The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  The wretched local people often fled, but some of them struck back. The warriors sang:

  We cannot endure that our women and children are taken

  And dealt with by white savages….

  We know that we shall die, but we want to die.

  We want to die.

  Word of how the whites were brutalizing Africans was slow to make its way from isolated Congo villages to Europe. Even Leopold, delighting in his palace or his villas in the south of France, cruising on his yacht, riding on his stately tricycle, strolling in his hothouses, romping with his buxom teenaged mistress, didn’t know a lot about it. His company was making handsome profits, and no doubt he didn’t ask his agents exactly how the system worked. When foreign missionaries told him what was happening in the Congo, he told them, hand on heart, that he was terribly disturbed. He met with aides and told them, “I will not allow myself to be spattered with blood or mud.” But his agents in the Congo knew his righteous wrath would pass, and they kept on reaping “taxes.”

  To his credit, Leopold did build some roads and bridges in the Congo, and harbors and cities. His contractors braved the heat, the rain, and the jungle to build a railroad to the interior that bypassed cataracts on the Congo River. Formerly that trip had taken months; now it lasted only hours. On the maiden voyage, white-gloved Congolese served iced champagne to the railroad’s European guests. But the king spent even more on public works in Belgium. He gave generously to education, and to building arches, avenues, palaces, and parks. What paid for them of course were tusks and rubber gathered by his Congo serfs.

  When Britons heard reports about the Belgian ruler’s arm’s-length brutality, the British foreign office told its consul in the Congo to investigate. The consul traveled deep inside the forests and reported finding villages abandoned. He blamed this mainly on the dread disease called sleeping sickness, but he also claimed that many Congolese had fled the Belgian bosses and the brutal goons. Survivors asked him, “Are the white men never going home; is this to last forever?”

  By the early 1900s, Leopold had made great profits but had also fallen into debt. He borrowed money from his kingdom, and agreed that Belgium should inherit the Congo on his death if he hadn’t paid the debt. The Belgians were upset about his treatment of the Congolese and embarrassed by the outrage other countries voiced. In 1908 Belgium took the Congo over from the king, a year before his death. The settlement was complicated, but the king came out ahead. He claimed that he had always meant to give the Congo to his people.

  After Belgium started governing the Congolese, their lives improved. Belgium did away with chop-hands serfdom, and fought malaria and sleeping sickness. Its practice was to treat the Congolese like children. It encouraged missionaries to give elementary schooling and to train some carpenters, gardeners, and cooks. But the Congo people had no voting rights and didn’t know such rights existed elsewhere. The Belgians strove to keep them that way. It’s said that when a Congolese sailor jumped ship in Europe, Belgium refused to let him return home for the rest of his life. Until it granted independence, in 1960, Belgium claimed the Congo was a happy place.

  EUROPEANS WERE THE big imperialists in the 1800s, but not the only ones. Near the end of the century the United States joined them, and so did Japan, to everyone’s surprise. No one would have thought Japan would play a major role in world events; the Japanese had always lived apart. Geography in part accounts for that (see map, page 69). A broad and foggy sea divides Japan from mainland Asia, and its islands rise abruptly from the water and appear to tell the world, “Let us be!”

  In 1543 a tempest blew a Chinese junk to Japan. Aboard the ship were three Portuguese, and they may have been the first Europeans ever to set foot in Japan. Later they reported what they’d seen, and others — Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, and English merchants and missionaries — also came to Japan. These foreign contacts lasted for a century.

  Then, however, 30,000 Japanese who had converted to Catholicism revolted against their local lords, who slaughtered them. The shogun, the general who ruled Japan in the emperor’s name, decided to protect his country from pollution. He ordered foreigners to leave Japan, and warned them that if any should return he would execute them. Three years later a Portuguese vessel actually did come back. It bore no cargo, only foolish men who carried gifts and hoped the shogun would relent. He did not; he chopped the heads off all but thirteen men, whom he advised to tell their friends to “think no more of us; just as if we were no longer in the world.”

  For the next two centuries, the Japanese lived nearly in seclusion, like nuns behind a wall. They did admit some Dutch and Chinese merchants. (Apparently the shoguns thought that since the Dutch were Protestants they were not Christians, and therefore weren’t as dangerous as Portuguese.) Through this contact with the Dutch the Japanese kept up with what the Western world was learning in such fields as medicine and astronomy. They also bought some western goods, such as telescopes and watches.

  Even in these centuries of seclusion, the Japanese economy began to modernize. Large business firms grew up, among them the House of Mitsui, which still survives. Mitsui was so up-to-date in merchandising that on rainy days it gave its patrons free umbrellas that bore its trademark.

