What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  The colonies spurred a revolution back home. North America and India were rich in white gold—cotton—and clever Brits devised new machines to more easily turn the fluff into cloth. Spinning jennies, steam engines, and water-powered machines sparked the Industrial Revolution that brought the masses from their cottages, where they had worked by the hearth, to cities where they sweated in factories as cogs in the machine.

  Even though her textile business was booming, Britain’s wars (mostly with France) were costly, and King George III’s new sugar tax, then stamp tax, then tea tax, brewed up such anger in the colonies—culminating in the Boston Tea Party of 1773)—that Britain lost America. Fighting began in 1775, the Americans declared independence in 1776, and in 1783, the Brits recognized it and shoved off, relying even more on India to keep Britain in cotton.

  THE DAYS OF BRITISH EXPANSION

  By the end of the 1800s, the empire’s holdings included:

  Canada, Australia, New Zealand: Now independent, but Queen of England is still head of state

  Hong Kong: Returned to China in 1997

  Cyprus: Independent in 1960

  Malta: Independent in 1964

  Most of India: Independent in 1947

  South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Sudan, British Somaliland: All of Britain’s African colonies became independent in the 1960s and 1970s

  The Falklands, Belize, Honduras, Bahamas, Gibraltar: The last remains of the British Empire, they’re still holding, but who knows for how long

  The nineteenth-century British military forces were formidable: under Wellington, they halted Napoleon’s grand ambitions at Waterloo in 1815.

  In 1837, eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria took the throne, where she would remain for sixty-four years, during which time over half of the country’s residents moved to London or industrial cities Manchester and Birmingham. During the Victorian era of engineering marvels, Britain leapt into the future, pulling the rest of Europe along with her. The electric telegraph opened up new worlds as Brits strung cables under the Atlantic. Just as revolutionary was the steam locomotive, which crossed over massive iron bridges, shortening journeys that once required days to mere hours, delivering hordes of workers to cities, and replacing canal barges as haulers of coal to steel factories. Huge steamships plied oceans in two weeks, explorations into Africa and Asia brought more riches, and riveting adventure books were the rage. The world suddenly seemed so close at hand (and so intriguing) that fashionable Victorians decorated with wall-size ornamental screens displaying maps. And new ideas percolated everywhere.

  CHARLES DARWIN (1809–1882)

  Heir to the founder of Wedgwood pottery, Charles Darwin could have spent a leisurely life flitting about collecting butterflies and plucking pansies on the moors. Instead, he triggered the biggest leap in human self-understanding when he published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Invited in 1831 to be the captain’s companion on the HMS Beagle, which voyaged to South America, Darwin was sick for most the journey, but threw himself into nature exploration once the ship anchored and he stopped throwing up. Most interesting: the finches and tortoises on the Galápagos Islands off Ecuador, where locals knew which island a tortoise or bird was from by subtle differences in markings. Back in England, Darwin became intrigued with the idea that species adapted to their surroundings, and that those with the qualities most suited to their environment were most likely to survive. He threw himself into a frenzy of writing and research about natural selection, ultimately proposing that humans had evolved from primates. Realizing that his theories would deeply offend the Christian Church, he sat on his manuscript for twenty years. He might never have published it, had not a letter arrived in 1858, from a scientist in Asia, Alfred Russel Wallace, laying out almost exactly the same premise as Darwin had in his unpublished book. Honorably, Darwin sent Wallace’s paper in for publication, but soon thereafter he finally lugged his own dusty manuscript to the printer. Predictably, the church condemned his ideas, but Darwin’s book about our ancestors the apes wasn’t as controversial as it might have been; he had friends in publishing circles and one, Thomas Henry Huxley, launched a lecture series about it, softening the blow.

  Darwin’s ideas opened the door to eugenics, selective breeding to emphasize positive characteristics, which intrigued the Nazis. The man who first peddled eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, was Darwin’s cousin.16

  Times were still hazardous, particularly for the urban poor; cholera raged, along with typhoid and deadly flus. Syphilis brought death and insanity to millions; workers lived in overcrowded, rat-ridden dwellings; and Jack the Ripper made the night seem much darker, even after the streets glowed with gaslights.

