Книга - Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History
Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History
Hugh Williams
What are the key 50 events you really need to understand to grasp the developments of our world?In this highly entertaining read Hugh Williams distils world history into an insightful overview. By selecting fifty key people, places, battles, objects and events, he casts a clear eye over the way the world has developed and how we live today.Injecting life into familiar historical landmarks as well as bringing lesser-known events to the forefront, Hugh shapes the fifty things into themes as all-encompassing today as they were over two thousand years ago: wealth, religion, conquest, discovery and freedom.The Fifty Things include…Origin of SpeciesModel T FordThe Russian RevolutionPlatoConquest of MexicoMao Tse TungCrucifixion of JesusVia EgnatiaWorldwide webOzymandias9/11Nelson MandelaCoronation of CharlemagneAmerican Declaration of IndependenceFranco-Prussian WarMahabharataThe Black DeathAnd many more…
Copyright (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
First published in 2010 by Collins
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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Text © Hugh Williams 2010
Hugh Williams asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007326501
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007411115 Version: 2018-07-18
Contents
Cover (#u144179df-1FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Title Page (#u144179df-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Copyright (#u144179df-3FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Introduction (#u144179df-5FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
1 Wealth (#u144179df-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Introduction (#u144179df-7FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 1 The Building of the Via Egnatia 146 BC (#u144179df-8FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 2 The City of Chang’an 750 AD (#u144179df-9FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 3 The Travels of Marco Polo 1271–95 (#u144179df-10FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 4 The Black Death 1348–50 (#u144179df-11FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 5 The Foundation of the Dutch East India Company 1602 (#u144179df-12FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 6 The Invention of the Flying Shuttle 1733 (#u144179df-13FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 7 The Foundation of Oil City, Pennsylvania 1859 (#u144179df-14FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 8 The Treaty of Versailles 1919 (#u144179df-15FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 9 The Model T Ford 1908 (#u144179df-16FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 10 The Credit Crunch 2007 (#u144179df-17FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
2 Freedom (#u144179df-18FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Introduction (#u144179df-19FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 1 Spartacus 73 BC (#u144179df-20FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 2 The Burning of Jan Hus 1415 (#u144179df-21FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 3 The American Declaration of Independence 1776 (#u144179df-22FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
CHAPTER 4 The French Revolution 1789 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony 1824 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 The Zulu War 1879 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 The Russian Revolution 1917 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic of China 1949 (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates 1 (#)
CHAPTER 9 The Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 The Release of Nelson Mandela 1990 (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Religion (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 The Epic of Gilgamesh 2000 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 2 The Mahabharata 500–100 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 3 Plato 429–347 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4 Buddha c.400 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 Confucius 551–479 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 The Crucifixion of Jesus 33 AD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 The Death of Mohammed 632 AD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses 1517 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 1859 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 9/11 2001 (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Conquest (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 Ozymandias (Rameses II) 1279–C.1213 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates 2 (#)
CHAPTER 2 Alexander the Great 356–323 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 3 The Sack of Rome 410 AD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4 The Coronation of Charlemagne 800 AD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 Chinggis Khan Becomes Sole Ruler of the Mongol People 1206 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 The Conquest of Mexico 1521 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 The Exile of Napoleon Bonaparte to St Helena 1815 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 The Indian Mutiny 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 Hiroshima 1945 (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Discovery (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 Archimedes of Syracuse 287–212 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 2 The Chinese Invention of Printing, seventh century AD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 3 Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4 Vasco da Gama Discovers a Sea Route to India 1498 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5 Sir Isaac Newton Publishes the Principia 1687 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 6 Australia’s First Colony 1788 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 John Logie Baird Demonstrates the First Moving Television Images 1926 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 The Discovery of the Structure of DNA Helix 1953 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon 1969 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 The Creation of the Worldwide Web 1990 (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY HUGH WILLIAMS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
The world in which we live is growing smaller, and shrinking. There is hardly a corner of it that has not at some time or another appeared on television in our homes. The activities of African, Asian and Middle Eastern politicians are often as familiar to us as those in our own country. The world is a bubble into which, thanks to the internet and other forms of mass communication, we peer at will. But where do we fit into the seething mass we see? What do we have in common with other people, places, cultures and ideas? What do they share with us?
One book cannot possibly answer all those questions but, with the help of history, it can provide a guide. History is one of the most important things that we possess: knowing about the past helps us manage the present and plan the future. And today we need a knowledge of history more than we have ever done before. Our world may be smaller but it is also more complex. We have become participants in even its most extreme activities. We watch the progress of wars on CNN or the BBC and, if we want, travel to its most dangerous places. I read a newspaper report recently about an elderly British pensioner who spends his time visiting Afghanistan, Iraq and North Pakistan. ‘You don’t think about roadside bombs, or being kidnapped,’ he said. ‘You know it happens, but you’re just too busy taking it all in.’ Exactly what he was taking in, the newspaper did not go on to say–presumably it was the experience of being there, of doing something unusual and rather dangerous. While we might admire the pluck and energy of someone taking his holidays in war zones, the fact that it happens at all is rather mystifying and confusing. Man was once an explorer: now he is just a tourist.
These extraordinary developments have helped create a world that is easy to see but difficult to understand. Discussions about world problems and their possible solutions are commonplace. People of influence think globally, in politics and economics, the environment and entertainment. At the same time we sometimes feel that our national identity is slipping away from us to be replaced by forces that are unfamiliar and uncertain. We would probably quite like to become citizens of the world, if only we knew what that meant. How should we balance national interests against global requirements? Where does our country end and the world begin?
The upheavals that surround us become inexplicable unless we can put them into some sort of context. That is one of the uses of history: to create a shape that helps make sense of the confusion in which we live. In 1919, H. G. Wells published The Outline of History in which he used his skill as a novelist to trace the history of mankind from prehistoric times to the present day. It was hugely popular. ‘The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world,’ he wrote in the Introduction to a later edition, ‘has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years.’ He might well have written exactly the same sentence were he to publish his book today. The world moves on and its glories and disasters move with it. We will always need help in understanding its history.
But, people will say, the history of the world is so big and so long that to take fifty things from it is impossible. It cannot be reduced to such a formula without becoming ridiculously oversimplified. That is always a danger. In history it is always easier to complicate than simplify. The fifty things described in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about world history, to make that claim would be absurd, but they are fifty very important things each of which provides a vantage point from which to survey large historical trends. Some of them are huge, others comparatively small. Each is unique and made an important contribution to the way in which world civilisations changed and grew. Taken together they provide a structure, a framework, on which to hang the great events of history.
There is another obvious and fundamental question relating to the selection of events from world history. Where do you begin? And once you have decided on your starting place, where do you end? I am writing this in a house on the East Devon coast in Britain, which is now a World Heritage Site because its cliffs and rocks are millions of years old. Today this beautiful part of the country has a temperamental climate – wind, rain and sun in almost equal measure. Once, however, it was almost tropical and dinosaurs, whose fossilised footprints can still be found along its beaches, plodded around in burning heat. I used to spend a lot of holidays in the Dordogne area of south-west France where, in the caves around Les Eyzies, some of the earliest signs of primitive man were discovered in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As I paddled with my children down the gentle summer waters of one of France’s grandest rivers I could look up to the caves and hollows where Cro-Magnon once lived. He hunted with primitive spears and drew crude pictures of the world around him on the walls of his subterranean home. In September 1940, a few months after their country had fallen to German occupation in the Second World War, four teenagers stumbled on the wall paintings in the Lascaux Cave near Montignac, vivid pictures of horses, bulls and stags drawn by people who lived in the area 15,000 years ago.
Examples of ‘pre-history’, excitingly close to our everyday lives, are important in establishing how the world as a whole began to evolve. But in terms of explaining how mankind organised itself to create the world we recognise today, our starting point should be much later, at a time when man was beginning to organise himself into some sort of social structure, building places to live in rather than simply using the natural resources around him, and communicating in a language that was capable of being written down. This brings us forward to a time nearly 6,000 years ago, to the civilisation that existed in the Middle East in an area that today makes up Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey.
The finishing point is more arbitrary. We can define a beginning, but we cannot predict the end. I can remember my wife, a journalist and broadcaster, asking me once what I thought she might say to a group of sixth-formers that she had been asked to address. The head teacher wanted her to come up with something that her pupils would find valuable and remember in later life. This was more than twenty years ago. The Berlin Wall had been torn down and we all felt optimistic and confident about the future. I suggested that she talk to them about a world that might at last be changing into a place of peace and prosperity. How wrong I was. Today world peace seems as distant as it ever was. As for prosperity, that too seems to have taken a battering thanks to the ceaseless turbulence in the financial markets. At the moment conflict and debt are the world’s stopping points, and it is with these that this history will end.
Though this book looks at events about 6,000 years ago, much of it is concerned with the events of the past few hundred years. That is a sobering thought. Mankind seems to have accelerated the pace of change as he has grown older. We know from our own lives how rapidly things develop from one generation to another. For most of us today, life without email would be unthinkable. It is actually quite difficult to buy a flight ticket unless you have a computer. But these inventions did not exist in any form whatsoever until I was a grown man, and are completely beyond the grasp of many people in the generation before mine. In the history of the world such rapid transformations are unusual. I would speculate that someone from 1700 would not have been as bewildered had he found himself living in 1800 as a person from 1900 transported to the year 2000. But just because transforming change seems to pick up speed with time, we should not make the mistake of putting more emphasis on events that have taken place more recently in any particular cycle. That would simply unbalance the narrative of the world’s historical development.
The other factor to take into account is the role of European civilisation. European people have been remarkably successful in spreading their practices and ideas around the world ever since mankind formed himself into discernible social groups. Their civilisation has tended to triumph where others have been lost. But the history of the world is not the history of Europe. It did not begin that way and, who knows, may not end that way either.
Throughout his life on earth, man has been driven by certain principal aspirations and I have taken some of these as the five themes of this book:
The first engine of man’s development has revolved around Wealth – the story of his ambition to be rich, and to buy and sell and make money through barter and exchange. This section is mainly about man as a trader and entrepreneur.
The second theme is Freedom – the story of the explosive ideas and inspiring people that have led man on his journey to become master of his individual fate, and to be free. This part of the book is about rebellion and revolution and the bravery of those who spoke or acted against oppression.
The third of man’s aspirations has been for Religion – the story of his continuing hope that his life has more lasting value than the one he spends on earth. This theme is used to describe the spread of the world’s religions and their heritage.
The fourth part of the book is about Conquest – the story of man’s appetite for expansion and territorial gain. This is all about the rise and fall of great empires, from the ancient world to the present day.
The fifth aspiration is Discovery – the story of man’s hunger to find and invent new things in the world around him in science and the arts. Here, some of the great inventions that have changed the nature of the world sit side by side with the achievements in exploration that improved our knowledge and understanding of it.
Inevitably there are times when these themes overlap, as the paths through our past crisscross one another. Religion was sometimes man’s motive for conquest; conquest was often carried out in search of wealth and so on. The Spanish conquest of South America in the sixteenth century is a good example. The conquistadors were motivated by both religious conviction and a desire for riches and their story might have been included in more than one place.
A good history book should be a companion as well as a teacher. It should help people understand as well as simply learn. From understanding comes confidence and hope, two feelings that sometimes seem in rather short supply in the world today. So if history can help us understand perhaps it can also help to inspire. And why not? After all, the world is ours: we owe it to ourselves to enjoy it.
1 Wealth (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Introduction (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Most of the children described in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses come to a sticky end. Matilda, who lies, is burned to death; Henry King, who chews string, dies from knots in his stomach; and Godolphin Horne, who is excruciatingly superior, becomes a bootblack at the Savoy. Only one child is saved from misfortune – the obsequiously good, horribly nice Charles Augustus Fortescue.
In eating Bread he made no Crumbs,He was extremely fond of sums,
To which, however, he preferredThe Parsing of a Latin Word–
Such assiduous, good behaviour brings its just reward:
He rose at once in his Career,And long before his Fortieth Year
Had wedded Fifi, Only ChildOf Bunyan, First Lord Aberylde.He thus became immensely Rich,And built the Splendid Mansion which
Is called ‘The Cedars, Muswell Hill’.Where he resides in Affluence still,To show what Everybody mightBecome by SIMPLY DOING RIGHT.
The gentle satire of Belloc’s comic verse, written at the very beginning of the twentieth century, has some relevance to life in Britain today. Men like Charles Augustus Fortescue still exist, their apparently effortless success a source of bewilderment and envy. How did they do it? Why have they been blessed with so much money? The way in which people set about acquiring wealth, and how they use it once they have got it, has preoccupied mankind for centuries.
Most human beings want to be richer than they are. In the English language there is a difference of meaning, or at least of usage, in the words ‘wealth’ and ‘riches’. Wealth implies a sense of prosperity shared for the common good. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, has come to be seen as the great rational defence of capitalism, just as the United States has become its most controversial exponent. In this context ‘wealth’ means the collective output of a free market whose different functions reinforce one another to the benefit of all. We tend to use the word ‘riches’ rather differently. Riches can be envied as much as enjoyed. To be rich you need to have done better, or been luckier, than your fellow men. It denotes individual good fortune rather than social wellbeing. Man works to be wealthy, but gambles to be rich.
The fact remains, however, that a society cannot be wealthy unless at least some of its members are rich. And wealth cannot be created unless individuals are motivated to acquire riches. How people become rich – in other words, whether or not they can be said to have earned their wealth – lies at the heart of our attitude towards this whole subject. As I write, Britain is engulfed in a scandal about MPs’ expenses. Many of them have been exposed for making extravagant and dishonest claims for the maintenance of their second homes. People are angry because they believe those they elected to be the guardians of the nation’s money have behaved like cheats, trying to become richer without earning the privilege. Unearned wealth is not to be tolerated.
But what do we mean by ‘unearned’ wealth? Less than a hundred years after Adam Smith explained the advantages of a free market, Karl Marx described its dangers. Where Smith saw benevolent prosperity, Marx found exploitation and inequality. The huge process of industrialisation, which was beginning to rumble into action when The Wealth of Nations was published, had, in Marx’s view, resulted in social and economic divisions that could only end in tension and conflict. How man has coped with wealth and defined both its benefits and drawbacks is an essential part of world history.
This chapter is about man’s acquisition, and sometimes loss, of wealth and its consequences. It begins with the building of the Via Egnatia that carried the traffic of the Romans across the Balkans from the Adriatic to Constantinople. The Roman road system supported the wealth of the greatest of the empires in world history, helping to maintain a centralised grip on the huge territory it controlled. The chapter then explores the city of Chang’an in China, the first great city of the world – richer and larger than anything Europe would see for hundreds of years afterwards. Marco Polo and his family risked their lives in search of wealth, travelling from Venice to China towards the end of the thirteenth century. But in the middle of the fourteenth century the wealth that Europe had begun to enjoy from its expanding trade was nearly destroyed by the arrival of the Black Death. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the foundation of the Dutch East India Company demonstrated how easily merchants could become princes, and how money could rule the world. The invention of the Flying Shuttle in the early eighteenth century was a simple improvement to the business of weaving that, though small in itself, was the first step along a process of industrialisation that led to the biggest revolution in wealth-creation the world had ever seen. The discovery of oil in America accelerated that process and made some individuals fabulously rich. After the First World War, a failure to understand the economic interests of different countries lay at the heart of the Treaty of Versailles which, in trying to put Europe back together again, only succeeded in preparing it for another terrible war. Meanwhile the invention of the Model T Ford ushered in an age of consumerism: many more people could now at least feel rich if they wanted to. Finally, in our own time, the Credit Crunch brought to an end a period of continuous wealth expansion as people discovered that good times are never forever. From the tramp of Roman legions across the packed sand of a Balkan highway to the hideous devastation of the plague and the calculated ruthlessness of sober Amsterdam businessmen, from the belching ferocity of the Industrial Revolution to the economic failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the remorseless spread of the motor car, the history of mankind is a history of trying to get rich and stay rich.
CHAPTER 1 (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
The Building of the Via Egnatia 146 BC (#u144179df-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
The Via Egnatia was a Roman road that stretched from the Albanian port of Durres on the Adriatic coast to Istanbul. It carried commercial and military traffic across the Balkans and through Greece and Turkey, sustaining the wealth of a great empire.
For nearly a thousand years, the Romans ruled an empire the like of which the world had never seen before, and has not seen since. Their rise to power began at the beginning of the fifth century BC when, as a republic, they elected their first ruling consuls. It ended with the sack of Rome, by then just another city in only half the empire, by the Goths in 410 AD. At its height, after the conquest of Britain in the first century AD, the empire covered all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans and most of Western Europe including Spain, France, the German lands and Italy. But its size, though vast, was not the most impressive thing about it. Its extraordinary achievement – one that has never been equalled in the history of the world – was the degree of organisation and control that it brought and then maintained to the disparate territories under its authority. When St Paul, a converted Jew from the town of Tarsus in Anatolia (in what is now eastern Turkey), fell foul of the law for his preaching about Christianity, he could claim that he was a Roman citizen – ‘civis Romanus sum’ – and therefore be sent to Rome for trial. Whether patrolling the bleak landscape on the border between occupied Britain and Pictish Scotland, or marching through the desert in the conquered provinces of North Africa, a Roman lived under the same laws and was entitled to the same treatment.
