Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  By all accounts—at least for a ruthless fratricidal killer—Aurangzeb was a deeply pious man. In stark contrast to some of his decadent predecessors, he lived a simple life, knitting prayer caps and copying the Koran, which he had memorized, over and over by hand.

  Aurangzeb extended and accelerated the repression begun by Shah Jahan. Increasingly, the dictates of orthodox Islam shaped the imperial court. Aurangzeb prohibited the consumption of wine and opium and banned non-Muslim ceremonies. For the first time in a century neither the Hindu festival of Diwali nor the Persian spring festival of Nauroz was celebrated at court. To enforce his increasingly dogmatic ordinances, Aurangzeb appointed muhtasibs, or censors of public morals, all across the empire.

  Reversing earlier policies of religious tolerance, Aurangzeb imposed Sharia (Islamic law) throughout the empire. He razed thousands of Hindu temples and shrines, including the great temple of Mathura. Land that had formerly been granted to Hindu institutions was redistributed to Muslim clerics. In 1679, Aurangzeb revived the jiziya, the punitive tax imposed on non-Muslims, provoking heated protests across the empire.

  Aurangzeb's intolerance was an imperial catastrophe. To begin with, the persecution of Hindus was bad for business. When one of Aurangzeb's henchmen forcibly converted a Hindu clerk in Surat, the heads of eight thousand Hindu trading families left the port city in anger, bringing commerce to an effective halt.

  But far more destructively, Aurangzeb's Muslim zealotry tore the fragile religious and political unity of the Mughal Empire to pieces. His vicious campaign to eradicate Sikhism—including the destruction of temples and the execution of a revered Sikh holy man (on charges of converting Muslims)—earned the Mughals the hatred of tens of thousands in northern India and paved the way for Sikh militarism.

  Meanwhile in the south, a number of Hindu Maratha clans banded together to fight Mughal supremacy. Their leader was Shivaji, a now legendary warrior viewed by many as the founder of guerrilla warfare in India. Shivaji successfully drove the Mughal armies out of Deccan (in the modern state of Maharashtra), becoming king of the Maratha confederacy in 1674. For the next two decades, Aurangzeb expended enormous resources trying to hold his ground against the Marathas, who, using their guerrilla tactics and familiarity with the terrain, bled the mighty Mughal army. Instead of strengthening his ties with the Hindu Rajputs—who might have remained his allies and who had formerly served as great empire builders for the Mughals—Aurangzeb sacked their temples and eventually turned them against him too.

  Not only Hindus faced the might of Aurangzeb's Islamic orthodoxy. Shiite Muslims did too. A devout Sunni, Aurangzeb sent conquering armies to Bijapur and Golconda, where the ruling families had for centuries been Shiite.

  Until his death in 1707, Aurangzeb kept the empire intact, ruthlessly deploying enormous marauding armies to crush enemies, stamp out heretics, and extend Mughal rule over Shiite and Hindu lands. When he died, the Mughal Empire was larger than it had ever been or ever would be again. But because of all his constant warring—external and internal—the empire was also bankrupt. More than that, the hatreds and divisions he sowed made India easy prey for the divide-and-conquer stratagems that the British would soon deploy to great success, turning India from a subcontinental Muslim empire to a jewel in the crown of the largest Western empire the world had ever seen.

  Perhaps the devout Aurangzeb understood his own legacy. On his deathbed, he wrote to his son: “I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing. I have sinned terribly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me.”24

  EIGHT

  “Rebel Buggers” and the “White

  Man's Burden”

  Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess'd the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker's word. And all are satisfied.

  — VOLTAIRE, 1733

  A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.

  — RUDYARD KIPLING, Beyond the Pale, 1888

  Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.

  — MAHATMA GANDHI, 1921

  When we left Britain two chapters ago, it was 1688 and William III of Orange, stadtholder of the Netherlands, had just become king of England. What kind of country did William and Mary take over? A country not very different from the rest of intolerant Christian Europe.

