‘Progress’ was the buzzword of the age in late 19th century imperialism, as Britain and America expanded their projects of bringing ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ to the diverse peoples and economies of Asia. One prime example of this ‘civilizing mission’ can be found in Britain’s protracted engagement in China, beginning with the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. To justify its imperialism in China, the British Foreign Office had long argued that Britain brought economic and moral progress to the Chinese by enforcing free trade in their ports. The Foreign Office’s aim in the late 19th century was to extract as much trade from Chinese markets as possible, while maintaining Qing territorial integrity so as not to lose China to an East Asian “scramble for Africa” equivalent.
However, in 1897, the burgeoning German Empire took out a formal lease on the city of Qingdao in Shandong province. This marked the first incident of a European colonial power taking direct ownership of continental Chinese land—and it created a scramble for concessions from the Qing court by Britain, France, and Russia. Not to be left behind, in 1899, US Secretary of State John Hay (under President William McKinley’s government) declared an official “Open Door” policy in China in the hopes of reversing the scramble. Hay intended to reinforce the same policy that Britain had been maintaining for the half-century before the Qingdao Lease: that of trade and goods extraction from China without the divvying-up of Chinese territory among the Great Powers.[1]
In this paper, I intend to examine the diplomatic records of Britain and the US in 1899, and analyze the rhetoric of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ that they used to counter the scramble for Chinese concessions that took the imperial world by storm in the aftermath of the 1897 Qingdao Lease. In the 1890s, a western foreign minister’s greatest weapon was liberal economic ideology: in the dominant rhetoric of the US and Britain, territorial acquisition brought misery and economic exclusion to most—but peaceful control of markets brought prosperity and progress to all.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/collections/united-states-treaties-and-other-international-agreements/about-this-collection/bevans/m-ust000001-0278.pdf
Aidan Lilienfeld, paper proposal for the 1st LSE Department of International History Student Conference, March 2022
Haus Lilienfeld 