Watched warily by Britain and Russia, Germany makes to carve out a slice identified as ‘Kiao-Tschaou’ from a pie called ‘China’, while France offers her Russian ally moral support and Japan looks on. Behind them all, a Qing official throws up his hands in despair, but is powerless to intervene. As so often in such images, the powers are represented as individual persons: Britain, Germany and Russia by caricatures of their respective sovereigns, France by ‘Marianne’, the personification of the Republic, and Japan and China by stereotypical exotic figures. Personifying states as individuals was part of the shorthand of European political caricature, but it also reflects a deep habit of thought: the tendency to conceptualize states as composite individuals governed by compact executive agencies animated by an indivisible will. Yet even a very cursory look at the governments of early twentieth-century Europe reveals that the executive structures from which policies emerged were far from unified.
