 CE) and the Iraq and AfPak wars (1979-2014 CE). These events are points of departure, reference points that provide a useful record of the complex interactions between the Anglo-Americans and the world of Islam.
(The author is Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture; Advisor, World Organization for Resource Development and Education; Chairman, Delixus Group and Visiting Dean, HMS IT)
