A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Chapter 3

  The Enlightenment

  The most radical intellectual challenge to received ideas since the rise of class society occurred in the aftermath of the Dutch and English revolutions. The more intellectually aware sections of the middle, and even the upper, classes elsewhere in Europe began to feel that their societies were defective, and sought to bring change by changing ideas. This led to a much more far-reaching attack on prejudice and superstition than had occurred in the Renaissance and Reformation. The result was a current of ideas known as the Enlightenment.

  This catch-all category included a range of thinkers and writers – natural scientists, philosophers, satirists, economists, historians, essayists, novelists, political theorists and even musicians like Mozart. They did not all hold the same set of views. Some had diametrically opposed opinions on major issues. 18

  What they shared was a belief in the power of rational understanding based on empirical knowledge. This had to be applied to the world, even if it meant challenging existing myths and established beliefs. Such an approach represented a challenge to many of the institutions and much of the ideology of existing European societies.

  One influence was that of the philosophers Descartes in France, Spinoza in Holland and Leibniz in south western Germany. They were convinced a complete understanding of the world could be deduced from a few unchallengeable principles of reason – a conviction which grew in the eighteenth century on the basis of Newton’s success in establishing basic laws for physics. 19 These ‘rationalist’ philosophers were not necessarily political radicals. Leibniz famously declared that the universe ran according to a prearranged harmony, that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ – a view caricatured brilliantly in Voltaire’s Candide . But the rationalist approach could become an almost revolutionary weapon in other hands, since it implied that every institution or practice not deducible from first principles should be rejected.

  Another influence was the rather different tradition begun by John Locke in England. He insisted that knowledge came not from the ‘innate ideas’ of the rationalists but from empirical observation of what already existed. Locke was just as politically conservative as Leibniz. He reflected the attitude of English gentlemen landowners and merchants. Their aims had been achieved once English kings agreed to govern through an upper-class parliament. Yet as the eighteenth century wore on, increasingly radical conclusions were drawn in France and Germany from the English empiricist approach. So Voltaire and Montesquieu in France were great admirers of Locke, drawing from his writings the conclusion that the countries of continental Europe should be reformed along English lines. A conservative doctrine in England could be a subversive one across the Channel.

  The Enlightenment thinkers were not revolutionaries. They were dissident intellectuals who looked to members of the upper class for sponsorship. They placed their hopes not in the overthrow of society but in its reform, which would be achieved by winning the battle of ideas. Diderot saw no contradiction in visiting the Russian empress Catherine the Great, nor did Voltaire in collaborating with the Prussian king Frederick the Great. Their milieu is demonstrated by those regularly in attendance at the twice-weekly ‘salons’ organised by d’Holbach’s wife, where thinkers like Diderot, Hume, Rousseau, the future American leader Benjamin Franklin and the radical chemist Joseph Priestley mixed with the ambassador of Naples, Lord Shelbourne, the future French royal minister Necker and the Prince of Brunswick. 20 Voltaire insisted, ‘It is not the labourers one should educate, but the good bourgeois, the tradesmen.’ Even the French encyclopedists, who were zealous propagandists of the new thinking, concentrated their efforts on books which were way beyond the financial reach of the bulk of the population (the early editions of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie , in 17 volumes, sold only 4,000 copies), through the salons of friendly aristocrats or participation in Masonic Societies whose secret semi-religious rites brought together the ‘Enlightened’ elite of the upper and middle classes.

  There were also limits to how far most of the Enlightenment thinkers were prepared to take their critiques of existing institutions and ideas, at least in public. So Voltaire could rage against the superstition of religion (‘ écrasez l’infame ’ – ‘crush the infamous thing’ – was his slogan) and subject biblical accounts of miracles to devastating critiques, but he was very upset when d’Holbach published (under a pseudonym) a thoroughly atheistic work, The System of Nature . ‘This book has made philosophy execrable in the eyes of the king and the whole of the courts,’ he wrote. 21 Gibbon, in England, could write a pioneering history, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , which was scathing in its attack on the influence of the Christian church. But it was not intended to shake the faith of the masses. The Scot David Hume did not publish his own savage attacks on religion during his lifetime. Voltaire objected to what he saw as Rousseau’s negative attitude to existing social institutions in The Social Contract , while Rousseau objected to Voltaire’s ‘negative’ attitude towards religion.

  But however reluctant they were to take a radical stance, the thinkers of the Enlightenment challenged some of the basic props of the societies in which they lived. These were not open to easy reform, and powerful interests saw any questioning as deeply subversive. Many of the thinkers suffered as a result. Voltaire was beaten up by the hired thugs of an aristocrat, endured a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille and then felt compelled to live away from Paris for many years. Diderot was incarcerated for a period in the fortress of Vincennes, near Paris. Rousseau spent the latter part of his life out of reach of the French authorities across the Swiss border, and the plays of Beaumarchais (whose Marriage of Figaro laid the basis for Mozart’s opera) were banned in several countries for suggesting that a servant could thwart the intentions of his master.

