A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  By 1642 the great city of Soochow [on the lower Yangtze] was in visible decline, with many homes vacant and falling into ruin, while the once-rich countryside had become a no man’s land which only armed men dared enter. 141

  Historians often explain this crisis, like the earlier ones, in terms of overpopulation or harvest failures due to global changes in climate. 142 But ‘rice was available in the Yangtze delta even during the terrible “famines” that plagued the country during the early 1640s … People simply lacked sufficient funds to pay for it’. 143

  The crises were, in fact, rooted in the organisation of Chinese society. The state and the bureaucratic class which staffed it had encouraged economic expansion in the aftermath of the crisis of the fourteenth century. But they soon began to fear some of the side-effects, particularly the growing influence of merchants. There was a sudden end to the great naval voyages to India and Africa in 1433 (so ensuring it was ships from Europe which ‘discovered’ China, rather than the other way round). 144 ‘The major concern of the Ming empire was not to allow coastal trade to disturb the social life of its agrarian society’. 145 Its rulers could not stop all overseas trade. What today would be called a ‘black economy’ grew up in coastal regions, and there were bitter armed clashes with ‘pirates’ controlling such areas. But the state measures cramped the development of the new forms of production.

  Meanwhile, the ever growing unproductive expenditure of the state was an enormous drain on the economy. Under Emperor Wan-li, for instance, there were 45 princes of the first rank, each receiving incomes equal to 600 tons of grain a year, and 23,000 nobles of lesser rank. More than half the tax revenues of the provinces of Shansi and Honan went on paying these allowances. A war with Japan for control of Korea ‘completely exhausted the treasury’. 146

  Acute hardship led to social discontent. Almost every year between 1596 and 1626 saw urban riots by ‘workmen’ in the most economically developed parts of the country. 147 In 1603 the miners from private mines marched on Beijing, the 1620s saw rebellions by the non-Chinese peoples in the south west, and there were major peasant rebellions in the north of the country in the 1630s. A sort of opposition also emerged at the top of society among intellectuals and former mandarins which was crushed by a secret police network. 148

  Political collapse followed in 1644. The last Ming emperor strangled himself as a former shepherd leader of a peasant army proclaimed a new dynasty. A month later Manchu invaders from the north took Beijing.

  The economic and political crisis bore many similarities to that in Europe in the same period. But there was a difference. The merchant and artisan classes did not begin to pose an alternative of their own to the old order. They did not even do what the Calvinist merchants and burghers in France did when they exerted some influence on the dissident wing of the aristocracy. They certainly did not remould the whole of society in their own image, as the merchant bourgeoisie of the northern Netherlands and the ‘middling classes’ in England did. As in the previous great crises in Chinese society, the trading and artisan classes were too dependent on the state bureaucracy to provide an alternative.

  The immediate chaos lasted only a few years. The Manchus had long before absorbed many aspects of Chinese civilisation, and by restoring internal peace and stability to the imperial finances they provided a framework for economic recovery – for a period. There was further agricultural advance as crops from the Americas made their full impact and industrial crops expanded. The peasant was ‘in general much better and happier than his equivalent in the France of Louis XV’, with the better-off peasants even able to pay for their children to receive a formal education. 149 There was a resumption of trade and craft production until it outstripped anything before. There were 200,000 full-time textile workers in the region south west of Shanghai, and tens of thousands of porcelain craftsmen turned out products for the court and for export to as far away as Europe. Tea output grew rapidly, with the leaves processed in workshops employing hundreds of wage workers and exported by sea. One estimate suggests half the silver carried from Latin America to Europe between 1571 and 1821 ended up paying for goods from China. The population grew by leaps and bounds as people saw hope for the future, perhaps reaching 260 million in 1812. 150 The country was ‘the richest and biggest state in the world’. 151

