A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  But the coastline that Cook called New Wales, and New South Wales, would stay vividly clear in Banks’s imagination when he came home. He was a farmer as well as a botanist, and he believed the soil and water of the rim of Australia would be easily cultivable by European farmers, to support oxen, sheep and wheat. And as wealthy landowner and scientist, Banks became an influential figure in Georgian London. He was a member of the King’s Privy Council, of the Royal Society and of a mass of other learned bodies. The nude cavorter of Tahiti grew into the potato-shaped potentate of Piccadilly; the tousle-headed adventurer and collector became the spider at the centre of a web of botanical and learned debates; and he was appointed George III’s adviser on his Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. So it was hardly a surprise that Parliament turned to him when looking for a place to send convicts.

  This had become an urgent problem. With a fast-growing urban population and a criminal ‘bloody code’ which at one point listed 220 crimes punishable by hanging, Britain needed an alternative way of dealing with her convicts. Public opinion was becoming queasier about the practice of killing the poorest, including hanging children, even for small thefts. During the sixty years from 1770, around 35,000 people were sentenced to death but only 7,000 or so were actually hanged.27 British prisons were few and foul. To many, transporting the convicted by boat somewhere else seemed the humanitarian alternative. Before the loss of Britain’s American colonies, some sixty thousand felons had been sent there to work on the land for a few years, until they had earned their freedom. Once the United States’ independence closed off that option, felons were instead held in disgusting dismasted old hulks off the Thames. This was a dangerous and impractical long-term answer, however, and ministers were forced to look for another penal colony.

  Banks suggested Australia. Here, as in America, British felons could make a new land flower, and then enjoy their freedom. ‘Botany Bay’, named by Cook after Banks’s enthusiasm for plant-hunting, was chosen as the site. In May 1787 the ‘First Fleet’ of eleven ships, carrying 775 convicts – 192 of them women – plus 645 soldiers, officials and family members, set out for a gruelling thirty-six-week journey. The convicts had been sentenced for a range of small crimes, almost all involving theft – from clothes, watches and food to repeated burglary. (Transportation for political crimes, particularly Fenian rebellion, would come later.) Thus the first of 165,000 convicts arrived in Australia on 20 January 1788. The practice was finally abolished in the 1850s, just ahead of the far greater migration that was the Australian gold rush.

  In charge of the First Fleet was an admirer and correspondent of Banks’s, the professional seaman Arthur Phillip. He quickly realized that Botany Bay was considerably less inviting than its name suggested, and transferred the new colony to nearby Port Jackson (naming the cove where they first stayed ‘Sydney’, after Lord Sydney, the home secretary under whose orders he was acting). The natives, however, were not friendly. They had greeted the first settlers with cries of ‘Warra, warra, warra!’, meaning ‘Go away, go away, go away!’.28 When, instead, the colonists started to build huts, they faced periodic attacks and harassment by some of the fifteen hundred people already living in the area, clans of the Eora people.

  Phillip was an ambitious multilingual sailor from a poor family who saw himself as a modern Enlightenment man. He had been in correspondence with Banks, and had no intention of merely running a vast prison. He insisted on the rule of law and the eventual emancipation of the convict settlers, promising that in New South Wales there would be ‘no slavery’. It was a tough beginning, however, which at times brought the new colony close to starvation. Lashed and harangued, and very occasionally hanged after all, the unwilling farmers survived on the rations brought out with them and occasionally replenished by British supply ships, while they learned to cultivate the land and tend herds of those other shipboard migrants, cows.

  London, rather more worried about the wars with the French, seemed to have forgotten about them, but eventually further fleets and more convicts arrived, and the colony grew.