Legal and administrative systems were not the only things that bound together the peoples whom the Romans ruled. They were also connected by a great road network that ran throughout the empire. Aristides of Smyrna, an orator living in the second century AD, enjoyed flattering his Roman masters by proclaiming: ‘You have merged all nations into one family.’ He went on: ‘You have measured the earth, bridged the rivers and made roads through the mountains.’ For a man like Aristides, an educated Greek who travelled all over the empire, roads were one of the most obvious manifestations of Roman power and wealth. Journeys across huge territories were comparatively easy and helped to create a secure, prosperous environment.
The Roman Empire’s extraordinary achievement was the degree of control it brought to territories under its authority.
The Roman road system began with the Via Appia which was built in the fourth century BC, when Rome was still a republic. It was named, as were most roads, after the official who ordered its construction and, by the middle of the second century BC, had reached what is now the port of Brindisi on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At this point in time Roman expansion was confined to land within the Italian peninsula, although the republic subsequently grew into an international power following the defeat of the Greek king, Pyrrhus, whose armies invaded southern Italy in 280 BC. In the years that followed, the Romans pushed out beyond the boundaries of Italy itself, conquering all of Greece, the Balkans and North Africa. With these victories came the need for new roads.
The Via Egnatia picked up on the other side of the Adriatic from where the Via Appia ended. Starting on the Albanian coast it followed the line of the River Shkumbin and went over the mountains of Candava towards Lake Ohrid. It then dropped south, going through several mountain passes until it reached the Aegean Sea at Thessalonica in Greece. From there it went through the port of Kavala, today the second largest city in northern Greece, crossed into Turkey at Ipsala before travelling the last 160 miles into Istanbul, then called Byzantium and later Constantinople. It was a great Balkan highway 700 miles long, designed when it was built to help bring control to Rome’s new conquests across the sea from its eastern shore, but eventually becoming the essential link between its western and eastern capitals. It was about twenty feet wide and paved with big stone slabs or packed hard sand. From the time when the Romans first gained power over the peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor, to the moment, 500 years later, when their empire began to collapse, the Via Egnatia was one of the principal methods by which control was maintained and wealth distributed throughout this huge region.
The Roman road network not only carried troops and supplies but imperial messengers as well. The centre of the empire kept in touch with its provinces through the cursus publicus, the postal system, which could travel at very high speeds thanks to the frequent resting places where riders could change horses or repair their vehicles. The poet Ovid, who lived in Rome for about sixty years just after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, said he received a letter from Brindisi in nine days – presuming that the post did not travel at night, an impressive average speed of thirty-six and a half miles per day. At the end of the eighteenth century, before mail coaches were introduced into Britain, the post from London to Bath could take nearly forty hours or more to reach its destination. Even with an improved road system a coach and horses could only manage an average speed of ten miles an hour by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.
The Roman world was immensely rich in resources. Tin from Britain, silver from Spain, wheat from North Africa, and fruit from the Middle East, all found their way into Roman homes. Craftsmen who made clothes out of silk imported from China or glass objects created from the high-quality sand of the eastern Mediterranean could find markets for their goods in places far away from where they worked. Trade moved easily between one place and the next – and sometimes the merchants went with it, moving their places of business from one city, or one region, to another. A Roman altar discovered in Bordeaux in 1921 was found to contain an inscription from a wealthy merchant with positions in the cities of both York and Lincoln who thanked the ‘protecting goddess of Bordeaux’ for allowing him to complete his journey to her city. He might have been a trader selling French wine to the Roman legions stationed in Britain: the Romans were as familiar as we are with the free movement of goods across provincial boundaries. Today in Britain, we have grown used to enjoying the fruits of the world, but the generation that lived during and immediately after the Second World War did not drink much wine and rarely ate exotic fruits or other food from Europe and beyond. Now these things are part of the nation’s everyday diet: we have become used to peace and plenty. In this we are not unlike the people who lived in the Roman Empire as it reached the height of its power. Its extraordinary cohesion was reinforced by language and law and oiled by the benefits of trade. The Roman road – straight, ruthless and capable of cutting through any obstacle in its path – was the physical embodiment of the empire’s wealth and success.
The Via Egnatia survived the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West to remain an important highway for centuries afterwards. Inevitably it fell into disrepair. It is remarkable how the great buildings of Rome were allowed to decay: succeeding generations preferred to destroy or ignore what had been built, rather than make use of their remarkable architectural inheritance. The Romans were enthusiastic builders. Great cities as far apart as York, Lyon or Carthage (today part of Tunis), became the provincial capitals of the empire, each demonstrating the Roman taste for fortification and domestic architecture. The same types of buildings were reproduced everywhere, a coherent manifestation of the imperial presence. We can still see ruined examples of them all over Europe, beautifully constructed aqueducts, gates, theatres and villas that remind us of the extent of Roman power. The modern world has been brought up to believe in the concept of the nation state. We tend to talk about architectural style in terms of its country of origin – French, German, English and so on. When the Romans were the rulers of Europe it was not like that at all. Whoever you were, Berber, Celt or Slav, you were the citizen of a Roman province and subject to the tastes and disciplines of your Roman masters. Perhaps it was this that ensured their eventual destruction. Their beauty and usefulness was not enough to assuage the brutal forces of revenge. The historian Procopius, writing during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century AD, reported that: ‘The barbarians … destroyed all the cities which they captured so completely that nothing has been left to my time to know them by – unless it might be one tower or one gate or some such thing that chanced to remain.’ The glories of Rome were extinguished with remarkable speed.
The Via Egnatia was the physical embodiment of the empire’s wealth and success.
It was Justinian who undertook repairs to the Via Egnatia. He had ambitions to restore the power of the old empire and, with his general Belisarius, succeeded in briefly recapturing Rome itself. His was a remarkable period of power. He was from peasant stock and his wife, Theodora, one of history’s more colourful consorts, was described famously in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon as: ‘The prostitute who, in the presence of innumerable spectators, had polluted the theatre of Constantinople was adored as a Queen in the same city, by grave magistrates, orthodox bishops, victorious generals, and captive monarchs.’ In the end, Justinian’s legacy was not a new Roman empire, but a codification of Roman law that set out the basis for civil law still in use in many places today. He also rebuilt Constantinople, which he hoped to restore to the glory it had enjoyed under its founder, the Emperor Constantine, 200 years earlier. Beyond this, however, the architecture of ancient Rome continued to decay.
Despite the collapse of its infrastructure, the route of the Via Egnatia maintained its importance. At the end of the eleventh century, in 1081, the Byzantine Empire nearly collapsed after Norman invaders, having conquered southern Italy and Sicily, landed at Durres intent on breaking into Byzantium through its western gateway. The Emperor gathered an army and came down the Via Egnatia to confront the Normans who appeared to be isolated and disheartened after their invasion fleet had been defeated by the Empire’s allies, the Venetians. But the Norman commander, Robert Guiscard, was a resourceful and brilliant soldier. Displaying the same sort military bravado that had seen the island of Britain fall to Norman control at Hastings less than twenty years earlier, he routed the imperial army. Its defeat did not bring about the fall of the Byzantine Empire, but the Via Egnatia had now become a much more open road than before. Overland trade between Constantinople and the rest of the Byzantine Empire had always travelled along it. Following the battle of Durres, or Durrazzo to give it its Italian name, it also became the chosen route for the armies of the Crusades as they made their way out of Europe into Asia Minor. The first Crusade was launched fifteen years after the battle, in 1095.
Timeline of Roman History
The Roman road was straight, ruthless and capable of cutting through any obstacle in its path.
The Via Egnatia retains its allure as a symbol of prosperity and hope even today. The Via Egnatia Foundation was set up recently with the mission ‘to inspire this old road with new life’ and to stimulate cultural and economic interest in the region by bringing together the different communities through which the road passes. The road, that was once used by ‘by soldiers and later by crusaders, preachers, bandits, merchants and peasant caravans loaded with skins, wines, wood and sulphur’, served ‘economic and social functions for more than two millennia’.
So this great road is still with us. In the middle of the busy Greek city of Thessalonica the ruined Arch of Galerius, built at the end of the third century AD, stands across its route. Surrounded by cars, shops and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern city life it is a permanent reminder of an ancient empire and one of the great highways that carried its wealth.
CHAPTER 2 (#)
The City of Chang’an 750 AD (#)
In the middle of the seventh century AD, the largest city in the world was Chang’an on the Guanzhong Plain in central China. Standing at the end of the Silk Route that brought traders from all over Asia, it was rich, civilised, and home to a population of about a million people.
China has the oldest surviving civilisation in the world. Its modern population can trace its ancestry back to the Shang dynasty that ruled from about 1700 BC. An earlier dynasty, the Xia, seems to have existed from about 1900 BC, but evidence of its activities remains slight. There were other civilisations living in other parts of the world before this date but they have since died out. China has enjoyed a continuous development, growing from a fragmented rural culture into a great, united world power.
In the West, our knowledge of this process has been remarkably limited, not least because China has often preferred to shield itself from foreign intrusion and investigation. Until the early part of the nineteenth century it was, to most Western eyes, an enormous secret world, whose wealth and attainments were glimpsed only sporadically. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imports of Chinese ceramics as a by-product of the tea trade promoted a fad for ‘chinoiserie’ as Western artists imitated what they believed to be Chinese styles in art and design. In 1793 a British diplomat, Earl Macartney, paid a visit to the Chinese Emperor on behalf of George III to try to win concessions for British trade in Chinese ports. Having agonised over the protocol of how to kneel in front of the imperial presence – his lordship would not ‘kowtow’ and prostrate himself, but agreed to go down on one knee as he would before his own king – Macartney presented a list of requests. But the Chinese were not interested. ‘I set no value on objects strange and ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures,’ was the Emperor’s haughty response. ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance … there is no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.’ The British came home empty-handed.
From the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, the centre of the world lay in the East.
The Emperor who dismissed the British expedition with such disdain was Qianlong. He was a member of the Manchu or Qing dynasty that ruled China from the middle of the seventeenth century until the end of imperial rule in 1911. China was first united under a dynasty that existed nearly 2,000 years earlier, the Qin (pronounced ‘Chin’) from whom the name ‘China’ originally derives. The last emperor in this line went to his grave in 210 BC surrounded by the famous terracotta army, one of the world’s most exciting archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Although the Qin emperors only held power for fifteen years, the unification of the country under one government was an enormous, if bloody and ruthless, achievement. China did not enjoy the same measure of centralisation again until the second century AD, when first the Sui and then the Tang dynasties came to power. The Sui used the same repressive techniques as the Qin to gain control of all China’s lands. When they fell, their successors, the Tang, ruled for nearly 300 years, ushering in a period of growth and civilised development. It was during this period, from the beginning of the sixth century to the start of the ninth century AD, that the city of Chang’an became the greatest in the world.
The history of mankind from the Middle Ages to the present day has been in the main the history of a European civilisation. But before then, in the time between the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of the Renaissance, the centre of the world lay in the East. When the city of Rome was at its height its population stood at around a million people. By 800 AD, when Chang’an was thriving, it had been reduced to no more than 50,000. The biggest city in Europe at this time was Córdoba in southern Spain, with a population of something in excess of 150,000. It was not really ‘European’ at all, but the capital of an Arab dominion, a caliphate that controlled most of the lower part of the Iberian peninsula. That part of Europe had fallen to a foreign power as the Moors, inspired by the world’s newest religion of Islam, pushed out from their original homelands in North Africa. Other European cities were tiny by comparison. London probably had a population of no more than 10,000.
It was a teeming, cosmopolitan city.
Chang’an was a teeming, cosmopolitan city. High walls protected the inhabitants and no one except imperial messengers could enter or leave during the night when the city gates were locked and a strict curfew was enforced. The town was constructed on a grid with broad roads running either north to south or east to west. Speed restrictions applied to coachmen and riders on horseback. There were five canals that carried merchandise all over the town and delivered water to its parks and fed the lakes in the gardens of the nobility. Within this framework, Chang’an was divided into sections, each with its own walled boundary and housing its own complement of homes, offices, temples and workshops. The curfew applied here too: once its drumbeat sounded at the end of the day, the gates dividing the different areas were closed and movement between them was forbidden. A night patrol called the Gold Bird Guard enforced the law, capturing and beating those who disobeyed. There was a government office, a walled compound from which the Emperor’s representative read imperial decrees to the city’s seniors who stood before him in carefully designated ranks. There were many monasteries – fabulously wealthy places endowed by rich aristocrats or the Emperor himself – whose splendid pagodas dominated the city skyline. The pagoda was a form of architecture developed by the Chinese from an Indian design. Today the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda and the Small Wild Goose Pagoda – one 210 feet high, the other 141 feet – still stand in the modern Chinese city, renamed X’ian (‘Western Peace’), memorials to an age 1,300 years ago when the landscape they survey was the most prosperous in the world. The ancient city had beautiful parks, generally off limits to ordinary citizens, but places where the rich and well connected could go to enjoy the countryside or feast in tents that protected them from the spring rain. It also boasted a ‘red-light district’ where madams offered girls as young as eleven or twelve to their customers and courtesans entertained members of the imperial court and well-heeled merchants.
It became the greatest city in the world.
The wealth of the city was based on its markets. Chang’an had two, both of which were strictly controlled by a government agency that registered merchants, inspected the currency for counterfeit coins and imposed regulations relating to weights and measures. Some sold goods imported from all over the world – precious stones, silks and sacred relics. Others had more everyday produce on sale such as meat, vegetables, fish and herbs. There were restaurants where customers could enjoy pastries and other delicacies and moneylenders were available to advance cash to those who needed it. There was also a primitive banking system. For a fee, certain traders would take charge of citizens’ valuables giving them pieces of paper as proof of their deposits. The owners could then use these as a method of financing other purchases, in effect using a sort of paper currency. Many of the traders came from Central Asia – from the lands that now encompass countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – and from Persia. It is also probable that the city had a number of night markets, today a normal feature of life in many large Asian cities, even though the authorities, who liked to impose restrictions on the movement of city dwellers after dark, disapproved of them. The Han dynasty poet Ban Gu described the busy scene as follows:
In the nine markets they set up bazaars,Their wares separated by type, their shop rows distinctly divided.There was no room for people to turn their heads,Or for chariots to wheel about.People crammed into the city, spilled into the suburbs,Everywhere streaming into the hundreds of shops.
Merchants sold precious stones, silks and sacred relics.
The blossoming of Chang’an coincided with another important feature in Chinese history – a shift of population from north to south. China’s geography is dominated by its two great rivers: the Yellow River in the north and the Yangzi in the south. The Yellow River is prone to disastrous flooding and could wash away agricultural farmland devastating the livelihoods of peasants farming in the region. The area around the Yangzi is much drier and naturally less suitable for growing staple crops such as rice. But by the time of the Tang dynasty the techniques for irrigating paddy fields had become established (the Chinese imported them from Southeast Asia) and the population began to drift southwards. Today the majority of the country still lives in its southern part. In this way the nature of Chinese society for hundreds of years to come began to take shape, an enormous peasant population controlled as tightly as possible by a highly efficient and cultured bureaucracy.
Inevitably it sometimes broke down. The dynasties that ruled this great land did not succeed one another effortlessly, and the country succumbed to rebellion and disruption on many occasions. But it always grew, a growth that seemed to take it more into itself as it became stronger and bigger. Bureaucracy tends to dislike change – its very purpose is to preserve continuity – and this dependence on maintaining the status quo became typical of the way China chose to govern itself. Traders and travellers still managed to penetrate its heart, but their journeys were long and dangerous and the traffic always went in one direction. As Earl Macartney found to his cost a thousand years after the boom years of Chang’an, the Chinese did not feel the need to look much beyond their own immediate frontiers. No wonder he chose to describe the country as an ‘old, crazy first-rate Man of War’, overawing its neighbours merely by its ‘bulk and appearance’.
The name Chang’an means ‘long-lasting peace’. No doubt the Turks, Persians and Arabs who thronged its bazaars, ate in its restaurants and visited its brothels, thought that this pulsating hub of commerce would last forever. By the start of the ninth century, however, the great city was no more. The last Tang emperor was deposed by a warlord who moved his capital (physically – by dismantling many of the wooden buildings and floating them on barges down the river), to Luoyang 250 miles away. The dynasty that later came to power, the Sung, lost control of the Silk Route and turned to maritime expeditions for commercial gain.
It is extraordinary to think that when George Macartney visited China at the end of the eighteenth century, London, the stinking city and burgeoning hub of a great world empire, home to his king, George III, was still not as big, and perhaps not as well ordered, as the ancient city of Chang’an. China had shut its doors by then. Foreigners could no longer enjoy places like the great cosmopolitan crossroads where the Tang poet Lu Zhaolin had once described the progress of an imperial procession: ‘Chang’an’s broad avenues link up with narrow lanes, where one sees black oxen and white horses, coaches made of seven fragrant woods the dragon biting the jewelled canopy catches the morning sun, the phoenix disgorging dangling fringes is draped with evening clouds.’
As Chang’an died, so China’s wealth became all its own. In the centuries that followed, the empires of the west – Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and British – would grow rich from unashamed mercantilism. But China stayed behind its chosen boundaries, secure in its own customs and traditions, a parallel place of riches protected from the prying activities of the world beyond.
