A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  The improved transportation network, and the economies of scale that resulted from mass-production, put more products within the reach of more people at prices they could afford to pay. The result was a huge boost to the economy. It is even argued that the increased tax revenue that resulted played a large part in the ability of Britain to defeat Napoleon, as it provided funds to which the French did not have access.

  There were also profound revolutionary changes in the social structure, with an unprecedented movement of people from the countryside to towns. Initially this was caused by peasants who had been displaced by new agricultural techniques and had migrated to towns reactively in their search for better-paid work, but the growing demand for manufactured goods required a labour force of its own, and people soon began migrating to towns in their millions. Enormous cities developed around manufacturing centres and by 1850 most Englishmen were working in industrial towns. These towns, however, were unprepared for such a large influx of population and this led to its own set of problems.

  Rule Britannia: Great Britain Leads the World (1815–1900)

  Britain profited greatly from France’s defeat in 1815, gaining the Cape of Good Hope and the strategic islands of Malta, Mauritius and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), among other territories. The blockade on trading with Britain that Napoleon had imposed on his European allies ironically served to give Britain a monopoly on overseas trade that helped it to grow even further. The new territories Britain gained after 1815 also expanded the number of markets for British goods and provided raw materials to feed its growth. By 1850, Britain dominated world trade in manufactured goods, supplying two-thirds of the globe with cotton from the industrial centres of northern England. It also dominated in related services such as shipping, finance and insurance, with the result that London became the largest city in the world. By the turn of the century, Great Britain under Queen Victoria ruled about 20% of the world’s land-mass.

  From about 1830, the Industrial Revolution gradually spread from Britain throughout Europe and to the United States. There were numerous reasons why it took other countries so long to industrialise.

  France was no longer a real competitor; any nascent industrial development had been interrupted by the French Revolution in 1789. The Napoleonic wars continued to hold France’s attention until its defeat in 1815, which saw the country stripped of much of its empire. Even after 1815 the country had limited coal supplies, a poor transportation structure, and a focus on agriculture, not to mention immature financial markets.

  Germany, despite an abundance of coal, was still not unified, consisting of a mish-mash of 38 separate states of the former Holy Roman Empire, of which Austria and Prussia were the largest. A failure to co-operate with each other did not lend itself to national progress.

  From a position of maritime supremacy and technological leadership in the 17th century, the Netherlands had begun a period of slow decline from the 18th century onwards, partly due to having bet the house on spices and slaves as opposed to the growing textile industry. The Netherlands lost its colonies in the Americas and its colonies in Asia ended up costing more to run than they produced. The Dutch were also dragged into a number of wars relating both to trade and to the succession of royal families in Europe in the 18th century. In 1795, the French overran the country under Napoleon, forcing the Dutch to pay significant sums for the garrisoning of French armies. Finally, traders to the end, Dutch investors preferred to lend to financial markets rather than to invest in industry, just when investment in industry would become the difference between a strong and a weak state.

  Russia lacked a middle class, which was vital for successful industrialisation, and despite its advantage in sheer numbers, ‘remained technologically backward and economically underdeveloped. Extremes of climate and the enormous distances and poor communications partly accounted for this, but so also did severe social defects: the military absolutism of the tsars, the monopoly of education in the hands of the Orthodox Church, the venality and unpredictability of the bureaucracy, and the institution of serfdom, which made agriculture feudal and static’.91

  In North America, farming and trading took precedence over industrial production until the 1820s and 1830s, and even then industry only took off in the north. For a long time the richest people in the US were those who farmed cotton in the south, and they had no incentive to reinvest their profits into machinery when they had a ready slave-labour force. Asia had the same issue: labour was so cheap that there was not the same incentive to invest in machines.

  The turning point for mainland Europe in its efforts to catch up with industrialised Britain was an increase in population, which resulted in a larger market and a growing labour supply.

  The Growth of Socialism (19th Century)

  But industrialisation also had a darker side. The European urban infrastructure had been unprepared for the rise in numbers that followed the rapid growth in industry; by-products were serious overcrowding, disease, poverty and unrest – a state of affairs highlighted by the popular press. Socialist ideology arose from the desire to introduce some equality into the conditions that had arisen in the new factories of Europe. Why was it that the workers did all the work and the owners gained all the profit? Surely this was unfair?

  Writing in England after he had been expelled from numerous countries in Europe, Karl Marx wrote two works that subsequently formed the basis of socialist thought, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. He stated that the history of society could be considered as a history of class struggles as opposed to the conflict between states or individuals. The workers would finally rise up against the business owners, or bourgeoisie, and end the era of class struggles. ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!’ Industrial capitalism would collapse and be replaced by a communist society, in which different social classes would not exist. Largely unread until the 1870s, his work became the main inspiration for communist regimes in the 20th century.