  For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what is now Great Britain was a pit of vicious religious and ethnic warfare. Protestants massacred Catholics, Catholics beheaded Protestants, Anglicans persecuted dissenters, and Englishmen slaughtered Irish, Scots, and Welsh, all of whom retaliated in kind. Indeed, the Britons of this period could almost be compared to the Mongols before the rise of Genghis Khan: exacting revenge on one another, caught in seemingly unending cycles of bloodshed and mutual destruction. In the words of one contemporary, Britons had inflicted on themselves more “killing and cutting throats…spoyling, and ruinating one another (under the fair pretences of Religion and Reformation) with more barbarous inhumanity and cruelty, than could have been committed here by…millions of Turkes, Tartars, or Cannibals.”1

  All this was to change dramatically, beginning with the reign of William and Mary. In 1689, the English parliament passed the Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, two revolutionary documents. Notwithstanding significant limitations—for example, the Act of Toleration protected only Protestant dissenters, not Catholics—these two decrees marked the beginning of a new era. Although there would be continuing bigotry and brutality, particularly toward Catholics, Britain would over the next two centuries earn the reputation of the most tolerant nation on earth.

  Indeed, the rise of Great Britain vividly exemplifies the thesis of this book. Because of England's marked turn toward tolerance after 1689, three groups in particular—Jews, Huguenots, and, most important, Scots—were able to enter into British society with unprecedented freedom. Collectively, these three groups played an indispensable role in the financial and industrial revolutions that catapulted Great Britain to world dominance.

  But once it achieved global dominance, Britain found itself in a profoundly schizophrenic position. At home, Britain had triumphantly embraced the values of pluralism and tolerance. At the same time, in India, Rhodesia, Jamaica, and almost all its overseas domains, British governors ruled as Occidental despots, who presumed white, Christian superiority and openly practiced ethnic and racial discrimination.

  In other words, for the British, a funny thing happened on the way to world dominance—the Enlightenment. This may sound flip, but in fact Great Britain differs from every preceding world-dominant power in the following respect: It reached the pinnacle of global power after the threshold of modernity—with its fundamental ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy—had been irreversibly crossed. Britain during its Victorian heyday thus confronted a dilemma that never faced Genghis Khan or even the burghers of seventeenth-century Holland, who never imagined that the tolerance they practiced at home might require them to view the Javanese as their equals. How could Victorian Britain, a nation increasingly coming to see itself as the freest, most tolerant, most moral in the world, rule an empire of conquered subjects?

  In the modern world, the meaning of tolerance has changed. The purely instrumental tolerance of the ancient empires, in which skilled groups or talented individuals were “harnessed” in the service of the empire like good horses or mules, cannot satisfy modern ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government. Thus the history of Britain raises an intriguing question. Is it possible for a world-dominant power to be genuinely tolerant in the modern, “enlightened” sense? Answering this
question is especially important for today's global hyperpower—the United States of America—the only one to have been a former colony itself.

  “THE PRODIGIOUS MULTITUDE OF EXCELLENT PEOPLE OF ALL KINDS”: JEWS AND HUGUENOTS IN BRITAIN

  After expelling its Jews in 1290, England had virtually no Jewish population for the next four centuries. In the early 1600s, James I was urged by Sir Thomas Shirley to invite the Jews back to England—or, if that was too objectionable, then at least to Ireland, which was filled with barbarians and miscreants anyway—in order to take advantage of their trading connections and commercial skills. Shirley's advice went largely unheeded. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century, and particularly after the 1688 arrival of William of Orange, that a significant Jewish community in Britain began to take root again.