CHAPTER 3 (#)
The Travels of Marco Polo 1271–95 (#)
At the age of seventeen, Marco Polo left Venice with his father and uncle and travelled along the Silk Route to China. He did not return for seventeen years. His account of his experiences became one of the most influential books published in Europe during the Middle Ages.
The poet James Elroy Flecker had a very English vision of the Orient. He did not like the East very much, even though he served as a diplomat in both Constantinople and Beirut. He preferred his own country and the manners and habits of the Edwardian age in which he lived. But when he died, at the age of thirty from tuberculosis, he left behind some of the most beautiful verses ever written about the world beyond the Eastern Mediterranean and the ancient silk routes that took traders on their long and dangerous journeys:
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous talesOf ships and stars and isles where good men rest,Where never more the rose of sunset palesAnd winds and shadows fall towards the West …… And how beguile you? Death has no reposeWarmer and deeper than the Orient sandWhich hides the beauty and bright faith of thoseWho made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
Flecker’s poem, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’, written just before the First World War, created an image of the exotic that Europeans had enjoyed for centuries: hot sand, warm breezes, and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans loaded with cloths, spices and precious stones picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes. The city of Samarkand, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, stood in a fertile river valley where travellers stopped before the last difficult climb across the mountain ranges into China. ‘It is,’ said a tenth-century Iranian writer, ‘the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.’ This was the world that Marco Polo wrote about at the end of the thirteenth century. No wonder his account of his travels was one of the bestselling books of the Middle Ages.
An image of the exotic: hot sands, warm breezes and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes.
The use of the term ‘Silk Road’ came into existence in the nineteenth century just before Flecker was writing. It was used to describe the many different overland trading routes that linked the Mediterranean with China from the days of the ancient classical world until the medieval period. Some ran through central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir and northern India; others went through Iran and the Caucasus, sometimes passing north of the Caspian and Black Seas. A third journey started in India after the traders had reached it by sea. Silk was not the only merchandise that travelled along these trading channels, but because it was light, beautiful and easy to carry, it was always one of the most highly prized imports from the east into Europe. The Romans are believed to have first seen the splendour of silk in the banners of the Parthians who defeated them at the battle of Carrhae in Turkey in 53 BC. Pliny the Elder, who composed his observations on natural history more than a hundred years later, believed that it came from the leaves of trees that had been soaked in water.
The existence of these long commercial highways had a profound effect on the people who passed through them: ideas, technology, fashion and disease also travelled along their path. Empires grew on their back as warlords decided to exploit their commercial potential. The Khazar Empire, which became a great power in the ninth and tenth centuries, developed from the farming communities on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in what is the modern state of Dagesthan. Today it is still a place of enormous ethnic diversity whose people speak Caucasian, Turkish or Iranian languages. Religions, too, found the converts they wanted. Christianity, Islam and Judaism bred easily in this world of constant exchange, although following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD it was Islam that predominated. Inevitably there were times when trade fell away as wars and power struggles made the overland routes too dangerous. But there were also long periods of comparative peace and prosperity, the last of which coincided with the growth of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. His army sacked and looted Samarkand in 1220 and he then went on to establish control over a huge area of China and Central Asia. It was just after this time that Marco Polo made his famous journey.
Marco Polo went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before.
Marco Polo was not the first European to penetrate the heart of Asia but he went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before. Two Franciscan priests, Giovanni di Piano Carpini and Guillaume de Rubrouck, had at separate times in the middle of the thirteenth century travelled to the capital of the Mongol Khan in Karakorum as emissaries from the Pope. Guillaume de Rubrouck described his journey in great detail, recalling at one point how he decided to walk barefoot as was the custom in his order, and how his feet froze as a result. ‘The cold in these regions is most intense,’ he said. In winter the frost never thawed, ‘but with every wind it continued to freeze.’
Marco Polo came from a family of Venetian merchants. When he was six his father and uncle left Venice to set up a trading business on the Black Sea, eventually moving further north to a town on the River Volga. Here they became stranded as a war broke out between rival Mongol clans and they began a detour to the east in order to get home. They were then persuaded that the Great Khan, Kublai, who had never seen any Latin people, would like to meet them and so they went via Samarkand, Kashgar and the Gobi Desert to Kublai’s new capital, in what is today Beijing, arriving there in 1266. This was an historic moment in the history of China. Kublai, grandson of Genghis, had conquered the whole country and founded the Yuan dynasty. Three years later, in 1269, the Polo brothers arrived back in Venice carrying messages from him for the Pope. They stayed for two years before setting off for China once more, this time taking Marco with them.
They decided against the route they had used before. They sailed to the port of Acre on the coast of modern Israel – a city that had already seen one siege in the Crusaders’ attempts to gain control of the Holy Lands and would finally fall to the Saracens twenty years after the Polos were there – and then crossed Syria and Iraq, and went on through Central Asia to Balkh, in today’s northern Afghanistan. From there they crossed the Pamir Mountains, ‘the roof of the world’, where the highest peak is more than 24,500 feet high, and made their way across the Gobi Desert. Marco reported that it was said to be so long ‘that it would take a year to go across it from end to end. There is nothing at all to eat.’ Finally they arrived once more at the court of Kublai Khan. The journey had taken them three and a half years. They had travelled 5,600 miles. Even today such an expedition would be a challenging undertaking, probably impossible for an ordinary family like the Polos, because it goes through so many areas of conflict. Nearly 750 years ago it must have been momentous. Most of it ran through territory completely uncharted by Europeans. Their desire to find things of unique value, to become the traders of treasure the like of which had never been seen before, drove them on.
Their determination yielded their reward. The Polos stayed for seventeen years at the court of Kublai Khan and built up a store of gold and precious stones. Marco’s account of the time he spent there was dictated many years after he returned. Venice went to war with its rival city-state, Genoa, and Marco Polo seems to have been the captain of a galley that was captured by the Genoese. He told the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner who wrote them down and circulated them. They are the observations of a man with a keen eye for business. Describing the city of Kinsay – referring to Hangchow – he claimed that ‘the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of wealth that passed through their hands was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof’. With obvious envy he added that they ‘live as nicely and as delicately as if they were kings and queens’. He described the produce in the markets – ‘of duck and geese an infinite quantity; for so many are bred on the Lake that for a Venice groat of silver you can have a couple of geese and two couple of ducks’ – and explained how Kublai Khan raised his revenues. Marco Polo obviously enjoyed the detail of commerce and ‘heard it stated by one of the Great Khan’s officers of customs that the quantity of pepper introduced daily for consumption into the city of Kinsay amounted to 43 loads, each load being equal to 223 pounds’.
The journey had taken three and a half years; they had travelled 5,600 miles.
It is not surprising that it fell to a Venetian to find and report all these things. The Venetians had gradually built up a maritime empire that extended all over the Adriatic. Their links with the Eastern Mediterranean meant that they also controlled most of Europe’s trade in luxury goods such as spices, cloths and porcelain. During Marco Polo’s lifetime his native city adopted a constitution that gave the adult males in about two hundred families the hereditary right to make and manage state policy. This limited the power of the Doge, the ruler of Venice, and reduced the chances of the inter-family squabbling that bedevilled many other places, like the imaginary Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Stable government allowed the powerful group of ruling families to run things according to their own economic interests. Although the travels of Marco Polo were important as journeys of exploration, and greatly influenced Christopher Columbus when he was planning his voyage to the New World, they were prompted by a desire to improve and expand trade. Marco himself always argued that Europe could expand its trading links and grow richer through an economic relationship with China. ‘Both in their commercial dealings and in their manufactures,’ he said of the Chinese, ‘they are thoroughly honest and truthful. They treat foreigners who visit them with great politeness and entertain them in the most winning manner, offering them advice on their business.’
Marco Polo’s stories of his journey to the court of the Great Khan and the time he spent in China were read eagerly and gained a wide circulation even though printing had not yet arrived in Europe. Not only were his descriptions of an unknown land exciting, they also hinted at the possibility of lucrative opportunities and, perhaps, at an alliance with the Mongols against the Islamic religion which had taken deep root in the countries of the East. This was the age of the Crusades, and Catholic warriors were always looking for allies in their holy war. In the end it was religion rather than commerce that flourished. In 1291 a Franciscan friar, Giovanni da Montecorvino, was sent by the Pope as a missionary to the Chinese capital and in 1307 made Archbishop of Peking. But this spate of activity did not last long. The Yuan dynasty created by the Mongols, although the first to rule over the whole of China, began to decline in the face of economic hardship and famine. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was facing revolt, and in 1368 was driven out to be replaced by the Ming dynasty. The Ming ruled China for nearly three hundred years, creating a highly centralised government that towards the end moved towards isolation from the rest of the world. It began by expelling all Christians from China. Opportunities for trade fell away. The road down which Marco Polo had wandered so successfully was blocked once more.
Many people chose not to believe Marco Polo’s stories and some today are still inclined to think that he made up a lot of it, or took it from others that he met. In the end, however, the weight of evidence is on his side. He provided too much accurate description for his travels to have been pure invention. He died in about 1324 in Venice, a prosperous merchant and the father of three daughters. We have no contemporary picture of him, and his tomb, which was probably in the church of Sam Lorenzo, no longer exists. He has disappeared, as he did in his own lifetime, and we only have his stories as witness of what he did. Those tales tell us a great deal about the Silk Route and the life and adventures of those who journeyed along it.
In recent times, China has tried to resurrect the ancient trading routes that once linked it with the West. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century it began to open up to the markets of the world. When from 1991 onwards the old Soviet empire began to disintegrate into separate nations, China looked to the new neighbours that emerged on its western borders as opportunities for commercial expansion. The city of Horgos in the mountainous province of Xinjiang was identified as a place ripe for growth. The Chinese improved the road that links it with Shanghai in the east of the country, and built new gas and oil pipelines as well as a railway. Horgos lies about 750 miles north-east of Samarkand, on the other side of the forbidding mountains of the Kyrgyz republic. It is a landlocked world. The capital of Xinjing, Urumqi, is said to be farther from a seaport than any other large city in the world. The whole area is as large as Europe, and as ethnically diverse. In 2009, riots between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, who form the majority population in the province, forced Chinese troops to intervene. The people are poor, and the struggle for survival a continuous battle. Border crossings, corrupt officials and impenetrable bureaucracy make everyday commerce difficult to pursue. It is a world that in many respects would have been familiar to Marco Polo and his family. They understood the value of the trade routes of the Silk Road, one of the main pathways to prosperity for the people who lived in the vast lands that separate China from Asia Minor and the beginnings of the European continent. Those routes have never completely died. As the modern world shrinks in pursuit of greater wealth, they may enjoy a full life again.
CHAPTER 4 (#)
The Black Death 1348–50 (#)
The Black Death was the name given to a pandemic of different types of plague that swept across Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century killing millions of people. Its social and economic consequences were devastating.
In October 1347 a Genoese ship entered the port of Messina in Sicily carrying a deadly cargo. Its crew was infected with the plague and within a short space of time the disease spread throughout the town. The ship was ordered to leave immediately, but it was too late: the damage had been done. ‘Soon men hated each other so much,’ said a contemporary account, ‘that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’ As more and more people died, ‘many desired to confess their sins to the priests and draw up their last will and testament. But ecclesiastics, lawyers and notaries refused to enter the houses of the deceased.’ The Black Death had arrived in Western Europe.
The ship had come from Caffa, a port belonging to Genoa on the Black Sea. The Genoese had bought the town from its Mongol owners at the end of the thirteenth century and built it into a prosperous commercial centre that dominated Black Sea trade. It was also the home of a big slave market. In 1347 the Mongols tried to capture it back, but their siege withered as their army was reduced by plague. In a last desperate attempt at victory they catapulted dead infected bodies over Caffa’s walls and then withdrew. Their siege might have been a failure, but they left behind forces of destruction far greater than they ever imagined. By the beginning of 1348 the Black Death had reached Genoa itself. From there it crossed northern Italy into France. In 1349 it entered Britain and a year later spread through Scandinavia and the Baltic. It is difficult to be precise about how many people it killed across Europe. Thirty million is not an unreasonable estimate.
‘Soon men hated each other so much that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’
This number, in a population the size of medieval Europe’s, is a huge proportion – possibly a quarter of the total. The disease that brought such destruction had three variants. The most common was bubonic plague, carried by fleas hosted by black rats. The other two were septicaemic plague, which affects the blood, and pneumonic plague, which is a disease of the lungs. Other illnesses doubtless played their part as well – typhus and smallpox were both common – adding to the general feeling of overwhelming catastrophe. Bubonic plague is particularly horrifying. In medieval Europe black rats lived in houses and other inhabited areas, breeding profusely and never travelling far from their nests. Humans caught the disease from flea bites, or from bites from the rats themselves. Once a person had been bitten by a diseased creature the skin around the infected area grew dark and the body carried the germ to its nearest lymph node, the usual place for filtering foreign particles out of its system. The areas around the groin, armpit or behind the ear began to swell and became intolerably painful; this was followed by internal haemorrhaging. One of the clearest accounts of the plague was written by Gabriele de Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza in Italy, who described how people died:
They felt a tingling sensation as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. The next stage was a fearsome attack that took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil … As it grew more solid, its burning heat caused its patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever with severe headaches. In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought vomiting of blood … The majority died between the third and fifth day.
With no medical knowledge to explain the causes of this rampant slaughter in their midst, the people of medieval Europe turned to heaven and hell for their answers. The clergy in fact were particularly badly hit because they inevitably became infected if they tried to minister to those who were ill. In England their numbers were reduced by nearly a half. Saint Sebastian was declared the patron of plague sufferers because his body full of arrows seemed to represent the onset of the disease. Many pictures of him began to decorate churches and cathedrals: one of the most famous was painted by Giovanni del Biondo for the cathedral in Florence just after the Black Death in the early 1350s. Charitable foundations sprang up as people looked for new ways to expiate the holy anger that had visited such death on the world. There were also scapegoats, particularly Jews. Thousands of them were massacred in Germany as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster. God had to be appeased, but as piety increased so did cruelty towards heretics. But the real effect of the Black Death was felt not in the bitter blows of flagellants as they tried to thrash evil spirits from their bodies, or in the exhortations of priests who claimed that the disease was part of ‘God’s command’, but in the economic life of the people of Europe.
The people turned to heaven and hell for their answers.
The commercial activity of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century was prosperous, conservative and confined. Its trading routes had reached a limit beyond which they would not significantly expand until Christopher Columbus sailed to America 150 years later. To the south, the Italian city-states controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. To the north the German ports of the Hanseatic League, particularly Lubeck, dominated the Baltic. European towns tended to be run by powerful merchants’ guilds that kept a tight rein on the activities of their craftsmen and artisans. The countryside was still in the grip of the nobility who expected service from their peasants in return for providing them with land to cultivate. It was a carefully protected, feudal world that had developed just enough to introduce the first fruits of capitalist enterprise into its system. But it was also an age of dreadful calamity, the worst of which was the Black Death, and it was this that brought about or accelerated a process of change. In the early part of the century there was a terrible famine. The European population had been growing steadily but a series of poor summers and hard winters destroyed crops and brought about mass starvation in the years 1315–17. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France exhausted the energies and drained the resources of both countries. Edward III’s victory over the French at the Battle of Crécy at which his son, the Black Prince, fought heroically and ‘won his spurs’, took place only two years before the Black Death carried all before it.
Thousands of Jews were massacred as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster.
Disease, war and famine began to corrode Europe’s social structure. In the towns, craftsmen rebelled against the restrictions imposed on them. In Flanders between 1323 and 1328, city workers and peasants rose up and challenged the authority of their masters. In France the depredations of disbanded mercenaries from the French army who roamed around trying to live off the land contributed to a rebellion in the Ile de France in 1357. In England, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the most serious challenge to the authority of the Crown and the ruling nobility throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. All these uprisings were crushed with rapid brutality. Europe in the fourteenth century did not succumb to revolution, but it did not escape from upheaval altogether. A catastrophe like the Black Death so reduced the total labour force that those who were left behind felt themselves to be in a stronger position than they had been before; a scarce labour force is always a valuable one.
Although manufacturing and trade were very important, land remained Europe’s principal source of wealth. Land belonged to the Crown, the Church and the nobility. In this organisation the nobility furnished the monarch with military support in return for being given valuable estates which the peasants farmed in return for the service they gave to their lords and masters. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the nature of the relationship between landowner and peasant had begun to change. The old system of labourers being tied to the manor by bonds of duty and obligation had developed into one that was more similar to a straightforward relationship between landlord and tenant. With labour scarce the tenants had more bargaining power and in some cases were able to move from one manor to another in search of work. Some estates broke up as their owners decided to lease the land to peasant farmers rather than own and manage it all themselves. A nation’s wealth, once the exclusive preserve of a small ennobled governing class, began to be shared more widely. This was a gradual but significant process. The Flemish, French and English peasants who marched in anger and desperation against those who ruled them won no immediate victories, but the underlying causes of their grievances began a slow transformation that would ultimately move Europe out of feudalism and into the modern world.