  In 1853 the country reached another turning point in contacts with the world. On the other side of the earth, a bustling, bumptious nation wished Japan to open its doors for trade. Audaciously, the United States sent an expedition to persuade or force Japan to end its isolation. Commodore Matthew Perry led his two steamships and two sailing vessels directly into the fortified harbor of Uraga. The Japanese commanded him to leave, but Perry sent a message: if Japan did not accept a letter he was bringing from the U.S. president, he would deliver it by force. The Japanese knew that the defenses of their harbor were feeble, so after several days they took the letter. Perry told them he’d return in a year for the answer, this time with a larger fleet.

  The shogun thought it over. He didn’t want Americans to shell his capital, Edo (soon to be renamed Tokyo), or cut off Edo’s food supplies, which reached the capital by sea. And he knew that many Japanese would like their country opened. Major business firms, down-on-their-luck landowners, and free-lance soldiers all believed they’d prosper in an open-door Japan. And so, when Perry returned in 1854 — this time with nine ships — the shogun signed a trade agreement. He later did the same with several European nations.

  The West had taught the Japanese a lesson they were not too proud to learn. Now they knew that if they didn’t want some empire-building nation to devour them, they had better make Japan a modern nation. Perhaps they would have modernized in any case, even if the American bully hadn’t paid his visit. The business moguls who had urged the opening would surely have demanded change.

  Japan began to modernize — or westernize, which meant the same. This process happened fast, and it started with a major change in governance. Influential Japanese compelled the shogun to retire and seemingly “restored” the emperor to power. A new constitution proclaimed that Japan “shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” In practice, though, the emperor remained what he had been before, a symbol, and his elderly but energetic advisers were in charge.

  Let’s see how all of this concerns the New Imperialism. For one thing, Japan’s rulers built an army. In doing so, they relied on French advisers till the Germans beat the French in war, when they switched to Germans. They formed a navy too, and naturally they modeled it on Britain’s, since Britain ruled the waves. They set up schools, and made the Japanese the most literate people in Asia, surpassing even Indians. They would need to read and write if they were to modernize their country. As the emperor explained: “Knowledge shall be sought for all over the world and thus shall be strengthened the foundation of the imperial polity.”

  The Japanese transformed their economic lives. Five years after seeing Perry’s steamships, they began to buy them for themselves. A dozen years later
they had a railroad and a telegraph line between Tokyo and their major seaport, which had been a fishing village when Perry made his visit, and they built a giant steel mill and began producing world-class ships. They also built a textile industry, which thrived in part because many Japanese were starting to wear western clothes. Women switched from kimonos to skirts and men from skirts to trousers.

  Foreign trade increased and so did the country’s population, which rose by a fifth in only twenty years, from 1890 to 1910. That trade and population rose together was not surprising, since each one drove the other. The problem for the government was how to keep the economic system going. Only if Japan imported metals, rice, and coal and exported manufactures could its densely crowded people get along.

  And that is why Japan began to do unto others as other modern nations were doing unto others. It was clear where they should start. Conveniently nearby was Korea, a peninsula that juts from Asia like a warning finger. Korea was the “land of the morning calm,” as isolated from the world as Japan had been before the Perry visit. Forests, where tigers, bears, and leopards lived, still covered much of it. Korea looked to be of no great value, but it had three things that Japan greatly needed: markets for its products, coal to power its mills, and rice to feed its people. Korea also gave Japan an opportunity to show the world its military power.

  Japan approached Korea as Perry had approached Japan: by threatening to strike it. Korea responded in 1876 by agreeing to exchange ambassadors and to open several harbors to the Japanese. This was not enough, but Japan could not push harder. Enormous China was the problem. For several thousand years the Middle Kingdom had been the Far East’s major power, and Korea was its satellite.

  As it happened, China was itself in trouble, thanks partly to the New Imperialism and its failure to modernize as Japan had done. For several decades European countries had been barging into China, claiming regions of the country as their spheres of influence. A Chinese leader once remarked, “The rest of mankind is the carving knife…while we are the fish and the meat.” China was too feeble to expel these parasites. A knowledgeable Briton opined that “twenty-four determined men with revolvers and a sufficient number of cartridges might walk through China from one end to the other.”

  In 1894 Japan attacked the stranded whale. Although China was many times as big, the Japanese were well prepared. Japan won the war with little trouble, and it then made China recognize Korea’s independence and give Japan the island of Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria, in northeastern China. The world was shocked to see Japan’s proficiency in bullying and war, since these were thought to be the special skills of Europeans.

  Japan’s aggressiveness alarmed the Russian Empire, which just then was completing a 6,000-mile-long trans-Siberia railroad from Moscow to a Russian port on the Sea of Japan. Manchuria, although it belonged to China, was vital to Russia’s planning for the railroad’s eastern end. So Russia won the help of Germany and France, and the three of them “advised” Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula to China. Outraged and indignant, Japan gave in, whereupon the Russians induced the tractable Chinese to lease them the peninsula. They also started angling for Korea, the special object of Japan’s desire.

