The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

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  State formation in North and South America as well as Australia and New Zealand (in the last quarter of the nineteenth century still part of the British Empire but, like Canada, virtually autonomous) largely reflected the activities of European settlers who subjugated or wiped out the original inhabitants and formed their own states. State formation in sub-Saharan Africa was completely different. It was the result of a two-stage process: colonization, mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century, and decolonization in the second half of the twentieth. In Africa all attempts to establish settlers’ states, as in South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), eventually failed.

  Asia and the Middle East offered yet another pattern. With the exception of Israel, no Asian or Middle Eastern state was the result of settlers establishing their own state. Some states were the direct result of colonialism, but the colonial powers had to work through existing elites and reach some kind of negotiated settlement. Others were states which pre-dated colonialism and maintained a strong element of continuity with the ancient world, such as China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Madagascar, and Tunisia. In many cases modern boundaries have no direct correspondence with older ones; thus India and Pakistan, as presently constituted, have never previously existed. In Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon state boundaries were decided by European powers.

  China is one of the oldest states in the world with 2,000 years of continuous history, though for most of its history it could not be called a ‘nation state’ in the modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense.62 The first emperor (huangdi) of a unified China was Qin Shi Huang, founder of the short-lived Qin Dynasty in 221 BC, but the China he ruled did not have the same borders as the China of today. The 2,000 years of Chinese history saw many dynasties including foreign ones. A Mongol, Kublai Khan, founded the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) and, in 1662, the Manchus founded the last dynasty, that of the Qing, which ruled until 1911 when the Chinese Republic was born. Not only the borders of the state altered frequently in the course of the centuries, but there were wars, rebellions, unrest, turmoil; nevertheless the continuity of the bureaucracy was remarkable as were the set of rules, based on Confucius’s teaching after the initial period of so-called ‘legalism’ under Qin Shi Huang.

  Although never a colony, China was hardly a sovereign state between the 1840s and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the period the Chinese call, fairly justifiably, the ‘century of humiliation’.63 It was more than humiliation; it was a century of disasters: the Opium Wars, the cession of the so-called ‘treaty’ ports, the loss of Hong Kong to the British. This was followed by the Taiping Rebellion, a bloody and brutal civil war (1850–64) and the Second Opium War (1856–60), the forcible opening of the whole country to trade including opium, then the Japanese invasion of 1895 and the loss of Taiwan, then the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign uprising (1899– 1901) that led to further foreign intervention.

  The end of the empire in 1911 led to further chaos: a failed attempt to reinstate a monarchy (1915–16); a protracted period of internecine warfare in the 1920s among regional warlords; the establishment of a nationalist government in 1928 under Chiang Kai-shek in partial control of the country; conflicts with the communists in the 1930s; Japan’s invasion of China in 1937; further conflict between nationalists and communists after the Second World War, leading to the communist victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, while Chiang Kai-shek’s armies retreated to Taiwan.

  This makes the continuity of China’s history all the more remarkable. As early as the Qin Dynasty (that of the First Emperor) there was a quasi-unified legal code (though not yet Confucian), a unified measurement system, and the standardization of Chinese characters. The Chinese state changed very little compared to most of the European states, let alone those of Africa and the Americas. Modern states tend to be recent inventions, often the product of European colonialism. Some new states, such as Israel, claim to be old when they are in fact a variant of settlers’ states (like Australia or the USA), one without a ‘mother-country’. The movement for the ‘return’ of the Jews to ‘Israel’ advocated a return to a territory that for the 2,000 years before 1947 had contained very few Jews, and that does not correspond to either of the two ancient Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Israel. A United Kingdom of Israel – that of Saul, David, and Solomon – existed, if at all (there is only questionable biblical evidence for it), for only 120 years. Zionism was substantially a European nationalist movement led by Jews who adopted a religious language since very little else, except persecution and religion, united them. The term ‘Zionism’ was coined by Nathan Birnbaum (who eventually became an orthodox Jew and turned against Zionism). The modern movement was initiated by rabbis: two Sephardic, Yehuda Bibas and Judah Alkalai, and one Ashkenazi, Hirsch Kalischer. The best-known spokesman for the movement, widely but wrongly regarded as its founder, was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), who was perhaps an atheist and certainly a secular, non-religious Jew.64 In his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat), Herzl raised the possibility that the Jewish state could be constituted in Argentina, should the authorities agree. Or even in Palestine, should ‘His Majesty the Sultan’ agree. ‘To give us Palestine’, then, Herzl wrote, ‘… we should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.’65

  The ‘Jews’ State’ was clearly viewed by Herzl as a European settlers’ state peopled by unskilled labourers, organized under some kind of military discipline, and imported from the Jewish communities of Russia and Romania, with funds raised from rich Jewish bankers.66 There was not, in Herzl’s pamphlet, any understanding that the settled land might already contain an existing population, and he wrote, mindlessly, ‘… the Jews, once settled in their own state, would probably not have any more enemies’.67