The plague remained a constant feature of European life after the Black Death of 1348–50 finally died out. It has been estimated that Europe suffered an outbreak somewhere every eleven years in the hundred years that followed. It continued after that: its last great manifestation was the Plague of London in 1665 which killed about twenty percent of the city’s population. In the middle of the seventeenth century people were rather more organised about coping with an outbreak of disease than they had been three hundred years earlier, but they still had no idea what caused it. The author Daniel Defoe wrote an imaginary diary of the London Plague more than fifty years after it happened. It was based on parish records and the recollections of citizens who had been there at the time: ‘So the Plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.’
Man cannot fight the things he does not understand. His greatest achievements can be destroyed by the unexpected. The Black Death terrified Europe, descending like a threatening cloud that brought it to a halt and left it groping for a new direction. Its effects were devastating. The population in many places declined by as much as thirty or forty percent – and stayed there, failing to recover even when the epidemic had long passed. The population of Toulouse, for instance, stood at 30,000 in the early fourteenth century: a hundred years later it was only 8,000. The Italian poet and author Boccaccio witnessed the effects of the disease in Florence and wrote about it in his book, The Decameron. He described the mass burials and claimed that some women developed loose morals because of the need to ‘expose’ their bodies as they investigated their illness. ‘The authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,’ he wrote. ‘Every man was able to do as he pleased.’ The Black Death fundamentally changed people’s attitudes towards wealth, and left behind a world very different from the one upon which it inflicted such horror.
CHAPTER 5 (#)
The Foundation of the Dutch East India Company 1602 (#)
For a hundred and fifty years, from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, world trade was dominated by the Dutch Republic. This achievement was largely due to the creation of a unique institution, the Dutch East India Company.
William the Silent is one of the great heroes of European history. His proper name was William of Orange, a Dutch nobleman who resented the injustice of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, rebelled against it and led the seven Dutch United Provinces to independence as a republic. He was called ‘the Silent’ because he was careful about what he said in public, sometimes avoiding saying what he thought. Under his leadership in 1581, the United Provinces signed the Oath of Abjuration in which they renounced Spanish rule. Although they were not formally granted independence until nearly seventy years later, in 1648, they operated from this moment on as a nation in their own right. The Spanish King, Philip II, proclaimed William an outlaw and he was assassinated three years after the Oath. ‘As long as he lived,’ wrote the American historian, J. L. Motley, ‘he was the guiding star of a whole great nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’
At the time of his death the republic he had helped to create seemed an insignificant country compared to the magnificence of the Habsburg Empire from which it had seceded. Only the northern part of the Netherlands had secured its independence. The south was still firmly under Spanish control: its Catholic nobility did not want to be part of William’s little republic and remained allied to King Philip and his able commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma. From these inauspicious beginnings the Dutch Republic grew with astonishing speed. At home, the work of its artists turned it one of the finest centres of painting Europe has ever seen, and the seventeenth century became known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art. Abroad it demonstrated rather more practical, and ruthless, skills as the commercial activities of the Dutch East India Company transformed it into a world power.
The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world.
The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world. It was created after a period when it seemed as though William the Silent’s dream of independence had died with him. Some of the Dutch provinces, disunited and unable to agree on a common ambition, were taken back into Spanish control by the Duke of Parma. But in 1590 he was despatched to France by Philip II to support Catholic opposition to the new French King, the Protestant Henry IV. With Parma out of the way, the Dutch rebels were at last able to consolidate their drive for independence and make the transition from a group of united provinces to a proper republic. But it was still a nation made up of separate entities. Although it was governed by a ‘States General’ that represented all the country’s different provinces, its constitution stated that this body ‘had no overlord but the deputies of the Provincial Estates themselves’.
The Dutch East India Company, the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, generally known then as the VOC, was the creation of rival merchants with one common interest – the pursuit of wealth. In 1598 all Spanish and Portuguese ports were closed to Dutch shipping, forcing the United Provinces to look beyond the Mediterranean for new trading opportunities. The obvious markets were South America, which was opening up steadily following the voyages of exploration of the sixteenth century, and Asia. South America was a difficult destination for the Dutch because the Spanish and Portuguese had established firm control there. Asia seemed a better bet, but here the problem was that so many Dutch ships were chasing after the same things that the spoils were in danger of becoming dissipated. By 1599, nine different Dutch companies were in the business of trying to get their hands on spices, tea, cotton and other goods from the East Indies. Many voyages ended in disaster. About a tenth of the ships that set sail never returned and many Dutch crews were lost without trace. The man who came up with a rescue plan was Johan van Oldenbarneveldt.
William the Silent
William the Silent (1533–84) was a curious product of Habsburg Europe: a sixteenth-century German prince, he inherited the French princedom of Orange, spoke French and liberated the Dutch, who have called him ever since the ‘Father of our Nation’.
William, whose full title was William I, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, was introduced as a boy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles grew to trust William, charging him with important negotiations and military engagements in the Netherlands. But William, an important member of the Dutch political elite (he held the title of ‘Stadtholder’), was far less enamoured with Charles’s son, Philip II, who became King of Spain in 1556. William disliked Philip’s religious intolerance towards Protestants and his encroachments on the Dutch nobility’s tradition of autonomy.
William’s upbringing as a Lutheran and then a Catholic (he would finally settle on Calvinism in 1573) taught him the importance of freedom of religion. ‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people,’ he once said, ‘and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’ William’s nickname ‘Silent’ is thought to have developed in this context. According to one story, while out hunting, the French king, Henry III, revealed a secret agreement to eradicate Protestant heretics, believing William, who was present but kept silent, to be a party to it.
William’s combination of political reality and idealism prompted him to rebel against the Habsburgs in 1567. He led the Dutch to several military successes culminating in the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and a formal declaration of independence by the renegade Dutch provinces in 1581. But he declined the crown, hoping instead that the French Duke of Anjou would become the monarch. His support of the Frenchman, who left the Netherlands after a short and unhappy stay, made William unpopular with many of his fellow countrymen although he remained the Stadtholder of the two important provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Meanwhile Philip II offered 25,000 crowns for William’s assassination. A French Catholic, Balthasar Gérard, took up the offer and, in a private audience with the prince, shot him in the chest. ‘My God have pity on my soul,’ he is supposed to have cried as he died. ‘My God have pity on this poor people.’
Many Dutch crews were lost without trace.
Van Oldenbarneveldt was the raadpensionaris – the Secretary of State – of the province of Holland. By all accounts a rather imperious character with a stiff and difficult manner, he had a fine legal mind, great vision and indomitable determination. In his view, war brought ‘little glory and great expense’. The provinces needed to be sure they could make money. The way to do that was to form their own company so that they could spread the cost of investment in ships and capital equipment. By pooling resources and sharing profits they would be able to build up the reserves necessary to fund the dangerous business of exploiting the East. They had not only the Spanish and Portuguese to contend with, but the English too. An English East India Company had been founded in 1600. Oldenbarneveldt set about trying to persuade the leaders of the different Dutch provinces to adopt his idea.
The desperate situation in which they found themselves speeded up their willingness to bury their differences and Oldenbarneveldt was able to devise a common plan for their commercial salvation. He then drew up the new company’s statutes and charter, and the Dutch East India Company came into being in Amsterdam in January 1602. It had six chambers, one each in the main ports of the United Provinces. Each of these chambers elected delegates who sat as the company’s directors. There were seventeen of them, the ‘Heeren XVII’ or Seventeen Gentlemen, who had the responsibility of guiding the fortunes of this semi-political, totally commercial and all-powerful corporation. Although the directors reported to the States General of the Dutch Republic, they were given enormous powers. In order to support their monopoly on trade in the Far East they were given the authority to raise armies, start wars, capture territory, build garrisons, negotiate with local chiefs and build their own ships. In the first instance their charter was to run for twenty-one years.
Nothing explains the success of the Dutch East India Company better than the exploits of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. An adventurer in the mould of Francis Drake or Robert Clive, Coen was harsh, clever and brave. Carefully controlled by the diligent burghers of the company for which he worked, he laid the foundations of the Dutch Empire in the East Indies and established its lucrative trading monopoly in Indonesia. He trained as a bookkeeper and sailed on his first voyage to Asia in 1607 where he experienced the rough and dangerous conditions in which the Dutch East India Company’s employees worked. The merchants had nothing but contempt for the sailors who risked their lives to make them rich. They called them ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’ and forced them to sign contracts in which they agreed to reimburse their employers for their food and equipment, amounts that could take as much as a year’s service to pay back. On his first journey, Coen’s commander was killed on the Banda Islands in the Indian Ocean. Coen came to realise that nothing less than conquest would give the Dutch ownership of the valuable territory they wanted and in 1614 sent the Seventeen Gentlemen of the Dutch East India Company a paper setting out his views about how this could be achieved. What was required, he told them, was ‘a grand resolution in our fatherland’ to send ships and men to subdue the area and bring it into the ownership of the company. It is extraordinary to think that a group of merchants sitting in the coastal towns of the Netherlands could simply set about conquering a large part of the world. But that is what they did, and Jan Pieterszoon Coen was their agent in this task.
He captured Jakarta from the British, which the Seventeen renamed ‘Batavia’. He subdued the Islands of Banda with great savagery – although he proposed the use of ‘justice backed up by force’, force tended to be the main method of achieving his aims – and established a thriving capitalist economy. This was to be the pattern of European colonial expansion for many years to come. Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters. Coen called for higher quality settlers to emigrate to the East Indies rather than the ‘scum’ who normally travelled in Dutch ships. He encouraged Chinese workers to come and help the work of empire-building, and used slaves to swell their numbers. For all this he was rewarded with 23,000 guilders (a considerable amount, given that the daily wage for a skilled worker was about 1 guilder); each of his achievements was carefully itemised, valued and rewarded by the meticulous merchants for whom he worked. He died of dysentery in Batavia during his second tour of duty in 1629.
Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters.
The Dutch East India Company provided much of the wealth of the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth century. At its height it had a presence in Persia, Bengal, Taiwan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. It also expanded beyond Asia into South Africa when, in 1652, it sent a detachment of men to establish a base on the Cape. Its intention was to protect the passage of ships on their way east, rather than to colonise the area, but full settlement inevitably followed from this first expedition. By this time there were 1,700 Dutch ships involved in international trade, more than England and France combined. The accession of William of Orange to the English throne in 1688 began the long process of decline as, bit by bit, power and influence transferred from the Netherlands to Britain, and the Dutch became the junior partners in the alliance. The British East India Company became a serious competitor to the Dutch Company, as did the French Compagnie des Indes founded in 1664. The French were late entrants into the scramble for the riches of the Orient, but highly successful once they recognised the opportunity. Between 1780–84, the Anglo-Dutch alliance was over and the two countries went to war. The result was a disaster for the Netherlands which finally lost its monopoly over East Indies trade.
There is one other sad footnote to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The man who had been its chief architect, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, became a victim of his country’s religious struggles. The majority of the Dutch people were Calvinist, believing in John Calvin’s stern form of Protestantism. This taught that God elected those he wanted to serve with him in heaven: man’s fate was predestined. By following God’s law he might hope to be elected, but there was no guarantee of this. We know from our own time how this sense of being entirely in God’s hands adds strength to a political cause: in seventeenth-century Europe it helped fuel the Dutch revolt against their Spanish masters. Oldenbarneveldt and his followers came to believe in a more moderate approach than that which Calvin decreed, arguing for a greater degree of religious liberty. This brought them into conflict with powerful elements in Dutch society, and when Oldenbarneveldt decided to raise a militia to help protect the peace in his home province of Holland, his enemies pounced. He was already unpopular for supporting a truce with Spain and the Dutch Stadtholder, William the Silent’s son, Prince Maurits, ordered his arrest. In a trial that was a mockery of justice he was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed at the age of seventy-one in 1619. ‘Is this the wages,’ he asked, ‘of the thirty-three years’ service I have given to the country?’
Today we can still look at him in the portrait by Michiel van Miereveld who, like his great contemporaries Rembrandt and Frans Hals, painted the men and women who led the Netherlands in its golden age. He looks towards us, serious, intelligent and sombrely dressed, a white ruff the only splash of brightness in a picture of unbending resolution. He showed his countrymen how the wealth of the world could be theirs for the taking. It was a lesson they learned with enthusiasm.
CHAPTER 6 (#)
The Invention of the Flying Shuttle 1733 (#)
In 1733 John Kay patented an invention called the Flying Shuttle. It transformed the cloth-weaving industry, the first of a train of events that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution.
In the early 1840s a young German called Friedrich Engels was despatched to Manchester to work in a family business. His father hoped that the experience would relieve him of his radical tendencies, but it had the opposite effect. In 1845, Engels published a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which has survived ever since as one of the great classic texts of socialist theory. In it he argued that the Industrial Revolution had transformed the lives of the English working classes. The workers’ pre-industrial condition, he wrote, was ‘not worthy of human beings’: labourers could barely read or write and existed in a state of docile obedience to the so-called superior classes. ‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest; for their looms and gardens; and knew nothing of the mighty movement, which beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.’ They were woken from their submissive torpor, Engels argued, by the invention by James Hargreaves of the Spinning Jenny in 1764; this was the year that Engels took as the moment the Industrial Revolution began. Though it is true that large-scale industrialisation in Britain did not begin until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the process really started much earlier – in 1733, when John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle.
Britain led the way in the Industrial Revolution and its history is essentially the history of Britain from the last years of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It was a revolution because it transformed everything. It changed people’s lives – where they lived, how they worked and how they were organised. It changed the status of the nation, catapulting Britain into a great power that dominated world trade. Most importantly, it changed attitudes, ultimately creating a working class that demanded proper involvement in the affairs of the state in return for its role as an essential engine of prosperity. Britain today is a country that, aside from London, is built around its great industrial cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast and Glasgow. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this structure was very different. The main provincial centres were York, Exeter, Bristol (because of its importance as a port), Norwich and Newcastle. When the Industrial Revolution got under way, most of these places, all ancient cathedral cities and big market towns with a long history of being at the centre of their communities, began to lose their influence as factories and the jobs that went with them grew up elsewhere. Many new towns grew tenfold during the course of the eighteenth century. Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1701 which grew to 84,000 by 1801; Liverpool increased from 6,000 to 78,000 in the same period; and Birmingham from 7,000 to 74,000. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population growth had accelerated even more: Liverpool’s stood at 443,000, Manchester at 338,000 and Birmingham at 296,000. York had only 40,000 people, Exeter and Norwich less than that. Between 1750 and 1850 the axis of regional life in Britain swung and settled in a completely new position.
This great cycle of change was unique in Europe. In other countries, particularly France, the German states and Belgium, industrialisation followed the British lead and there was expansion and rapid growth. But it did not have the same effect of disrupting the influence of those countries’ traditional urban centres. In Britain this experience was intensified by the realisation that steam power could be used for transport as well as manufacturing and the age of the railways began. From the 1840s new railway companies sprouted up all over the place. Like the emergence of the internet in our own time, the railway network became the epitome of achievement, a vital ingredient in a modern, aspiring society. The big difference was that railways, like the pulsating new towns they connected, required civil engineering on an enormous scale. Bridges, embankments, sidings and warehouses littered the countryside, while in the towns splendid new stations were built alongside other gothic monuments of civic self-confidence – town halls, libraries, museums and churches. The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom. But like all booms it eventually went into decline, leaving behind the people it had lured into its success and the buildings that accompanied its astonishing growth. It took barely two generations for a vision of the future to be seen, built, celebrated and lost. Today Britain’s ‘industrial heritage’ is a central part of what the nation is. The memorials of the Industrial Revolution are a formidable reminder of lost wealth, almost as precious as the thing itself.
The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom.
One of the finest of those memorials is Manchester Town Hall. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse (whose other masterpiece is the Natural History Museum, London), the Town Hall is decorated with murals by Ford Madox Brown, a painter who enjoyed depicting moral and historical scenes. The Manchester murals tell the story of the city’s history through some of its most-celebrated events. One of these is the occasion in 1753, legend has it, when machine-breakers raided John Kay’s home to try to destroy his invention, forcing him to run for his life.
John Kay came from near Bury in Lancashire where he worked as a reed maker. Reeds are combs used to hold apart the crosswise threads (or ‘weft’) in a weaving loom. Until John Kay came up with his invention of the Flying Shuttle weavers used their hands to pass a shuttle containing the crosswise threads across the downward thread (or ‘warp’) on their looms. Building up pieces of cloth in this way was time-consuming. Weavers always had to change the position of their hands, and two or more of them were needed to make pieces of cloth bigger than the span of an individual’s arms. There was also a lack of consistency. The quality of each piece of cloth depended entirely on the skill of its weaver. Kay simplified the whole process by automating the movement of the shuttle. He put it on wheels and mounted it on the edge of the loom’s comb, allowing it to run quickly in a completely straight line between two spring-loaded boxes at either end. In this way a single weaver could make pieces of cloth to any size required by giving the shuttle a quick flick with a piece of string attached to a stick that sent the mechanism flying back and forth across the loom. Suddenly one weaver could make much more cloth than he could before and build it up on his own to any size required. The productivity of the weaving industry was dramatically increased.
At the time Kay was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.
