9/11/01

The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed 'at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages':
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.
Not only could Keynes's inhabitant of London buy the world's wares and invest his capital in a wide range of global securities; he could also travel the earth's surface with unprecedented freedom and ease:
He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or cus- toms, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.
But the crucial point, as Keynes saw it, was that the man of 1901 'regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.' This first age of globalization was an idyll, indeed:
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
It is worth turning back to The Times of that golden age to verify Keynes's justly famous recollection. Exactly a century before two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, 'globalization' was indeed a reality, even if that clumsy word was as yet unknown. On that day - which was a sunny Wednesday - Keynes's inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a 'Breadalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt)'; or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime's book entitled Schoolboy's Special Immorality. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London - most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) - or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by The Times. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&O liner Peninsular, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&O ships scheduled to sail for Eastern desti- nations over the next ten weeks - to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines offering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The Manitou sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line's more luxurious Fiirst Bismarck, which sailed from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city's Grand National Tramway Company was using - or rather, losing - his money? Very well; the Danube, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free.
The world, in short, was his oyster. And yet, as Keynes understood, this oyster was not without its toxic impurities. The lead story in The Times that September 11 was a 'hopeful' report - vainly hopeful, as it turned out - that the American President William McKinley was showing signs of recovering from the attempt on his life five days earlier by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. ('The President is in great order,' his physician was quoted as saying. In fact, McKinley died on September 14.) This attack had awakened the American public to a hitherto neglected threat from within. The paper's New York correspondent reported that the police were engaged in rounding up all the known anarchists in the city, though the plot to kill the President was
believed to have been hatched in Chicago, where two anarchist leaders, Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, had already been arrested. 'I only done my duty,' Czolgosz explained, by which he meant the anarchist's duty to kill rulers and wage war on established governments. 'I thought', he added as he was led to the electric chair, 'it would help the working people.' The news that the President's condition was improving and that the perpetrator's associates were being rounded up might have reassured our breakfasting reader, as it had reassured the stock market the previous day. He would nevertheless have been aware that assassinations of heads of state were becoming disturbingly frequent; the King of Italy had been murdered the year before, the Empress of Austria- Hungary two years before that. In 1903 it would be the turn of the King of Serbia.
The ideology of anarchism and the practice of terrorism were just two of the 'serpents' in the garden of globalization that Keynes had forgotten about by 1919.
What of the 'projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries'? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast, The Times listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though The Times made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers' lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike The Times's editorial writers as sufficient to end the war:

To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty . . . would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire . . . The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.
Only the newspaper's man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:
The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need - indeed, it would be a mistake - to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman . . . The political views of the Dutch . . . will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.
The Englishman's 'inherited ability to rule' was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day's Times reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the 'spirit of lawlessness' in the Gambia, which nebulous entity was held responsible for the deaths of two British officials. That the editors shared the widely held conservative view of the Empire as militarily overstretched (or, rather, undermanned) seems clear; how else to explain their call for a revival of the eighteenth-century militia as 'the embodiment of the principle that it is the duty of every man to assist in the defence of his country'?
A further reason for disquiet was the apparently fraught state of relations between the continental great powers. The Times's Paris correspondent reported the imminent visit of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, to France, and offered two theories as to the purpose of his visit. The first was that he was coming to pave the way for the latest of many Russian bond issues on the Paris market; the second, that his intention was to reassure the French of his government's commitment to the Franco-Russian military alliance. Whichever explanation was correct, the newspaper's reporter saw dangers in this manifestation of harmony between Paris and St Petersburg. Since the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, he noted, France was 'to-day the only nation in Europe which has some claims to put forward, and the only one which neither can nor should admit that the era of European peace is definitive . . . W hat she might do if circumstances impelled her and patriotism as well, were it a question of filling the breach made in her territory . . . no one knows or can know.' Yet the most likely consequence of the Tsar's visit would be to strengthen Germany's rival alliance with Austria and Italy, recently under some strain because of disagreements over German import tariffs. Too strong an affirmation of the Franco-Russian 'Alliance of the Two' would tend to increase the risks of a war with this 'Alliance of the Three':
I make no allusion [the paper's correspondent concluded darkly] to the elements which at any moment may combine with those of the existing alliances, because the hour for action has not yet struck and is not near striking. Those who at present belong to neither of the alliances have time to wait and to continue their meditations before making a decision.
To be sure, our imaginary reader might have taken some comfort from the news that the Tsar was also paying a visit to his cousin the German Kaiser on his way to France, an event solemnly described by the semi-official Norddeutsche Zeitung as symbolizing the shared commitment of the Russian and German governments to the maintenance of peace in Europe. Less reassuring, however, was the news of a deterioration in relations between the French and Ottoman governments, which prompted The Times to speculate that the Sultan was considering 'the growing Pan-Islamic movement' as a possible weapon against both the French and the British empires. In the Balkans, too, there were grounds for concern. The paper reported signs of a slight improvement in Austro-Hungarian relations, but noted:
The respective influence of the two Powers in the Balkans are [sic] based upon different factors. Russian influence is founded upon community of race, common historic memories, religion, and proximity; while that of Austria- Hungary is chiefly manifest in the economic . . . sphere. Nothing has happened during recent years to diminish either Russian or Austrian influence. Both Powers have maintained their old positions . . .
In the eyes of pacifists, certainly, the world of 1901 was not quite the Eden of Keynes's recollection. At the 10th meeting of the Universal Peace Congress, then sitting in Glasgow, Dr R. Spence Watson prompted cries of 'Hear, hear' when he called 'the present... as dark a time as they had ever known'. Warming to his theme, Watson denounced not only 'that terrible war in South Africa, which they could not think of without humiliation' but also 'the swooping down of the Christian nations upon China, the most detestable bit of greed which history has recorded' - an allusion to the recent international expedition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. An advertisement on the front page of that same edition of The Times lends some credibility to his impugning of the expedition's motive:
CHINESE WAR LOOT. - Before disposing of Loot, it is advisable to have it valued by an expert. Mr Larkin, 104, New Bond- street, VALUES and BUYS ORIENTAL ART-SPECIALITIES.
Socialists might also have questioned Keynes's complacent claim that 'the greater part of the population . . . were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with [their] lot' and that 'escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes'. In the week preceding September 11, The Times reported, there had been 1,471 deaths in London, corresponding to an annual rate of 16.9 per thousand, including '7 from smallpox, 13 from measles, 14 from scarlet fever, 20 from diphtheria, 27 from whooping cough, 17 from enteric fever, 271 from diarrhoea and dysentery [and] 4 from cholera . . .' In Wales, meanwhile, twenty miners were feared dead after an explosion at the Llanbradach colliery near Caerphilly. Across the sea in Ireland seven members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners had been arrested and charged with 'conspiracy, assault and intimidation', having led a carpenters' strike for higher wages. The number of registered paupers in London, according to the paper, was just under 100,000. There was as yet no 'old age pension scheme . . . of giving State aid to those who had already in the past made some provision for the future'. The best escape from poverty in the United Kingdom was, in reality, geographical rather than social mobility. Between 1891 and 1900, The Times recorded, no fewer than 726,000 people had emigrated from the United Kingdom. Would so many have left if, in truth, they had been 'reasonably contented'?