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Transnationalism and the New Tribe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

James A. Field Jr
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Extract

Among the striking developments of modern history the growth of nationalism and the proliferation of nation-states must surely take high place. To numerous peoples in the post-Napoleonic era the possibility of modeling themselves on England and France seemed both desirable and feasible in a time when language groupings, the reach of political and economic control systems, and the capabilities of armaments appeared roughly to coincide. Together with patriotisms reinforced by popular education and increasing literacy these phenomena emphasized the defensibility of both the spiritual and the military frontiers. The result, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was a series of wars of national unification which were followed in the twentieth century by great efforts to defend the nationality thus gained, socially, through such devices as immigration restriction, economically, by tariffs and various autarchic experiments, and militarily, in two great wars.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Summer 1971 , pp. 353 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1971

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References

1 European aspects of these developments are dealt with in Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; their export to the wider world is the subject of Woodruff, William, Impact of Western Man (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 One should perhaps add, as an important background factor, the extraordinary continuing growth of world population.

3 Church, A. H., “Guano,” Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature (9th ed.; 24 vols.; Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1875–1888), Vol. 9, pp. 233–235Google Scholar.

4 Levin, Jonathan V., The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Mathew, W. M., “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820–70,” Economic History Review, 12 1968 (Vol. 21, No. 3), pp. 562–579Google Scholar.

5 Fairbank, John K., “Synarchy under the Treaties,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. Fairbank, John K. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 204–231Google Scholar.

6 American synarchists can be discovered in quantity in Curti, Merle and Birr, Kendall, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas, 1838–1938 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954)Google Scholar, and in such regional works as Dennett, Tyler, Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States with Reference to China, Japan, and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922)Google Scholar; Field, James A. Jr, America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Harrington, Fred H., God, Mammon, and the Japanese: Dr. Horace N. Allen and Korean-American Relations, 1884–1905 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Schwantes, Robert S., Japanese and Americans: A Century of Cultural Relations (New York: Harper & Brothers [for the Council on Foreign Relations], 1955)Google Scholar.

7 Curti, Merle, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

8 Latourette, Kenneth S., A History of the Expansion of Christianity (7 vols.; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937–1945)Google Scholar; Phillips, Clifton Jackson, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 32) (Cambridge, Mass: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1969)Google Scholar; Field, pp. 350–359.

9 The concern for the useful aspects of the Western stock of knowledge showed itself in the concentration on such fields as engineering, business and economics, and education. See, e.g., the list of studies elected by Chinese students in American universities in Liu, Kwang-ching, Americans and Chinese: A Historical Essay and a Bibliograph (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 31–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Boulding, Kenneth E., The Organizational Revolution: A Study in the Ethics of Economic Organization (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953)Google Scholar.

11 Hidy, Ralph W., The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work,, 1763–1861 (Harvard Studies in Business History, 14) (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feis, Herbert, Europe, the World's Banker, 1870–1914 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965)Google Scholar.

12 DeNovo, John A., “A Railroad for Turkey: The Chester Project of 1908–1913,” Business History Review, Autumn 1959 (Vol. 33, No. 3), pp. 300–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Israel, Jerry, “For God, For China and for Yale,” American Historical Review, 02 1970 (Vol. 75, No. 3), pp. 796–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Varg, Paul, Open Door Diplomat: The Life of W. W. Rockhill (Uibana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), p. 128Google Scholar.

13 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967)Google Scholar, considers this rationalization in purely domestic terms; Magdoff, Harry, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969)Google Scholar, provides a Marxist description of the American outward reach. Some idea of the limits of administrative possibility prior to the development of the new tools can be gained from White, Leonard D., The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan Co., 1959), pp. 466–506Google Scholar, and The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1954), pp. 530–551Google Scholar.

14 Southard, Frank A. Jr, American Industry in Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar. Wilkins, Mira, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, sheds much new light on this subject.

15 Since all sizable states had their own domestic underdeveloped areas—Scotland, Prussia, Sicily, the American South and West—these workings were also visible at home in urbanization, the depopulation of the hill country, and agrarian protest.

16 Southard, pp. xiv, xv, 11–14, and 203–206. For statistics on the development of 187 selected corporations see Vaupel, James W. and Curhan, Joan P., The Making of Multinational Enterprise: A Sourcebook of Tables Based on a Study of 187 Major U.S. Manufacturing Corporations (Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1969)Google Scholar.

17 Hamlin, Cyrus, Among the Turks (New York: R. Carter & Brothers, 1878), p. 282Google Scholar. That this was not a purely Anglo-Saxon conceit may be seen in a still earlier description of English by Pierre Aronnax: “Cette langue … est à peu près universelle.” Verne, Jules, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie., 1869)Google Scholar, chapter 8.

18 By 1965 the American population abroad was estimated at 1.4 million. In 1970 the United Nations and consular colony in New York totaled some 27,000. On the migration o£ European intellectuals see Fermi, Laura, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–41 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar; on the migration of talent generally see Adams, Walter, ed., The Brain Drain (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968)Google Scholar.

19 Transatlantic marriage is discussed in Wecter, Dixon, The Saga of American Society: A Record of Social Aspiration, 1607–1937 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), pp. 405–416Google Scholar.

20 The number of independent sovereignties, something under 50 in 1900, has subsequently more than tripled. This passion for independence has produced its share of curiosities: Nauru, a phosphate island in the Pacific Ocean (area eight square miles, population c. 6,000) which maintains a high standard of living by exporting itself; Anguilla, a would-be independent island in the Caribbean, thse majority of whose “nationals” live in the greater New York area; Israel, a state located in one continent, administered by an elite from another, and with much of its tax base located in a third. The list could of course be extended.

21 In 1870 the Argentine Juan Bautista Alberdi foresaw the coming of the “global village” (“pueblomundo”): Whitaker, Arthur P., The Western Hemisphere Idea: Us Rise and Decline (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 65Google Scholar. For a similar Chinese vision see Teng, Ssu-yü and Fairbank, John K., China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1963), p. 136Google Scholar.

22 Hobson, J. A., Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902)Google Scholar; Lenin, V. I., Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism—A Popular Outline (Little Lenin Library, Vol. 15) (rev. trans.; New York: International Publishers, 1939)Google Scholar.

23 Stead, W. T., The Americanization of the World; Or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: H. Markley, 1902)Google Scholar; Cobden, Richard, “England, Ireland, and America,” in The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (2 vols.; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), Vol. 1, pp. 5–119Google Scholar; Field, pp. 2–24. Although Stead (like Cobden) thought well of the process, some had reservations: See, e.g., Kennedy, John McFarland, Imperial America (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1914)Google Scholar.