A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The subjection of China

  China avoided being absorbed like India into a European empire. Yet the fate of the mass of its people was hardly more enviable.

  The wealth of China had excited the greed of Western merchants from the time of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. But they faced a problem. While China produced many things Europeans wanted, Europe did not produce much the Chinese wanted. The British East India Company set out to rectify this by turning wide areas of the newly conquered lands in India over to the cultivation of a product that creates its own demand – opium. By 1810 it was selling 325,000 kilos of the drug a year through Canton, and soon turned China’s centuries-old trade surplus into a deficit. When Chinese officials tried to halt the flow of opium, Britain went to war in 1839 for the right to create addiction.

  Chinese officialdom ruled over an empire older and more populous than any in the world. The country had only ever been conquered by nomad hordes from the north. Its rulers expected to be able easily to defeat a seaborne challenge from a country more than 7,000 miles away. They did not realise that economic developments at the other end of Eurasia – developments which owed an enormous debt to Chinese innovation in centuries past – had given rise to a country more powerful than anyone had ever imagined.

  A memo to the emperor from a leading official predicted easy victory:

  The English barbarians are an insignificant and detestable race, trusting to their strong ships and big guns; the immense distances they have traversed will render the arrival of seasonable supplies impossible, and their soldiers, after a single defeat … will become dispirited and lost. 123

  But after three years of intermittent fighting and negotiations it was the Chinese who acceded to British terms – opening a number of ports to the opium trade, paying an indemnity, ceding the island of Hong Kong and granting extra-territorial rights to British subjects. It was not long before the British decided these concessions were insufficient. They launched a second war in 1857, when 5,000 troops laid siege to Canton and forced a further opening up of trade. Still dissatisfied, they then joined with the French to march 20,000 troops to Beijing and burn the summer palace.

  China scholars disagree about the reasons for the easy British victories. Some ascribe them to superior weaponry and warships, a product of industrial advance. 124 Others stress the internal weaknesses of the Manchu state, claiming the difference between the industrial levels of the two countries was not yet enough to explain the victory. 125 But there is no dispute about the outcome. The concessions gained by Britain weakened the Chinese state’s ability to control trade and to prevent a growing outflow of the silver it used for currency. There was an escalating debilitation of industry and agriculture alike. The defeats also opened the door to demands for similar concessions from other powers, until European states had extra-territorial enclaves or ‘concessions’ (in effect, mini-colonies) all along the Chinese coast.

  The suffering of the peasantry from the decay of the Manchu Empire was intensified by the foreign inroads into it. Conditions became intolerable, especially in the less fertile mountainous areas on the borders between provinces. China’s peasants reacted as they had always done in such circumstances in the past. They joined dissident religious sects and rose up against their masters. What followed is normally called the ‘T’ai-p’ing rebellion’. In fact it was a full-blooded revolutionary assault on the power of the state.

  The movement began among peasants, labourers and a few impoverished intellectuals in southern China in the mid-1840s. Its leader was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, a school teacher from a peasant family, who saw himself in a vision as the brother of Jesus, commanded by God to destroy demons on Earth and establish a ‘Heavenly Kingdom’ of ‘Great Peace’ (T’ai-p’ing in Chinese). He preached a doctrine of strict equality between people, equal division of the land, communal ownership of goods and an end to old social distinctions, including those which subjugated women to men. His followers had a sense of purpose and discipline which enabled them to attract ever-greater support and to defeat the armies sent against them. By 1853 the movement, now two million strong, was able to take the former imperial capital of Nanking and run about 40 per cent of the country as a state of its own.

  The egalitarian ideals of the movement did not last. The high command was soon behaving like a new imperial court, as Hung began ‘a life of excess – high living, luxury and many concubines’. 126 In the countryside impoverished half-starved peasants still had to pay taxes, even if at a slightly lower rate than before.

  The T’ai-p’ing leadership’s abandonment of its ideals followed the pattern of previous peasant revolts in China. Illiterate peasants working land dispersed across vast areas were not a compact enough force to exercise control over an army and its leaders. Those leaders soon discovered the material resources simply did not exist to fulfil their visionary ideals of plenty for all. The easy option was to fall into the traditional way of ruling and the traditional privileges which went with it.

  But in the last stage of the rebellion there were signs of something new. Effective leadership passed to a cousin of Hung’s who began to frame a programme which did imply a break with traditional ways, although not a return to egalitarian ideals. He pushed for the ‘modernisation’ of China’s economy through the adoption of Western techniques – the opening of banks, building of railways and steamships, promotion of mining, and encouragement of science and technology. This suggests that the T’ai-p’ing rebellion had forces within it which could perhaps have broken with the pattern of past peasant revolts and swept away the social obstacles behind so much of the country’s poverty. But these forces had no time to develop. A reorganised imperial army financed by Chinese merchants, provided with modern weapons by Britain and France and assisted by foreign troops under a Major Gordon began to push its way up the Yangtze. Nanking finally fell, with 100,000 dead, in 1864. 127

  Western capitalist states had helped stabilise the old, pre-capitalist order in China, allowing it to survive another 50 years. By doing so, they helped ensure that, while western Europe and North American advanced economically, China went backwards.