  No writer better summed up the horrors and inequality of that era than Charles Dickens, who personalized the issues of class stratification, poverty, ghetto housing, and urban grime in his novels, including Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens was well versed in societal ills, and not just because of his experience as a reporter—his father’s debt had landed the entire family in the debtors’ prison. Dickens’s fiction produced tangible effects: in 1862, American George Peabody who was living in London, donated 500,000 pounds to renovate the real-life slum that was the setting for Oliver Twist. Peabody Building Housing Blocks, as the neighborhoods of workers’ dwellings became known, later became favorite haunts of Jack the Ripper.

  Parts of London were a scourge, but Scotland (or Alba as she’s known in Gaelic), was worse, especially after the English began fixing her up. Shortly after Scotland unified with England in 1707, the English banned northerners from wearing tartans or even playing the bagpipes, stripping the clansmen of their cultural past. Worse, the English embarked on so-called improvements. Justifying the moves as a means of modernizing the subsistence farming society, wealthy Englishmen, who had dreams of transforming Scotland into hunting estates and sheep farms, ran farmers off the land and into the cities. Their method was simple: torch the Scots’ houses and farms, killing their cattle, ruining their crops, scorching the soil, and ensuring that there was no timber left for rebuilding, as the farmers fled, choking, into smoke that sometimes spread for hundreds of miles. The Clearances drove tens of thousands of Scots from their homeland between 1785 and 1854, killing many in forced evictions now regarded as genocide.

  The Irish, too, were being uprooted from their land, which had been officially stitched to England in 1801. During the Irish Potato Famine (1845–1847), a million Irish starved to death, while English landlords shoved the weakened people, who couldn’t pay rent, off their farms. Another million Irish fled for North America. (See “Ireland,” page 124.)

  Even the Welsh, who’d been bonded with England since 1535, were having their worst run-ins with the English, who owned the coal mines in Wales that powered the Industrial Revolution. Armed uprisings and rebellions over poor working conditions and highway taxes became common, particularly in the 1830s.

  The queen ineffectively addressed the problems, although she personally donated substantial sums of money to help the starving in Ireland, a land she so adored that she’d wanted to set up residence there. Mostly a figurehead, her concerns had little effect.

  The most dramatic display of how life evolved in the Victorian era was the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851—which showed glimpses into cultures as much as it showcased machines. Six million visitors roamed through the Crystal Palace—a bubble of glass and steel iron erected in Hyde Park—where 100,000 exhibits came from all corners, from China to Italy, Turkey to the United States. Looms and ornate tapestries, giant harvesters and hookah pipes, life-size dinosaurs and homes carved from coal, thrashers and envelope-making machines, newfangled kitchen appliances alongside those from ancient Egypt, intricate paper screens and the latest fashions in nightcaps, as well as operas, circuses, dog shows, cat shows, flower exhibitions, displays of rare gems, flush toilets, carriages pulled by giant paper kites, the world’s biggest diamond, the
world’s biggest organ, the world’s biggest fountain (with water shooting 250 feet high)—all could be seen here at the world’s largest fair, which was thick with pickpockets and caused traffic jams across London for six months.17

  The event was trumpeted as proof that Britain was the world’s most advanced society—and it was certainly the most powerful of the era, although Brits of that age could scarcely be called the most humane. And no one epitomizes that period’s avarice and cruelty more than diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes.