  Japan considered what to do. Korea and Manchuria had the markets and the iron, coal, and rice it wanted, but Russia blocked its way to both these places. So why not go to war with Russia, both to win these lands and exercise its troops and ships? Suddenly, in 1904, Japan attacked and sank some Russian vessels off the Liaodong peninsula.

  Could Japan defeat an empire that could draft more soldiers than Japan had fish? Japan and Russia sent large armies to Manchuria’s treeless plains, and war began. In fighting near a major city, Mukden, two-thirds of a million men took part, more than the world had ever seen in any battle. The Japanese prevailed. Russia had not quite completed its long railroad, so it couldn’t use it to send out more troops. Instead it sent a fleet of forty ships from the Baltic Sea to Manchuria, steaming around Europe, Africa, and much of Asia. When the ships at last arrived, Japan’s new navy promptly sank or captured all but two.

  Japan had trounced the giant, and now it got most of what it wanted. Russia handed over its leases from China of land in southern Manchuria, and recognized Japan’s ascendancy in Korea. Japan sent a “resident general” to Korea, and when a Korean patriot killed him, it annexed the whole peninsula.

  In Korea and Taiwan, Japan tried to benefit both the colonies and itself. It gave them railroads, factories, and schools, but it carried off such quantities of rice that it left the colonies underfed. The Japanese were often brutal, and the Koreans, who had ruled themselves (as China’s vassals) for a thousand years, hated their oppressive rulers. When they rebelled, Japan struck back by burning villages.

  A few years after Japan had acquired Korea, World War I gave Japanese imperialists a splendid opportunity. Naturally, the Japanese cared little about Europe, where most of “World” War I took place. However, they were wise enough to join the winning side. They declared war on Germany and snapped up German interests in China. They also forced the powerless Chinese to grant them rights (that Europeans had already) to exploit their country.

  Japan had done so much so fast! In 1918, at the end of World War I, Japanese still living could remember Perry’s visit. Now their country attended the peace conference in France as a recognized great power, one of the wealthy nations that ruled the world.

  THE WEALTHY EMPIRE-GRABBING countries claimed that they were bringing God and other blessings to the “backward” peoples of the world. An American president, William McKinley, once told an audience that he had hesitated to annex the Philippine Islands, which the United States took from Spain in 1898. But, he said, he arose from a night of prayer convinced it must be done. The Filipinos were “unfit for self-government…. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them [most of them were already Catholics], and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.”

  At about the same time a British politician addressed an audience of professors and students at Glasgow University. Of the British Empire he exclaimed: “How marvelous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human — for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”

  We may well call those silly speeches laughable and insincere. It’s true that empire-building nations often squeezed the poor ones, made heaps of money from them, crushed their governments, and prevented them from working out their destinies alone. On the other hand, they also brought them things that many needed: order, law courts, harbors, railroads, medicine, and schools.

  Chapter 16

  We multiply, and shrink the earth.

  IN OUR FIRST 150,000 years on earth, we modern humans increased very, very slowly. Our number rose a little when times were good, and fell not quite as much when they were bad. Even as late as the 1600s (when Europeans settled in the New World, and the Manchus conquered China, and astronomers discovered where we are) all the people on earth numbered roughly half a billion.

  In those 1600s we began not merely to add to but to multiply our number. From then to 1900 our number rose threefold. The population of the Americas and Australia multiplied especially fast because many Europeans left their homes and occupied these nearly empty continents. Despite that exodus, Europeans tripled. Asians nearly tripled, and even Africans increased, although slave ships carried off at least ten million of them. On the eve of World War I, humans numbered easily a billion and a half.

  When humankind began to multiply, we didn’t do so for the reason you might guess. Women did not start to bear more childre
n than they had before. Married couples already had large broods, as they had to do since so many children died so young. Birthrates (births per 1,000 people) were already high, almost everywhere.

  No, what made our number swell was not a rise in birthrates but a fall in death rates. That drop in deaths is what we must explain, and in order to explain it, we shall focus mostly on the Europeans. To do so makes good sense, for in the early centuries of the global increase Europe led the way. If we include in Europe’s total not the people of that continent alone, but all the Europeans who settled in the other continents, and also their descendants, then Europeans multiplied by five.

  While they multiplied, Europeans also industrialized. Surely, one would think, these facts must be related; industrialization must have made the numbers rise. That was the case, but the point is hard to prove. The biggest growth in people often occurred in the rural parts of Europe, far from mills and coal mines. It was often the death rate, not the birthrate, that was high where development was happening fast. In the grimmest parts of Manchester, the English textile town, a boy would be lucky to make it to twenty, whereas a boy in England’s rural Surrey might survive to fifty.