  The Eastern Question

  The pattern was very similar in the third great Eastern empire, the Ottoman Empire. This vast multinational empire had dominated an enormous area for 400 years – all of north Africa, Egypt and what is now the Sudan, the Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, Asia Minor and a huge swathe of Europe, including all the Balkans and, at times, Hungary and Slovakia. It was ruled by Turkish emperors based in Istanbul, and there was a Turkish landowning class in Asia Minor and parts of the Balkans. But much of the empire was run by the upper classes of the conquered non-Turkish peoples – Greeks in much of the Balkans, Arabs in the Middle East, and the descendants of the pre-Ottoman mamluke rulers in Egypt. In Istanbul the various religious groups – orthodox Christians, Syriac Christians, Jews and so on – had structures of self-government, subject to overall collaboration with the sultan’s rule. Even the army was not exclusively Turkish. Its core was made up of janissaries – originally children from Balkan Christian families taken at a young age to Istanbul, nominally as slaves, and trained as hardened fighters.

  The wealth of the empire, like that of all the societies of its time, came overwhelmingly from peasant agriculture. But the Ottomans had long traded both with western Europe (through Russia and Scandinavia via the rivers which fed into the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, and through southern Europe via trade with Venice and Genoa) and with India and China (via overland routes such as the ‘silk road’ which ran north of Afghanistan, and through ports on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf). Until the mid-eighteenth century, at least, there were slow but steady advances in both agriculture (the spread of new crops like coffee and cotton) and handicraft industry.

  However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was increasingly under pressure from outside. Napoleon had conquered Egypt until driven out by British troops, and in 18
30 the French monarchy seized Algeria in the face of bitter local resistance. Russian forces conquered much of the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast, and set their sights on Istanbul itself. Serbs rebelled against Turkish rule and set up an autonomous kingdom in 1815, and Greeks carved out a state with British and Russian help in the 1820s. The Russian tsars encouraged similar movements elsewhere, posing as the ‘protectors’ of ethnic groups speaking languages similar to their own and belonging to the same Orthodox branch of Christianity.

  The Russian advance began to frighten the rulers of western Europe, even when they still relied – as did Austria and Prussia – on Russia’s armies to crush revolution in their own lands. Their desire to maintain the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to Russian expansion dominated European diplomacy right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and became known as ‘the Eastern Question’.

  British governments were in the forefront of these efforts. Propping up the Ottoman rulers allowed them not only to check Russian power – which they saw as a threat to their own rule in northern India – but also ensured the Ottomans allowed British goods free access to markets in the Middle East and the Balkans.

  The importance of this was shown in Egypt. Power in the country (together with adjacent areas of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) had passed to a ‘Pasha’ of Albanian origin, Mohammed (or Mehmet) Ali, in 1805. He ruled in the name of the Ottoman sultan, but was in effect a ruler in his own right until 1840. He saw that industry was rapidly becoming the key to power and set about using the state to begin an industrial revolution in Egypt. He established state monopolies, bought modern textile machinery from Europe and employed skilled Europeans to show Egyptians how to use it. He also had iron and steel furnaces built, seized land from mamluke landowners and produced cash crops for export. The result was that by the 1830s the country had the fifth highest number of cotton spindles per head in the world and up to 70,000 people working in modern factories. 128

  But Mohammed Ali’s experiment was brought to a sudden halt in 1840. Britain sent its navy to help the Ottoman Empire reimpose its control over Egypt, shelling Egyptian-controlled ports on the Lebanese coast and landing troops in Syria. Mohammed Ali was forced to cut his army (which had provided a protected market for his textile factories), dismantle his monopolies and accept British-imposed ‘free trade policies’. A cynical Lord Palmerston admitted, ‘To subjugate Mohammed Ali to Great Britain could be wrong and biased. But we are biased; the vital interests of Europe require that we should be so’. 129 The rulers of Europe’s most advanced industrial power were quite happy to impose policies which prevented the development of industrial capitalism elsewhere. Egypt experienced de-industrialisation over the next decades, just as China and India did – and then faced occupation by British troops when Mohammed Ali’s successors could not pay their debts.

  Egypt had at least attempted to industrialise. There were few such attempts elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and the unimpeded access of cheap goods to their markets damned these to failure. This also applied to similar attempts in the Iranian Empire, which was sandwiched between the Ottomans, British India and tsarist Russia.