Kay went on to invent several other pieces of equipment that were used to improve the efficiency of the textile industry, but he does not appear to have made any money out of any of them. He seems to have been a rather difficult and quarrelsome individual. He tried to charge hefty royalties for his Flying Shuttle, but manufacturers either refused to pay or simply copied his invention. Kay went to France to try his luck there, but ran up against the same problems as he had at home. His genius for invention does not seem to have transferred to the world of business and his death in France in about 1780 went unrecorded. Only time has given him his place in history. While he lived he was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.
His ideas, and many of those that followed, such as Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny, helped create the Industrial Revolution – described by the historian E. J. Hobsbawm as ‘the most important event in world history’. Britain was perfectly placed to lead it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, at the same time as industrialisation began to increase, large parts of its agricultural land fell into the hands of only a few landlords. The Enclosure Acts created a system of large estates farmed by tenants or smallholders who no longer owned the land themselves. The peasant class, like the one in France that played an important part in the French Revolution of 1789, did not exist in Britain. Farming had succumbed to the power of the market. The country was a nation of traders – or ‘shopkeepers’ in Napoleon’s famously dismissive phrase – where labour moved comparatively freely to support each new commercial opportunity. The textile industry provided many of these. The Industrial Revolution was built on the colossal expansion of the manufacture of cotton, as Britain became its biggest exporter throughout the world. The mill became a symbol of both prosperity and despair, the scene of many famous Victorian novels about life in Britain in the nineteenth century. Coketown in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is typical. It had, he tells us, ‘a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye’, and in the mills where ‘the hands’ worked long, cramped and unhealthy hours, ‘the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’. Dickens, writing ten years after Engels published his book about the working classes, echoed his concern for the state of Britain’s labouring poor, although he probably would not have agreed with Engels’s observation that the result of its exploitation had to be ‘a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794 (the year of the Great Terror), will prove to have been child’s play’.
That revolution eventually happened, but in Russia, not Britain. The country managed to absorb the surge in population and prosperity that the long cycle of industrialisation created. By the second half of the nineteenth century, many British writers and thinkers had come to realise that it had resulted in an unequal distribution of wealth that needed reform. The economic historian and passionate social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, whose book The Industrial Revolution was highly influential when it came out in 1884, set the tone when, talking about the working classes in a lecture in London, said, addressing them directly:
We – the middle classes, I mean not merely the very rich – we have neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity, and instead of sympathy we have offered you hard and unreal advice … You have – I say it clearly and advisedly – you have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously but if you will forgive us, nay whether you will or not, we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.
Such highly emotional and deeply felt calls for a change helped alleviate the social distress that accompanied the nation’s riches. The Victorian Age was often harsh and hypocritical, but it was fuelled by a determination for improvement as well.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s commercial supremacy around the world was beginning to face strong competition as other European countries began to catch up. After the end of the First World War in 1918, although Britain still called itself an empire, its problems were predominately national rather than global. But the Industrial Revolution continued, and is still continuing. New forms of energy – oil, gas and nuclear – have replaced steam. In our own time, the microchip has transformed our whole world of technology. If this sprawling, never-ending march of mechanisation can be said to have a beginning, it can be found as well as anywhere in John Kay’s simple invention which, as the bulky memorial to him in his home town of Bury observes, ‘quadrupled human power in weaving and placed England in the front rank as the best market in the world for textile manufactures’. Unveiled in 1908, the thirty-four-feet high monument is testament to the pride Bury feels for its famous son who died in France, though no one knows quite when, and is buried, though no one knows where.
CHAPTER 7 (#)
The Foundation of Oil City, Pennsylvania 1859 (#)
In 1859 the world’s first commercially successful oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The world discovered a commodity that would become one of the most valuable it had ever known.
In the late 1850s a former railway conductor called Edwin Drake turned up in the small community of Titusville, Pennsylvania in the United States. He had been sent there by a speculator who wanted him to see if oil could be extracted from the rocks in the area. Local farmers had complained for years that oil seepage polluted their wells. If its source could be located and extracted it could turn out to be a lucrative business opportunity. The speculator, James Townsend, had seen a report from a Yale University chemistry professor which said that oil, once refined, could be used for lighting, lubrication and other purposes. Townsend seems to have liked running his investments on a shoestring. The story goes that he only hired Drake because as a former employee he had a free pass on the railway.
Drake used his steam engine to drill for six days a week.
For the best part of a year Drake experimented with ways of trying to get to the oil, including using the money from his backer and his associates to buy a steam engine to bore down into the rock. They decided against giving him any more advances once he had spent the equivalent of $2,000 without any results – so Drake pressed on with funding the exploration from his own savings. Throughout the summer of 1859 he used his steam engine to drill for six days a week. When water flooded his borehole he drove down an iron pipe to protect his drill. On 27th August, at a depth of nearly seventy feet, he found what he had been looking for. Oil bubbled up to meet him: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.
Oil bubbled up to meet him [Drake]: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.
The Pennsylvania oil well was the first successful commercial enterprise, but drilling for oil had already begun on the other side of the world. Russian engineers had started sinking wells ten years earlier on the Aspheron Peninsula near Baku in Azerbaijan. In 1846 they reported to the Tsar that they had been successful, but development thereafter was rather slow. Imperial permission for drilling more wells was not given until more than twenty years later when Azerbaijan began to grow into a huge oil-producing area. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was competing with the United States as the world’s biggest producer of oil: in 1900 it was producing 11.5 million tons a year compared to America’s 9.1 million, but after the Bolshevik Revolution, oil production was diverted to domestic needs. The market, and the money that went with it, was left to America.
As is often the way with these things, no money found its way into Edwin Drake’s pocket. He eventually retired with a pension of $1,500 a year. Others, however, became fabulously wealthy as they learned how to own and distribute the vast reserves of oil that lay beneath the American continent. In the same year that Drake found oil in Pennsylvania, two young ambitious businessmen, John D. Rockefeller and an Englishman called Maurice Clark, opened a wholesale trading business a hundred miles away from Titusville in Cleveland, Ohio. Four years later, with the American Civil War still in full force, oil had turned the region into a fuming and disreputable place, thick with oil leaks, bars and brothels, known locally as ‘Sodden Gomorrah’. Rockefeller, a stern Baptist and anti-slavery campaigner, stayed out of the war for fear of losing his business. ‘Those vast stores of oil were the gifts of the great Creator,’ he said later, without adding that he was determined to turn the Lord’s benevolence to his own advantage. He set up an oil-refining business with Clark and several other associates, and on 14th February 1865, exactly two months before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated following the defeat of the Confederate Army, bought out his partners for $72,500. ‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘the day that determined my career.’ Within four years, helped by an economy that had started to grow again in a country at peace at last, Rockefeller was running the world’s biggest oil-refining business, producing ten percent of its output. At the age of thirty he changed his company’s name to Standard Oil.
Oil became a vital ingredient in national survival.
Rockefeller was not the only entrepreneur to recognise the value of oil. In 1864, a young Scotsman called Andrew Carnegie who had made money by building sleeping cars for first-class travel on the railways, invested $40,000 in a Pennsylvania oil well. The huge profits he made provided him with the foundation of a business empire on a similar scale to Rockefeller’s. Carnegie eventually made most of his money from iron and steel, though it was oil that set him on the road to enormous wealth. Rockefeller always stuck with oil, first forming a cartel with the railroad companies to control distribution and, when public protest forced that to disband, simply buying out his rivals. By the end of the nineteenth century, Standard Oil was the biggest private business corporation the world had ever seen. In 1911, the United States Supreme Court ruled that its existence contravened anti-trust legislation and ordered that it be broken up. Standard Oil metamorphosed into household names such as Mobil, Exxon, Amoco and Chevron. John D. Rockefeller, no longer an active corporate executive but still a major shareholder with holdings in all of these new companies, became even richer.
Oil was not the ‘driving’ energy of the world when Rockefeller’s huge corporation was broken up. Its main use was for lighting and lubrication –Vaseline was one of Standard Oil’s most successful products – and although valuable it was not seen as an essential part of a nation’s strategic needs. Coal was the fuel that drove the steam engines that kept manufacturing and transport on the move. But as the First World War developed and the motor car and the diesel engine came into use, oil became not just a commodity that made money, but a vital ingredient in national survival. It was Britain, a country without any oil of its own, that first recognised the importance of securing and maintaining oil supplies.
In May 1908, a British engineer called George Reynolds was looking for oil in Iran. Rather like Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania nearly fifty years before, he had been sent there by an English millionaire, William Knox D’Arcy, who had bought the country’s oil concession from the Shah. Armed with his pipe, pet dog and pith helmet, and sustaining his work force with supplies of cider and library books, Reynolds was one of those indefatigable Englishmen who never chooses to give up. Money was running out, conditions were becoming intolerable and he was about to be called home, when he found what he was looking for. His employers founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which, by 1912, had built the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf.
In 1914 the British government, prompted by Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty was determined to modernise the Royal Navy by moving it into oil-fuelled technology, secretly took a majority share in the company. Oil now lubricated the national interest. In 1951 the republican government of Iran nationalised the country’s oilfields, but fearing that it might align with the Communist East rather than the West, in 1953 the United States sanctioned the CIA to support a military coup that returned the Shah to the throne. Oil had also been discovered in Saudi Arabia, in 1938, and then in other parts of the Middle East. After the Second World War republican regimes that were hostile to Western interests came to power in countries such as Egypt and Libya. To defend their interests, America and Britain threw their support behind the old established kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The West’s crucial dependence on oil has kept it closely involved in the politics of the Middle East ever since.
The enormous wealth created by the discovery of oil became an important issue for the two men who had first gained most profit from it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were probably the two richest men the world has ever known. As businessmen they were ruthless, sometimes prepared to bribe or threaten to get their way: the expanding world of American commerce was a cruder place than it is today. At the same time a greater awareness of the responsibilities of wealth was beginning to appear. In 1894, the US journalist and progressive reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who attacked Standard Oil for its business practices, published a book called Wealth Against Commonwealth in which he observed: ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.’ In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.’
The names of Rockefeller and Carnegie live on through the philanthropic trusts their money endowed, permanent reminders of the wealth generated by oil and steel. In Azerbaijan, where the oilfields once competed with and might have overtaken their American counterparts, they remember another philanthropist. Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the son of a shoemaker, went drilling for oil on rented land near Baku. In a repetition of what happened in other parts of the world, his partners gave up and sold him their shares. In 1873 he struck oil and became one of the richest men in Imperial Russia. He could neither read nor write, but used his money to build schools and theatres and to help pay for the pipeline that still brings water to the city of Baku from the Caucasus Mountains a hundred miles away. When the Red Army reached the city in 1920, Taghiyev’s house was seized. He was allowed to live the last four years of his life in his summer cottage not far away, but his second wife was not so fortunate. She died in poverty on the streets of Baku in 1938. The Bolsheviks turned his splendid residence into the Azerbaijan National History Museum, which is what it still is today. The fortunes of the world’s first oil tycoons were very different. In capitalist America their wealth was their greatest protector: in Bolshevik Russia it destroyed them.
CHAPTER 8 (#)
The Treaty of Versailles 1919 (#)
The Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War of 1914–18 to an end. Its terms had the effect of making a defeated Germany feel impoverished and resentful. In trying to build a world of peace it laid down foundations that would lead to another war.
In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting of the First World War. Barely a month later, on 10th December, 75,000 soldiers of the German army marched back into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, a socialist politician who was the new Chancellor of the nation. ‘Welcome to the German Republic,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome home. You should march home with your heads held high. Never have men achieved greater things.’ Warming to his theme, he continued: ‘Your sacrifices have been unparalleled. No enemy has conquered you.’ With those words the mood of the new Germany was born. It was an undefeated country that had either been sold out by conspirators in its own ranks or was suffering from difficulties imposed by the punitive terms of an unfair treaty. The Kaiser’s Fatherland was not just a memory. It still existed. It could rise again.
The Kaiser’s Fatherland still existed … it could rise again.
Ebert was facing a situation that was in danger of running out of control. He and the other moderate socialists that he led, had supported the war as a necessary patriotic measure. He had not wanted to see the end of the monarchy and felt that the proclamation of Germany as a republic following the Kaiser’s abdication had been premature and needed to be ratified by a nationally elected assembly. But he was overtaken by events. By the time he addressed the first meeting of Germany’s new national assembly the following year, 1919, the German Republic was a fact and the country’s mood of resentment more entrenched. To maintain power he needed to respond to it. Germany’s enemies, he told the assembly in his opening speech, were seeking ‘to indemnify themselves at the cost of the German people … These plans of revenge and oppression call for the sharpest protest. The German people cannot be made the wage slaves of other nations for twenty, forty or sixty years.’ His remarks were met with loud applause. Ebert wanted above all to create a true democracy in his defeated homeland – but the task he faced proved hopeless. In the end the German people looked to the right-wing parties to redress their sense of grievance. Within fifteen years, the Nazis had assumed power, democracy died and Europe was on the road to war once more.
The victorious Allies who met in Paris at the end of the First World War wanted above all else to destroy German militarism. They also wanted to establish world peace, rearranging the fragments of disintegrated empires in a way that would ensure the future happiness and prosperity of their subjects. The task they faced was immense and probably impossible. The Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary had arisen out of the old Holy Roman Empire established by Charlemagne in 800 AD, and, in various forms, governed the whole of central and Eastern Europe for centuries. The Hohenzollern Empire of the German Kaiser, the Allies’ main enemy, had used its Prussian base to unite the German states during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a formidable military machine intent on expansion and conquest. These two great engines of state had collapsed and the people they had once governed were looking for new, democratic freedoms. The Allies recognised these ambitions, but they also wanted to punish the aggressor. Graciousness in victory is the greatest of all political virtues but it requires a degree of altruism unusual in human beings. At Versailles the Allies’ understandable desire for punishment outweighed their careful consideration of the future and undermined the hopes of those who thought they had been liberated from imperial control.
Bismarck and the Creation of the German Empire
On 18th January 1871, German princes gathered in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. They had come to witness the crowning of the Prussian King, Wilhelm I, as Emperor of a newly-formed nation – Germany. Before 1871, Germany was a patchwork of independent states over which Austria exerted the predominant influence. But German nationalism was growing. In 1848 revolutionaries demanded unification, offering the Prussian King the imperial throne. He refused, worried that it would lead to military intervention from Austria. But as Prussia’s military, diplomatic and economic power grew, the whole idea of unifying Germany without Austria started to become a real possibility.
The principal architect of this extraordinary achievement was a skilful and loyal diplomat called Otto von Bismarck (1815–98). During the 1850s he became convinced that unification could be achieved in Prussia’s interests. When in 1862 he was appointed Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Prussia he began to employ astute diplomacy blended with timely military intervention to secure his ends. With the assistance of two Prussian soldiers, Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke, the army was reorganised into an impressive fighting force. In 1866 it defeated the Austrian army at Königgrätz, east of Prague. This enabled Bismarck to annex the north German states including Hanover, Frankfurt and Saxony. France, frightened of being encircled by the growing power of Prussia, declared war in 1870. Prussia pounced. Having defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck wasted no time in negotiating with the leaders of the southern German states to complete unification.
Bismarck’s political system ensured strong monarchical authority. As Imperial Chancellor, he pursued a policy of pragmatic, peace-oriented diplomacy that made the new German Empire a powerful country. But his approach met with criticism, not least from Wilhelm II, who became German Emperor in 1888. Wilhelm’s politics were more expansionist and militarist than his Chancellor’s and he forced Bismarck to resign in 1890. The man who more than any other built the modern German state lived in restless retirement until his death in 1898.
‘It was,’ said Troeltsch, ‘reminiscent of the way Rome treated Carthage.’
The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were imposed upon Germany. The Germans took no part in any of the discussions prior to their being told what the Allies had agreed. Apart from being forced to reduce their army to 100,000 volunteers and to severely restrict their manufacture of weapons, the Treaty demanded that Germany accept sole responsibility for starting the war. It also insisted on severe economic penalties, forcing the country to make reparations – in the first instance settled at about $31.5 billion – stripped it of all its overseas colonies and reassigned a large part of its European territory to France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Poland. France was also given all rights for fifteen years over the German coalfields in the Saar on the eastern border between the two countries. Some of these conditions were to be expected: Germany was bound, for instance, to have to hand back Alsace to France and to restore the land it had taken from Belgium. But the economic demands, combined with the requirement to accept all the guilt for causing the war in the first place, aroused the anger of the defeated nation. ‘It was,’ said the German writer, Ernst Troeltsch, ‘reminiscent of the way Rome treated Carthage.’ He was not the only person to feel that the Treaty was unfair. In Britain the economist John Maynard Keynes urged re-negotiation of the terms. In his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919, he said that: ‘Great privation and great risks to society have become unavoidable.’ A new approach was needed to ‘promote the re-establishment of prosperity and order, instead of leading us deeper into misfortune.’ And he quoted the writer Thomas Hardy, whose long verse-drama, The Dynasts, is set in the Napoleonic war that had engulfed Europe a hundred years previously:
… Nought remainsBut vindictiveness here amid the strong,And there amid the weak an impotent rage.
The economic demands aroused the anger of a defeated nation.
