Occupation in the Age of Empire

In the decades between the end of the Franco-German War and the outbreak of the First World War there was no occupation by one European Great Power of the territory of another. The territorial simplification of the European map by the unifications of Italy and Germany may have been destabilising for the European international system in the long run, but they removed zones of instability or weakness which had sucked great powers into occupation in the earlier decades of the century. Occupation now took place on the European periphery, with the decaying Ottoman Empire continuing to provide the occasion for resort to occupation as well as risk of war between the Great Powers. The great Eastern Crisis of 1875–8 drew three powers, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia, into strategies of occupation but also saw avoidance of war between them as Bismarck orchestrated a settlement at the conference of Berlin in 1878. Although sometimes compared to the Congress of Vienna, the Conference of Berlin symbolised the intricate network overseen by Bismarck which ‘tided Europe over a period of several critical years without a rupture’. The Concert of Europe, if the name was still warranted, managed to resolve successive crises on Europe's periphery, containing in the process the occupations, but with increasing difficulty.

The wider pressures to which the European system was subjected were bound up with the pursuit of empire and the belief that the world was beginning to consolidate into continental or imperial blocs. Calculations of surface area and population, contrasts of land based and maritime power all fed into such speculations and anxieties. Insofar as empire involved the language of occupation, it mostly did so in a quite different sense from the understanding of occupation embodied in the laws of war codified in this period. Claims to exercise effective authority here did not signify the extent of occupied territory but amounted to a claim to sovereignty, though that was a criterion with which European states felt uncomfortable, preferring to base their claims on less stringent criteria, as became apparent at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, called to discuss the European powers’ respective claims in Africa.