The World полностью

A similar contradiction distorted his approach to Russia. On 1 March 1881, the sixty-seven-year-old emperor of Russia, Alexander II, was riding in his carriage through the streets, surrounded by Cossacks and secret policemen, on his way to review his Guards when a radical threw a bomb. It was a special day: the Romanov had just signed a decree to form Russia’s first consultative assembly of elected delegates, which ‘I don’t hide from myself, is the first step towards a constitution’. Yet his slow reforms had inspired, then lethally disappointed, Russian radicals, whose People’s Will faction launched four assassination attempts. Now Alexander was unharmed, yet against advice he insisted on comforting the wounded. As he did so, another terrorist dropped at bomb at his feet, blowing off his leg. He died a few hours later, watched by his Brobdingnagian son, now Alexander III, and his stunned grandson, Nicholas.

Alexander III, six foot three, coarse, hard-drinking, who favoured wearing muzhik blouses and boots, ended his father’s reforms, repressed both nationalist and liberal aspirations and embraced the other tradition – police autocracy, imperial expansion and messianic nationalism linked to Slavophilism. Russification – the banning of the use of Georgian, Finnish and Ukrainian languages – drove those peoples to join nationalist or socialist parties. Jews, the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy, were intensely persecuted. The Colossus was a masterful, competent autocrat who always knew what he wanted: he once bent a fork and told the Austrian ambassador, ‘That’s what I’m going to do to your army corps.’ He thought nothing of grabbing his ministers by the scruffs of the neck and bullied his shy slight son, Nicky, whom he called a ‘child’. But he also backed business, creating an economic boom of railway building and industrial development.^*

Willy tried to charm the Colossus (who was repelled by him), but then discontinued Bismarck’s alliance with the tsarist empire. Even Phili struggled to understand what Willy really wanted. Britain and Russia were rivals for Asian power, but did Willy want an alliance with Russia against Britain or one with Britain against Russia?^* Yet for twenty-four years this unstable narcissist was, said his ally Franz Ferdinand, ‘the grandest man in Europe’.

Alexander III reacted with two far-sighted decisions that produced world-changing consequences. In July 1891, he allied Russia to republican France, effecting the very envelopment that Wilhelm had meant to avoid; and around the same time he commissioned the building of the 5,772-mile Trans-Siberian Railway, projecting Russian power towards disintegrating China.

Willy was too gripped by the emergence of what the racist Gobineau called ‘the Yellow Peril’. On 17 September 1894, at the mouth of the Yalu River, a new naval power, Japan, sank eight (out of ten) Chinese battleships and then invaded China, seizing Port Arthur and massacring civilians.

* Married to four wives, keeping 200 odalisques, Ismail fell in love with a beautiful harem slave only to find that she had had her arm amputated for stealing; nonetheless he married her and she became the mother of King Fuad, living into the 1930s.

* The Sokoto jihadi empire would help inspire others in Africa later in the century, first the Senussi in Libya and then the Mahdi in Sudan. In the twenty-first century, it is the inspiration for the jihadist insurgencies in Nigeria, Mali, Chad and Niger.

* Singular, passionate, beautiful and intelligent, Salama had taught herself to read and write. On the death of her mother, Jilfidan, a Georgian slave bought by her father in Constantinople, she had inherited three clove plantations worked by slaves. Majid defeated the coup, exiling Bargush to Bombay, though their sister was not punished. When Bargush succeeded as sultan, Salama broke convention by spending time with Europeans, attending their parties and falling in love with a German trader, Heinrich Ruete. When she became pregnant, the sultan was enraged and ordered her execution. A Royal Navy frigate conveyed her to freedom. She converted to Christianity as Emily, marrying Ruerte and bringing up two children in Hamburg. When her husband was killed in a tram accident, Emily/Salama lost her security, was unable to claim her Zanzibari estates and, settling in Beirut, wrote her Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, perhaps the first Arab woman to write a modern autobiography.

* By 1890 Bargush was selling 75 per cent of global ivory, overseeing the killing of 60,000 elephants annually. The ivory was traded east and west. In the latter it was used to construct, among other things, the pianos – ‘supreme symbol of Victorian female gentility’, in Neil Faulkner’s words – that embellished European homes.

* The empress asked the British to protect Tewodros’s young son Alemayehu, who was brought up as an English gentleman.