Free The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson

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 emigratedfrom the United Kingdom. Would so many have left if, in truth, they had been ‘reasonably contented’?
EMPIRES
    The world of 1901 was a world of empires, but the problem was their weakness, not their strength.
    The oldest, the Qing and the Ottoman, were relatively decentralized entities; indeed to some observers they seemed on the verge of dissolution. Their fiscal systems had for too long been based primarily on quasi-feudal transfers from the rural periphery to the metropolitan centre. Other sources of revenue were becoming more important – notably the duties levied on overseas trade – but by the end of the nineteenth century these had largely been frittered away. The process was further advanced in China. Beginning in the 1840s with Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, numerous Chinese ports had come under European control, initially as bridgeheads for hard-faced Scots intent on building a mass market for Indian opium. Eventually there were more than a hundred such ‘treaty ports’, where European citizens enjoyed the privileges of ‘extraterritoriality’ – living in ‘concessions’ or ‘settlements’ with complete immunity from Chinese law. The Imperial Maritime Customs Administration, though nominally a branch of the Chinese Government, was staffed by foreign officials and run by an Ulsterman, Sir Robert Hart. In much the same way, numerous Turkish taxes were collected by a European Council of the Public Debt, which had been established in 1881 and was controlled by foreign bondholders. * These strikingly visible limitations of sovereignty – the magnificent offices of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the Shanghai Bund (embankment), the building ofthe Public Debt Administration in Istanbul – reflected both financial and military weakness. To pay for modern armaments and infrastructure that they could not make for themselves, the Chinese and the Turkish governments had borrowed substantial sums by floating loans in Europe; domestic intermediaries simply could not compete with the sums and the terms offered by the European banking houses, which were able to tap much wider and deeper