  As to the aboriginal people, furious and puzzled by the invaders, Phillip wanted them well treated. Kill them, he told the soldiers and settlers, and you will hang. His orders from the king were that he reach out to the native people – that he ‘endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all subjects to live in amity and kindness with them’.29

  This would have been all very well, had the clans of the area been willing simply to give up their excellent harbour and fishing grounds. They were not willing. One of Phillip’s officers, a marine captain called Watkin Tench, wrote that they ‘seemed studiously to avoid us, either from fear, jealousy, or hatred. When they met with unarmed stragglers, they sometimes killed, and sometimes wounded them.’ Tench came to think that the aboriginals were in fact people of ‘humanity and generosity’ who were only responding to ‘unprovoked outrages’ by the whites.30 Some kind of communication had to be opened up; hence the capture of Bennelong, a married man in his mid-twenties from the Wangal clan.

  Bennelong stayed for six months and developed a close relationship with Phillip, calling him ‘father’ and giving him a native name, before disappearing back into the bush.

  Once free, he persuaded Phillip to come to meet him while his people were celebrating the grounding of a whale. Probably as a matter of honour, he then had the governor speared in the shoulder by a ‘wise man’. Thomas Keneally, the Australian historian, argues that this was the natural consequence of the aboriginal custom of punishment by spear-throwing, and in Bennelong’s mind Phillip was being punished ‘for all of it: the fish and game stolen; the presumption of the Britons in camping permanently without permission; the stolen weaponry and nets . . . the random shooting of natives; the curse of smallpox; the mysterious genital infections of women and then of men’. Showing remarkable understanding, however, Phillip ordered there to be no retaliation, and when he eventually recovered from the serious wound, repaired his friendship with Bennelong and oversaw a period of better relations between colonizers and natives. But it would not last.

  In 1792 when Phillip returned home, Bennelong and an aboriginal youth came too, rather as native Americans such as the princess Pocahontas had been brought over in earlier times. When Bennelong was paraded around London and taken to the theatre, to court and to provincial towns, he does not seem to have attracted anything like the attention earlier ‘savages’ had, perhaps because the novelty value was wearing off. Or perhaps it was because New South Wales was already being seen as a grimly practical dumping-ground for unwanted Britons, rather than as an exotic paradise.

  It used to be thought that Bennelong returned home to live a sad life, rejected by his own people and drinking himself to death in Sydney; rejected too by colonists who had abandoned any notion of the noble savage for racist contempt. The true story seems to be less extreme, though no less poignant. Bennelong continued as an adviser to the British, and learned English well enough to write to the Phillips family in Britain. He also maintained a powerful aboriginal position and became the clan leader of some hundred people. ‘Honour fights’, involving spears being thrown at men who had to hold their ground with shields, were an important part of aboriginal life and Bennelong often took part. He remarried and had a son, and ended up a respected elder. But as the colonists took more land and relations with the native people deteriorated, the notion of some kind of peaceful coexistence or friendship collapsed.

  Bennelong died, aged fifty, perhaps partly from too much alcohol, but admired by his own people. The Sydney Gazette, however, speaking for the colonists, called him in its obituary not a ‘noble savage’ as Captain Phillips or the young Joseph Banks might have put it, but rather ‘a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him’. The Enlightenment’s admiration for hunter-gatherer people living without clothes or hypocrisy had not taken long to warp itself into colonial
ist contempt.

  Colonization was in the end about force, not friendship. The naked people so admired by Cook for their honesty had been forced off their land because Britain needed somewhere to put her thieves, many of whose families had also been ousted from the land they had lived in for generations. Industrialization and colonization involved multiple migrations and expulsions. In Australia, some aboriginals turned to open revolt. One of them, Pemulwuy, had made a final stand in 1797: he was shot seven times and captured. He escaped, with a manacle on his leg, and was killed in 1802. His severed head was sent to the collection of that great lover of Australia, Sir Joseph Banks.

  Australia is only one of the more dramatic instances of a story that was being repeated in the Americas, in Africa and in the Far East as well. Among its victims would be Enlightenment optimism.

