A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Societies that were divided into many little courts, such as Germany or Italy, could only join in the imperial game when they had come together and formed a single military and financial hub. And as soon as they did, almost their first act was to try to acquire overseas territories. They seemed among the most brutal of the imperialists, but this was because they were late. Britain had fought her way to dominance in India, and massacred Tasmanians, and helped wipe out native American peoples, before the full glare of modern communications made it all too embarrassing. The Dutch had behaved savagely to the Javanese before anyone in Europe knew or cared. The Germans with their machine-guns in East Africa, and Mussolini with his aircraft and gas in Ethiopia, were easier targets for outrage.

  The only European countries that were virtually non-participant in empire-building at this point were the ones that already had empires inside Europe, such as the Austro-Hungarians (and to a lesser extent the Russians), or that were too small or landlocked to hope to compete, such as the Swedes, Norwegians, Swiss and Poles. These have often built the more equal, more successful societies today, which may not be a coincidence. There is, however, one glaring example of a small country that did acquire a vast empire. Though an odd story, it is one that tells us a lot about how imperialism actually worked.

  Leopold the Nasty

  The personal empire carved out of the guts of the African continent by the Belgian King Leopold II was the most extreme, almost ridiculous, example of European imperialism. Belgium was a small also-ran in nineteenth-century Europe, a nation of two languages, which had only become independent in 1830 (and is now again barely a nation). The Belgians had gone shopping for a king in the monarchical bazaar of Germany. They had opted for Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had been a swashbuckling officer with the Russian army fighting Napoleon. He had married the second-in-line to the British throne, who had died before she could become queen; and he was Queen Victoria’s uncle. Indeed, he had helped arrange her famously happy marriage to his nephew, Prince Albert. After accepting Belgium’s invitation – he had earlier turned down the chance of becoming King of Greece – Leopold proved in many ways a good king, supporting social reforms and behaving with the circumspection of a constitutional monarch.

  He was, significantly, King of the Belgians, not King of Belgium – the head of a people, not the owner of a fiefdom. As the age of empire matured, this chafed on Leopold. His relatives, notably his niece Victoria, possessed fine empires. Belgium had nothing. It was a crammed and relatively poor country, where emigration was discussed as a way to avoid social revolution. Leopold asked the Turks if they would sell him Crete. He tried for Cuba, and even Texas, before it joined the USA. He wondered about the Faroe Islands. He covetously eyed parts of South America too. Nothing was available. Leopold died disappointed; but he passed this colony mania on to his son, the sly, gangling, large-nosed Leopold II. This son was more of a mess than his father. He was struggling in an unhappy marriage, and roamed the world. An unappealing figure and a world-class hypocrite, he disliked the minor role offered by constitutional monarchy in Europe and was unimpressed by Belgium in general. ‘Petit pays, petits gens,’ he moaned.

  As heir, he travelled around observing British imperialism in Egypt, studying in Seville the financial inflows of the Spanish empire, and reading about the treasure that had streamed into Holland from the Dutch colony of Java. As an importuning would-by buyer outdoing his father, young Leopold asked if he could buy part of Borneo. He fantasized about purchasing something in Abyssinia, or maybe on the Nile. Perhaps the Argentines could find him something? Or maybe he could snaffle a morsel of China? Fiji? Vietnam? The Philippines? An island off Uruguay? Or in the Pacific? Like his father, he was on the verge of becoming a comic-opera figure: ‘Trainee emperor in need of empire. Will consider all offers.’ Yet he had already received a grim warning about the dangers of Europeans parachuting themselves onto foreign thrones. His sister had married the ill-fated Austrian Archduke Maximilian, whom the French had packed off to Mexico as their puppet-emperor. Unimpressed, the Mexicans had executed him, providing the inspiration for a very fine painting by Manet. The bereaved wife, Leopold’s sister, went mad, and he kept her hidden away in a palace for the rest of her life.

