A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Yet the central features of the period were a product of the preceding revolutionary upheavals. That one-time bastion of counter-revolution, the Habsburg dynasty, was a shadow of its former self, losing the crown of Spain to a branch of the Bourbons. By contrast, the two states in which the revolutionary forces had broken through, the Dutch republic and England, were increasingly important – Holland taking over much of the old Portuguese colonial empire and England then challenging this.

  The second half of the seventeenth century is sometimes called the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. Agriculture flourished with land reclamation from the sea and the adoption of new plant types and farming methods. 1 Industry reached an ‘apex of prosperity’ when ‘the Zaanstreek, a flat watery district just north of Amsterdam’, emerged as probably ‘the most modern industrial zone … in all Europe’, with 128 industrial windmills permitting ‘the mechanisation of many industries from papermaking to rice husking’. 2

  England began to undergo an ‘agricultural revolution’ in the aftermath of the civil war. Farming was increasingly commercialised and new crops were widely introduced – from turnips and potatoes to maize. There was a spread of capitalist farming and a great wave of ‘enclosures’ – the fencing off of old common grazing land by landlords and capitalist farmers, forcing the mass of poor peasants to become wage labourers.

  Industrial output also grew – by an estimated 0.7 per cent a year from 1710 to 1760, 1.3 per cent a year between 1760 and 1780, and 2 per cent from 1780 to 1800. The proportion of town dwellers grew from about 9 per cent in 1650 to 20 per cent in 1800. 3 Initially there was widespread opposition in Scotland to the 1707 unification with England, but it resulted in a substantial and sustained growth of industry and trade. On visiting Glasgow 15 years later Daniel Defoe could describe it as ‘a city of business; here is a city of foreign and home trade … that encreases and improves in both’. 4

  Industrial innovation began to gain a momentum of its own in the now united kingdom, laying the ground for the industrial revolution in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The first working steam engine was developed in 1705 (although it was another 60 years before James Watt made it efficient enough to work anywhere but in mines). Iron was smelted using coke rather than charcoal in 1709 (although it was to be 40 years before it was of sufficiently high quality for general use). In the decades from the 1730s to the 1760s, successive inventors managed to break down the task of spinning into component parts and begin to mechanise them, with Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Arkwright’s water frame (1769), and Crompton’s mule (1779). 5 Along with such great changes there were lesser, piecemeal changes in many of the older, mainly handcraft-based industries: the spread of the stocking frame, the weaving of less costly ‘new drapery’ cloths, the introduction of the flying shuttle which doubled the productivity of the handloom weaver, deeper coal mines using more sophisticated equipment (coal output grew from 500,000 tons in 1650 to five million tons in 1750 and 15 million in 1800). 6

  In the new climate of intense competition for foreign trade, technical innovation was no longer a haphazard, accidental occurrence which took decades or even centuries to find acceptance, but a requirement for success.

  Holland and Britain were not modern industrial societies. The majority of the population still lived in the countryside and the poor quality of roads meant it still took many days of uncomfortable travelling to journey from provincial towns to capital cities. They were nothing like modern democracies either. British governments were dominated by the great landowning aristocrats, who were usually able to decide how the lesser gentry and burghers who elected the House of Commons would vote, while the great merchants held similar sway in Holland.

  Nevertheless, both countries were qualitatively different from what they had been a century, let alone two centuries, before – and qualitatively different from their European neighbours. The legal subjection of the peasantry to individual lords had gone completely. There were genuine national markets, without the hodgepodge of petty states which characterised Germany and Italy or the internal customs barriers that criss-crossed France. A very large number of people had some experience of urban life – fully one-sixth of England’s population had spent at least some time in London by the end of the seventeenth century. Rural industries absorbed the labour of many people even in agricultural districts, and the sea ports and navies employed large numbers of the lower classes in occupations dependent upon trade rather than agriculture. London overtook Paris as the largest city in Europe, and although most production was still carried on by individual craft workers in their own homes or workshops, their work was increasingly coordinated by merchants or other wealthier artisans. There were ‘clothier’ entrepreneurs in the west of England employing 100, 400 or even 1,000 weavers and finishers, and with incomes greater than many of the gentry. 7

  The great families who dominated governments were careful to adopt policies which kept the ‘middling’ traders, manufacturers and capitalist farmers happy as well as the large merchants. In the 1760s and early 1770s the burghers of the City of London agitated furiously against the aristocratic and gentry interests which controlled parliament and government, and their spokesman, John Wilkes, spent time in prison – but they had the backing of some of the great families and eventually managed to impose their will on the others without a need for revolutionary measures. The great ideological and political struggles of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries meant they had already won the most important battles.

  Things were very different in the European countries where the revolutionary upsurges had been thwarted. For most of these the seventeenth century was a period of economic decline – of falling population as deaths exceeded births, of a contraction of the urban crafts, of low investment in agriculture as lords and the state between them took all the surplus and the peasantry wallowed in endless poverty (and in places suffered the ‘second serfdom’). Total agricultural output was probably lower in eighteenth-century Poland, Sicily or Castile than it had been two centuries earlier. In Bohemia one person in ten died of hunger in the famine of 1770–72: such was the price of counter-revolutionary victory.