  The church could be especially hostile to any questioning of established ideas. In southern Europe the Counter-Reformation stamped viciously on all opposition until the second half of the eighteenth century. In Spain there were 700 cases of auto da fé (the burning alive of ‘heretics’) between 1700 and 1746. 22 In France, Protestants could still be sentenced to slavery in the galleys and two Protestants were broken on the wheel before being hanged in Toulouse in 1761 and Abbeville in 1766. 23

  By challenging such things, the thinkers raised fundamental questions about how society was organised, even if they shied away from providing complete answers. Voltaire’s Candide suggested that no state in Europe could fulfil people’s needs. Rousseau began his Social Contract with the revolutionary idea, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’, even though he seems to have put little faith in the masses himself. The philosophers d’Holbach and Helvetius attempted thoroughgoing materialist analyses of nature and society which rejected any notion of god. 24 The naturalist Buffon put forward an almost evolutionist theory of animal species (and insisted on the unity of the human species, ascribing differences between ‘races’ to climatic conditions). 25 The Scots Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith saw human society as progressing through stages, of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, and so laid the basis for a materialist understanding of social development. Between them, the Enlightenment intellectuals went further than anyone ever before in trying to make sense of human beings and human institutions.

  There is a sense in which their ideas became ‘hegemonic’, in that they dominated intellectual discussion right across Europe, everywhere throwing apologists for other views on the defensive. They received a hearing from all those, even at the very top, who wanted the kind of ‘modern’, economically successful society they saw in England, as opposed to the ‘antiquated’, economically stagnant societies of continental Europe.

  At various points, governments in Austria, Russia, Portugal and Poland tried to push through certain reforms associated with Enlightenment thought (and so are sometimes called ‘enlightened despots’ by historians). Between 1759 and 1765 the rulers of Portugal, France, Spain, Nap
les and Parma threw out the Jesuits – and, under pressure from the Catholic monarchs, the pope disbanded the order in Europe. 26 In France, Turgot, one of the most prominent ‘physiocrat’ Enlightenment economists, became a minister of Louis XVI in 1774. But in each case the reforms from above were eventually abandoned. Even ‘enlightened’ monarchs were unable to implement them in the face of resistance from ruling classes whose wealth depended on residual forms of feudal exploitation.

  Diderot wrote in the Encyclopédie that its aim was ‘to change the general way of thinking’. 27 The Enlightenment thinkers did make a highly successful challenge to the ideas of intellectuals, including ruling-class intellectuals, and it was a more far-reaching challenge than that of the Reformation two centuries before. By the 1780s the works of Voltaire and Rousseau ‘did speak to an enormous public’, 28 and cheap (often pirated) versions of the Encyclopédie sold far more copies than Diderot himself ever intended. ‘It spread through the bourgeoisie of the ancien régime ’ and ‘a progressive ideology … infiltrated the most archaic and eroded segments of the social structure’. 29 Yet the Enlightenment thinkers were hardly effective in achieving their goal of reforming society. Voltaire, apparently, was dispirited when he died in 1778. 30 Kant noted six years later that, although ‘he was living in the Age of Enlightenment … the age itself was not enlightened’. 31

  Changing ideas was not the same as changing society. It would require another cycle of revolutions and civil wars to bring that about.

  Chapter 4

  Slavery and wage slavery

  The ideas of the Enlightenment did not simply emerge, accidentally, from the heads of certain thinkers. They were at least a partial reflection of changes taking place in the relations between human beings – change which had gone furthest in Britain and Holland.

  The central change through the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that exchange through the market played an increasingly dominant role in the way people obtained a livelihood. The church might burn heretics and the Habsburg armies sack urban centres opposed to their rule. But popes, emperors, princes and lords all required cash to finance their efforts – and this meant that, even while trying to preserve the old order, they helped spread the market forces which would ultimately undermine it.

  This was shown most clearly after the conquest of the Americas. Silver from the American mines was key to financing the armies which backed the Counter-Reformation. But the flow of that silver was part of a new intercontinental network of market relations. Much of it flowed through intermediaries in north west Europe and out to China, the East Indies and India to buy luxury goods. New international shipping routes – from Manila to Acapulco, from Vera Cruz to Seville, from Amsterdam to Batavia 32 and from Batavia to Canton – were beginning to bind people’s lives in one part of the world to those in another.

  Market relations rest on the assumption that, however unequal people’s social standing, they have an equal right to accept or reject a particular transaction. The buyer is free to offer any price and the seller free to reject the offer. Mandarin and merchant, baron and burgher, landlord and tenant have equal rights in this respect. In so far as the market spreads, old prejudices based on dominance and deference come under siege from calculations in terms of cash.

  The Enlightenment was a recognition in the realm of ideas of this change taking place in reality. Its picture of a world of equal men (although a few Enlightenment thinkers raised the question of equal rights for women) was an abstraction from a world in which people were meant to be equally able to agree, or fail to agree, to buy and sell goods in their possession. The ‘rational’ state was one in which this could take place without arbitrary obstruction.