  The sheer strength of the empire bred complacency in its ruling circles, and complacency led to intellectual stagnation. The early Manchu years saw a flourishing of intellectual inquiry, a wave of ‘free thought and a radical criticism and questioning of the institutions and intellectual foundations of the authoritarian empire’. 152 Art, literature, philosophy and history all seem to have been marked by a spirit of vitality. Accounts of the period remind one of the ‘Enlightenment’ in Europe. 153 But the critical spirit subsided as the ‘educated classes rallied to the new regime’. 154 There was a decline in popular literature for the urban middle classes, 155 and a ban on anything that might be construed as mildly critical of the regime. In the years 1774–89 more than 10,000 works were prohibited and 2,320 destroyed. Dissident authors and their relatives faced exile, forced labour, confiscation of property and even execution. 156 Intellectuals could flourish, but only if they avoided dealing with real issues. The literature which thrived was ‘written in a classical style more difficult to access, full of literary reminiscences and allusions … The novel became subtly ironical, psychological … or erudite’. 157

  The basic causes of the crisis of the seventeenth century were never dealt with, and the old symptoms soon reappeared – immense expenditures on the imperial court, the spread of corruption through the administration, costly wars on the borders, increased oppression of the peasants by local administrators and tax collectors, a failure to maintain the dykes and regulate water courses, and recurrent and sometimes catastrophic floods. 158 A new wave of peasant rebellions began with the rising of the ‘White Lotus’ in 1795, and one of the greatest revolts in Chinese history was to follow within half a century.

  Mogul India

  Mogul India was a very different society to China. It did not have the great canal and irrigation systems, 159 a centralised bureaucracy inculcated with literary traditions almost 2,000 years old, a class of large landowners, or a peasantry that bought as well as sold things in local markets.

  A succession of Islamic rulers had overrun much of northern India from the thirteenth century, imposing centralised structures on the local peasant economies of the Indian Middle Ages. The Mogul emperors developed the system, ruling through a hierarchy of officials who were given the right to collect land taxes in specific areas, with which they had to maintain the cavalry essential for the military functioning of the state. They were not landowners, although they grew rich from the exploitation of the peasantry. There was also another landed class – the zamindars – in each locality. They were often upper-caste Hindus from the pre-Mogul exploiting classes, who helped to collect the taxes and took a share for themselves. 160

  The great mass of rural people continued to live in virtually self-sufficient villages. Hereditary groups of peasants would produce food for hereditary groups of village smiths, carpenters, weavers and barbers in a self-contained division of labour that did not involve cash payments. All the elements of the medieval caste system remained intact.

  But the peasants did need cash for their taxes, and had to sell between a third and a half of their crops to get it. Those who failed to pay, as one observer recorded in the 1620s, were ‘carried off, attached to heavy chains, to various markets and fairs’ to be sold as slaves, ‘with their poor, unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children in their arms, all crying and lamenting their plight’. 161

  The great bulk of the surplus extracted from the peasants in this way went to the imperial court, the state bureaucracy and its armies. As Irfan Habib explains, the state ‘served not merely as the protective arm of the exploiting class, but was itself the principal instrument of exploitation’. 162 Few of
these revenues ever returned to the villages. The state used them in the cities and towns of the empire.

  The result was a growth of trade and urban craft production, and a system that was far from economically static. The Mogul period witnessed ‘the achievement of an unprecedented level of industrial and commercial prosperity, reflected in general urbanisational growth’. 163 There was an ‘intensification, expansion and multiplication of crafts’, and of both internal and international trade. ‘There were as many as 120 big cities’, 164 and ‘great concentrations of population, production and consumption [in] Lahore, Delhi and Agra, and to a lesser extent in Lucknow, Benares and Allahabad’. 165 Contemporary observers regarded Lahore ‘as the greatest city in the east’. 166 One European visitor estimated the population of Agra to be 650,000, 167 and Delhi was said to be as big as Europe’s biggest city, Paris. 168

