Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  In speaking of the Medical Revolution, therefore, we must not think in terms of people suddenly switching from prayer to pills. Their behaviour shaded from one to the other gradually. They shifted from faith in prayer alone to a phase in which they both prayed and were treated by a religious physician; to a phase in which the morally correct physician both acted as the instrument of God’s healing power and prescribed all sorts of remedies; and eventually to a phase in which the physician simply prescribed the remedies without any religious context at all. Not everyone moved from one phase to the next at exactly the same time; there were still some people who trusted their prayers more than their doctor in 1700. However, by that date most people were prepared to put themselves in the care of the medical profession. If you think about all the temples, chapels, churches and shrines built before that in the hope of recovering health, and all the pilgrimages undertaken and all the saints and relics to whom prayers had been offered on behalf of the unwell, you can see that this relocation of hope for human well-being from God to medical professionals is one of the most profound revolutions that society has ever experienced.12 Indeed, it marks one of the most important stages in the transition of Europeans from the highly religious, group-thinking community members of the Middle Ages to conscientious modern individuals.

  Settlement of the world

  No one can look at a map of the world and fail to notice how many locations outside Europe are named after English, Dutch, French and Spanish places. New York (formerly New Amsterdam), New Hampshire, New England, New London (now Bermuda), New Holland (now Australia) and New Zealand all have precious little in common with their namesakes. The same could be said for many of the places on the east coast of North America: Boston, Yorktown, Plymouth, Jersey, Dover and Durham, to pick out just a few. Then there are those places named in honour of French and English rulers: Louisiana (for Louis XIV), Jamestown (for James I), Carolina and Charlestown in Massachusetts (for Charles I), Charleston in South Carolina (for Charles II), Williamsburg (for William III) and Maryland (for Mary II). All of the above were named in the seventeenth century. If the sixteenth century had seen Europeans discover the North American mainland, the seventeenth century saw them name it, settle it, lay claim to it with legal documents, fence it off and defend it with long-barrelled weapons.

  At the time of her death in 1603, Elizabeth I of England ruled over nothing outside the British Isles. The only exceptions were a failed settlement at Roanoke, in Virginia, whose inhabitants were either all dead or lost among the Native Americans; and Newfoundland, first claimed in 1497 and claimed again in 1583 but as yet still uninhabited. Her successor James I granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London in 1606 that established the first lasting settlement, Jamestown, the following year. A supply mission supporting the settlement was wrecked in 1609 off the coast of Bermuda, where the survivors established St George’s, the second English colony. In 1611, the town of Henrico was founded in Virginia, named after King James’s eldest son, Prince Henry. The farming of tobacco in Virginia proved the mainstay of the troubled settlement from 1616, and continued to be so even after a massacre at the hands of Native Americans in 1622. By then, merchants from Bristol had settled at several places in Newfoundland and a community of Puritan refugees from England, known as the Pilgrim Fathers, had founded the Plymouth Colony. The volume of tobacco exported from Virginia grew rapidly: in 1628, more than 250 tons was shipped to England. That same year, another group of English settlers founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There might not have been any gold in the region but there were good livings to be made from fur trapping, farming and tobacco.

  The New World also promised a degree of freedom from the constraints of Europe. By 1650 there were over 50,000 European settlers living on the American east coast in self-governing communities, including 1,600 black slaves bought for harvesting the tobacco. By 1700 that figure had grown to over 250,000 people, including more than 27,000 slaves.13 Crucially for those who dreamed of liberty, vast areas of land were available. The province of Carolina, granted to eight English lords, the Lords Proprietors, in 1663, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it amounted to more than a million square miles (about 20 times the size of England). Although most of it was not occupied by settlers, by 1700 approximately 75,000 square miles of the North American east coast was under their control.14 An even larger area was claimed to the south of Hudson’s Bay and in Newfoundland. By the end of the seventeenth century the North American colonies even had two seats of higher education – Harvard (founded in 1636) and William and Mary (founded in 1693) – the same number of universities as England itself.

  The English were not the only European nation to see North America as a land of opportunity and freedom. The New Netherland Company, founded in Amsterdam in 1614, received a charter from the Estates General of the Dutch Republic granting them trading rights for a period of three years. They hoped to profit from the fur trade in what is now Canada. The successor to this company, the Dutch West India Company, which received its charter in 1621, continued the expansion of the North American fur trade, but it also had rights to exploit whatever business interests it could find in the Atlantic, from the west coast of Africa to the Arctic. Soon it had territorial possessions on the Delaware river in America, on the Gold Coast in Africa, and in the West Indies. Political problems at home prevented the Dutch from investing heavily in the defence of their North American possessions, and these were surrendered to the English in 1664. At the same time, the Spanish strengthened their grip on Florida and New Mexico, and ventured into Texas. A series of French companies took possession of most of eastern Canada, including parts of Newfoundland, the area around the Great Lakes, and a central belt of land that reached right down to the Mississippi river and Louisiana. When you add the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in Central and Latin America, you can see that by 1700, European states ruled over far more land in America than they did in Europe. Long before Horace Greeley advised a friend to ‘go West, young man’, the principle of expanding westwards in search of a better life was established in the European mind.