  William had long had a strong, mutually advantageous relationship with Holland's Sephardic Jews. Among the Dutch Jews who followed William to England were members of the financially powerful Machado and Pereira families. Antonio (Moseh) Machado and Jacob Pereira were the chief provisioners for the Dutch Republic's military, supplying bread, grain, horses, and wagons to Dutch troops. In England, the newly arrived Dutch Jews continued to serve as William's military provisioners. The army contractor Solomon de Medina, one of Machado and Pereira's agents, proved so indispensable to William that the king dined at his home on Richmond Hill in 1699. The next year, Medina became the first openly practicing Jew to be knighted in England.2

  But Britain's new Jews did not only supply armies. Far more important, they played a critical role in financing Great Britain's wars against its most formidable rival in the eighteenth century— France.

  Between 1689 and 1763, and arguably for much longer, the rivalry between England and France was obsessive and constant. It extended, moreover, to seemingly every dimension of potential power: land wars, control of the seas, overseas colonies, the slave trade in Africa and the Americas. In many respects, France was in a better position than England to succeed the Dutch Republic as Europe's foremost power. In 1689, France's population was four times greater than that of England, and it had a much larger army, a comparable navy, and a chain of excellent ports and naval bases in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Moreover, in 1689, France's industrial production seemed, if anything, stronger than England's. How, then, did England prevail?3

  In a nutshell, Britain triumphed over France because it had greater access to money. Throughout the seventeenth century, European monarchs were constantly scrambling for the resources needed to finance the skyrocketing costs of war. During this period, most of Europe's treasuries were empty. Armies marched into battle insufficiently provisioned, their soldiers hungry and unpaid. England's coffers were practically empty as late as 1603. (According to the Earl of Clarendon, it was “the popular axiom of Queen Elizabeth,” who ruled from 1558 to 1603, “that as her greatest treasure was in the hearts of her people, so she had rather her money should be in their purses than in her Exchequer.”) In this context, the “capacity to summon up large sums swiftly and transfer them secretly was crucial to the execution of sudden, bold initiatives of state.” Jews were particularly well placed to do this: They were able to raise massive amounts of capital, relying on international family networks and drawing on funds from all over the world.

  Jews played precisely this role for William III. Not only did Jewish loans finance the stadtholder-king himself, but it was Jewish loans to a nearly bankrupt Spain—provided, ironically, by Sephardic families who had fled the Inquisition just a few decades earlier—that allowed the anti-French alliance among England, the Netherlands, and Spain to turn the tide against Louis XIV.4

  However, loans from a few wealthy individuals to desperate monarchs would soon become a thing of the past. (The individual loans, not the desperate monarchs.) In 1694, Parliament established the Bank of England, built on the modern system of privately financed public debt pioneered by the Dutch. Here too Britain's new Jewish community played an important, although less direct, role.

  After they arrived in London around 1689, one of the first things that men such as Machado and Medina did was to establish a stock market like the one already flourishing in Holland. It was they who “helped to reproduce the intricate apparatus of speculation which had already been perfected at Amsterdam a hundred years before: settlement or ‘contango’ day, puts and calls, continuations, backwardation, and all the refinements of the modern stock exchange.” More fundamentally, the London Exchange was the chief vehicle by which foreign capitalists—and eventually average British citizens—could invest in Britain's maritime expansion, its industrial and commercial explosion, or the long-term government bonds that funded Britain's wars.5

  Once the Bank of England was created, Jews also served as brokers for the government's debt, specializing in placing government notes in smaller hands. Thus Samson Gideon, who first made his fortune speculating in government securities and joint-stock companies, became by the 1750s both the leading underwriter of government loans in Britain and the richest Jew in the country; when he died, he was worth £580,000, a staggering sum for the time. (In a familiar pattern, Gideon married a Protestant, raised his children as Christians, and wed his daughter to English nobility; although Gideon himself was refused a baronetcy, being still a Jew, his Eton-educated son and heir was granted that honor at the age of thirteen.) Similarly, the sons of Aaron Goldsmid, another immigrant magnate from Amsterdam, were among the Bank of England's most important brokers for short-term government securities such as three-month Exchequer bills. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was the Goldsmids who, by finding private investors for these bills, helped raise the hundreds of millions of pounds that gave Britain a crucial advantage in its war with France.