  The biggest industry, cotton textiles, was exporting products to Europe by the seventeenth century: ‘As many as 32 urban centres manufactured cotton in large quantities’; 169 ‘no city, town or village seems to have been devoid of these industries’; 170 and ‘almost every house in the villages used to have its spinning wheel’. 171 At the same time, ‘The organisation of commercial credit, insurance and rudimentary deposit banking reminds us of conditions in Renaissance Europe’. 172

  But one factor was missing to make this economic advance lasting – there was no feedback into the villages of the industrial advance in the towns. ‘So much is wrung from the peasants’, wrote one contemporary witness, ‘that even dry bread is scarcely left to fill their stomachs’. 173 They simply could not afford to buy improved tools. ‘There is no evidence that the villages depended in any way on urban industry’, 174 and so the growth of the city trades was accompanied by stagnation and impoverishment of the villages. In general, the city ‘was not a city that produced commodities for the use of society, rather one that devastated the countryside while eating up local produce’. 175

  The long-term effect was to ruin the peasant productive base of the empire. 176 At the same time as Shah Jahan was using the tax revenues to glorify Lahore, Delhi and Agra and build the Taj Mahal, an observer reported that ‘the land was being laid waste through bribery and revenue farming, as a result of which the peasantry was being robbed and plundered’. 177 Peasants began to flee from the land. Habib tells how ‘famines initiated wholesale movements of population … but it was a man-made system which, more than any other factor, lay at the root of the peasant mobility’. 178

  The cities grew partly because landless labourers flooded into them looking for employment. But this could not cure the debilitating effect of over-taxation on the countryside. Just as the empire seemed at its most magnificent it entered into a decline that was to prove terminal.

  The effects became apparent during the reign of Shah Jahan’s son (and jailer) Aurangzeb. 179 Many histories of the Moguls contrast Aurangzeb’s Islamic fanaticism, anti-Hindu actions and endless wars with the apparently enlightened rule of Akbar a century earlier, based as it was on religious tolerance and controls on the rapaciousness of local officials. No doubt these differences owed something to the personalities of the two emperors. But they also corresponded to two periods – one in which the empire could still expand without damaging its agrarian base and one in which that was no longer possible.

  Eventually urban industry and the towns began to suffer from the agricultural decline – except, perhaps, in Bengal. In Agra after 1712 there was ‘talk only of the present deserted state of the city and the glory that existed before’. 180

  At first, few peasants dared challenge Mogul power. ‘The people endure patiently, professing that they would not desire anything better’, a European traveller reported in the 1620s. 181 Discontent at this time found expression in the rise of new religious sects. They used vernacular dialects rather than the dead language Sanskrit, and their prophets and preachers came mainly from the lower classes – including a weaver, a cotton carder, a slave, and the grain merchant Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism. 182 The sects challenged the traditional Brahman-based religious ideology and stood for ‘an uncompromising monotheism, the abandonment of ritualistic forms of worship, the denial of caste barriers and communal differences’. 183 But they also shied away from the language of outright rebellion. They taught ‘humility and resignation’, not ‘militancy or physical struggle’. 184

  This changed as the conditions of their followers worsened: ‘The sects could not always remain within the old mystic shell … They provided the inspiration for two of the most powerful revolts against the Moguls, those of the Satnams and the Sikhs’. 185 By the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, ‘half-crushed Sikh insurgents’ were already a problem in the hinterland of Lahore. 186 There was a revolt of the Jat peasant caste in the region between Agra and Delhi (one writer boasted that the suppression of a revolt involved the slaughter ‘of 10,000 of those human-looking beasts’), 187 a great Sikh rebellion in 1709, 188 and a revolt of the Marathas, ‘which was the greatest single force responsible for the downfall of the empire’. 189

  The fighting strength of the rebellions was provided by peasant bitterness. But the leadership usually came from zamindar or other local exploiting classes who resented the lion’s share of the surplus going to the Mogul ruling class. ‘Risings of the oppressed’ merged with ‘the war between two oppressing classes’. 190

  The merchants and artisans did not play a central role in the revolts. They relied on the luxury markets of the Mogul rulers and lacked the network of local markets which allowed the urban classes in parts of Europe to influence the peasantry. The old society was in crisis, but the ‘bourgeoisie’ was not ready to play an independent role in fighting to transform it. 191 This left zamindar leaders with a free hand to exploit the revolt for their own ends – ones which could not carry society forward.