  Yet there were two great holes in the Enlightenment picture as applied in the eighteenth century – and not just to ‘backward’ regions of Europe such as Castile, Sicily or eastern Europe, but to Britain, the model for people like Voltaire. One was the chattel slavery of the Americas, and the other the wage slavery of the propertyless labourer at home.

  Chapter 5

  Slavery and racism

  A growing amount of the wealth of eighteenth-century Europe came from an institution based on the very opposite of equal rights between buyers and sellers – from enforced slavery. Philosophers might talk abut equal rights in the coffee houses of Europe. But the sweetened coffee they drank was produced by people who had been herded at gunpoint onto ships in west Africa, taken across the Atlantic in appalling conditions (more than one in ten died on the way), sold at auctions and then whipped into working 15, 16 or even 18 hours a day until they died.

  About 12 million people suffered this fate. 33 A million and a half died while making the passage. The death toll on the plantations was horrendous, since the planters found it profitable to work someone to death and then buy a replacement. A total of 1.6 million slaves were taken to the British Caribbean islands in the eighteenth century, yet the slave population at its end was 600,000. In North America conditions (a more temperate climate and greater access to fresh food) allowed a more rapid expansion of the slave population, through births as well as imports, so that it grew from 500,000 at the beginning of the century to three million at the end and six million by the 1860s. But the death toll was still much higher than for non-slaves. As Patrick Manning points out, ‘By 1820 some ten million Africans had migrated to the New World as compared to two million Europeans. The New World white population of 12 million was roughly twice as great as the black population’. 34

  Slavery was not invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of course. It had persisted in small pockets in different parts of Europe and the Middle East through the Middle Ages – as a way of manning the naval galleys of the Mediterranean states, for instance. But it was a marginal phenomenon at a time when serfdom was the main form of exploitation, and the slavery which did exist was not associated with black people more than any other group. Whites could be galley slaves, and the word for slave is derived from ‘Slav’. As Patrick Manning writes, ‘In 1500, Africans or persons of African descent were a clear minority of the world’s slave population; but by 1700, the majority’. 35

  The change began with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Christopher Columbus sent some of the Arawaks who first greeted him to be sold as slaves in Seville and there were attempts to use American Indians as slaves in the Caribbean. But the efforts were not very successful. The Indian population fell by up to 90 per cent as a result of barbarous treatment and epidemics, the Spanish conquerors found it more remunerative to extract tribute and forced labour than to resort to outright slavery, and the Spanish crown – worried that the Indian population would die out and leave it without any labour to work the land – listened to the criticism of Indian slavery from priests who saw the priority as converting the Indians to Christianity.

  Crown and colonists alike turned increasingly to a different source of labour – the buying of slaves on the coast of west Africa. Cortés started a plantation manned by African slaves, and even the priest Las Casas, the best-known critic of the Spanish treatment of the Indians, recommended African slavery (although he later repented giving such advice).

  Slavery took off on a massive scale when Portugal, Holland, England and France began the commercial cultivation of tobacco and sugar in their colonies. These crops demanded a huge labour force, and free immigrants from Europe were not prepared to provide it.

  At first the plantation owners utilised a form of unfree labour from Europe. ‘Indentured servants’ – in effect slaves to debt – were contracted to work for three, five or seven years for no wages, in return for their passage across the Atlantic. Some were kidnapped by ‘spirits’, as agents for the contractors were known in Britain. 36 Others were convicts or prisoners from the civil and religious wars in Europe. The sugar plantations of Barbados had a labour force of 2,000 indentured servants and 200 African slaves in 1638 – with an indentured servant costing £12 and a slave £25. 37 Since neither t
he servant nor the slave was likely to live more than four or five years, the servants seemed ‘better value’ to the plantation owners than the slaves.

  Merchants and rulers had no moral problem with this. After all, the British navy was manned by ‘pressed’ men – poor people kidnapped from the streets, ‘confined’ in conditions ‘not markedly better than that of black slaves’ before leaving port, 38 and facing a death toll at sea as high as that of the human ‘cargo’ of the slave boats they might be escorting. 39 An act of parliament gave captains the power to impose the death sentence for striking an officer, or even for sleeping on watch. 40

  But bond slavery from Europe was not on nearly a big enough scale to supply the labour the planation owners required as the market for tobacco and sugar grew and they turned increasingly to Africa. By 1653, slaves outnumbered indentured servants in Barbados by 20,000 to 8,000. 41 Where there were only 22,400 black people in the southern colonies of North America in 1700, there were 409,500 by 1770.

  At first the plantation owners treated white indentured servants and African slaves very similarly. In Virginia servants who ran away had to serve double time and were branded on the cheek with the letter R if they repeated the offence. In Barbados there were cases of owners killing servants who became too sickly to work. 42 Servants and slaves worked alongside one another, and there was at least one case of intermarriage in Virginia (something which would be inconceivable for another 300 years).