In fact France was treated rather more carefully in 1815 than Germany a hundred years later, not least because the French negotiator, Talleyrand, participated in the Congress of Vienna where the peace terms were agreed. Talleyrand was the great survivor of the European politics of his day, a famous prince who had played an important part in the early days of the French Revolution, served as Napoleon’s Foreign Secretary, fallen out with him and then, after his defeat, planned the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The German representative at Versailles, Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff Rantzau had no such pedigree. Summoned to hear the terms of the peace the Allies had agreed, he and his delegation were kept waiting for several days before they were read out to them. They were shocked at what they heard. Brockdorff Rantzau wrote a letter to the President of the Peace Conference, the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, describing the attitude of the Allies as ‘victorious violence’. He declared that the ‘exactions of this treaty are more than the German people can bear’.
The whole approach to peace was also very different in Vienna in 1815 from that which existed in Paris in 1919. The monarchs and princes who set about rearranging Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars were trying to put things back to where they were before Napoleon’s attempt to create a European continent in his own image. Talleyrand helped them by supporting the return of the Bourbons even though he knew, in his own phrase, that ‘they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing’. After the First World War, the politicians making peace wanted to look forward, and to build a world in which war would not happen again. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, was intent on forming a ‘League of Nations’, a multinational body designed to discuss and debate grievances rather than allow them to slide inevitably into conflict. He got what he wanted, even though America did not join the organisation because Congress refused to ratify its membership. The victors also created new countries out of the fragments of dismembered empires. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came into existence as new independent states; Poland was given independent statehood for the first time in more than a hundred and twenty years; and two small and severely weakened countries, Austria and Hungary, came into being as separate entities. All this seemed fair and proper, responding to Woodrow Wilson’s ‘fourteen points’ for peace in which he explained how he believed Europe should be divided up to give autonomy and self-determination to its different ethnic groups.
The League of Nations
The carnage of the First World War generated widespread international agreement ‘to develop cooperation among nations and to guarantee them peace and to avoid future bloodshed’. The League of Nations was established by the Treaty of Versailles to pursue this aim. It was the brainchild of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, who saw it as a mechanism for the promotion of diplomacy, the prevention of war through collective security, and a way of safeguarding human rights for minority groups. But he failed to persuade the American Senate of its value, and the United States never joined it. During its first ten years of operation, the League successfully resolved several disagreements and international diplomatic activity began to be conducted through it. It oversaw an international judiciary as well as a number of agencies dealing with pressing international issues such as refugees, health, disarmament, opium and slavery.
Structurally, though, the League was flawed; it was bureaucratic and unwieldy, and lacked teeth. In 1931 it declared the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in northern China to be wrong but was unable to enforce a withdrawal when Japan withdrew its membership from the organisation. Nor did it halt Hitler’s militarism, which directly contravened its commitment to disarmament and failed to prevent the German invasion of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The outbreak of the Second World War was final proof of the League’s ultimate powerlessness. It was eventually disbanded in 1946 following the foundation of the United Nations, which the Americans joined, and which inherited the League’s ideals as well as many of its agencies.
Germany seethed with resentment. Stripped of much of its territory and saddled with the enormous cost of reparation it seemed to have been treated very harshly. In fact, however, its position was rather stronger than it first appeared, not least because the new countries that had been created were so weak. Furthermore it never repaid all the money that the Treaty of Versailles demanded. France and Britain put great pressure on Germany to pay its debts – they needed the money because they themselves owed $10 billion to the United States. When eventually Germany defaulted on the reparations, the country was leant $200 million in a loan floated on the American market by the banker, J. P. Morgan in 1924. It was quickly over-subscribed. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought further hardship to all the countries struggling with the aftermath of the war, and in 1932 the Allies agreed to cancel reparations altogether in return for one final payment. The German economy started to recover, the new, struggling countries surrounding it became victims of Hitler’s demands for national Lebensraum – living space – and Europe was once again in conflict.
The destruction of empires, whether well-intentioned or not, is never easy. The Treaty of Versailles made two fundamental mistakes. First of all, it imposed economic terms on Germany that proved impossible to fulfil. Secondly, it created a patchwork of weak countries that ultimately fell prey to their aggressive neighbour, Germany. Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria had all come under German control by the time the Second World War broke out in 1939. Implicit in both of these mistakes was a lack of economic common sense. In trying to repair a broken world, the Allies had thought hard about rewards and punishment, but had given little consideration to how any of it was to be paid for. They overlooked the fact that in the years leading up to the war, Germany, as the biggest industrial nation on the continent of Europe, was an important source of wealth for the countries that surrounded it. Their aims were almost entirely political – and in the case of Woodrow Wilson, almost religious. Of the Allies’ approach to the post-war reconstruction, Keynes wrote that ‘that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse (their) interest’. The First World War destroyed the wealth of nineteenth-century imperial Europe. The Treaty of Versailles failed to provide a framework in which it could be replaced.
CHAPTER 9 (#)
The Model T Ford 1908 (#)
The Model T Ford turned America into a nation of motorists and put luxury within the reach of many. The sophisticated pleasures of life were no longer just for the wealthy.
An owner’s manual is not an obvious place in which to look for lofty observations on life, but the one that the Ford Motor Company published at the end of the First World war was not shy about attempting such things. ‘It is a significant fact,’ it warbled, ‘that nearly all Ford cars are driven by laymen – by owners, who in the great majority of cases have little or no practical experience with things mechanical.’ They were, however, not to feel threatened by such ignorance. They had ‘a singular freedom from mechanical annoyances’ owing to the superior craftsmanship of their vehicle, but were still urged to indulge in a little gentle study of its working parts because ‘it is a truism that the more one knows about a thing the more one enjoys it’. Homilies from a manufacturer to its customers reveal a lot. The Ford Motor Company seemed to know that it was in the process of changing the world.
‘I will build a car for the great multitude’ said Ford.
Henry Ford was a visionary in two ways. Firstly, and most importantly, he realised that it was possible to provide ordinary people with what seemed at that time to be an unobtainable luxury – a motor car. ‘I will,’ he declared, ‘build a car for the great multitude.’ Secondly, his manufacturing methods transformed industry by introducing an assembly line capable of mass production. His sturdy little car was a significant invention in its own right. What made it revolutionary was that Ford built a factory capable of distributing it to millions of people. In 1908, the year the first Model T Ford rolled off the production lines, the car cost $825. By 1927, when the last one was built, seventeen million of them had been sold and its price was just $275. The factory at Highland Park in Detroit had reduced the time taken to build each car from around thirteen hours to just over an hour and a half, and was capable of producing one every minute. One of every two cars in the world was a Model T. These are astonishing statistics. In 1927 the population of the whole of the United States was a little over 119 million: by selling seventeen million cars, Henry Ford had unquestionably realised his ambition of bringing the power of motoring to the multitude. The writer E. B. White looked back with wistful humour at the age of the Model T in an article for New Yorker magazine in 1936:
‘Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before.’
The car is fading from the American scene – which is an understatement because to a few million people who grew up with it, the old Ford practically was the American scene. It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before.
For other writers the age of the Model T was not something to be celebrated, even teasingly. In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, published in 1932, the characters live in an era known as ‘AF’ – after Ford – inhabiting a uniform world of drug use and recreational sex where everything is reduced to relentless monotony like the work on an assembly line. For some, Henry Ford’s American dream was the beginning of a universal nightmare.
Henry Ford’s own life provides a similar contrast between the bleak and the sunny. Born in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863, he had little schooling and eventually set up a small business repairing farm machinery. He was a natural engineer and found a job with the Edison Illuminating Company where he was rapidly promoted. He and Thomas Edison became good friends, but Ford left to set up his own company building cars. To begin with his companies failed, even though he and a partner designed and built a racing car that set the world land speed record in 1902. A year later he was able to start a new company. His backers wanted to build luxury cars, but Ford was convinced that the opportunity lay at the other end of the market. He won the boardroom battle and after producing a series of small cars came up with the Model T. The car, and the way in which it was produced, became the epitome of industrial progress. Ford introduced a minimum wage for his workers of $5 a day, double the going rate at the time. His competitors thought he was mad, but he stuck to his principles and followed up his wages policy with, first, a sociology department, and then an education department to try and help his workers spend their new-found wealth wisely. Autocratic but benevolent, it was one of industry’s first recognitions that the welfare of employees was an important component in commercial success. ‘There can be no true prosperity,’ Ford announced, ‘until the worker upon an ordinary commodity can buy what he makes.’
Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 a day, double the going rate at the time.
Like all autocrats, Henry Ford found change difficult and challenge impossible. He refused to respond to the need to manage his business in a more structured way, preferring to rely on the instinct and touch that had made it successful in the first place. Good managers left, and when after 1927 the production of his new car, the Model A, ran into difficulties, he hired thugs to terrorise union members and break up their meetings. At the same time he gave vent to his anti-semitic feelings by running a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that contained articles hostile to Jews. Hitler would be one of Henry Ford’s strongest admirers. The brilliant mechanic who had put America – and the world – on a road from which it would never look back died in 1947 as a rather disagreeable example of a paranoid tycoon.
The life of Henry Ford provides a good description of the way in which the world changed during the twentieth century. It was a change that hinged on one thing above all others: the role of the individual as a consumer. Anyone was entitled to anything as long as he could pay for it. Wealth, even luxury, was within the grasp of all. The role of business, supported by new management techniques, was to ensure that consumers received the marketing messages that would encourage them to participate in this new opportunity.
At the same time as Henry Ford was beginning to manufacture his popular car, another mechanical engineer called Frederick Winslow Taylor published a short book called Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was one of the world’s first management consultants. A talented tennis player – he was a winning partner in the doubles competition for the first American National Championships in 1881 – he wanted to bring to industry the same precision and efficiency he applied to his sport. Good management, he argued, was the result of carefully designed rules and principles. Workers in America, he said, suffered from the delusion that improved efficiency reduced the amount of labour required; their methods of working encouraged ‘soldiering’ or taking as long as possible to complete each job; and they were organised on a ‘rule-of-thumb’ basis rather than by clear and precise systems. Taylor wanted to achieve the maximum amount of prosperity for both employer and employee and explained how properly defined tasks and responsibilities could achieve this. His ideas followed those of another pioneer in the field of management consultancy, Frank Gilbreth, who not only came up with ideas for improving efficiency but tried to organise his twelve children by the same principles (his efforts were turned into the film Cheaper by the Dozen based on a humorous book written by his son). But the effects of the ideas of men like Taylor and Gilbreth were serious and permanent. They brought to industry – particularly American industry – a belief in the idea of management as a science, even an art, deserving of recognition on the same level as other human activities hitherto regarded as more important or refined. Henry Ford remained very much his own man – an industrial dictator to the end of his working life–but in creating the car plants based on mass production he used many of the principles of ‘scientific management’.
With mass production went mass consumption. Henry Ford made sure that people bought his cars by setting up a system of dealer franchises across America: there were 7,000 of them by 1912. At the same time he campaigned for better roads and more petrol stations to ensure that his customers had all they needed to enjoy his products more. As his competitors – Chrysler, Packard, Dodge and others – entered the market, the motor car became the symbol of middle-class prosperity. The consumer boom stretched beyond tarmac and gas pumps to shops, cinema and home appliances. In the same year that Ford launched the Model T, Richard Sears was making $41 million a year in sales by offering the nation what it wanted to buy through his mailorder business. Later, as the suburbs sprawled out of the towns, he built department stores all over the country. In Britain, Marks and Spencer began a similar operation, but much more limited in size and with a smaller range of goods for sale. In 1927 the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, appeared. Six years later, American families could watch a film from their cars as the first drive-in movie theatres were built. Meanwhile radios, refrigerators and sewing machines were selling in huge numbers – often bought on long-term credit plans. The liquid embodiment of American consumerism, Coca-Cola, was a worldwide brand by the end of the 1920s.
There were attempts to turn the relentless tide of acquisitive prosperity. The American temperance movement successfully lobbied for the introduction of Prohibition in 1919, which for fourteen years, until it was repealed in 1933, banned the manufacture, sale or transport of alcohol. This attempt at applied morality – its supporters called it ‘The Noble Experiment’ – was ultimately unsuccessful. Illegal bars, ‘speakeasys’, mushroomed in their thousands and, as with the modern drug trade, gangsters cashed in on the high profits to be made from illegal but much-wanted goods. In 1929 an economic theorist and writer called Ralph Borsodi inveighed against the way of life that America had adopted in a book called This Ugly Civilisation. ‘America,’ he wailed, ‘is a respecter of things only, and time – why time is only something to be killed, or butchered into things which can be bought and sold.’ Borsodi came from a family of Hungarian immigrants – one of millions that had been attracted to America because of its freedom, particularly its wide, open spaces. For men like him, the nation’s founding fathers had been people who combined qualities of intellectual strength, physical vigour and a belief in the land – virtues that were being strangled in a jungle of greed.
The consumer the spender – was to be the agent of renewal.
America, happy and free in its new motor car, was not to be sidetracked. Even when its economy went into severe decline from 1929 as a result of the worldwide depression, the role of the new consumer was actually strengthened rather than weakened. President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, the economic legislation designed to resurrect the nation’s fortunes, provided for consumers to participate in the new authorities he created in order to encourage industrial and financial reform. In the election campaign that first brought him to power he announced that: ‘I believe we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer.’ The consumer – the spender – was to be the agent of renewal. The irony was that Henry Ford, who did more than anyone to create the acquisitive citizen whose willingness to spend lay at the heart of economic reconstruction, disliked the idea of government involvement in business and never supported Roosevelt’s reforms.
The Model T Ford was by some accounts an exasperating car to own. Its popular name was the ‘Tin Lizzie’ and as E. B. White recalled in the New Yorker magazine: ‘The lore and legend that governed the Ford were boundless. Owners had their own theories about everything; they discussed mutual problems in that wise, infinitely resourceful way old women discuss rheumatism.’ Cantankerous, strange, cheap and constantly available, it became a fixture of the American way of life – a symbol of wealth that everyone could aspire to own.
CHAPTER 10 (#)
The Credit Crunch 2007 (#)
In 2007 the world’s financial markets began to face serious problems as owners of houses in America began to default on their loans. It became clear that banks all over the world had extended credit unwisely and were about to collapse. This, combined with a general market recession, created the most serious global economic crisis for nearly a century. It became known as the Credit Crunch.
It is with some caution that I decided to include the Credit Crunch in this book. When in the future people look back at the first years of the twenty-first century, the world’s economic problems that began in 2007 may not appear particularly significant. But for those who have lived and are living through them they represent a moment of reckoning. The Credit Crunch brought to a shuddering halt a cycle of prosperity and growth that had lasted, with one brief interlude, for more than thirty years. It seemed unstoppable and its sudden end sent waves of fear and panic round the world. As fear subsided it was replaced by sober reflection. Many people, particularly in the West, began to reassess their attitudes towards individual wealth. The chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland that lost more than £24 billion in 2008 – the biggest in Britain’s corporate history – was urged to relinquish part of his pension as the public mood turned against the big salaries and bonuses earned by senior managers.
Waves of fear and panic went round the world.
In 2009, in a BBC Reith Lecture, an American political philosopher argued that it was time that the self-interest of the individual was replaced by what he called ‘a new politics for the common good’. It is still too early to say whether these agonies of conscience have made a long-term difference to the way men and women behave. In part they are simply the result of the anxiety people always feel during a period of economic decline when wages and profits are falling, concerns that tend to evaporate once growth and prosperity return. That is why the Credit Crunch is important. Whether it was just another blip in the economic cycle, or something far more, only time will tell.
‘Banking,’ said Walter Bagehot, ‘is a watchful but not laborious trade.’
In 1873 the banker, journalist and author Walter Bagehot published a book about banking in Britain called Lombard Street. Britain was then the richest country in the world, its money markets a global hub for credit and exchange. Bagehot was a shrewd and lucid observer of British public life. ‘Banking,’ he said, ‘is a watchful but not a laborious trade.’ Watchfulness, however, had not been much in evidence in a recent banking scandal. In 1866 a private bank called Overend, Gurney & Company, collapsed. It had over-extended its lending and had invested heavily in the surging growth of the railways. When the market weakened it found itself unable to meet its liabilities. ‘In a short time,’ remarked Bagehot, its managers had ‘substituted ruin for prosperity and changed opulence into insolvency.’ Other banks followed Overend, Gurney & Co. into liquidation and a variety of companies also failed as the credit crisis took its toll on the country’s economy. The directors of Overend, Gurney & Co. asked the Bank of England for help, but were refused. They were eventually tried for fraud at the Old Bailey, though the court found them guilty of ‘a grave error’ rather than a crime. Twenty-four years later, in 1890, the bank of Baring Brothers nearly collapsed because of unwise investments it made in Argentina. This time the Bank of England did step in, averting a crisis that might have brought the whole of the British banking system to its knees. Bagehot had proposed this course of action: he believed the Bank of England should be used as a central bank whose reserves could help other banks and businesses weather the difficulties of the economic cycle.
These dramatic events shook the confidence of Britain’s powerful commercial interests, but they made few long-term differences to the way people behaved. Britain in 1900 was very similar to Britain in 1870 and its Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, a typical product of the grand Victorian world – aloof, patrician and suspicious of democratic change.
