by Tom Anderson
Tokugawa could not afford to send any of his men to tackle such insolence at present, not when the large and vaguely organised patched-together armies of the two sides were clashing in the less mountainous coastal parts of Niphon’s Chubu region, the battle lines now having been more or less drawn. Tokugawa in the north with his puppet emperor Kojimo possessed a numerical advantage in men, perhaps seven to five, but Yasuhito had Dutch aid and the small but useful naval forces possessed by Satsuma Han. This enabled him to land small parties of men in the north and raid Tokugawa’s undefended coastal cities, forcing Tokugawa to split his forces. The main object of the conflict for the present remained the cities of Yoshino and Nara (which were tenryo land and ruled directly by the Shogun, not part of a Han). Nara was one of the ancient capitals of Japan and, more importantly from Yasuhito’s perspective, Yoshino had been the capital used by the southern court in the earlier Northern and Southern Courts divided period, five centuries before, to which the current civil war was inevitably compared. And the southern court had eventually won. The symbolism of possessing the city was obvious, and thus while the war petered out into scattered skirmishes elsewhere, the battle for Yoshino became a meat grinder and defined the war.
The result of this was that, by 1810, Japan had almost resigned itself to division, though the war would drag on for another decade on and off before the death of Tokugawa Iemochi would mean a de facto ceasefire. This in turn meant that in the meantime the RLPC was firmly ensconced in its near-direct control of northern Niphon, its core holdings in Edzo definitely safe. However, by this point the Company had bigger problems; Lebedev’s arrest and death and the Three Emperors’ War over the water.
The Company men in the Amur region were under the command of Adam Laxman, the Finn who had been one of the first to explore Japanese waters under Russian auspices. Laxman had managed them well through the early years of the war, as the two Qing Chinese claimants battered at each other and could spare little attention for the north, but in response to the crisis Ivan Potemkin in Yakutsk had decided to impose more direct control and went to the Amur with his own troops under the command of the exiled General Sergei Saltykov, former Potemkinite commander in the Russian Civil War. The Russians had been deeply involved in the Coreans’ declaration of war in 1808 which had further served to buy them time, but though King Gwangjong’s men fought valiantly they were nonetheless severely outnumbered by the Yenzhang Emperor’s troops. At first Yenzhang could spare little of his attention for that front thanks to the fact that most of his armies were engaged in facing his brother’s, but he nonetheless seethed at Gwangjong’s impudence. He could not afford to let the Coreans continue audaciously taking Manchurian towns and then renaming them according to Gwangjong’s questionable irredentist claims. It jarred with his own Manchu-golden-age ideals, both personally and as an affront to the image he projected. Therefore at the first opportunity, Corea must be crushed, forced back into its proper vassal position, and then have its own armies appropriated and thrown into the battles raging in Shandong province. To Yenzhang this was the perfect solution, as even if Corea remained rebellious he would force its armies to die weakening his brother, meaning he could leave his northern border undefended once again for the moment.
All Yenzhang lacked was an opportunity, something that would force his brother Chongqian to hesitate in the south and give him time to redeploy his own troops against Corea. He found this in General Sun’s Great Eastern March; by raiding Chongqian’s southern provinces, the Yenzhang-loyal general would force Chongqian to slacken off in Shandong and assemble an army to hunt Sun’s troops. This would provide the time Yenzhang needed to crush Corea before turning around again to finally defeat Chongqian.
It did not turn out like that, of course, for several reasons. Firstly, Chongqian did not react as strongly as Yenzhang had hoped, only sending troops once Sun’s rampages became uncomfortably close with their attack on Wuchang. Secondly, Corea was not such an easy nut to crack as Yenzhang had hoped. When he hurled his armies and his favourite general, Yu Wangshan, against the Corean troops, they slowed their advance and halted it but could not drive it back. In despair at this and the fact that his brother’s troops were still advancing, Yenzhang recalled Yu and the attempt at retaking Corea ground to a halt. In fairness to Yenzhang, there was something he could not have taken into account. Beginning with the Battle of Niuzhuang[234] in December 1810, a new force fought alongside the Coreans as they once more began to advance into Yenzhang’s territory: a Russian force. But it consisted not only of Russian troops and those drawn from its allies and subjects such as the Lithuanians and Yakuts; a great many Japanese ronin had also agreed to travel over the water now that their own civil war, winding down, had fewer offers of employment for mercenaries. The Russians, quite by happenstance it seems, had found a powerful weapon; the Japanese were still the subject of many tales of the Imjin War in that part of China, and some feared them as a legendary bogeyman.