  The Independence of South America (1808–1826)

  The American and French revolutions of the 18th century, and the Napoleonic wars in Europe that ran into the 19th century, also had monumental consequences for another part of the world: South America. In 1800 South America remained almost entirely in Spanish and Portuguese hands, yet within 26 years all that remained of these European empires in the New World were the Spanish-held Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Even these would become protectorates of the USA after the Spanish-American war of 1898.

  Spain's restrictions over economic matters, the authoritarian nature of its government, and the preference given to Spaniards born in Spain over Creoles (those with Spanish parentage but born in the Americas), were just some of the factors that, when put together, alienated much of the local population. Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 gave such movements the excuse and the impetus they needed to throw off the yoke of their colonial masters.

  Led by freedom fighters, such as Simon Bolivar92 – the George Washington of Latin America after whom the country of Bolivia was named – and Jose de San Martin, who led the liberation of Argentina and Chile, most of Spanish-held South America had gained its independence by 1825. Brazil became a republic only in 1889.

  As regards Brazil, the local population sought their independence only after Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815 and when the Portuguese royal family returned to Lisbon, from where they had fled in 1808. In a relatively bloodless coup, the son of the Portuguese monarch became emperor of an independent Brazil in 1822. The freedom these people gained was not entirely that which they had hoped for; with little experience of managing their own affairs, the majority of the countries fell rapidly into military dictatorships.

  The Rise of Nationalism and Liberalism (19th Century)

  At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, it seemed initially that the old order would be restored. Exhausted after 25 years of warfare, many people looked to their kings
and emperors as symbols of unity and peace, and it was not in the interests of landowners to support movements that targeted their dispossession. The Bourbons returned to France under Louis XVIII and to Spain under Ferdinand VII. Austria and Prussia, the two largest states in a newly formed German Federation, were equally keen that the new forces of nationalism and liberalism be kept at bay. Tsar Alexander suggested that Russia, Austria and Prussia even come together in a Holy Alliance, ostensibly to promote Christianity. In reality, the objective was to suppress any outbreaks of rebellion, including any liberal ideas of change to the existing system.

  However, through the introduction of reforms, and by encouraging nationalist aspirations, Napoleon had unleashed forces of change that would become increasingly difficult to suppress. In Western Europe, industrialisation was beginning to enrich a growing middle class increasingly interested in the democratic ideas of the revolution, and less and less prepared to put up with a secret police, arbitrary arrests, press censorship, and autocracy. Among other things, this class sought freedom of speech, the right to vote, a representative government and a free economy; after all, the French and American revolutions had shown that the status quo could be challenged.

  In addition to the development of liberal thought there was a new nationalistic agenda – predominantly in eastern and central Europe – of ethnic groups that lived under the yoke of the Austrian, Ottoman and Russian empires. The ruling classes reasoned that these empires would disintegrate if the nationalist agenda were given any room to breathe. Their attempts to stifle it would ultimately lead to war.

  Spain and Greece were the first to break out in revolt in the 1820s. While the revolt in Spain was put down with difficulty, a Greek independence movement succeeded in throwing off Ottoman domination in 1832.

  France was next. Unhappy with press censorship, attempts to control parliament, and the general illiberal tendencies of the French king, Charles X, who had inherited the crown from his brother, Louis XVIII, the Parisians rebelled. In 1830 Charles was forced to abdicate and promptly fled to England, while his more moderate cousin, Louis-Philippe, who was descended from the brother of Louis XIV, was made king. That year revolution spread throughout Europe, but while it failed to gain any real momentum, the old order failed to crush the new political ideologies entirely.

  In 1848 uprisings took place throughout Europe once again and this time gained more traction. The Hungarians, keen to throw off their Habsburg masters, rebelled and were crushed. The Czechs demanded their own government and the Austrians were driven out of northern Italy. In France, Louis-Philippe was driven out of France and the Second Republic was proclaimed. Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president by popular vote. When he realised that he was forbidden by the constitution to stand for election twice, he undertook a coup, dissolved the Second Republic, and became a dictator. A year later, in 1852, he declared himself to be Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire – a position he would hold with some success until 1871, when France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war. Louis-Napoleon ended up retiring to England, where he died during an operation.

  Britain narrowly managed to avoid revolution by making some last-minute concessions to the working class. Russia would wait its turn.

  The Great Game in Central Asia (19th Century)

  Despite the increasing strength of Britain during the 19th century, the country still needed to defend its empire from encroaching powers. As the century progressed, an increasing interest was shown by Russia in Central Asia – the lands between Constantinople and India – and the area became a battleground where the two nations competed for spheres of influence in what came to be known as the ‘Great Game’.

  Russia’s southerly expansion was the initial cause of concern: if the Russians continued south through Afghanistan, they might be able to invade India via the Khyber Pass. As a result, Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839 in an attempt to control the area, but an insurrection there forced the army into an ignominious retreat three years later, during which 16,000 soldiers and civilians were massacred. No attempt by a foreign power to rule Afghanistan has ever been successful.