  What transformed all of this from byway in European dynastic history into world-class tragedy was the penetration of central Africa by European explorers. From the late 1840s, Britons such as the flamboyant multilinguist Richard Burton and his comrade (later enemy) John Speke began to chart the African interior, starting with their search for the origins of the Nile. The heroes of London’s Royal Geographical Society were not motivated by a desire to extend the British Empire – though fame, and the wealth accruing from successful book-publishing certainly were lures. Nor was the British government much interested. When Verney Lovett Cameron tried to rescue the great David Livingstone, the Scottish Congregationalist missionary and explorer, he failed, but he returned to London having crossed the continent and brimming with tales of its rivers, lakes and rich soil. Ministers could not have cared less.

  Livingstone had crossed the continent himself, in the opposite direction, travelling light and managing not to offend most of the African chieftains he met. He believed strongly in Western, Christian civilization, and he wanted to save souls as well as to chart rivers and lakes, but he came from a religious tradition that was suspicious of earthly, militaristic power. Like Cameron, he was a genuinely outraged critic of African slavery. The same could not be said of Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh boy who had suffered a horrible upbringing in a poor-house before getting to America, where he managed to fight on both sides during the Civil War until he emerged as a brilliantly self-publicizing and unreliable journalist.

  Employed by a New York press tycoon, he was sent to find Livingstone. Cruelly misusing his native bearers and driven by a reckless hunger for fame, he was able to ask, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ and make himself a global celebrity. Stanley too returned to London and, though now an American, wanted the British to claim the huge new land. But like Cameron, Stanley found no enthusiasm in London for annexing the Congo. Leopold II, reading the explorers’ reports in his daily copy of The Times, delivered freshly ironed to his breakfast table at his palace outside Brussels, thought differently.

  Leopold wanted, as he said, a slice of ‘this magnificent African cake’, and he began a cunning campaign to help himself. He decided to pose as a philanthropist. As we have seen, Muslim slavers had long preyed on African kingdoms, and after the anti-slavery movement had ended British involvement in the Atlantic trade, African slavery had become a fashionable moral cause. So Leopold set himself up as a Crusader, telling Queen Victoria he wanted ‘to bring civilization to Africa’ and in 1876 convening a lavish conference in Belgium, where explorers, politicians and do-gooders from all over Europe and Russia were honoured, given medals, listened to and served superb banquets. Free drink and flattery go a long way, as Brussels knows well. Leopold told everyone he merely wanted to shine the light of civilization on the natives, and suggested a network of European stations in the Congo, staffed by doctors, scientists and others, to help abolish slavery, establish ‘harmony among the chiefs’ and ‘pacify’ the region. Impressed, the grandees of the Brussels conference agreed to form the International Association of Africa with King Leopold as president. His cake knife was poised.

  Burton, Speke and Livingstone would have been aghast at the consequences of their heroic and lonely voyages. They might have thought it unlikely this land would soon be taken over by Europeans. Malaria, yellow fever, thick forests, wild beasts, hostile natives and ferocious heat had so far kept most outsiders at bay. This was the interior of what was called, without any European self-consciousness, the ‘Dark Continent’. But Stanley, who was in Africa when the Brussels conference was held, was a very different cast of man. He was ambitious for worldly success and, spurned by the British, was easily wooed by Leopold II. Within five years of the conference Stanley
and his Belgian team had carved a river through the rock and jungle to reach the huge and navigable waterway of the Upper Congo. Soon riverboats would be using it to trade, to create small settlements and to reach one-sided, bogus ‘treaties’ with local chieftains.

  Even in the 1880s, the legality of simply taking a vast slice of Africa for one’s personal empire (the parliament of Belgium had made it clear it had no wish to be involved) was controversial. But Leopold’s serpentine diplomacy won him the support of the US President. France and Portugal, who both had interests in the area, were furious, but Leopold played off the European powers against each other. It helped that nobody felt threatened by Belgium. So Leopold won the backing of Bismarck’s Germany and then of the British. The ‘International Association of the Congo’, flying an old Congo king’s flag, became in effect a shell company for Leopold’s new empire. In 1885 the Belgian parliament backed his scheme and he began to call himself ‘King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State’. Shares were sold and funds raised, though Leopold retained personal control. Soon, at terrible human cost, a railway was being blasted from the coast to the safe waters beyond the huge rapids and falls that divided the mighty Congo River from the sea.