  France, south western Germany and northern Italy were ‘intermediate’. They did not suffer the economic regression which characterised Castile, the Italian south and eastern Europe. But their agriculture and industry were more backward, on average, than England’s and Holland’s. Innovative farming techniques and capitalist relations spread in some regions close to large towns. There was some increase in handicraft production and even, in a few cases, the establishment of larger mining or industrial enterprises. Some ports oriented on Atlantic trade expanded considerably, especially on the west coast of France. By the 1780s, 20 per cent of the French population were employed in mainly small-scale industry – as against 40 per cent in England. Major parts of Europe were moving in the same direction on the road to industrial capitalism, but at very different speeds.

  Chapter 2

  From superstition to science

  The contrasting economic fortunes of the different parts of Europe were matched by a contrast in intellectual endeavour.

  The Renaissance and Reformation had broken upon a world penetrated at every level by superstitious beliefs – beliefs in religious relics and priestly incantations, beliefs in the magic potions and talismans provided by ‘cunning men’, beliefs in diabolical possession and godly exorcism, beliefs in the ability of ‘witches’ to cast deadly spells and of the touch of kings to cure illnesses. 8 Such beliefs were not only to be found among the illiterate masses. They were as prevalent among rulers as among peasants. Kings would collect holy relics. Men as diverse as Christopher Columbus, Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton took prophecies based on the biblical Book of Revelation seriously. A Cortés or a Pizarro might ascribe victory in battle to divine intervention, and a king (James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England) could write a treatise on witchcraft.

  Such beliefs went a
longside ignorance of the real causes of the ills that afflicted people. Life for most was short. Sudden death was common and all too often inexplicable given the level of knowledge. The ignorance of doctors was such that their remedies were as likely to make an illness worse as to cure it. An epidemic of plague or smallpox could wipe out a quarter or more of a town’s population. Devastating harvest failures – and sudden hunger – could be expected by most people once or more a decade. A single fire could burn down a whole street or, as in London in 1666, a whole city.

  The only long-term solution to any of these problems lay in beginning to understand the natural causes behind apparently unnatural events. But science was still not something fully separate from superstition. Knowledge of how to separate and fuse natural substances (chemistry) was mixed in with belief in the transmutation of base metals into gold (alchemy). Knowledge of the motions of the planets and the stars (astronomy) – essential for working out dates and charting ocean voyages – was still tied to systems of belief which purported to predict events (astrology). A serious interest in mathematics could still be combined with faith in the magic of numerical sequences. And it was possible to reject most of these confusions but still believe scientific knowledge could be gained simply from the study of old Greek, Latin or Arabic texts.

  There was a vicious circle. Magical beliefs could not be dispelled without the advance of science. But science was cramped by systems of magical beliefs. What is more, the difference between a set of scientific beliefs and a set of unscientific beliefs was not as obvious as it might seem today.

  Take the belief that the planets, the sun and the stars moved around the Earth. This was based on the views of Aristotle, as amended after his death by Ptolemy. 9 There had long existed a different view, holding that the Earth moved round the sun. It had been developed in the ancient Graeco-Roman world by Heraclides of Pontus and in the medieval period by Nicole Oresme and Nicolas Cusanus. But hard as it may be to understand today, the most learned and scientifically open minds rejected the view that ‘the Earth moves’ for a millennium and a half, since it contradicted other, unchallenged Aristotelian principles about the motion of objects. The new account of the Earth and planets moving round the sun presented by the Polish monk Copernicus in 1543 could not deal with this objection. It was far from winning universal acceptance, even among those who recognised its utility for certain practical purposes. For instance, Francis Bacon – whose stress on the need for empirical observation is credited with doing much to free science from superstition – rejected the Copernican system since ‘a teacher of the modern empirical approach does not see the need for such subversive imaginings’. 10 Scepticism was reinforced by inaccuracies discovered in Copernicus’s calculations of the movements of the planets. It was half a century before this problem was solved mathematically by Kepler, who showed the calculations worked perfectly if the planets were seen as moving in elliptical rather than circular orbits. But Kepler’s own beliefs were magical by our standards. He believed the distances of the planets from each other and from the sun were an expression of the intrinsic qualities of numerical series, not of physical forces. He had turned from the Aristotelian picture of the world to an even older, and if anything more mystical, Platonist or even Pythagorean picture in which there were universal patterns to be found in different sectors of reality. Such a belief could justify astrological predictions as well as astronomical calculations, since what occurred in one part of reality was believed to follow the same pattern as what occurred elsewhere. Kepler was quite prepared to make astrological forecasts. In Prague in 1618 he predicted, ‘May will not pass away without great difficulty.’ The forecast turned out to be correct, since the Thirty Years War began – but hardly because of celestial movements.