  Young European men had a choice: they could either build a new life for themselves in North or South America, or they could join the trading world and sail to the East. It was the Dutch who saw the most benefit from eastwards trade. As the United Provinces (which included the Dutch Republic and six other minor states), their whole population was only about 1.5 million; nevertheless, they made significant dents in the Portuguese Empire. The main instrument of their success was the Dutch East India Company, established in 1602. The following year they founded their first permanent post in the Far East, at Java. In 1605 they captured the Spice Islands. The Eastern headquarters was set up at Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1611 and from there the governors general organised the systematic domination of the silk and spice trade. The Portuguese managed to keep hold of Brazil and some of their African ports but in the Far East they only hung on to a few trading outposts: Macao, the Lesser Sunda Islands and Goa. While capturing Portuguese ports the Dutch discovered most of the rest of the as yet unexplored world, including Australia in 1606, and Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga and Fiji in 1642–4. They also founded a colony in South Africa in 1652 to supply their ships. In 1668, when their empire was at its greatest extent, a French observer reckoned that the Dutch had 6,000 ships under sail, not including small single-masted vessels. A Portuguese Jesuit in 1649 had put the figure at 14,000, and added that all these ships were bigger than those in the Portuguese fleet.15 Historians today generally agree that in the 1660s the total tonnage of the Dutch fleet was about 600,000 tons – as much as the rest of Europe put together.

  Finally, we must look at the English advances in the East, which centred on the East India Company, established in 1600. Nine profitable trading ventures had returned to England by 1612 and in that year the company founded a trading base at Surat, north of Bombay. Shortly afterwards, the affable English diplomat Sir Thomas Roe secured the right for
the company to trade inland in India, wisely adopting a policy of never using armed force to exact trading advantages. The company also uneasily did business alongside the Dutch in Indonesia – even more uneasily after a number of Englishmen were executed for treason against the Dutch Republic in 1623. In 1661 it was given an unexpected lift when the Portuguese handed over Bombay to the English Crown as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry. This gave the English their first sovereign territory in India and it soon became the company’s headquarters. Successive royal charters granted the company sovereign rights in India: it was able to issue its own coins, exercise jurisdiction over English subjects, and form agreements with local rulers. After the English trading post at Bantam in Java was lost, the company gave up trying to compete with the Dutch in Indonesia and concentrated on the Indian trade, bringing back calico, spices, silk, indigo and saltpetre (for gunpowder). In 1684 the East India Company purchased goods worth £840,000 in India and sold them in Europe for £4,000,000.16

  Modern readers may prefer to forget about this period of colonial rule but it cannot be denied that it transformed the world, including Europe itself. For a start, the Spanish and Portuguese territories – united under one crown from 1580 to 1640 – were the world’s first ‘empire on which the sun never set’, with settlements on five continents. As a result of these wide networks, developments in technology spread far beyond the confines of Europe. The war between the Dutch and the Portuguese, which saw military action in Latin America, India, Africa and the Far East, and in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and which drew in the Spanish, French, British and Danish as well as local rulers, was the first world war. Colonial expansion in this century also established the basis for the later British Empire, especially through acquisitions of sovereign territory in India, the West Indies and Canada. But just as importantly, the colonies provided a safety valve to relieve the pressure of population growth. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the population of Europe had risen by over a third to about 111 million – the continent was as heavily populated as it had been in 1300. With no governments making allowances for the extra mouths that needed feeding, the situation was ripe for Europe to turn on itself violently. When harvests failed, people became desperate, risking the gallows to poach livestock or steal bread. In France, lords began to exercise authority over their lands to the point of tyranny. In Italy and Spain, feudal lords commanded brigand armies. Revolutions and rebellions broke out throughout Europe: the Bolotnikov Rising in Russia (1606–7), the Dosza insurrection in Hungary (1614), the peasants’ war in Upper Austria (1626), the civil wars in England (1643–9), the Neapolitan Revolution (1647–8) and the Fronde in France (1648–53). In addition, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish minorities were persecuted in many countries. Thus the opportunity to make a voyage to the New World and live freely in a self-governing community, without fear of famine or religious persecution, was deeply attractive. It exercised a potent effect on people’s minds even if the numbers of actual emigrants at this point were still small. The next two centuries would see the population pressure valve open more fully, as millions of Europeans flocked to the New World, and set about building a society that would one day rival those they had left behind.

