A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The second Civil War and the great execution

  However, Charles had no intention of conceding to demands he regarded as against the very principles of kingship. He determined on a new resort to civil war, escaping from captivity in November 1647. Cromwell now recognised his attempts to negotiate with the king had been mistaken and used New Model Army troops to pressurise parliament into voting for the war party’s measures. What is usually called ‘the second Civil War’ followed in the summer of 1648. Former supporters of parliament fought alongside the Cavaliers, there were royalist risings in south Wales, Kent and Essex, and an invasion from Scotland.

  This time the victory of the anti-royalist army was not followed by a policy of leniency or negotiation with the king. Cromwell declared, ‘They that are inflexible and will not leave troubling the land may be speedily destroyed’, and the officers of the New Model Army called for the death sentence on Charles and his chief advisers. Knowing the Presbyterian majority among MPs would never vote for this, the army occupied London. A detachment of troops under Colonel Pride barred the leading Presbyterians from the House of Commons, and other troops removed the leading oligarchs from their control of the City of London. At the end of January the executioner held the severed head of the king before a crowd in Whitehall.

  The events leading to the execution were paralleled by ferment within the New Model Army and among its civilian supporters. Cromwell and the Independents would not have been able to take control of London and beat back both the Presbyterians and the king without the revolutionary movement within the army. Faced with the threat of counter-revolution, Cromwell had been prepared for a time to defend the Levellers against Presbyterian repression. He even went so far as to visit the imprisoned Lilburne in the Tower of London in an attempt to reach an agreement. But he also resorted to force as the second Civil War approached. He isolated the radicals by using the war as a pretext to reorganise their regiments, put down an attempted mutiny – executing one of the alleged leaders, Richard Arnold – and imprison the London Levellers. At the same time he continued to rely upon the Leveller-influenced army rank and file in the period up to and immediately after the execution of the king. Only then did he feel confident enough to smash those who articulated class feelings. Cromwell berated his fellows on the Council of State: ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you’. 119 In the spring of 1649 the Leveller leaders in London were confined to the Tower and, in May, a mutiny of 1,000 troops was broken and four of its leaders were executed in the churchyard at Burford in Oxfordshire.

  The bulk of the New Model Army was no longer needed to defeat the king and the Presbyterians in England. It was dispatched, minus its agitators, to Ireland, while a Leveller pamphlet asked the soldiers:

  Will you go on still to kill, slay and murder men, to make [your officers] absolute lords and masters over Ireland, as you have made them over England? Or is it your ambition to reduce the Irish to the happiness of tithes … to excise, customs and monopolies in trades? Or to fill their prisons with poor disabled prisoners, to fill their land with swarms of beggars? 120

  This was a prophetic warning of what the English ruling class was to do to Ireland. But it could hardly stop impoverished men accepting military discipline and the only livelihood open to them once their leaders had been shot.

  The Levellers were a movement based not on the impoverished mass of society, but on the ‘middling sort’ – the artisans, the lesser traders, the better-off farmers and the soldiers who were recruited from these groups. They were the most radical and courageous party to emerge from these groups and pushed a programme which, had it been successful, would have brought about a much greater revolutionary change than actually occurred. They did so from the point of view of social groups which hoped to prosper from the growth of capitalist forms of production – the groups which were to crystallise over the next century into an increasingly self-conscious ‘middle class’. But in doing so they began to challenge the tradition that a section of society was divinely entitled to rule over the rest. Like Müntzer and his followers in the German Peasant War, they helped to establish a rival tradition of resistance to class rule.

  The defeat of the Levellers did not mean nothing had been achieved by the agitation and fighting of the previous years. The group around Cromwell had only been able to win by taking revolutionary measures, even if limited in scope. From 1649 the government of England – and soon of Scotland as well – was run by army officers, many of whom came from the ‘middling sort’.

  Christopher Hill has noted that after the second Civil War:

  The men who were taking control of events now, though not Levellers, were … of a significantly lower social class [than before] … Colonel Ewer, a former serving man, Colonel Thomas Harrison … the son of a grazier or butcher … Pride … had been a drayman or brewer’s employee … Colonel Okey a tallow chandler, Hewson a shoe maker, Goffe a salter, Barkstead a goldsmith or thimble maker, Berry a clerk to an iron works, Kelesy a button maker … The men who came to power in December 1648 and who were responsible for the execution of Charles I were men well below the rank of the traditional rulers of England. 121

  Such men pushed through a series of measures which broke the hold of those who would have turned English society back in a feudal direction once and for all. In this way the English Revolution cleared the ground for the development of a society based on market relations and capitalist forms of exploitation.

  Cromwell himself did not come from a new ‘bourgeois’ exploiting class, although he had family connections with some of the merchants. But he could not have succeeded without relying on those out of whom such a class was forming. His genius lay in his ability to grasp the fact that the crisis of English society could not be resolved without turning to new methods and new men. This alone could stop the English Revolution suffering the same fate as the French Calvinists or the Bohemian estates. A member of a gentry family had to carry through a revolution which ensured society would be run on essentially bourgeois lines.