  As Irfan Habib concludes:

  Thus was the Mogul Empire destroyed. No new order was, or could be, created from the force ranged against it … The gates were open to endless rapine, anarchy and foreign conquest. But the Mogul Empire had been its own gravedigger. 192

  The way was open for armies from western Europe to begin empire-building of their own, and to have the backing of sectors of the Indian merchant bourgeoisie when they did so.

  Part five

  The spread of the

  new order

  Chronology

  Eighteenth century

  Chinese agriculture and industry recover for half a century.

  Revolts by Sikhs and Marathas lead to breakup of Mogul Empire in India.

  Economic stagnation in much of eastern and southern Europe.

  Peter the Great begins building of St Petersburg 1703, tries to introduce west European science and techniques to Russia.

  Unification of England and Scotland 1707.

  Defeat of attempted Stuart Restorations 1716. Agricultural revolution in Britain, spread of enclosures to almost all land.

  British economy overtakes France and then Holland.

  Voltaire publishes first philosophical work 1734, praises English system.

  Bach develops counterpoint and fugue form in music.

  Battle of Culloden, defeat of final attempt at Stuart Restoration in Britain, bloody destruction of remnants of Highland feudalism 1746.

  Diderot begins publication of Encyclopédie to popularise ‘Enlightened’ ideas 1751.

  British East India Company takes control of Bengal 1757.

  Rousseau publishes Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 1755 and The Social Contract 1762.

  Voltaire publishes satirical novel Candide 1759 pouring scorn on optimism. Banning of Encyclopédie 1759.

  Execution of two Protestants in France 1761 and 1766.

  ‘Enlightened despotism’ – monarchs in Prussia, Russia, Portugal and Austria try unsuccessfully to reform rule.

  Growth of Glasgow as a major commercial and industrial city.

  ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ of David Hume, Adam Fer
guson and Adam Smith.

  Britain defeats France in war over control of new colonial lands 1763.

  Height of slave trade, growth of Bristol, Liverpool, Bordeaux, Nantes.

  Slave population of North America 400,000 (out of three million) 1770.

  Arkwright founds first spinning factory at Cromford in Derbyshire 1771.

  Attempts at ‘scientific’ justification for racism – Long’s History of Jamaica 1774.

  Watt and Boulton build first generally applicable steam engines 1775.

  Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations preaches order based on ‘free labour’ and ‘free trade’ 1776.

  Revolt of North American colonies against British rule, Tom Paine’s Common Sense popularises Enlightenment ideas for mass audience.

  Declaration of Independence declares ‘all men are created equal’ (but is silent over question of slavery) 1776.

  Henry Cort devises more advanced way of smelting iron using coal 1783.

  Beginnings of industrial revolution in Britain – 40 per cent of people no longer living on the land.

  Mozart’s symphonies and operas, The Marriage of Figaro 1786, Don Giovanni 1787.

  Chapter 1

  A time of social peace

  The century and a quarter after 1650 was very different in most of Europe from the century and a quarter before. Religious wars, peasant uprisings, civil wars and revolutions seemed a thing of the past.

  There were bitter wars between European powers, such as the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century and the Seven Years War in its middle. There were also struggles at the top of society over the exact division of power between kings and aristocrats in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Portugal. There were even attempts by supporters of the Stuart dynasty in 1690, 1715 and 1745 to upset by military means the constitutional order established in Britain. But the passions which had shaken so much of Europe through the previous period now survived only on its fringes. It would have been easy for anyone contemplating the world in the mid-1750s to conclude that the age of revolution had long since passed, despite the absurdities and barbarisms of the times so brilliantly portrayed in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide .