Prologue - New Century, New Problems
The 20th century dawned with a sense of trepidation for many, fearful of the massive cultural, technological and economic changes rolling across the world; the phenomenon of this fairly widespread sentiment of queasy dread mixed with cautious optimism that denoted the transition from one century to another came to be known later as the
fin de siecle, and there was perhaps reason for people to be worried about what was to come with the dawn of a new century.
No sooner had the 1900s begun than they were marked with extraordinary bloodshed; in China, the
Boxer Rebellion against Western influences, in particular the conversion of Chinese to Christianity, had gained such steam that entire provinces across the North of China were utterly lawless, and rather than attempt to put down the revolt, the Qing government controlled by the Dowager Empress Cixi instead not only indulged the Boxers but began encouraging their violent outbursts against Westerners, finally endorsing their cause in the late spring. This ended with the
Siege of the Peking Legations, in which thousands of Boxers attacked defenseless foreigners in the quarter of Peking where they resided and, after the makeshift defenses failed, massacred them nearly to a man. When a British expedition to free them failed and was brutally slaughtered in the field, seven European countries - Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain - along with Japan and the United States formed the
Nine Nation Alliance to forcibly retaliate. This
Boxer Intervention was a difficult proposition; seizing the port city of
Tientsin was exceedingly difficult and the first instances of trench warfare were observed in the Zhihli Province of China over the next year as the Alliance attempted to press towards Peking but were frequently pushed back both by Boxers as well as the professional forces of the Chinese state. In a particularly infamous episode, British General
Lord Charles Gordon was surrounded with his men in Tientsin and they were all killed; not until the next spring would the Alliance finally press their way in a bloody campaign in which entire Chinese villages were put to the sword to Peking, which fell in June of 1901 with tens of thousands of casualties, many civilian - including the Guangxu Emperor, under suspicious circumstances, and became an infamous episode of imperialist wanton murder, rape and looting known now as the
Sack of Peking.
The Boxer War was a rallying moment across Europe, providing an hour of unprecedented cooperation overseas amongst the imperial powers, and particularly in Great Britain had a profound effect as Gordon was mourned as a martyr and Chamberlain's government stumbled over its perceived failure to defend him; in Canada, the debate over whether to participate formally in the expedition reopened wounds on the question of nationalism, and to Australia it would suggest, as would events a few years later, that their neighborhood was considerably more dangerous than they thought and Britain's ability to defend them may be limited. This spirit of unity in the face of the
yellow peril, as the particularly nasty and xenophobic variety of political racism directed at fears of a rising and aggressive Asia came to known, did not last long. Almost as soon as Peking fell, disagreements about the future of China erupted amongst the various powers, and soon the Alliance splintered into smaller cliques pursuing their own interests. A group of conservative but ethnically Han court mandarins and provincial governors consolidated under
Zhang Zidong had formed a collective mutual defense against both the Boxers and foreign intervention during the war in the wealthy and peaceful Southeast and with the fall of Peking and, with it, likely the Qing authority declared a
Republic of China with its capital in Hankow; a quartet of Germany, the United States, Italy and Spain recognized them as the legitimate government of China and signed a peace with them that would earn them concessions such as treaty ports and monetary restitution but allow them to cease in the bubbling conflict in the north that was rapidly turning to low-intensity civil war for British and Japanese soldiers. Russia would be next; having focused during the Boxer War on pushing down through Manchuria, it struck a deal with a returning Manchurian Prince,
Zaifeng, to recognize him as the new Emperor with his seat in Peking even as the British scrambled to find any viable Ming heir they could stick on the throne instead, in return for territorial adjustments in favor of Russia and its essential vassalization of Manchuria proper as a pseudo-protectorate, while not denying Russia's suzerainty over newly-independent Turkestan and Mongolia. With the writing on the wall, Japan, France and Austria followed suit in order to score themselves concessions in Shandong, and Britain was left holding the bag, humiliated and furious, having to concede to the terms on the ground after close to a century of having been used to dictating them themselves.
This gargantuan and embarrassing setback for Britain in China was just one of many major European debacles of the Great Powers in the early 1900s. Chamberlain nearly gambled away his government on an election called over "tariff reform," in other words a plan to introduce mild protectionism as a step towards a more fully united Empire that bordered on federation, but he lost his majority and until the stroke that ended his Premiership in 1906 was a weakened shadow of the titanic figure he had been who defined the 1890s. In contrast to its relative successes in China and elsewhere in the Orient, Germany's domestic politics remained as incoherent as ever between its fluid parliamentary factions and its flimsy constitutional construct, and Heinrich I was eventually forced to sack his government and appoint the rigid, conservative and competent
Maximilian Egon II, Prince von Furstenburg, as his Chancellor to knock heads on both right and let together to build some kind of unified governmental approach to managing the chaotic politics of the Reich. Russia, while enjoying a tremendous coup that landed in its lap with its advances in the East, nonetheless continued to be a severe underperformer industrially and socially and as the health of Alexander III declined in his advancing age, so did the ability of his various "troikas" of favored court officials to manage the restive country's complex economic and cultural fabric.