  The Revolution

  They gathered, a citizen army of patriots, declaring themselves for liberty – ‘an inalienable right . . . derived truly from the people’ – and using a fresh word in European politics. Remembering Athens, they called themselves ‘democrats’, and announced that the land belonged not to the hated aristocrats or the monarch but to the people.

  Wearing ribbons and carrying muskets, they called on the ordinary folk to ‘arm yourselves, assemble together and take charge of the affairs of the land’. First one city, then another, fell to this revolutionary uprising. This, however, was not Paris in 1789 but the Netherlands four years earlier, where rebels had declared a new written constitution, and their ‘Free Corps’ had seized Utrecht, then Amsterdam itself. Just as would soon happen in France, symbols became all-important: the then rulers were the House of Orange, so the colour orange was banned; even carrots had to be displayed with their green leaves, or not at all. The Dutch, however, were a small people, and when they annoyed the Prussian king by arresting a relative, his army invaded and easily snuffed out this unsettling display of democratic idealism.

  Snuffing out the French Revolution would be a little harder. When the Bourbon monarchy finally collapsed, embroiled in debt and politically hamstrung, France was the greatest nation in Europe. She was the centre of ideas and fashion. French was the international language of diplomacy and polite society. Her armies were huge and her navy, not yet humiliated by Nelson, seemed awesome. Paris claimed to be the capital of civilization; and to many, still barely aware of China or Japan, this seemed a statement of the obvious. So the impact of the French Revolution – the biggest event in European politics since the fall of the Western Roman Empire – was always going to be felt by the rest of the continent. It proved to be even more important than that. Along with the industrial revolution, it was one of two concurrent changes on the European stage that unquestionably altered the history of humankind.

  The revolution in Paris left a legacy that is even harder to weigh. It gave the world the notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’. It introduced ‘human rights’ in the modern sense into political talk, and influenced the constitutions of countries all over the globe. Even at the time those who were enraptured by it, and those who were terrified by it, understood it as a turning-point in history, the beginning of a new age. It also demonstrated how short is the route from abstract ideals to bloody repression, for this was the first revolution to eat its children – hungrily, publicly and quickly. Its initial impact on the rest of Europe was not to bring the freedom that the likes of Beethoven and Wordsworth hoped for, but to plunge the continent yet again into war, starvation and repression. In 1972, the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai is said to have replied to the American diplomat Henry Kissinger, who had asked about the impact of the French Revolution, simply, ‘Too early to say.’ Perhaps, forty years on, that is no longer quite true.

  Almost everything about the French Revolution is argued about, except when it started. It began when Louis XVI summoned an archaic body called ‘the Estates General’ on Sunday, 5 May 1789. This body was intended to represent the three different interest groups in France – nobility and clergy, and the ‘third estate’, which represented everyone else, from wealthy businessmen to peasants. As we have seen, the absolutist Bourbons had managed without it. Louis hoped this protoParliament would help him raise taxes, particularly from the aristocracy. France was suffering a now familiar crisis in which soaring debt and a too-narrow tax base meant the old way of ruling had become unsustainable – something that happened with the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties and the British Stuart one too.

  In France, despite the theory of royal absolutism, the great landowners, the clergy and the most powerful commercial concerns enjoyed immunity from most taxes and, indeed, from other legal constraints. There was a thick web of hallowed agreements which someone, somehow, had to cut through, if the French crown was not to become bankrupt. The position had been dramatically worsened by the decision to aid and fund the American rebels against Britain’s George III. This had helped soothe France’s hurt pride for the loss of her Indian and Canadian territories to the British, but it had turned the long-running debt problem from a malady into a mortal crisis. At the same time, a series of bad summers and rising inflation were making life for the rural poor, which had never been easy, almost intolerable. Louis and his ministers had to find a dramatic answer. But summoning the Estates General, which had been dormant for 175 years, would prove a little too dramatic. Louis ought to have remembered his English history, and the parallel gamble of Charles I when he needed money from the London parliament.