  Further concern came a decade later when Russia invaded two vassal states of the weakening Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, ostensibly to protect Eastern Orthodox Christians. The problem for the British was that the territories brought the Russians much closer to the Dardanelles and the nearby Bosphorus Strait, which linked the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Once again, the British feared that this would give the Russians a sea route to India, thereby threatening British control there. The destruction of a Turkish flotilla by the Russian Black Sea Fleet in 1854 gave Britain the pretext it needed to declare war, and the French, eager to avenge their defeat at the hands of the Russians in 1812, eagerly joined in.

  And so began the Crimean War. The Russians were rapidly driven out of the territories they had occupied, and the Allies planned to follow up with the quick capture of Sevastopol – the principal Russian naval base on the Black Sea – in present-day Ukraine. Underestimating the Russian defences, the war dragged on for a year until Sevastopol capitulated in 1855.

  While the Allies won the war, the costs for both sides were immense, with up to 25,000 and 100,000 losses on the British and French sides respectively and many multiples of this on the Russian side. The majority of the deaths were caused by diseases such as typhus, cholera and dysentery, despite the best efforts of the nurse, Florence Nightingale, and her colleagues to look after the wounded and dying soldiers. It was not until 1865 that the Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, came up with the theory of germs, citing that most infectious diseases are caused by bacteria or micro-organisms. This discovery transformed medicine, saved millions of lives and became central to our understanding of disease that had caused so many deaths over the ages.

  One consequence of Russia’s defeat in the Crimea was a programme of reform and modernisation initiated by Tsar Alexander II, who came to the throne in 1855. While he gets credit for the emancipation of the peasants in 1861, in true Russian style, his reforms were haphazard and badly managed and ironically ended in his assassination. Over the following years professional revolutionaries would play on the frustrations of the people and ultimately take over the Russian state in the October Revolution of 1917.

  The Opium Wars

  While Europe underwent a period of industrialisation and revolutionary change, China experienced its own upheaval. The Portuguese had arrived in China already in 1517, but the Ming Chinese had had no interest in learning from them, assuming that China and its products were superior in every way. While not treated as equals, foreigners had nevertheless been permitted to operate in Macau, a Chinese port from where they imported tea, silk, porcelain and other goods for which there was growing demand in Europe.

  The Manchus were clear from the outset that all trade was to be made on their terms, via their own intermediaries, and that the Europeans should pay for items they wished to purchase with silver. The problem was that the quantity of the purchases made by the British traders and the refusal of the Chinese to part with their own silver to buy foreign goods in any significant quantities began to affect the British balance of trade. Looking for a solution, the British realised that if their traders could exchange merchandise in India for raw materials and then exchange these raw materials with the Chinese in return for tea, they would stem the haemorrhage of silver from their treasury.

  One of the products they obtained from India was opium, and to their joy, this found an insatiable demand in China. Used to relieve pain and reduce hunger, it was also used to make morphine and heroin, a drug to which the Chinese soon became addicted. Within no time at all, a huge number of men under 40 living in the country’s coastal regions were smoking opium and by the late 1830s over 30,000 chests of it were being imported annually by various foreign powers. However, most of this was in fact smuggled into the country as the Chinese government had recognised the social cost of the drug
and had banned it as a result. In 1838, realising that their ban was being defied, the Qing government decreed the death sentence on anyone dealing in opium. When they realised a year later that this threat was not reducing the trade in opium, government officials confiscated and then burned 20,000 chests of East India Company opium, scattering the ashes into the sea and offering no compensation to the traders.

  For the British, the trade in opium and tea provided such significant revenues that they could not take this affront lying down. They responded by sailing into the port of Canton with several warships, easily defeating the Chinese with the aid of their modern weaponry and forcing the Chinese to open their ports to British trade. Furthermore, the Chinese were required to cede the island of Hong Kong and to pay an indemnity for the opium they had destroyed. All this was in addition to accepting the distribution of an addictive drug throughout their land. This did not go un-noticed in Britain, where a newly elected member of parliament, William Gladstone, wondered if there had even been “a war more unjust in its origin, or a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace.”

  The humiliation of the Opium War shattered China’s false sense of superiority and encouraged the rise of anti-Manchu sentiment that had been simmering beneath the surface since the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At the same time, China faced a huge population increase and a number of natural calamities. Added together, this resulted in a large increase in poverty and unrest that ultimately provided the setting for China’s largest uprising and the bloodiest civil war in history.

  Civil War in China (1851)

  In 1851, a rebellion was launched by Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, chosen by God to establish a heavenly kingdom upon earth, with himself as king. He would rid China of evil influences, including Confucians and Buddhists, replace the corrupt Manchu Qing dynasty, and restore China to its past greatness. Slavery, arranged marriages, opium-smoking, foot-binding and torture would all be abolished. The era of ‘Taiping’, or ‘Great Peace’, had begun.