  Armed traders poured into the belly of Africa, first buying up all the ivory they could find. Chiefs were fooled into signing over their lands. Villagers were cajoled, bullied and threatened so they would hand over their supplies of food and ivory. Elephants were hunted to near-extinction in all the areas the whites could reach. The rule of the rope and the whip reached deep into the Congo; the supposed humanitarian crusade had become a new form of slavery.

  Ivory was hugely valuable because it was used for everything from false teeth to piano keys, but once the pneumatic bicycle tyre had been invented, rubber – which grew wild, the sap of creepers, across the Congo – was even more so. Native Africans were forced to deliver ever greater amounts of the sticky, unpleasant gum. If they seemed reluctant, their wives and children would be held as hostages. Those who protested – and there were rebellions – were mowed down with the new fast-action rifles and machine-guns, or strung from trees, or whipped to death. A brutal native army, officered by Belgians, cut the hands off those it had killed so as to claim a financial bounty. Often, to make up the numbers or out of pure sadism, hands and ears were cut off the living.

  Away from their families, their priests and their neighbours, out of reach of newspaper reporters, ordinary Belgian men turned into the perpetrators of massacres. It was a story not so different from the transformation of quiet Lutheran shopkeepers and Swabian farm-hands into SS killers in Nazi extermination camps. Congolese were like Jews, not quite human. Society’s restraints had been stripped away. ‘Nobody’ was watching. From Antwerp off went adventurers, guns and ammunition, along with shackles and manacles, to the Congo. What came back were cargoes of ivory and rubber, and huge profits, including for Leopold, who began splurge-spending, not just on mistresses and luxuries but on expanding his royal palace and on new buildings to impress his Belgian subjects.

  The apparent success of Leopold’s audacious gamble caused worry and jealousy elsewhere in Europe, and the ‘scramble for Africa’ began. The British had been mainly settled in the far south of the continent, a much easier climatic and geographical area for Europeans, living uneasily alongside Dutch Boers and native people. In the far north, the French had begun to seize Algeria in 1830, and the Suez Canal was being built with French and British money during 1859–69.

  But it was Leopold’s rubber bonanza, and the discovery of diamonds around the Orange River in South Africa, followed in the 1880s by a gold rush, that turned expansion into a frenzy. The French pushed into West Africa, into countries such as Chad, Senegal and Mali that had been at the core of earlier African civilizations, as they tried to link the river basin of the Niger with their North African possessions across the Sahara. The British proceeded north from South Africa, through today’s Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi, trying to link the Cape with Egypt in a huge north–south stripe of control. Germany, late into the game, seized chunks of the remaining carcass – Tanganyika, Togoland, Namibia. From the 1890s until 1914, the frenzy caused snarling and squabbling between the European powers. Germany’s unsatisfied hunger was one of the causes of the First World War.

  From the ravaged rainforests of the Congo Basin, stripped of rubber and elephants, then depopulated by the Belgian slaughter, to the brutal regimes that emerged from the humiliation of conquest and exploitation, the ‘scramble for Africa’ was late imperialism with almost no redeeming aspects. Some of the worst behaviour seen in modern Africa, from the use of child soldiers (a Belgian idea) to the amputation of rebels’ arms, feet or hands, originated at this time. The lines on the map drawn back home in Europe, dividing tribes and language groups, are at least partly responsible for the sequence of failed states, unable to command loyalty, that litter contemporary Africa. True, European doctors brought drugs and medicines that began to turn the tables on ancient African diseases; but these same drugs allowed Europeans to enter parts of the continent, and exploit them, for the first time. Africa was less populous, and as soon as medically protected and industrially armed people arrived, almost completely helpless. To give him a kind of cold credit, Leopold realized this early and instinctively.

  His Congolese empire was so barbaric that word got out, and European protests grew. The story of the writers and campaigners who publicized the horrors of the Belgian Congo is an impressive one. A former shipping clerk called Edmund Morel, who had spotted the disparity between the cargoes leaving and arriving in Antwerp – only guns and ammunition going out, lucrative ivory and rubber coming back – was a key leader in the agitation, setting up the Congo Reform Association. Morel was a ‘good European’ pendant to hang against Leopold. Other famous men, including the British–Polish novelist Joseph Conrad and the later Irish nationalist Roger Casement, were also influential, though the Christian nonconformist tradition was more important than any one individual. This became the first humanitarian campaign of the modern age, an Edwardian equivalent of Live Aid or Amnesty International.