  Kepler was by no means alone in believing in the mystical influences of some bodies on others. ‘Neo-Platonism’ remained influential at Cambridge University until well into the second half of the seventeenth century, with people believing that treating a knife which has cut someone could help heal the wound – just as a magnet can affect a piece of iron some distance away. 11

  Galileo did most to win acceptance of the Copernican picture of the universe when, using the recently invented telescope in 1609, he discovered craters and mountains on the moon. This showed that it was not made of some substance radically different to the Earth, as the Aristotle–Ptolemy account argued. He also developed the elements of a new physics, providing an account of how bodies move, which challenged Aristotle’s. But his was still not a full break. 12 Galileo accepted, for instance, that the universe was finite, and he rejected Kepler’s notion that the planets moved in ellipses. To this extent he was still a prisoner of the old ideas. He was soon to be a prisoner in another sense as well – put on trial by the Inquisition, forced to denounce the Copernican system and held under house arrest until his death.

  The arguments over physics and astronomy became intertwined with the general ideological arguments of the period. In 1543 Copernicus had been able to publish his views without fear of persecution by the Catholic church to which he belonged. Indeed some of the hardest attacks on his views came from Luther’s disciple Melanchthon, while the reform of the calendar by the Catholic church relied on computations based on Copernicus’s model.

  But things changed with the Counter-Reformation. Its supporters mobilised behind the Aristotelian model as adopted by the theologian Thomas Aquinas 250 years earlier to resolve the philosophical arguments of the thirteenth century – a model imposed on doubters at the time by the newly born Inquisition. Aristotle (and Aquinas) had taught that everything and every person has its own place in the scheme of things. There was a fixed hierarchy of celestial bodies and an equally fixed hierarchy on Earth. This was the perfect worldview for kings and classes which wanted not just to destroy the Reformation but to force the rebellious middle and lower classes to submit to the old feudal order. From such a perspective the Copernican worldview was as subversive as the views of Luther or Calvin. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for suggesting there were an infinity of worlds. The ideological climate in the Catholic states worked against further scientific investigation. On hearing about the trial of Galileo, the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes suppressed a finding that foreshadowed the later discoveries of Newton. 13 It is hardly surprising that the centre of scientific advance shifted to the Dutch republic and post-revolutionary England – and to Boyle, Hook, Huygens and, above all, Newton, whose new laws of physics solved the problems which had plagued Copernicus’s, Kepler’s and Galileo’s accounts of the universe.

  This was not because the Protestant leaders were, in themselves, any more enlightened than their Catholic counterparts. As Keith Thomas notes, ‘theologians of all denominations’ upheld the reality of witchcraft. 14 But the popular base of Protestantism lay with social groups – artisans, lesser merchants – who wanted to advance knowledge, even if it was only knowledge of reading and writing so as to gain access to the Bible. The spread of Protestantism was accompanied by the spread of efforts to encourage literacy, and once people could read and write, a world of new ideas was open to them. What is more, the mere fact that there was a challenge to the old orthodoxy opened people’s minds to further challenges. This was shown most clearly during the English Revolution. The Presbyterians who challenged the bishops and the king could not do so without permitting censorship to lapse. But this in turn allowed those with a host of other religious views to express themselves freely. Amid the cacophony of religious prophecies and biblical interpretations, people found it possible for the first time to express doubts openly about them all. One drunken trooper in the New Model Army could ask, ‘Why should not that pewter pot on the table be God?’ The conservative political theorist Thomas Hobbes published a thoroughly materialist work, Leviathan , which contained attacks on the notion of religious miracles. A group of likeminded scientists had been able to gather in the liberated atmosphere of Oxford after the New Model A
rmy had taken it from the royalists and set up a society for scientific advance.

  Hobbes feared he might be burned at the stake for heresy, at the time of the Restoration. But in fact he received a royal pension and the society became the ‘Royal Society’. Science was beginning to be identified with an increase in control over the natural world which paid dividends in terms of agriculture, industry, trade and military effectiveness.

  This did not mean the battle against superstition was won. Vast numbers of people in advanced industrial countries still put their faith in astrologers and charms, whether religious or ‘magical’. And this is not just true of supposedly ‘uneducated’ people. ‘World leaders’ such as Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi and former French prime minister Édith Cresson have consulted astrologers. In the eighteenth century the influence of magic was even greater.

  But a change did occur. The professional witchfinder Matthew Hopkins had been able to push 200 convictions for witchcraft through the courts in England’s eastern counties in the mid-1640s amid the chaos of the unresolved civil war. This was a far greater number than at any time previously. 15 By contrast, the occupation of Scotland by the New Model Army brought a temporary end to prosecution for witchcraft, 16 and by 1668 one commentator could note, ‘Most of the looser gentry and the smaller pretenders to philosophy and wit are generally deriders of the belief in witches’. 17 The last witchcraft execution in England took place in 1685, although the crime remained on the statute book for another 50 years. A change in the general ‘mentality’ had resulted from the economic, social and political changes of the previous century.