But by the time the next crisis arose, thirty years into the twentieth century, the situation had changed dramatically. As with the Credit Crunch, the Great Depression of the 1930s began in America when the country’s stock market crashed in 1929. Although America had enjoyed a period of booming economic growth, there was still a wide division between rich and poor. The rich pumped their surplus cash into speculative stocks. When these failed not only they, but the poor they had left behind, suffered terribly. This suffering, which spread into Europe and the rest of the world, meant that the Great Depression had enormous political consequences. In America, President Roosevelt’s New Deal introduced fierce banking regulations, farm subsidies and a more inclusive approach to many aspects of the economy. In Britain, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government to try to cope with the crisis. In Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini used economic misfortune to strengthen their call for vigorous anti-democratic measures. The Great Depression did not create fascism, but it certainly helped.
Further afield the freedom movements that had begun to develop in the colonial territories of the great powers pointed to economic misery as the inevitable legacy of selfish, wealth-obsessed masters. The man who would become the first Prime Minister of an independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, said in a speech in 1929: ‘Our economic programme must … be based on a human outlook and must not sacrifice man to money.’ In Brazil, where growing prosperity suddenly began to decline, Getulio Vargas, one of the country’s most influential leaders in the whole of the twentieth century, seized power in 1930 and became known as ‘The Father of the Poor’. Economic turmoil had a global impact. At the end of the nineteenth century, capitalist economies were controlled by a few people and their mistakes could generally be contained without triggering revolutionary reverberations. By the middle of the twentieth century, the widening of the democratic process that accompanied the continuing march of industrialisation meant that ‘the market’ was everybody’s concern. The whole world demanded answers when things went wrong.
‘The market’ ran free. Capitalism was the great conqueror.
Answers could no longer be heard above the noise of war by the end of the 1930s. But in the fifty years that followed peace the world economy was further transformed. To begin with reconstruction was slow and in many countries, including Britain, times were harsh and austere. Gradually, however, as the old Bolshevik Communist system in Russia collapsed, China began to open its doors, the European Community grew larger and communications improved through the growth of the internet and air travel, the privations of the past slipped away. ‘The market’ ran free. Capitalism was the great conqueror. In Britain and America emphasis on the power of individuals to control their economic destinies became the dominant feature of policy-making. This approach spawned attitudes that were satirised in the film Wall Street in 1987. One of the main characters is a ruthless corporate financier called Gordon Gekko. ‘Greed,’ he tells a shareholder meeting, ‘for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right, greed works.’
Gordon Gekko is a caricature used to capture a prevailing mood. But when the Credit Crunch struck twenty years after he first appeared on the screen, his speech had something of a prophetic ring to it. In the film Gekko gets his come-uppance. In real life, too, the good times stopped as lifestyles financed by credit were no longer sustainable. In this atmosphere what people had once applauded as a healthy aspiration for wealth-creation was now condemned as nothing better than careless greed. The banks were blamed for over-extending themselves and lending money to creditors whose earnings could not support the debts they were encouraged to take on. The BBC Reith Lecturer Michael Sandel described the end of what he called three decades of ‘market triumphalism’. It was time, he said, to think again about what ‘the market’ was for. Putting it all down to greed was too easy because greed, in the form of self-interest, was how markets functioned. What was wrong was allowing them to intrude into areas of public policy for which they were entirely inappropriate. Arguments like this are significant. If heeded, they mean that the Credit Crunch will result in a fundamentally different approach towards money and how it is made.
What Do We Mean By ‘Financial Crisis?’
A financial crisis occurs when institutions or assets lose a great deal of value. Financial crises occurred more frequently from the seventeenth century onwards with the increasing circulation of money, the development of banking institutions, and globalisation.
Stock market crashes and financial bubbles occur when speculation drives up the price of an asset or stock above its true value. When participants begin to sell the stock, panic-selling often takes over, and the price declines dramatically, prompting a stock-market crash. ‘Tulip Mania’ in the 1630s is regarded as the first economic bubble. Prized as a luxury during the Dutch Golden Age, speculative trading saw tulip prices peak and collapse in 1636–37. In 1825 the stock market in London crashed partly as a result of highly speculative investments in Latin America, including the imaginary kingdom of Poyais, and nearly led to the collapse of the Bank of England. The best-known crash is that of Wall Street in 1929.
Bank runs occur when depositors rush to withdraw more money from the banks than the banks hold at the time with the result that depositors lose their assets. The Great Depression in America in 1931 saw a ferocious run on the Bank of the United States.
Currency crises and hyperinflation occur when the supply of paper money increases dramatically causing the value of the currency to decline. The Weimar Republic of Germany experienced this in 1923 when the Deutschmark fell to a value of DM 4,200,000,000,000 to the dollar. Between 1945 and 1946 Hungary experienced hyperinflation when prices rose by over nineteen percent per day.
It is still too early to know whether the Western world will change its attitude towards markets and what they are for. But if they do, it is more than likely that those changes will be created, not by the application of a new philosophy, but by the impact of harsh economic reality. The principal difference between the Great Depression and the Credit Crunch is the effect upon the poorer people of the industrialised nations. In the Great Depression this was devastating, not least because to begin with banks did not know how to cope with it. In particular they made the fatal error of restricting money supply by raising interest rates. In America, the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank, did not intervene and lend to struggling banks in order to prevent their collapse. In the Credit Crunch the reverse happened. Interest rates fell and failing banks were bailed out by governments. This and the improvements in social welfare that have taken place since the end of the Second World War meant that the immediate consequences of the crisis were reduced. The sight of large crowds of homeless or unemployed people has not so far been a feature of the collapse in the markets.
In the longer term, however, that may change: the price of quick salvation is high. The cost of rescuing the financial systems of the West has plunged its governments into deep debt. In 2009 the International Monetary Fund reported that the world’s ten richest economies had borrowed a total of more than $9 trillion in order to cope with the crisis. In a weak global economy, paying back these huge sums will prove a hard task. In Ireland the economic improvements of the previous twenty years have been all but extinguished by the financial turmoil. Everywhere countries face the prospect of introducing older retirement ages, higher taxes and deep spending cuts. In 1929 the sudden shock of the Wall Street Crash led to immediate devastation and despair. In 2010 the aftermath of shock may have been delayed, but not necessarily eradicated. The Credit Crunch could yet lead to the long term of erosion of wealth in the modern world.
2 Freedom (#)
Introduction (#)
Freedom is a much-abused concept. In English we use two words meaning the same thing – ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’. The first has a Teutonic root, the second comes from the Latin. Most other European languages have only one word, for example, liberté in French, freiheit in German or libertad in Spanish. The sad fact is that however many words are used to describe it, in the history of the world those promising liberty or freedom have often lied. Movements claiming to set people free have ended up imprisoning or suppressing them. True freedom is both hard to find and define. Like happiness, with which it is often associated, it is one of the most desired yet most elusive accompaniments to the progress of mankind.
In his book On Liberty published in 1859, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ As with all philosophical pronouncements, it is a statement that begs some questions – most importantly in this case, what is the definition of preventing harm to others? But the broad principle of Mill’s thought is one that many of us would agree with today. It remains a remarkably modern definition of liberty. For most of us our individual freedom is the most precious thing we possess. Furthermore, we take it for granted.
The journey to this state of affairs has been a long one, and it is not finished yet. It started in ancient Greece with philosophers like Socrates who argued that accepted truths should always be tested by rational argument and free discussion. From there it travelled into Roman thought where politicians like Cicero adopted the Socratic approach to open debate. The triumph of Christianity in Europe led eventually to the medieval age of suspicion and persecution. Argument became heresy in the mire of the Inquisition. By the fifteenth century, the ideas of the Renaissance, combined with the desire for greater religious freedom that inspired the Reformation, began to shake the foundations of the Church, although freedom of thought was still suppressed. Protestants could be just as ruthless as Catholics in exterminating opinions of which they did not approve. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when scientific discovery started to undermine the defences of a world built on religious foundations, that rational thought burst into the explosion of ideas we call the Enlightenment. From that time on concepts of freedom that we would recognise today came into being. Modern political thought has its beginnings in the philosophers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This section of the book picks its way through this process beginning with the slave rebellion against the Roman Republic led by Spartacus in 73 BC. Its bravery and brilliance have been an inspiration for many of those fighting for freedom ever since. Jan Hus, a Czech who was burned at the stake for his religious beliefs in Constance, Germany, in 1415 was one of the first great leaders of opposition to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and is still regarded as a national hero in his own country. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution that began in 1789 were two of the greatest upheavals in world history. The first led to the creation of a great democracy while the other’s high ideals were drowned in blood and resulted in Napoleonic dictatorship. The concept of individual freedom is arguably nowhere better expressed than in the works of Beethoven, whose music embodies the Romantic movement. The Zulu War of 1879 was an unsuccessful fight for liberty against the oppressive power of the British Empire; in Russia in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the monarchy of the Romanovs, promising liberation but building a terrifying Communist monolith instead; and in 1949 Mao Zedong became the Communist leader of China and began the ruthless control of his nation that would begin its transformation into a great world power. But in Europe the power of Communism fell into decline, its end signalled by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A year later, the greatest African leader of the twentieth century, Nelson Mandela, was released from prison. The oppression of apartheid ended as he began the leadership of his country to black majority rule.
Each of these events can be seen as stepping stones to freedom. Together they provide a series of points from which we can look forward and back at man’s attempts to make himself free. But a series of attempts is all they are. On the whole man’s freedom remains something he desires rather than something he has found.
CHAPTER 1 (#)
Spartacus 73 BC (#)
Spartacus was a Roman slave and gladiator who led a rebellion against his Roman masters. He won a number of victories before being killed in battle. Since the eighteenth century his name has been used to evoke the idea of freedom.
In Paris in 1760 a five-act tragedy called Spartacus by the lawyer and playwright Bernard-Joseph Saurin was a great popular success when it appeared at the Comédie-Française. Exactly two hundred years later, a Hollywood movie with the same title starring Kirk Douglas brought the Spartacus story to the worldwide cinema audience. The French philosopher Voltaire described the Spartacus rebellion as ‘the only just war in history’ and Karl Marx chose him as one of his heroes, calling him ‘one of the best characters in the whole of ancient history’. Lenin also described him as ‘one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections’, while the Communist revolutionaries in Germany during and after the First World War took the name of Spartacus as their inspiration and called themselves ‘Spartacists’. From the time of his death in battle in 71 bc until the eighteenth century, Spartacus was little more than one of history’s footnotes. But as ideas of individual liberty took hold, the Western world looked back to ancient Rome. In Spartacus it found the symbol of freedom it was looking for.
Slavery is as old as man.
Slavery is as old as man. In the ancient world slaves were valued in the same way as domestic animals and treated as such. The Greek philosopher Aristotle said that both slaves and animals were necessary for providing help in daily life. ‘It is clear,’ he said, ‘that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just for them, to be slaves.’ There are frequent references to slaves and slavery in the Old Testament; and many pre-colonial African countries operated systems of slavery, as did China, the countries of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Different societies had different forms of slavery and different attitudes towards it as well. But all of them had one thing in common: slaves were human beings. They had a natural sense of freedom, and would always try to escape or rebel. Even though they might sometimes be well treated, the oppressive fact of their servitude was a constant burden. They knew that any freedoms and privileges they might enjoy could be taken away from them in an instant. They had no free will and no basic human rights.
The only way in which any such system can be maintained is through brutality. The achievements of classical antiquity may be inspiring but they were built upon a society that depended on the violence and human indignities of slavery. This acceptance of something that today we find abhorrent was regarded in the ancient world as perfectly appropriate, although in the early sixth century AD the legal code of the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian, recognised this conflict between the institution of slavery and its human effects. Slavery, it said, was contrary to the law of nature but was sanctioned as a legal activity.
Much later, when most European countries had in their own countries abandoned not only slavery, but its successor serfdom too, some of them adopted it again in order to support their colonial conquests. Once they had grown used to it, they found it almost impossible to relinquish it. Even the founding fathers of the American nation, some of the greatest apostles of liberty in the history of the modern world, could not face the issue of slavery when they devised the constitution of their new country. Their inability to do so contributed eventually to the American Civil War of the 1860s and the murderous battles that killed more than 600,000 people. In 1861, at the outset of the war, the State of Missouri gave its reasons for secession in a declaration. ‘Our position,’ it announced, ‘is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest in the world. Its labour supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilisation.’ No Greek philosopher, no Roman senator or emperor, could have put it better. In Brazil, where the Portuguese introduced slavery to maintain their sugar plantations, slavery was not banned altogether until 1888, even though the country had been independent for sixty-six years. Two years earlier, Thomas Hardy published one of his most famous novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which, in the opening scene, a man auctions his wife and daughter at a country fair. His description of the event was met with horror and incredulity in late Victorian Britain but Hardy claimed that rural records showed that such activities still occurred in the English county of Dorset where his story was set. Not slavery perhaps, but not far off. Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them.
In Spartacus, the Western world found the symbol of freedom it was lookingfor.
The economy of the Roman Republic and early Empire depended on slavery. We do not know exactly how many slaves there were, but estimates suggest that they made up a third of a total population of about six million. The main way in which people became slaves was through capture in war although traders and pirates also played their part. Natural reproduction helped maintain the numbers: a child born to a female slave was automatically enslaved, no matter who the father might have been. Slavery knew no racial or national boundaries. Anyone could become one. Slave markets flourished in towns throughout the Roman world as people went shopping for the human labour they needed to look after their homes or work their fields. Slaves involved in heavy labour were rarely set free – that was a privilege afforded to the better educated, who worked in clerical or educational jobs. At no time was this system of forced labour questioned or criticised. It did not change with the advent of Christianity. The Romans inherited slavery from the Greeks and used it as an essential part of their organisational structure until the last days of the Empire.
Spartacus came originally from Thrace, an area covering modern southern Bulgaria, northern Greece, and northern Turkey. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, writing long after the slave rebellion, Spartacus was brave and strong and also rather more intelligent than his fellow gladiators. He had seen service in the Roman army, was later sold as a prisoner and ended up in a school for gladiators in the prosperous southern town of Capua, not far from Naples. Gladiators were one of the sex symbols of ancient Rome. They were imprisoned in communal quarters, sometimes with their wives – Spartacus was married – and forced to take part in the violent spectacles that the Romans enjoyed. They lived in a world of constant uncertainty, thrust together with others they did not know and whose languages they may not have spoken. Their lives meant nothing, except to themselves. It is not surprising that there are recorded instances of gladiators committing suicide in order to escape from their life of bloody servitude. One man slit his throat in a lavatory before he was due to fight, another pretended to fall asleep as a cart carried him into the arena and broke his neck by thrusting his head between the spokes of its wheels.
In 73 BC Spartacus and about seventy other gladiators escaped from their school and set up a camp on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius about twenty miles away. From here they began to carry out raids on nearby properties. News of their activity spread and they began to be joined by other runaway slaves, building what seems to have been a quickly improvised dash for freedom into a significant insurrection. A military force of about 3,000 men was sent from Rome to suppress the rebellion, so we can assume the number of slaves under Spartacus’s command must have grown to a considerable size. The Roman commander, Claudius Glaber, laid siege to the slaves’ stronghold, but they escaped by climbing down the mountainside on ropes made from vines. Using what were presumably makeshift weapons they then attacked the Romans from behind and defeated them. More slaves now joined Spartacus and his men. Many of them were agricultural workers and herdsmen who were used to living in open country and were fit and strong. The slaves acquired better weapons and horses, perhaps brought to them by the new recruits. Within a few months they had formed a powerful, well-managed army capable of challenging the might of Rome.
Roman Slave Rebellions
There were two important rebellions by slaves before the one led by Spartacus in 70 AD. Both took place in Sicily where increasing numbers of slaves were brought from abroad to work on agricultural estates. The first started in Enna in 135 BC when Eunus, a Syrian fire-breathing entertainer who claimed to have prophetic powers, rebelled against an opulent landowner called Damophilus. His 400 men joined forces with 5,000 slaves led by Cleon, a horse-breeding slave. The rebellion engulfed half the island and became organised enough to resist several local governors until 132 BC, when the Roman army under the Consul Piso defeated it. In 104 BC a group of thirty slaves killed their wealthy landowning masters at the prosperous city of Halicyae near the modern town of Marsala. Their numbers spread spontaneously until they had a force of about 20,000 operating across a wide geographical area. Their leaders, Salvius and Athenion, became ‘slave kings’ and Salvius assumed the name ‘Tryphon’ after one of the rulers of the Seleucid Empire that succeeded Alexander the Great. The unplanned proliferation of their numbers sowed the seeds of the rebels’ downfall. They found it too demanding and ultimately impossible to control such a large army. They were defeated when Rome committed adequate resources to defeat them in a full-scale battle under Consul Aquillus in 100 BC. Slaves were imported from many different countries and lacked common customs and attitudes. Their main purpose in rebellion was to take revenge against their owners and taste freedom. Beyond that they had little to sustain them.
By the following year, 72 bc, the slaves were able to travel over large parts of southern Italy, carrying out raids and attracting recruits. New commanders were put into the field against them, but none was able to defeat the rebels. This persuaded the Roman authorities to take a very serious step. The two consuls for that year – Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus – were despatched to quash the rebel forces once and for all. The consuls were the highest military and civilian authorities in the Roman Republic, elected on an annual basis by the Senate. The Romans obviously felt that Spartacus and his army represented a serious threat to the security of the state. This time the Roman army scored a quick victory. One of Spartacus’s principal lieutenants, a Gaul called Crixus (the name means ‘curly-headed’ in Latin) with 3,000 slaves under his command, became separated from the main army. He was pursued, defeated and killed by the consul Gellius on a rocky promontory near Foggia on the Adriatic coast in Apulia.