  The steady rain of horror stories in European and American newspapers infuriated Leopold. He reacted by bullying, bribing and hiring his own propagandists, but none of it worked. When a commission of inquiry he set up himself failed to whitewash the story, he eventually gave up and sold his private empire to the Belgian state, after which reforms began. Adam Hochschild, the American writer who has written a careful modern history of Leopold’s empire, quotes calculations suggesting that between 1880 and 1920 murder, starvation, disease and a falling birthrate cut the human population of the Congo by about half: ‘That would mean . . . that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.’35

  Stuffed animals, uniforms, chains and native loot are on show at one of Leopold’s tasteless, rather grotesque buildings on the outskirts of Brussels. The people of Belgium, quite understandably, have done their level best to forget this clever and remarkably unpleasant monarch. But the most dramatic act of imperial chaos was performed not by a latecomer, but by the originator of modern imperialism.

  Opium, War and Tragedy

  The story started, however, with a Chinese victory over the British, masterminded by one of the most intriguing and tragic figures of the nineteenth century, Lin Zexu, or ‘Commissioner Lin’, as he is mostly remembered. The scene was a small village downriver from the great city of Canton, a world of water, grey-green, hot, misty, vibrating with mosquitoes, smelling of mud. Lin, a large man with a loud laugh and a substantial moustache, was overseeing the destruction of a huge drugs haul. On the orders of the Chinese emperor, he was meticulously disposing of twenty thousand chests of opium, worth many fortunes.

  Getting rid of so much of the sticky, strong-smelling dark drug was very difficult. Lin had a team of five hundred digging huge pits, lined with stones and timber. The wooden chests were
upended. The balls of opium, bound in poppy leaves, were then crushed underfoot and thrown into the pits, where they were dissolved in water with salt and lime, stirred into a foul-smelling porridge, before being allowed to trickle into a stream, then into the sea. There was so much opium that the job took three weeks to complete. Lin, who was an amateur poet as well as a popular and successful government official, had already composed a prayer to the sea, apologizing for the pollution and advising fishes and other sea creatures to go and hide somewhere safe until the opium was dissolved.36

  This was the finale of Commissioner Lin’s dogged campaign against foreign merchants in Canton, mainly but not entirely British, as he tried to bring an end to the opium trade. The Chinese were not the first users of opium, or even early adopters. The bitter, gritty powder that comes from white poppy seeds had been used in classical times and around the Arab world. It had been grown in India under the Mughals and shipped across Asia by Indian and Dutch merchants. Even as Lin’s men were emptying their wooden chests into the Pearl River, it was being used in Britain too. Writers such as Thomas de Quincey and poets such as Coleridge and Crabbe were addicts. The British conqueror of India, Robert Clive, died of an overdose. Opium had been prescribed as laudanum, a liquid ‘medicine’ that was also very popular among working-class men and women struggling to adapt to the industrial revolution. It was even being given to babies to stop them crying. But only the Chinese had moved in large numbers to a new way of taking the drug – smoking it, mixed with tobacco. This produced a stronger, more addictive and therefore much more dangerous high – the difference has been compared to snorting cocaine and smoking ‘crack’.

  No one knows for sure how many Chinese men (for it was mostly a male preoccupation) had become addicted by the 1830s. Estimates at the time varied between four and twelve million. Whatever the true figure, everyone thought the rate of addiction was growing fast, despite a ferocious edict against the trade issued by the emperor in 1799. As a boy, Lin had seen the effects of the drug in his home province of Fujian, where it turned hardworking men into dazed zombies. He became a passionate anti-drugs campaigner. He was also a rising star of Chinese bureaucracy who had put down a peasant revolt by persuasion, and was known as ‘Blue Sky’ because of his reputation as a rare uncorrupted official. Appointed to confront the problem in Canton by the emperor, Lin had arrived with a sophisticated mix of carrots and sticks. The carrots included an eighteen-month amnesty for drug addicts and a refuge for smokers trying to kick the habit. The sticks included the death penalty for pushers – slow strangulation for Chinese, decapitation for foreigners.