  CECIL RHODES (1853–1902)

  The sickly son of a village vicar, Cecil Rhodes sailed to the warm Dark Continent to recuperate at his brother’s South African farm. Arriving during a diamond rush, the young lad bought a hefty portion of the Kimberley mines, which (it turned out) held most of the world’s most adored sparklers. Wealth wasn’t enough, although he had even more after buying up nearby gold mines; Rhodes wanted land, power, and British domination of the world. “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race,”18 he wrote in Confession of Faith, a book he penned at the age of twenty-four. Though he never succeeded in bringing the whole world under British control, he brought part of Africa under it, being de facto founder of three colonies, Nyasaland (today’s Malawi), as well as Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively), which he named after himself. In roping the colonies together, his hired armies killed a thousand Africans, and Rhodes single-handedly triggered a three-year war with Dutch living in Africa—the nasty Boer War (1899–1902) that killed upward of 75,000—after a botched raid to seize Dutch-held lands. Just as loathsome: he turned the Africans who lived near his mines into imprisoned slaves. Workers were forced to live in his heavily policed mining compounds, which they weren’t allowed to leave, even when deadly epidemics broke out. According to his live-in companion (Rhodes was rumored to be gay), Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, “Cecil’s favorite Sunday pastime was to go into the De Beers’ native compound, where he had built them a fine swimming bath, and throw in shillings for the natives to dive for.”19 Rhodes died of a heart attack in 1902, but left many legacies, among them the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, until recently exclusively for men, and the De Beers Diamond Company, which hoards most of the world’s diamonds and has been charged with antitrust activities and artificially manipulating the market. The land grabs Rhodes initiated while he was prime minister have repercussions today. In 2002, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, snatched those lands back, this time taking them from the whites and giving them to the blacks.20 One more continuing Rhodes ripple: he’s now an idol to neo-Nazis.

  The nineteenth-century British were the most benevolent of colonizers, which, granted, is not saying much. They built roads, schools, and hospitals; introduced new agricultural crops; and planted the seeds of democracy and liberty. However, slavery was common, as were massacres; wars were purposely whipped up; diseases were (inadvertently) introduced; resources were entirely depleted; religion and culture changes were forced upon the locals; and most riches from the colonies went to the British Treasury. At their worst, the British imperialists were brutal. They burned textile plants in Madras, India, so that India couldn’t compete with Manchester’s factories; they introduced opium to the Chinese to even out the balance of trade; the (Dutch and German) Boers in South Africa were marched to the world’s first concentration camps, where about 20,000 died during the Boer War, after the discovery of gold on Boer property. And even when they weren’t colonizing, Brits had a knack for showing up in foreign lands—the Middle East, for instance—and rearranging the power politics and map lines, frequently making vows they didn’t keep.

  BRITS IN THE SANDS

  No Europeans loved the Middle East more than the British, who began seriously mucking around there in the early 1900s, the first Westerners (since the tenth-century Vikings and, later, Marco Polo) to explore Mesopotamia, Persia, Syria, and Palestine. Of the three British explorer-spies most associated with the area, two were women. Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) and Freya Stark (1893–1993) spoke Arabic and Persian, and both worked with the Royal Geographical Society, which held the world’s largest collection of maps, and worked closely with the military. Gertrude Bell was extremely powerful, holding many British government posts; she literally drew the doomed boundaries for Iraq, and in 1921, she convinced Churchill—then colonial secretary—to renege on Britain’s promise to make Kurdistan (in northern Iraq) a separate country for Kurds. Freya Stark was a brilliant travel writer, although also a WWII spy. T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, gathered Arabs to fight with the British against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He promised the Hashemite clan (today the rulers of Jordan) that they would rule the entire Middle East if they joined in battle. The British government, however, didn’t follow through on his promise, which is unfortunate because Jordan, the only land the Hashemites held on to out of the deal, is the most peaceful and democratic country in the Middle East today.

  Due to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement struck during World War I, the British and French supervised Middle East territories after the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918. Both made a terrible mess of the area, drawing bogus borders, bringing questionable groups to power, and planting the seeds for unrest that still haunts the region. Brits pulled together warring factions when they drew the map for Iraq, which led to the problems today, but the classic example of bewildering British diplomacy was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The British then controlled Palestine (the territory that holds today’s Israel, Gaza, and West Bank) and Zionist Jews wanted part of it as a country for Jews. British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour responded on November 2, 1917, ambiguously writing, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…” Jews interpreted the letter to mean that the British supported creation of their country; Palestinians took it to mean that they didn’t. Scholars and politicians have been scratching their heads over the letter and its implications for ninety years.

