EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2000 by Jacob Heilbrunn

How did it all get started? Abernethy quite rightly notes that various enterprises pushed colonialism along. He writes, "People living in the metropoles were generally uninformed about and uninterested in overseas expansion" in its early stages in the 15th century. Sound familiar? Instead, "important decisions were made by leaders of sectoral institutions: monarchs, officials in the royal court, directors of government-chartered companies, heads of Roman Catholic missionary orders." Though Abernethy does not say so, this state of affairs is the dream of most national security types. Though they have to pay pious homage to democracy they would really like to get things done, which means that, for all the Council on Foreign Relations' talk about the need to get the broader public interested in foreign affairs, it's the last thing anyone really wants. What they want is deference and attention, not opinions.

European leaders were easily able to get away with thuggish behavior and drape it in the vestments of honor and nobility, not just profit. Abernethy suggests that things really got cracking once western Europe got the technological edge on its rivals. Coupled with the introduction of European diseases, subjugating the natives was a fairly easy enterprise. According to Abernethy, "The estimated three to four million Amerindians who inhabited Hispaniola as of 1492 numbered about fifteen thousand by 1518 and essentially disappeared by 1570." Sometimes, though, it was the whites who were vulnerable. The west African coast became known as "the white man's grave" because of malaria and other tropical illnesses.

For all his legwork recounting in some detail the history of imperialism, Abernethy shies from reaching much of a conclusion about its effects. He correctly observes that it did spread Western institutions--such as the rule of law in India. But he retreats into saying: "Among the most reprehensible aspects of colonialism, in my judgment, were its deliberate, systematic, and sustained assaults on human dignity." Well, yes. But that's not exactly news. Today, the great powers are on better behavior. A guilt complex is evident, a la Clinton apologizing in Africa for the excesses of the Cold War.

But that doesn't necessarily mean, as Robert Kaplan observes, that matters

have improved all that much. Kaplan, you might say, takes a rather saturnine view of the world. Kaplan does not come by his views easily, and his book is the product of incredibly hard work. A tough traveler, he seems to have been everywhere and talked to everyone, from peasants to presidents.

His new book is a sequel, he says, to his earlier Balkan Ghosts, a work cited by President Clinton as a reason for not intervening in the Balkans. It depicted the hostilities in the Balkans as the product of ancient enmities that outside powers were incapable of extinguishing. Kaplan maintains that he is not offering a prescription in any of his books for whether to intervene, but simply describing harsh realities. Eastward to Tartary is no less bleak.