Perhaps no country in Europe had as debilitating of an early 1900s as Spain, however. It had always been a peripheral participant in the Chinese conflict and evacuated to return its attention to the Philippines long before the three-way internal conflict between the Republic, the new Qing regime in Peking and Cixi's
Loyalist in Xi'an began squaring off against one another. Despite Weyler's best efforts, the war had started to turn against Madrid again, and new Spanish leadership decided to take a remarkably unilateral approach in dealing with suspected Japanese arms smugglers that triggered an all-out war with Japan, as Tokyo responded with indignation at the execution of a Japanese merchant crew and sent their navy south to attempt to sink the Spanish Oriental Fleet at the
Battle of Manila Bay. While doling out a fair deal of damage, Spanish submarines - in which the country was and remains a leader - were able to force the Japanese to retreat, but Japanese support for the revolutionaries led by
Andres Bonifacio nonetheless helped turn the tide in the war in Luzon as Japanese soldiers fought alongside Filipino rebels to near the outskirts of Manila, and in one of the most decisive and widely studied naval defeats in history, the Spanish fleet in pursuit of the enemy was sunk almost in its entirety at
Yaeyama. Only an intervention of Britain, France and Germany prevented the Philippines falling wholesale to Japan, an insult Japan would not soon forget, but in Spain the damage was done - the country cycled through several National Liberal governments in quick succession and the Conservative cabinet elected to replace them headed by
Antonio Maura was not much better and handling the shocking loss of prestige seen as presaging the end of the Spanish Empire and its pursuant economic depression.
To an outside observer, the Americas seemed wholly occupied with their own internal matters for the first half of the first decade of the last century of the second millennium. Brazil's Emperor was assassinated in the first days of 1900 five years after defeating a putsch by his cousin, and was replaced by his brother the pious but deferential
Luis I, who was reluctant to challenge the increasing influence of right-wing ideologues in the Army and relied on his familial supporters in the Navy to counterbalance them. While both republican regimes, Argentina and Chile continued to dramatically diverge in their paths as the former continued to sprint towards its progressive, radically secular and labor-friendly future under the civic religion of Leandro Alem's worldview, while the latter's decaying oligarchy of urbane liberals and landed gentry conservatives collaborated to crush political opposition and relied on increasingly violent methods to keep the radicalized working class at bay, and that was merely at home - Chile continued its policy of aggressive saber-rattling against not only Argentina but the United States, intervening in the efforts of
Ecuador to sell its Galapagos Islands as a naval base to Washinton, while tacitly accepting the French intervention in
Colombia's 1899-01 civil war and the subsequent puppetization of Bogota, thus bringing it into the French alignment and supporting France's
Panama Canal.
Canals indeed became something of a theme in the Western Hemisphere, as the United States finally passed its
Nicaragua Canal Treaty to allow its project competing with the flailing French dig in Panama to go ahead, supported by Washington's thuggish Liberal client in Managua,
Jose Santos Zelaya.
[1] The Canal Treaty was perhaps one of the few genuine achievements accomplished by the otherwise mediocre and forgettable American President
Joseph Foraker, who had ascended to the office by way of his predecessor Hay's assassination and subsequently lost both Houses of Congress as he was reelected by the skin of his teeth in 1900 and then saw one of the worst landslides in American history further wipe out Liberal delegations in the midterms of 1902, and this was even before the Panic of 1904 was triggered by a speculative boom in railroad securities and other stocks exacerbated by a Supreme Court decision interpreting antitrust law narrowly. The economic calamities of the early 1900s saw the job of ending Liberal control in Washington finished off by Hearst, who was elected in a landslide along with supermajorities in Congress in 1904 and immediately went to work on a robust progressive program that included the enshrining of labor rights, regulation of banks and securities brokerages, and amongst a whole host of other initiatives a constitutional amendment for the direct election of Senators, implemented in time for 1908, which he won by an even greater margin. The Progressive Era had officially arrived in the United States, and the relationship between citizens and their government would forever be altered.
The Canal and concerns in Central America would occupy a fair deal of Hearst's attention when he was not ushering through, with the help of his Congressional allies and friendly Governors, his grand
Fair Deal program; American influence in Nicaragua as well as Costa Rica was not received well by Mexican and Confederate officialdom who viewed the area as their sphere of influence, particularly Richmond which supported the authoritarian dictatorship of
Manuel Estrada Cabrera in the
Union of Centroamerica, quietly encouraged
Standard Fruit of New Orleans to do everything it could to limit American economic suzerainty in the region, causing a number of incidents including the hijacking of a boat on the high seas and a tense standoff on the coast of Santo Domingo. Hearst's first term would thus be defined abroad by an increasingly aggressive Confederacy and deteriorating relations, in large part the cause of the pugilistic Senator
Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, who having seen his ambitions for the Confederate Presidency thwarted instead pursued power from the Senate and made it his mission to cement all of the Caribbean as Richmond's backyard. With the liberal but extremely unpopular
Jose Limantour government in Mexico faltering by the middle of the decade and the rise of the powerful landed interests in the North, particularly the firmly pro-Confederate
Creel-Terrazas Clique, the contours of an alliance against America began to take shape, and the interplay between these allies and the United States would within the decade plunge the Hemisphere into its grand conflagration...
[1] As I've mentioned before, Zelaya iOTL was very distinctly
not a friend to the US, who spent a lot of money and political capital trying to get rid of him.