  The social contract

  The existence of seemingly less sophisticated native cultures in Africa and America raised significant new questions for European intellectuals. Societies that did not include formalised marriage, money, writing or land ownership seemed to support the Biblical story that mankind had once existed in a primitive form in a ‘Garden of Eden’. Europeans only had to look at their own society – at the guns, the printed books and the scientific and navigational achievements of the last hundred years – to realise how rapidly they were moving away from this original state. Above all else, the juxtaposition of the developed and primitive caused European philosophers to reconsider matters of law and morality. What was the natural law that governed all mankind? How had mankind progressed morally from a state of nature, in which men and women had presumably obeyed their own personal desires, to a state in which they agreed common rules of social engagement?

  Thomas Hobbes was the first significant commentator on the subject. In his Leviathan (1651), he argued that the emergence of society was entirely due to human interactions, not divine intervention. He theorised that men in a state of nature had natural rights but lived in a state of brutality. Over the years they compromised some of these rights by means of agreement with others for their mutual benefit. For example, a group of men might agree to waive the right to kill each other and choose instead to defend each other against outsiders. Their understanding of this consent formed a social contract, and that in turn provided the philosophical justification for the commonwealth or political body. Hobbes argued that there were only three types of commonwealth – monarchy, democracy and aristocracy – and that of these three, monarchy was the best. Only a strong centralised government, the ‘Leviathan’, could uphold peace and civil unity and protect individuals and their property. For this reason, rebellion against the monarch was never justified, even if the ruler acted contrary to the interests of the people. Moreover, no aspect of religion could be allowed to claim greater authority than the commonwealth, so no personal spiritual insight could be permitted to rival the monarch’s position or the civil law.

  Contemporaries of Hobbes saw things somewhat differently, especially with regard to what form of government was ideal and how far people could go in holding their rulers to account. But almost everyone agreed that there were natural rights. The concept appealed to radicals, who used it to complain against government officers and landowners abusing the natural rights of the common man. It also appealed to other philosophers. The most significant of these was John Locke, who further developed the idea in his Two Treatises of Government (1689–90). Locke argued that all men were equal in the state of nature and that they enjoyed three natural rights: first and foremost, the right to life; second, the right to liberty, to do what they wanted as long as it did not conflict with the first right; and third, the right to enjoy their property as long as it did not impinge on the first two rights. Locke did not agree that monarchy was necessarily the best form of government, and even suggested that if the monarch did not protect the rights of his people, they had the right to depose him. Indeed, he praised the Glorious Revolution in England (1688), which had recently enacted this very principle. He also approved of the Bill of Rights that followed, which limited the power of the king. Henceforth the monarch was unable to intervene in the law or in the workings of Parliament. He could not levy his own army or his own taxation without the authority of Parliament, and was not permitted to use or authorise ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. However, Locke did follow Hobbes in arguing that no personal religious insight could override the social contract. In his view, religious intolerance was an infringement of a man’s liberty. No one could prove one faith true and another false, so the reasons for religious intolerance were delusional.

  In such ways, the discovery of the New World stimulated Europeans to think outside the box of a divinely ordained hierarchy, and to imagine the liberty of all people – rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant. The irony was that at the same time as they were developing these ideas, Europeans in Africa and America were busy removing the liberty of indigenous people by forcing them into slavery. Despite this tragedy, the stories told of prosperity in the New World inspired a fresh, more libertarian vision of life in Europe. This in turn gave rise to ideas that would be exported back to North and South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – prompting their respective fights for their own liberty from their colonial masters in Great Britain and Spain.

  The rise of the middle classes

  In 1709 the Venetian artist Marco Ricci painted three opera rehearsals in a practice room at the Queen’s Theatre, on the Haymarket in London. These pictures reveal a world strikingly different from London life a century earlier. Nothing you see in th
em could have been depicted in 1600. The clothing worn by the singers is of the latest fashion, including long curly wigs rather than the ruffs of a century before. Portraits and landscape paintings line the walls of the practice room; prior to the career of the French artist Claude (1600–82), artists didn’t paint landscapes except to illustrate a religious scene, and few people hung paintings on their walls. As for opera itself, the genre did not exist in London in 1600: the very first opera was performed in Florence in 1597, and it was not until the 1680s that Henry Purcell wrote the first English opera. One of Ricci’s three pictures shows the foremost Italian castrato of the day, Il Niccolini, which hints at other developments: in 1600, singers did not travel on international tours, and nobody was castrating boys to develop their high singing voices in later life. The audience being seated on chairs was a relative novelty too, as individual chairs were relatively uncommon a century earlier. A standing member of the audience in one of the paintings is even holding a porcelain cup and saucer, drinking tea. Finally, the very subject of Ricci’s painting – an indoor scene, which has nothing to do with myth or legend – is something that you would not have found in 1600. The painting speaks of a changed world, with changed people, changed tastes and changed ideas.