  Chapter 10

  The Japanese exception

  One part, and one part alone, of the non-European world managed to escape the stagnation or decline that beset the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America and much of eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. This was Japan.

  Over the previous thousand years the much older civilisation of China had influenced the country’s developments – its technology, its alphabet, its literature and one of its main religions. But in one important respect Japan differed from China. It had neither the great canals and irrigation works of China nor a strongly centralised state. Until around 1600 it had an economic and political system very much like that of medieval Europe. There was a weak emperor, but real power lay with great territorial lords, each of whom presided over armed samurai (roughly equivalent to medieval Europe’s knights) who directly exploited the peasants and fought in their lord’s army against other samurai .

  At the beginning of the seventeenth century one of the great lordly families, the Tokugawa, succeeded in defeating and subduing the others. Its head became the ‘Shogun’, the real ruler of the country, although the emperor remained as a figurehead. The other lords were forced to spend much of their time at the Shoguns’ capital, Edo (present-day Tokyo), leaving their families there as hostages for their good behaviour. The Shoguns banned guns, which had played a devastating role in the last great wars of the previous period (although the samurai continued to exist and to carry arms, a right denied peasants, artisans and merchants). They also tried to prevent any foreign influences undermining their rule. They forbade all foreign trade, except by Dutch and Chinese vessels, which were allowed into one port under strict supervision. They banned all foreign books, and they deployed savage repression against the many thousands of converts to Catholic Christianity.

  These measures succeeded in bringing the bloody wars of the previous period to an end. But the Shoguns could not stop the society beneath them continuing to change. The concentration of the lords and their families in Edo led to a growing trade in rice to feed them and their retainers, and to a proliferation of urban craftspeople and traders catering to their needs. Japan’s cities grew to be some of the biggest in the world. The merchant class, although supposedly of very low standing, became increasingly important, and a new urban culture of popular poetry, plays and novels developed, different in many ways from the official culture of the state. A relaxation of the ban on Western books after 1720 led to some intellectuals showing an interest in Western ideas, and a ‘School of Dutch learning’ began to undertake studies in science, agronomy and Copernican astronomy. As money became increasingly important, many of the samurai became poor, forced to sell their weapons and to take up agriculture or crafts in order to pay their debts. Meanwhile repeated famines hit the peasantry – almost a million died in 1732 (out of a population of 26 million), 200,000 in 1775, and several hundred thousand in the 1780s – and there were a succession of local peasant uprisings. 130 The Tokugawa political superstructure remained completely intact. But beneath it social forces were developing with some similarities to those in western Europe during the Renaissance period.

  Such was the background in 1853 when a Commander Perry of the US navy arrived off the coast with four warships to demand the Japanese government open the country to foreign trade. The whole ruling layer in society was thrown into turmoil. The Tokugawa government looked at the balance of military weaponry and decided things could no longer continue in the old way – it had to make concessions if it was to avoid the sort of defeats China had just suffered in the Opium Wars. But for other sections of the ruling class the old ways were sacrosanct, and any concessions to foreigners were a betrayal of the highest ideals. Caught between them, groups of lower samurai formed an association committed ‘to revere the emperor and repel barbarians’ 131 by militant, even revolutionary means. At one level, their demands were deeply traditional – they looked to restore to the emperor the power which his predecessors had not enjoyed for hundreds of years. But some samurai understood that there had to be thoroughgoing changes in Japanese society if it was to be capable of matching the economic and military strength of the ‘barbarians’.

  Their chance to achieve their aims came with the ‘Meiji Revolution’ of the late 1860s, when two of the great feudal lords attacked the Tokugawa Shogun with samurai support and formed a new government in the name of the emperor.

  This was a revolution from above. Its slogans were traditionalist and the condition of the mass of people was not improved one iota by the change. But those leading it understood they had to go forward to capitalism if they were going to maintain anything of the past. They abolished the power of the rival feudal lords, making them dependent on the state for their privileges. They did away with the old distinctions of rank between samurai , peasants, merchants and artisans. The inc
omes samurai used to enjoy from exploitation of the peasantry now went straight to the state; any samurai who wanted more than a minimal livelihood had to look to employment with the state or private firms. Most importantly, the government embarked upon setting up new industries, under its control and subsidised out of taxation. When these were strong enough to stand on their own feet, it handed them over to merchant or banking families with close connections to the state.

  The Meiji Revolution was doubly significant for the future development of capitalism, not just in Japan but internationally. It showed that the initiative in opening society to full-blooded capitalist relations of production did not have to come from the bourgeoisie. What the ‘middling elements’ had achieved in the English Revolution or the Jacobin section of the ‘bourgeoisie’ had achieved in the French Revolution was carried through in Japan by sections of the old exploiting classes.