  He ruled England virtually as a dictator for a decade. His regime was based on military force. But it could not survive indefinitely without wider social backing. Cromwell recognised this and attempted to establish parliaments which would back him, only to discover that the dissensions which had turned Presbyterians against Independents in the mid-1640s continually re-emerged. The gentry in each locality wanted an end to the uncertainty associated with revolutionary upheaval and balked at further reform. Sections of the ‘middling sort’ wanted more radical reform, and were well represented among the army officers. But they were not prepared to push such reform through if it meant further social unrest and as the decade passed they increasingly allied themselves with the very sections of the gentry they had fought during the Civil War – people who still saw a monarchy as the precondition for maintaining social order. The culmination of this process came in 1660 after Cromwell’s death. A section of the army agreed with the remnants of parliament to invite the son of the executed king back as monarch.

  Although the revolution was over, many of the changes survived. The monarchy’s existence now depended on the will of the propertied classes expressed through parliament – as was shown in 1688 when they threw James II out in a ‘bloodless’ revolution. The wealth of the propertied classes depended as never before on their success in coping with market forces. The large landowners increasingly embraced capitalist methods of agriculture. The growing portion of the population who lived in towns increasingly either employed others or worked for others. Guilds were no longer able to prevent innovation in productive techniques – by 1689 three-quarters of English towns contained no guilds at all. 122 Government policies were dictated by the desire to expand trade, not by the dynastic intrigues of the monarch.

  Together these changes represented something radically new in world history. The means by which people earned a living was now carried out in units whi
ch depended for survival upon the ability of those who ran them to keep costs below those of other units. The big farmer, the medium-sized iron master, even the individual handloom weaver, could only guarantee they earned a living if they could stay in business, and that meant keeping up with new methods of production which cut costs.

  Competition for the sake of competition, rather than the immediate consumption needs of the rich or poor, increasingly became the driving force of economic activity. The growth which followed was often chaotic, marked by sudden ups and downs. It was also of little benefit to a growing section of the population whose survival increasingly depended on their ability to sell their labour power to others. But it transformed the situation of the English economy and those who dominated it. What had been one of the poorer parts of Europe rapidly became the most advanced, providing its rulers with the means to build a world empire – and, in the process, helped the new capitalist form of production to begin to displace all previous forms.

  Chapter 4

  The last flowering of

  Asia’s empires

  Looking back today we can see that what happened in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was to transform the world. It would enable a few European powers to carve out empires which encompassed virtually the whole of Asia and Africa, and lead the whole world to be drawn into a new way of organising production, industrial capitalism.

  But history had not come to a standstill for the five-sixths of humanity who lived elsewhere. The empires of Mexico and Peru may have fallen almost overnight to the European colonists. But this was not true even of the rest of the Americas. In the north, only a narrow eastern seaboard was colonised by the end of the seventeenth century. As for Africa and Asia, European colonies in these continents were little more than trading posts at the time of the Thirty Years War and remained so long after. Dutch settlers did succeed in conquering the Khoisan hunter-gathering peoples (the so-called ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen’) of the southernmost tip of Africa. But it was almost 200 years before Europeans could begin to move north by defeating agriculturists whose knowledge of steel making provided them with effective weaponry. The Portuguese seized Goa, a coastal enclave on the southwest coast of India, in the sixteenth century, establishing a city 123 which was impressive by the European standards of the time, and ran a trading town on the island of Macao, off the coast of southern China. But their efforts seemed puny in comparison with the great kingdoms and empires close by. The first Portuguese visitors to the capital of one of the four kingdoms of southern India, Vijayanagar, 124 wrote in 1522 that it was as big as Rome, with 100,000 houses, and was ‘the best provided city in the world’ as regarded the organisation of its food supplies. 125 Certainly, the remains of the city cover a much wider area than almost any early sixteenth-century European city. Further north, the Mogul emperors who began conquering the subcontinent in 1525 built or rebuilt a series of cities – Lahore, Delhi, Agra – on a scale unmatched in Europe. The rulers of the Chinese Empire could virtually ignore the Europeans on the southern coast. The only threat to their great cities came from the pastoralist peoples to the north. Meanwhile, Ottoman Turkey was the great rising power on western Europe’s doorstep. After conquering Constantinople in 1453, it went on to take Cairo in 1517, Algiers in 1528 and Hungary in 1526, besieging Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683. The Ottoman Empire was a continual player in the diplomatic games and military coalitions of Reformation Europe, its culture much admired in the literature of the time. Between the Ottoman Empire and the Mogul Empire in India stood the Iranian Safavid Empire, centred on the new capital of Isfahan which amazed European visitors with its splendour. And off the coast of east Asia, the islands of Japan had borrowed enormously from Chinese culture and technique to establish a relatively developed civilisation which shared certain of the features of European feudalism, complete with wars between aristocratic lords using steel and gunpowder to try to establish hegemony over one another. 126 Even in Europe, a great power emerged outside the area swept by the Renaissance, the Reformation and religious wars. In the east, a succession of rulers began to transform the old duchy of Muscovy into a centralised Russian state and then an empire which spread over the whole of northern Asia and encroached on Poland to the west.