  By introducing the stock exchange, developing new capital markets, and underwriting vast sums of public and private debt, Jews such as Medina, Gideon, and Goldsmid, along with the Montagus, Sterns, and members of the famous Rothschild family, helped turn London into the world's preeminent financial center. After 1815, “it was from London that the world's financial system was articulated, while Amsterdam had been relegated to a subordinate role.”6

  Lest the picture of Jews in Britain appear too rosy, it should be emphasized that immensely wealthy Jewish families were the exception, not the rule. There were roughly 200 such families by the 1830s, out of a total Jewish population in England of approximately 30,000. Before the 1800s, the majority of Jews in Britain— most of whom arrived from Germany, Poland, and central Europe, where Jews were routinely scapegoated and forced into ghettos— were impoverished and poorly educated, typically eking out a living as peddlers and street hawkers. (The stereotype of the Jewish rag seller was still vivid enough in the 1870s that cartoonists routinely depicted Prime Minister Disraeli in that guise in order to highlight his Jewishness.) In addition, there was widespread anti-Semitic prejudice and discrimination. Jews remained barred, for example, from holding public office or attending ancient universities (such as Oxford or Cambridge, both of which required taking a Christian oath).7

  Nevertheless, at least by comparison to the other countries of Europe, Great Britain after 1688 became a famously receptive haven for Jews. British Jews were generally not subjected to special taxes, as in other countries, and Parliament imposed virtually no restrictions on Jewish immigration, occupations, commerce, and residency. Jews born in Britain were considered British citizens, entitled to the same property rights as Christians. By 1860, Jews were officially allowed to attend Oxford and Cambridge, hold municipal office, and even run for Parliament. Between 1881 and 1914, as many as 150,000 additional Jews from eastern Europe arrived in Britain, although by then the United States had replaced Britain as the most popular destination.8

  Britain was a haven and land of opportunity for another enterprising religious minority. The Huguenots were French Protestants who, heavily influenced by John Calvin, fiercely opposed the hierarchy and rituals of the Catholic
Church. The first Huguenot church was apparently established in a home in Paris around 1555. Thereafter, the movement spread quickly; at their peak, the Huguenots numbered between one and two million, as compared to roughly 16 million Catholics. They could be found on all rungs of society, including artisans and professionals as well as wealthy financiers and nobles. At one point, backed by the House of Bourbon, the Huguenots had their own fleet of warships and controlled dozens of fortified cities and towns throughout France.9

  In the mid-seventeenth century, Louis XIV launched a cam- paign of brutal persecution of Protestants, culminating in the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had granted a significant measure of religious liberty to them. Following the Revocation, Protestant pastors were hanged, churches destroyed, and property confiscated. Threatened with prison, execution, or the wheel of torture, many Huguenots converted to Catholicism, or pretended to do so. Others—perhaps 150,000 to 200,000—fled the country. Of these, approximately 50,000 sought refuge in the British Isles.

  The Huguenot exodus was followed by a period of economic decline in France, but the causes of this decline are difficult to pinpoint. Some historians believe that the departure of the Huguenots was extremely important, adversely affecting France's steel, paper-making, shipping, and textile industries. Others point out that the majority of Huguenots remained in France, often practicing their religion in secret, and that factors such as bad harvests and Louis XIV's military overreaching contributed far more to France's economic problems.

  There is no question, however, that England profited. Huguenot clock-makers helped turn London into one of the world's leading clock-making centers. The French town of Caudebec lost most of its master hatters to England, which, armed with new trade secrets for making fine, rain-resistant felt (the trick was mixing wool with rabbit fur), began producing its own “Caudebec” hats. Huguenots also brought with them skills in paper manufacturing, glassblowing, lace making, book printing, metalworking, and linen and silk production.10