Spartacus’s attempt to be liberated expressed a hope understood by all people who wanted to be free.
Spartacus began to move north. Gellius came after him from the south while Lentulus tried to bar his way from the northern end. Spartacus defeated them both and then won another victory, this time over the commander of the Roman forces in Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus. This battle took place at Mutinae, near what is today Modena, nearly 400 miles north of the gladiator school from which Spartacus had originally escaped. The commanders of the Roman forces were recalled in disgrace, but Spartacus, instead of taking his army out of Rome and across the Alps, now turned south and began to make his way back to the area from which he had originally come. Another army, bigger than any of the others, was sent after him. Its commander was Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men in the whole history of Rome and a politician and general of overwhelming influence and ambition. His army was paid for out of his personal fortune and when its first attack against Spartacus failed, Crassus decided to instil discipline by using ‘decimation’. The army was divided into groups of ten and drew lots for one of them to be killed. The chosen victim was then clubbed or stoned by the nine others. In 71 BC, in far southwest Italy, Crassus succeeded in driving the rebel slaves into a position where he could finally defeat them. Spartacus was killed. Six thousand recaptured slaves were crucified along the Via Appia into Rome – a warning to others about what would happen to those who defied the authority of the Republic. Crassus was awarded with an ovation.
Spartacus almost certainly knew that he could not destroy the institution of slavery. His rebellion was not an attempt to change the system. He just wanted to be free, probably to get home to the country from which he had originally come and lead a life where he did not belong to someone else. That is why his rebellion has become an enduring symbol of freedom. Spartacus could never have won, but in his attempt to be liberated, however briefly, from the bonds of slavery he expressed a hope understood by all people who want to be free.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is probably the most famous novel about slavery ever written. It had an enormous impact when it was first published in America in 1852 because it explained the lives of slaves in human terms. Its style may now seem sentimental, but its message is still strong and clear. Reading it more than a hundred and fifty years after it was written awakens a spirit of anger and astonishment at how civilised men and women could rub along with a system of such iniquity. In one scene a trader, ferrying his slave cargo down river to the South, sells a baby to another man without the mother’s knowledge. When she finds out she is distraught. ‘The trader,’ writes Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘had overcome every humane weakness and prejudice … The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practised; but he was used to it … ‘ The passage ends with the words: ‘You can get used to such things, too, my friend.’ Written 2,000 years after the Spartacus rebellion it is a sobering reminder of how slavery has endured throughout the history of mankind.
CHAPTER 2 (#)
The Burning of Jan Hus 1415 (#)
Jan Hus was a priest and teacher from Bohemia, which today forms the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 1415 the Catholic Church condemned him to be burned at the stake for his heretical views. He was one of the first Europeans to die in the struggle for liberty of thought.
When I was at school I was encouraged to view the world more widely through the debates and lectures organised by the Masaryk Society. It had been founded by a headmaster shortly after the Second World War in an effort to bring his traditional public school into the twentieth century. He named it after one of the most remarkable men in modern European history – Thomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was born in 1850, in a small town called Hodonin about 170 miles south-east of Prague. He began his working life as a teacher and philosopher, became the leader of his country in exile during the First World War and succeeded to its presidency when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918. ‘We can judge nations, including our own, quite impartially,’ he once said. ‘We need not worship the nation to which we belong.’ This careful, rational approach to nationhood was founded on his deep love for his country and its history. He understood where his people had come from and how they had been shaped by events. They might have suffered as possessions of an empire but their desire to be free remained. It had been with them for 500 years, ever since Jan Hus had gone to his death rather than renounce his beliefs.
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the administration of the Catholic Church in Europe had begun to enter the long, slow period of decline that would lead to the Reformation a hundred years later. To those who governed the Church the signs of decay were barely visible. The idea of any secession from its teachings was unthinkable. Christianity led from Rome had enjoyed triumphant progress ever since the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, had, in 313 ad, ordered that persecution was to cease and Christianity tolerated. Having captured the Roman Empire, Christianity spread across Europe, its influence thwarted only in the Middle East where, after the death of Mohammed in 632, Islam became the preferred religion. At the end of the eleventh century, the papacy began a series of crusades against Islam in an attempt to take back control of places it believed were central to its religious authority. Ultimately they failed. By the time Jan Hus began to explain his interpretation of the Scriptures, Christian influence was largely contained within Western Europe, blocked from further expansion by the presence of Islam in North Africa, the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea and the Balkans.
The European papacy saw itself as all-powerful.
The European papacy of the Middle Ages saw itself as all powerful. In 1208, Pope Innocent III issued an interdict against England’s King John because the King had refused to accept his nomination for Archbishop of Canterbury. For a Godfearing people, an interdict was a serious imposition. It prevented them from observing everyday religious rites associated with such things as baptisms and funerals without which they were unprotected from salvation. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull entitled ‘Unam sanctum’ – a declaration of supreme Church power. It said that there was no salvation outside the Church and that those who resisted the Pope were resisting the law of God. Boniface felt the need to reassert the authority of his office because the French King, Philip IV, had begun to raid the Church for taxation and undermine the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. The conflict between King and Pope resulted in Boniface’s capture and detention. Six years after he died, in 1303, the papacy moved from Rome to France, ending up in Avignon where it would remain for more than seventy years. Although housed in papal territory – Avignon was not part of France – the papacy inevitably fell under French influence. All the popes who took office during the period of the Avignon papacy were French.
Power Corrupts
One of the most famous aphorisms in the whole of historical writing was composed directly as a result of a discussion about the medieval papacy. In the 1880s the cleric and scholar, Mandell Creighton, later a Bishop of London, published a History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation. Creighton was lenient in his judgements of the policies and actions of the medieval Catholic Church. Describing the trial of Jan Hus, for instance, he acknowledged that Hus ‘had first deliberately asserted the rights of the individual conscience against ecclesiastical authority’, but added that it was ‘useless to criticise particular points in his trial. The Council was anxious for his submission and gave him every opportunity to make it.’ This careful, temporising approach irritated another scholar of the age, Lord Acton. In a famous letter to Creighton he told him that he could not accept the idea that popes and kings should not be judged like other men. He went on: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.’ Acton believed that what he called ‘the inflexible integrity of the moral code’ was essential to the study of history. If debased history ‘ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of the earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress’.
Political instability began to undermine the papacy. The Avignon court lived well: to many people it appeared to prefer the luxurious trappings of an earthly life to the spiritual requirements of religious devotion. A splendid new palace was built, the number of wealthy officials needed to administer papal business grew and the Church became richer as it sought, not only to establish its presence in its new home, but to look after the territories and possessions it had left behind in Italy. One of the Avignon popes, Clement VI, believed that largesse increased papal prestige. ‘No one ought to retire discontented from the presence of a prince,’ he said. ‘My predecessors did not know how to be popes.’ Such comfortable grandeur might have reassured the papal hierarchy, but it worried many of its subjects. Franciscan friars compared Avignon to the captivity of the Israelites in Babylon. Matters worsened when in 1378 Pope Gregory XI decided to return to Rome. After his death, the French cardinals refused to accept his successor, the first Italian pope since the exodus to Avignon, and moved back to France where they elected an alternative pontiff, called the Antipope. For nearly forty years the Church was divided by the Western Schism. The rulers of Europe took sides, supporting either the popes elected by Rome, or those chosen by Avignon. It was against the background of this confused, highly political situation that Jan Hus began to question the behaviour of the Church.
Jan Hus was born in southern Bohemia. In 1398 he became a professor at the University of Prague where he was ordained and began to teach theology. His lectures and sermons in favour of clerical reform gathered widespread support, partly because many members of his audience were looking for release from the domination of Vienna and the German sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. Earlier in the fourteenth century, other Bohemian priests had begun to call for change. The Czech language and the individuality of the Czech people came together to form a nationalist movement that found expression in the language of its priests. Hus was influenced by the English cleric, John Wyclif, who had begun to identify a new approach to organised religion. Both men went back to the Scriptures, arguing that the Church should not own property or pursue wealth. The observation of religion should be founded on the teachings of its Christian founders, nothing else. The Church was a body of elected members predestined to enjoy salvation: Christ, not the Pope, was their leader. Hus’s views alarmed the Church authorities. In 1411 he was excommunicated and a year later forced to go into hiding where he wrote his most famous work, De Ecclesia. ‘The opinion of no man,’ he said, ‘whatever his authority may be – and consequently the opinion of no pope – is to be held if it plainly contains falsehood or error.’
Hus’s death stands as a uniquely important event in the whole history of man’s desire to be free.
In 1414 the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, called a council in the German city of Constance overlooking the Bodensee. His main concern was to heal the schism that had divided the Church since Gregory XI had returned to Rome from Avignon. Aware that the views of John Hus had found favour with many of his subjects in Bohemia, he invited Hus to attend the gathering in order to explain his views. He promised him safe passage and Hus, against the advice of some of his closest supporters, decided to accept. Instead of participating in the theological debate he had expected he was arrested and tried for heresy. His accusers urged him to recant but Hus refused, arguing that the charges against him were inaccurate. ‘I stand at the judgement seat of Christ, to whom I have appealed,’ he told them, ‘knowing that He will judge every man, not according to false or erroneous witness, but according to the truth and each one’s deserts.’ In July 1415 he was removed from the priesthood and burned at the stake. He died singing hymns.
Hus, caught up in the political turmoil of the schism that had divided the papacy at the end of the fourteenth century, found that those who had supported him deserted him in his hour of greatest need. In England, John Wyclif was luckier. His strongest supporter was John of Gaunt, the most powerful prince in the land who, although not always agreeing with some of Wyclif’s views, allowed him to die in peace in 1384 in the Leicestershire village of Lutterworth to which he had retired. It was not until after his death, at the Council of Constance more than thirty years later, that Wyclif’s works were condemned as heretical.
While Wyclif was allowed to die quietly, his greatest apostle, Jan Hus, was burned. However the flames of change that Hus had set alight began a movement that was to change the Roman Catholic Church forever. In Bohemia his death was met with anger and rebellion. Between 1420 and 1436, the forces of the Hussites repelled the armies of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor that were sent to subdue them. Inspired by Jan’s teachings and united by a sense of Czech nationhood, the Hussites fought successfully against the crusades launched against them by an enraged Catholic Church. The lessons that Jan Hus had taught his people did not die. He – and Wyclif too – were the forerunners of the Reformation that in the century that followed would finally destroy the universal power of the papacy and set Europe and the world on a new course.
Hus’s decision to die for his beliefs towers over the time in which it took place, a permanent reminder of man’s desire for liberty.
The death of Jan Hus stands as a uniquely important event not only in Czech history but in the whole history of man’s desire to be free. The Czech people have been some of the most oppressed in the history of Europe. Suppressed by the Habsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary in what one writer called a ‘truceless warfare against the soul of a people’, they enjoyed a brief moment of independence under Thomas Masaryk after the First World War. This was crushed first by the Nazis and then by Stalinist Russia. In the fight for Czech freedom three men called Jan played important parts. Two of them were students who lived in the twentieth century. The first, Jan Opletal, was killed in Prague during demonstrations against the Nazi occupation of the country in 1939. The second, Jan Palach, burned himself to death thirty years later in 1969 after Russian troops destroyed the liberalising reforms of the Czech government. He died within walking distance of Prague’s memorial to the third Jan – Jan Hus. In the Middle Ages, life and liberty revolved entirely around religion. By expressing a new approach to religious observation Jan Hus defined liberty for the time in which he lived. But his decision to die for his beliefs towers over the time in which it took place, and succeeding ages, unchanged by any historical context, a permanent reminder of man’s desire for liberty.
CHAPTER 3 (#)
The American Declaration of Independence 1776 (#)
In 1776 the thirteen colonies on the continent of North America declared their independence from British rule. The reasons they gave, and the nation they created as a result, define many of the ideas of liberty in the modern world.
‘Democracy starts here.’ So proclaims the promotional material for America’s National Archives in Washington DC. The Archives, it says, tell the story of the ‘American journey to young and old, scholars and students, cynics and dreamers.’ They are held in a grand neo-classical building on Pennsylvania Avenue, designed in 1935 by the same architect who created the city’s Jefferson Memorial. Among their treasures is a 1297 copy of England’s Magna Carta, as well as the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, freeing all slaves held in Confederate States. But pride of place goes to the so-called ‘Charters of Freedom’ kept in a splendid, echoing rotunda at the heart of the building. These are the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is a faded document barely readable to the naked eye. To discover what it says, and who signed it, one needs to look at the facsimile displayed alongside it. But people do not come to read it: they simply come to look. This piece of dilapidated parchment, just over two feet wide and nearly two and a half feet long, is one of history’s most important symbols of liberty.
The leaders of the thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of the American continent became the first people to give expression to modern ideas of democracy through the mismanagement and miscalculation of their imperial masters in Britain. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Britain enjoyed a system of government more open and more liberal than most other places in the world. Europe’s other great world power, France, was in the sclerotic grip of the Bourbon monarchy and the ancien régime. Louis XV, who ruled for fifty-nine years, only thirteen less than his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, before him, died in 1774 having abandoned all attempts to reform his country’s creaking administration. China was locked behind its wall of self-imposed isolation. In St Petersburg and Vienna, two powerful autocrats, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, attempted to modernise their vast lands, but never with a view to relinquishing any of their own enormous power. Catherine was the more impressive of the two. She was actually a minor German princess who deposed (and perhaps murdered) her weak-willed husband and seized the throne. In partnership with powerful Russian ministers, generally her lovers as well, she managed to get the wild country she governed to adopt some European ideas, but widespread reform eluded her. Her fellow emperor, Joseph of Austria, dismissed her as merely ‘a woman who cares only for herself, and no more for Russia than I do’.
Britain was different. Ever since Henry VIII had broken away from the Roman church at the beginning of the sixteenth century and provided, though not intentionally, a form of royal licence for reformation, the nation had been involved in a long battle for religious liberty. This happened elsewhere in Europe too, but in Britain it resulted in the civil wars of the seventeenth century and, in 1649, the execution of the King and the creation of the brief republic of Oliver Cromwell. Over time, expressions of religious and political liberty came to mean similar things. The Bill of Rights that Parliament imposed on its new king, William III, in 1689, was both a religious and political settlement. It banned Roman Catholics from the monarchy – they were ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ – but also restricted the powers of the sovereign. Freedom from royal interference in the law, freedom of speech in Parliament, and freedom from taxation by royal prerogative were all enshrined in the English constitution, an unwritten distillation of precedent and acts of Parliament. In the years that followed, these ideas were expanded and developed by eighteenth-century philosophers and writers, creating an age of freedom of thought – an ‘enlightenment’ – that was entirely new. But if the British felt that they enjoyed liberty, it existed in a form that fell far short of democracy. The aristocracy and landowners controlled Parliament because they owned its constituencies – sometimes so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ with no one living in them – and chose the members to represent them. These were people who had grown rich as Britain expanded her empire: caution and conservatism were the weapons they used to protect their wealth.
Franklin declared that he was not just a colonist but a Briton’.
In the American colonies, English concepts of more open and more inclusive government began to find an opportunity for unfettered expansion. Self-reliance is a natural ally of democracy. The men and women who built new lives far from home developed a sense of fellowship and common identity. They viewed themselves very differently from the way they were regarded in London. But they were not revolutionaries. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, declared that he was not just a colonist but ‘a Briton’, and added: ‘I have long been of Opinion that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire lie in America.’ In that statement can be found the seeds of the tension between the British government and its lands across the Atlantic. The colonists were loyal, but proud and independent too. They wanted to share in the growth of the British Empire on an equal footing, not as a subservient people. The British, meanwhile, grew increasingly irritated with the behaviour of the colonists who failed to act in unison, defied the King’s instructions and, most importantly of all, baulked at paying the cost of the war that had protected them from French invasion. In Quebec in 1759, General James Wolfe defeated the French in a battle that gave Britain control of the whole of North America. It was one of the most significant victories of the Seven Years’ War. The French, supported by native American Indians, had invaded areas west of British settlements planning to colonise them. George Washington, as a young major in the Virginia militia, saw action in an expedition against them.
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- Жанр: Историческая литература
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 540 стр. 27 иллюстраций
- ISBN: 9780007411115
- Дата выхода книги: 29 декабря 2018
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
What are the key 50 events you really need to understand to grasp the developments of our world?In this highly entertaining read Hugh Williams distils world history into an insightful overview. By selecting fifty key people, places, battles, objects and events, he casts a clear eye over the way the world has developed and how we live today.Injecting life into familiar historical landmarks as well as bringing lesser-known events to the forefront, Hugh shapes the fifty things into themes as all-encompassing today as they were over two thousand years ago: wealth, religion, conquest, discovery and freedom.The Fifty Things include…Origin of SpeciesModel T FordThe Russian RevolutionPlatoConquest of MexicoMao Tse TungCrucifixion of JesusVia EgnatiaWorldwide webOzymandias9/11Nelson MandelaCoronation of CharlemagneAmerican Declaration of IndependenceFranco-Prussian WarMahabharataThe Black DeathAnd many more…
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