  These empires were not characterised by the economic backwardness in comparison with Europe which was their feature by the late nineteenth century. Some of the technical advances which had propelled Europe from the old feudalism of the tenth century to the very different societies of the sixteenth century could be found in all of them. They all used firearms of some sort – the first Mogul emperor, Babur, defeated much bigger armies in northern India in 1526 by using artillery to complement his highly competent cavalry. These societies borrowed building techniques and craft skills from one another so that, for instance, craftsmen from across Asia and Europe worked on the construction of the Taj Mahal tomb built by the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan. In all of them agriculture and diet began to change considerably with the spread of new domesticated plants from the Americas – the cultivation of chillies, sweet peppers, tomatoes, tobacco and maize in India, and of sweet potatoes, ground nuts, maize and tobacco in China.

  China’s glorious sunset

  China was already recovering from its crisis of the fourteenth century by the early part of the fifteenth. One proof was a series of epic voyages by naval expeditions. Fleets of large ships carrying more than 20,000 people sailed to the west coast of India, Aden and on to east Africa, on one occasion making the 6,000-mile journey non-stop. This was three-quarters of a century before Spanish or Portuguese fleets attempted comparable journeys.

  Gernet calls the sixteenth century ‘the beginning of a new age’. 127 In agriculture, he notes, there were new machines for working the soil, for irrigation, sowing seed and the treatment of products along with new methods of improving the soil and the selection of new crop strains. In industry, there was the introduction of the silk loom with three or four shuttle-winders, along with improvements in cotton looms, the development of printing from wood blocks in three or four colours and the invention of a copper-lead alloy for casting moveable character, and new ways of manufacturing white and icing sugars. 128 ‘Numerous works of a scientific or technical character were published’ in the first part of the seventeenth century, dealing with questions as diverse as agricultural techniques, weaving, ceramics, iron and steel, river transport, armaments, inks and papers, and hydraulic devices. 129 This was certainly not a period of technological stagnation. Nor was it one in which intellectuals simply parroted certainties from the past. Gernet tells of thinkers such as the self-educated former salt worker Wang Ken, who questioned the established view of historical figures, challenged the hypocrisies of the age and traditional morality, and defended ‘lower classes, women, ethnic minorities’. 130 Gernet continues:

  The end of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century were marked by the remarkable development of the theatre, the short story and the novel, and by the upsurge of a semi-learned, semi-popular culture … of an urban middle class eager for reading matter and entertainment. Never had the book industry been so prosperous or its products of such good quality. 131

  There was a ‘rapid increase in the number of cheap publications’, with literature ‘written in a language much closer to the spoken dialects than to classical Chinese … addressed to an urban public … not well educated, but free of the intellectual constraints indicated by a classical training’. 132 If Gernet’s account is correct, then China was undergoing a technical and intellectual renaissance at more or less the same time as Europe. 133

  There were some similar social changes. The state increasingly commuted the old labour services of peasants and artisans into money taxes. The commercialisation of agriculture led to the production of industrial crops like cotton, dyes, vegetable oils and tobacco. Poorer peasants, driven from the land by landlords, sought a livelihood in other ways – taking up handicraft trades, emigrating to
the mining areas, seeking work in the towns. Trading and craft enterprises flourished, especially in the coastal regions of the south and east. As in Europe, most production was still in artisan workshops. But there were occasional examples of something close to full-scale industrial capitalism. Small enterprises grew into big enterprises, some of which employed several hundred workers. Peasant women took jobs at Sung-chiang, south west of Shanghai, in the cotton mills. 134 At the end of the sixteenth century there were 50,000 workers in 30 paper factories in Kiangsi. 135 Some Chinese industries began producing for a worldwide, rather than a merely local, market. Silk and ceramics were exported in bulk to Japan. 136 It was not long before ‘Chinese silks were being worn in the streets of Kyoto and Lima, Chinese cottons being sold in Filipino and Mexican markets and Chinese porcelain being used in fashionable homes from Sakai to London’. 137

  It was a period of economic growth despite continued poverty among the lower classes. After falling by almost half to around 70 million in the fourteenth century, the population rose to an estimated 130 million in the late sixteenth century and to as high as 170 million by the 1650s. 138 Then the empire ran into a devastating crisis similar in many ways to those of the fourth century and the fourteenth century – as well as to that occurring simultaneously in much of seventeenth-century Europe. There were a succession of epidemics, floods, droughts and other disasters. Famines devastated whole regions. The population stopped growing and even declined in some regions. 139 Once-flourishing industries shut down. By the 1640s reports from northern Chekiang (the hinterland of Shanghai) spoke of ‘mass starvation, hordes of beggars, infanticide and cannibalism’. 140