  Some African states avoided, at least for a while, the fate of colonization. Ethiopia succeeded in remaining independent after the Battle of Adua of 1896 when it defeated the Italians, but was eventually occupied by them in 1936. The occupation did not last long since the country was liberated in 1941 by the British. Escaping from Western colonialism, however, does not seem to have benefited Ethiopia particularly: famine, civil war, and despotic governments have plagued the country as much as some of its neighbours. But even Ethiopia was not an ancient country. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ethiopian monarchy existed only in name. The real rulers of the country were provincial chieftains, or ras. Only in 1855 was the country effectively ruled by an emperor (‘King of Kings’), Tewodros II (1855–68); later one of his successors, Menelik II (1889–1913), further enlarged it.68 So Ethiopia too, like Germany and Italy, had recently established borders. Today’s states are mostly recent; old nations are hard to come by.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century there were only two sovereign countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Liberia and South Africa, and neither were ruled by indigenous people. Liberia had in fact been colonized in 1847. The settlers were black Americans (mainly freed slaves), who were backed by a group of wealthy white Americans under the aegis of the aptly named American Colonization Society, formed in 1816. The black colonialists behaved liked their white counterparts. They defrauded the indigenous people, whose hostility they encountered. They ‘built stockades in the North American frontier tradition, with cannon mounted’.69 They imposed a regime of servitude on the local inhabitants, forcing them to work in appalling circumstances in rubber plantations. The descendants of these black settlers (only 3 per cent of the population in 1980) monopolized the government and the domestic market economy until a military coup in 1980. The ensuing civil war (1989–2003) caused 200,000 deaths out of a population of 3 million.

  In 1909 an Act of the British Parliament created the Union of South Africa, a Dominion with at least nominal independence and that include
d the former territories of the Cape and Natal colonies, as well as the republics of Orange Free State and the Transvaal. It became fully sovereign only in 1931. Until 1994, South Africa was in fact ruled by white settlers, who increasingly strengthened racial segregation after independence, culminating in the formal adoption of the apartheid system in 1948.

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  Thus most of the two hundred or so states that are members of the United Nations today have a recent history. State formation coincides with the recent history of globalized capitalism. The economic imperative of the state managing the economy was the key mechanism that favoured the growth of states. Capitalism is often seen as trying to straddle the world, but this is an abstract notion. In reality each variety of capitalism must be nurtured by a state and shaped according to local conditions. There is no single path. Strong states have helped the development of capitalism. Weak states have faced problems industrializing. States that are not effective states, states that became states recently, or that have been subjected by other states, fare worst of all.

  But what were the conditions of life of the population of states before capitalism developed? What was it like to be an ordinary inhabitant of those states that were invented or reinvented in the course of the nineteenth century? To this we now must turn.

  2

  The Lives of the People

  INTRODUCTION

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century, at the heart of western Europe, in France, then as now one of the richest countries in the world, many rural families lived in a single room in appalling hygienic conditions. These citizens of the Third Republic slept in their daily clothes, which they changed perhaps only once a month. Most only washed their hands and face. Drinking water was scarce. The daily diet of many French peasants consisted of soup, some lard, and bread. Peasant cuisine, unlike the romantic image that some urbanites have of it today (simple and healthy unadulterated food, close to the earth, a world we have lost, etc.) was poor, devoid of nutritional value, lacking in vitamins, and unhygienic.1

  In the north of the country, the more prosperous farmers, part of the 3.5 million who owned their land, were eating meat regularly, but the rest lived in misery, not so distant from the present-day living conditions of people in the Third World.2 In fact peasants in the Third World, even in the 1930s, were probably better off than some of their French counterparts in the 1870s – as we can see from Pierre Gouron’s account of the living conditions of poor peasants in the Tonkin Delta in 1936.3

  This rural world coexisted with a developing capitalism. Was that, as the optimists believed, the age of progress? The case is strong. It was the age of cotton spinning, of the steam engine, and of railroads; textiles became cheaper, communication easier, and the world smaller. Later in the century a further spate of innovations made life more bearable and the economy far more productive: the application of electricity, the internal combustion engine, running water with indoor plumbing, a chemical revolution, a revolution in information (the telephone, the phonograph, the cinema). This formidable technological evolution laid the path for successive decades of increases in productivity and led to a hitherto unequalled period of economic growth.4

  The nineteenth century was also the age of the abolition of the slave trade; the introduction of (some) democracy; the age of science and social science (Darwin and Marx); of opera (Verdi and Wagner); of the great novels (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and Dickens); the age of national liberation (Giuseppe Garibaldi, Simón Bolívar, but also Abraham Lincoln). It was, of course, the age of industrialization; the age of the birth of global capitalism and hence also the age of the ‘new’ imperialism, of colonialism, of the Opium Wars. Many of these developments were of benefit only to a minority. The conditions of the rest would improve, if at all, only in the twentieth century. It is certain, however, that in the nineteenth century more people than ever survived in spite of wars, famines, and diseases. It took 250 years, from 1500 to 1750, for the world’s population to increase by just over 300 million, that is from 460 million in 1500 to 770 million in 1750. By 1900 it had reached 1,630 million. In 1950 there were 2,500 million people on the planet. By 1987 the population had doubled again. By 2018 there were 7,600 million people in the world.5