  With diamonds and gold from South Africa, tea and spices from the East, and a nasty habit of “borrowing” treasures such as the Elgin Marbles (elaborate friezes taken from Greece; see “Greece,” page 218), nineteenth-century Britain grew yet more powerful and moneyed, but the twentieth century steamrolled the kingdom’s ego back to proper size—and her geographic size shrank too, as colonies and other holdings began snapping off like brittle leaves. One of the most troubling was Ireland, the predominantly Catholic island to the west, whose problems Britain had long ignored. After decades of rebellions, terrorist attacks, and fighting (on both sides), the British government gave up and accepted Irish home rule in 1921, but with one condition: the six counties in Northern Ireland, where Britain had sent Protestant settlers, would remain under British rule. That arrangement has been a point of bloody contention ever since. (See “Ireland,” page 117.)

  Scotland and Wales reluctantly remained part of Great Britain, however, in the 1990s, both regained more autonomy and their own parliaments.

  BRITS IN INDIA

  Nowhere are the effects of British colonization more keenly felt than in the South Asian subcontinent that, for centuries, made the British Empire even richer. During the British Raj (the period of British rule that unofficially started in the seventeenth century with the British East India Company), Brits turned India into their plantation, using Indians as poorly paid, heavily taxed laborers, and forcing them to turn over their farmlands to plant cotton and tea—moves that killed hundreds of millions from famine. Brits also transformed the social system. In 1858, Brits executed and exiled the Muslim mughals who had ruled the land for centuries and made Hindus the dominant force they remain today. By the twentieth cent
ury, high taxes, particularly on salt, prompted Mahatma Gandhi to lead mass protests, including one to the sea to make his own salt, and to launch the “Quit India” campaign against the British government. The British clamped down on the press and prohibited protests—and a British massacre of demonstrators only heated up calls for independence. Brits finally offered independence if Indians fought in the Second World War; millions of Indians volunteered. With independence drawing near, Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah won a last-minute legislative victory—a decree that the Indian territory would be split, with a new country for Muslims. Before granting independence in 1947, Brits divided the land into India and Pakistan. The work was done so sloppily that farmers were separated from their crops and houses were split from their villages, one reason that borders have been in dispute ever since.

  The first half of the twentieth century rocked Britain, as it did most of Europe. British military prowess kept the country from capture during both world wars, although Brits fought in both with high losses. The Great War killed 750,000 Britons, and the Depression of 1929 hit Britain particularly hard, as the economy was already wobbling. And then, under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Britain went weak.

  Nobody wanted a return to war, and nobody could afford one. And the terms inflicted on Germans after World War I had been too tough, as most leaders agreed by the 1930s. The Weimar Republic had gone bankrupt paying war reparations; German cash was worthless. Many believed that Germany’s territorial losses as outlined in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had been too harsh as well. So when Hitler showed up in 1933, talking about taking back “lost” areas that held large German populations, he didn’t sound all that unreasonable at first, except perhaps to those in the countries he wanted to take back. Austria happily joined up with Germany in 1938—and Brits said nothing even though that union had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. But when Hitler fixed his gaze on the Sudetenland, the northwestern corner of Czechoslovakia, President Edvard Beneš wasn’t keen to give it up. “Sorry mate,” was the message from British prime minister Chamberlain, seconded by French president Édouard Daladier. As the countries that had helped create Czechoslovakia in the 1919 treaty, Britain and France had few qualms about taking her apart. In what now looks like quivering appeasement, Chamberlain and Daladier simply forked the Sudetenland over to the Führer, thinking it would placate the man whom they regarded as a harmless nut. It didn’t. And Winston Churchill had been saying it wouldn’t from the start.