  On 17 June, the ‘third estate’ of non-aristocratic and non-clerical representatives (mostly lawyers, officials, merchants and journalists) overwhelmed the other two estates by insisting the body met as one, and declared itself the National Assembly. Unable or unwilling to suppress this insurgent new institution, Louis found public order was beginning to break down in the capital. On 13 July the revolutionaries tore down the customs posts around Paris, which represented royal authority. The following day, the 14th, they stormed another (though mostly empty) symbol of the ancien régime, the fortress and prison of the Bastille. A tide of violence tore through the french crown, as abbeys were attacked, rich aristocrats assaulted and nuns and priests murdered. Some cities declared themselves self-governing.

  But power had decisively shifted. The Convention, making up new rules as it went along, now rewrote the constitution of France. To start with, it seemed as if the king could be accommodated in the new order. The revolutionaries destroyed the old system of French provinces and turned them into modern departments; took over Church lands for the state; declared all men equal before the law; ended censorship and torture; cancelled noble privileges and the legal apparatus of serfdom; and began to build a properly representative government system. This was a cascade of change never seen before in history. On 26 August the Assembly issued a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ whose promises of freedom, liberty and due process rang out across Europe, delighting the young and optimistic and causing courtiers everywhere to fret. The cowed Louis XVI was obliged to attend a mass with the leaders of this revolution, to celebrate its remarkable achievements. The world marvelled.

  At each successive stage, however, the pressures of war, hunger and fear drove the different bodies riding the revolution to more extreme positions. The Legislative Assembly, which replaced the National Constituent Assembly after elections in September 1791, was further to the left, but was then itself swamped by the declaration of a republican National Convention. During 1792–5, this fell under the control of an extremist group calling themselves ‘Jacobins’. The revolution seemed in peril, hemmed in as it was by Prussian and Austrian enemies; and abroad, at war with the British. The Paris mob, the sansculottes or ragged-legged poor, both intimidated and were manipulated by a new phenomenon – popular demagogues, cousins of the radical leaders of the late Roman republic.

  German threats to exact bloody revenge if the king was threatened had the opposite effect to that intended, sparking further extreme violence. In September 1792, priests, aristocrats and
others merely suspected of being against the revolution, were murdered in Paris’s prisons, and Louis was finally deposed. He was already a captive in the old Tuileries palace in the centre of the capital, after very nearly escaping from France the previous June. He had been spotted and arrested at Varennes, not far from the eastern border. His trial in the winter of 1792 was a passionately argued and public affair. On 33 charges, the deputies voted overwhelmingly for his guilt, with only a few dozen abstentions and no votes against. The vote to put him to death was, however, very close. But close was enough: on 21 January 1793 Louis was executed, having pardoned his enemies, his voice drowned out by drums. His Austrian Habsburg wife Marie Antoinette, who had been a particular hate figure of the Paris mob, was guillotined in October; and their child, aged ten, briefly and only theoretically Louis XVII, died in the hands of unsympathetic foster-parents.

  Though the fate of the royal family shocked foreign observers, the greater drama was the bloody fate of the revolution itself. The Convention, which had clustered the Jacobins on the left and the moderate Girondists on the right, continued to be a theatrical arena for speeches, but real power moved to the smaller Committee of Public Safety, run first by Georges Danton and later by Maximilien Robespierre. This, in turn, then fell mostly under the control of the Jacobin Club. The club was perhaps only around 3,000-strong at its height, and far fewer than that had real influence. An inner clique controlled a slightly larger committee, which in turn controlled the front organization. This was very like the way in which Communist revolutionaries in the twentieth century, behind the charade of Party Congresses and parliaments, would set up small inner groups inside ‘politburos’– dolls within dolls within dolls. And as with later revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, the ruling clique became obsessed by security, treachery and the need for ideological ‘purity’ – the latter a particular obsession of the green-eyed, chilly and mesmeric former lawyer, Robespierre.