  In 1900 ‘capitalist’ Europe was still overwhelmingly rural; by 2000, peasants had almost disappeared. The workers of the world, who were supposed to follow Marx’s call to arms, losing little but their chains, were very few when the Communist Manifesto was written (1848), almost all of them in western Europe and North America. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of industrial workers were not in the ‘West’ but in the ‘Rest’ – what was once known as the Third World.

  THE RURAL WORLD

  In Europe, even in 1900, the rural world still dominated everywhere, except in Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, Holland, Germany, and Belgium. France, not far behind them in industrial capacity, was still a largely agrarian society. Nearly 70 per cent of its inhabitants lived in the countryside. Small businessmen accounted for 11 per cent of the population, but the majority of these were shopkeepers and peddlers, hardly better off than many small farmers.6

  In 1910 only 10 per cent of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire lived in cities and only in 1961, in what was by then the Soviet Union, would the country become mainly urban. In Sweden, in 1870, only 13 per cent of the population lived in urban areas. By 2015, 86 per cent did so.7 In Britain, between 1790 and 1840, the conditions of agricultural labourers hardly improved. In the course of the subsequent decades there was some amelioration, but it was interrupted by the fall of prices during the so-called long depression of 1873–96.8

  In the early nineteenth century, in villages near Zurich, soon to become one of the wealthiest regions in the world, the peasant’s main meal consisted of a kind of porridge to which some milk had been added.9 A country with the characteristics of Switzerland in 1800 would today be classified by the United Nations as qualifying for international aid.10

  In the 1870s, in the countryside of what is now the Emilia-Romagna region, where much of what is now most famous in Italian cuisine originates (Parma ham, parmesan cheese, tortellini, ravioli, etc.), and home to luxury cars such as Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini, people in the countryside hardly ever drank wine, ate little bread, and had to be content with a kind of polenta, a few vegetables and, occasionally, a little meat. This is what was reported in the famous Inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola (‘Inquiry into Agriculture and the Conditions of the Agrarian Class’) conducted by Count Stefano Jacini, an enlightened conservative politician, and published in 1884.11 Similar observations can be found in the travel journal of the British diplomat William N. Beauclerk, who sojourned in Italy in the 1880s: ‘Meat and wine seldom form a part of the food of the peasants’, who were reduced to a diet of coarse bread, chestnuts, and herbs.12

  Housing was dismal and, for casual labourers, terrible. Near Rome, according to the Jacini Inquiry, casual labourers lived ‘like cattle’:

  Occasionally they find an old house, or an ancient inn or some edifice in ruins, and they crowd in there, one on top of the other without distinction of sex or age, defenceless against the weather and with none of the comforts which are indispensable to human existence.

  These were the lucky ones; others simply slept in caves and in holes dug in the hills:

  Inside these caves, for months at a time, these families live without privacy, with no beds, no latrines, just like animals. It is a sorry spectacle which faces the traveller who passes by these primitive dwellings. Women who barely look human, masses of half-naked children surround the visitor begging.13

  They lived on a miserable diet: polenta with no salt, bread made with maize flour shaped as a pizza, occasionally with some lard or ricotta or stale olive oil. The food, such as it was, was often rotten. Further south, conditions were worse. Bread made with wheat flour was rare, in fact wheat consumption was fairly limited then, even in wheat-growing a
reas such as the northern Mediterranean.14 Most peasants ate bread made with maize or chestnuts. Pasta was then eaten only by the more prosperous.15 In 1891 the health officer of Capracotta, a small town (5,000 inhabitants) in the Molise region of south-central Italy, reported that the people lived in tiny hovels, huddled together with their domestic animals: pigs, horses, sheep, and cows.16 Twenty years later, in Sicily, the situation had barely improved. The Faini Parliamentary Commission (1907–10) noted that in a typical peasant home animals and humans slept together: the grandparents, the children, the grandchildren, the mule, the donkey, the chickens, and sometime the pig.17 Even as recently as the mid-1930s, Carlo Levi, a doctor and painter exiled in the Italian rural south for anti-Fascist activities, noted in his famous account – Christ Stopped at Eboli – that the local inhabitants appeared quite alien to him (as he appeared to them):

  as I talked with the peasants, I observed their faces and their build: short, dark, with round faces, large eyes and thin lips, their archaic aspects did not resemble that of the Romans, or of the Greeks, or of the Etruscans, or of the Normans, or of any of the other conquerors who had passed through their lands. They reminded me of some very ancient Italic figures. I reflected that their lives had not changed since the oldest of times. History has swept over them without touching them …18