The other side of the coin was that the Coreans defined their national character by that same war against the Japanese and were aghast at the Russians’ use of ronin. But Gwangjong and his ministers were astute enough to know that their audacious attack on Manchuria needed all the help it could get. In a treaty negotiated by Benyovsky and Potemkin for the Russians and Gwangjong’s ministers (many of whom were associated with the Silhak Neo-Confucian movement), the two sides agreed to divide Manchuria, with the Russians roughly gaining everything north of the Amur/Songhua river system and the Coreans gaining the south. This deprived the Russians of a southern port for the present, but Benyovsky pointed out that they now had access to ports in Edzo (and new ones could be built) and there was the possibility of leasing one from the Coreans after Gwangjong’s irredentist fervour had died down. As for the fate of the interior of Manchuria – well, that depended on the fortune of war…
It was against a Russian-Corean force in July 1813 that Yenzhang’s leadership finally came to an end. The Second Battle of Ningyuan was so named for a reason, even though in reality naming it after the nearby town of Xingcheng would be more logical. The first battle, in 1626, was one of the last hurrahs of the native Ming dynasty against the Manchu conquerors under Nurhaci, and now it lent its name to another battle in which the man who idolised Nurhaci was at last toppled. Precisely what occurred is uncertain. At the time of the battle, Beijing was falling to Chongqian’s armies under General Liang, yet Yenzhang and General Yu were in the north once more, being overwhelmed on all sides. Yenzhang had desperately gambled that Chongqian must surely respond to the uprising in the south that would become the Feng dynasty, but he had underestimated his brother’s single-mindedness. In any case the remnant of Yenzhang’s armies – still formidable, even with defections as Chongqian’s victory became assured – faced a Russian army. A vast Russian army, for the Great Eastern Adventurers of General Kuleshov had finally arrived, still backed by smaller forces from the armies Yenzhang had already faced: the Coreans and the RLPC. Thanks to the large sizes of the Chinese armies fighting in the war, this was the first time that Yenzhang found himself outnumbered by a force on the northern front. Nonetheless the battle could have been winnable, but the Emperor was wounded at its height. The conventional story states that it was by a Yapontsi ronin sharpshooter with a Lithuanian rifle, quite the opposite of conventional busydo. The resulting uncertainty in the troops meant the army lost all morale. General Yu’s leadership prevented a complete collapse and rout but he led the army westward in the Long Retreat, knowing the position was lost in the north but intending to fight on from the western provinces, which generally supported Yenzhang thanks to Chongqian’s disdain for the frontier.
What happened next remains uncertain. Yenzhang may have died right there on the battlefield, or from the rapid retreat, or from his wound festering over time; that remains unclear. An outside possibility is that what Yu claimed was actually true, that the Emperor lived on, though now preferring never to leave his covered jiao as his armies
slowly and grudgingly retreated through the interior provinces to Yu’s old power-base on the south-western frontier.[235] Two years later, after Yu had established the exilic capital at Yunnanfu,[236] it was claimed that Yenzhang had fathered a son and proclaimed him his heir. Six months after that, Yenzhang apparently finally died and was buried with as much honour as the pissant exiles could manage – though strangely at no point in all this was his body ever visible to the public eye. When the boy did grow up, many noted (though few dared mention aloud) how he bore more of a resemblance to Yu Wangshan than the Yenzhang Emperor…
Chapter #97: The Root of All Evil
“Currency is… a shared delusion in the minds of all men, a necessary delusion if civilised society were not to fall… yet so many lives, so many cities and kingdoms and nations, ultimately depend on hoping that no man ever stops to wonder why he values discs of a shiny yellow metal so highly…”
- Giovanni Tressino, writing in 1818; later quoted by Manfred Landau in an 1840 speech
*
From: “An Economic History of the World, 1700-1900” by Arnold J. Walborough, New York Institute of Monetary Forecasting (1958)—
The dawn of the nineteenth century saw two events which, in combination, transformed the global economy – indeed, made the economy more truly global than it had ever known. The first, most obviously perhaps, was the Jacobin Wars. That terrible conflict redrew the map of Europe both literally and figuratively; toppling whole kingdoms, extinguishing royal families, rewarding those who learned to ride the wave like a Gavajski crestman [Hawaiian surfer]. From a monetary standpoint it also had an effect on European economies more profound even than the Wars of Supremacy that had emptied France’s treasury and driven her to revolution in the first place. The very fact that France was running on empty, led by two successive fanatical regimes that believed that they could ordain events without any regard for logistics or economics, meant that the entire continental trade system was turned upside down. Germany suffered terribly from the ravages of the Jacobin armies across her lands, with the accompanying destruction of many of the mines and manufacturing towns that gave her her wealth. Italy shared such misery to a lesser extent, and while Spain escaped most such vindictive and arguably deliberate damage, she nonetheless was hamstrung in the Watchful Peace by being divided and essentially ruled by two other powers which deliberately wanted to keep her weak and dependent on them, and did not particularly desire an economic recovery. Most importantly of all, the fact that her American empire was now a separate and hostile entity meant that the regular flow of treasure fleets from the New World dried up, meaning that even if Spain had remained intact, the way her economy had worked for three centuries had been abruptly obsoleted.
Yet as Anglophones the greatest effect of the wars that springs to mind is of course the invasion of England and the ensuing Marleburgensian period. Though England suffered the Jacobin presence for far less time than her continental counterparts (as citizens of said counterparts were apt to remind her in later days), she had been attacked by the monstrous Modigliani, who used terror as a deliberate weapon. What the French could not hold, they destroyed. England lost her capital and chief port in the Second Fire of London, along with the gold reserves of the Bank of England which had mostly been cast into the Thames when the French realised they would be unable to hold the city or evacuate. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Churchill’s men found it rather easy to gain volunteers to clear the Thames of the sunken ships that blocked the Pool of London; most of them surreptitiously spent half the time dredging the river looking for the gold instead, but little was recovered at first (although their efforts did produce numerous archaeological artefacts which formed the core of the new collection of the resurrected British Museum).
The resulting collapse of the British economy – even collapse is too mild a term, perhaps ‘suddenly vanishing from the face of the earth’ would be more appropriate – sent shockwaves across the world and sent the economies of Britain’s chief trading partners in Europe (the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Low Countries, and some of the Mediterranean states) into recession. Paradoxically, in the immediate aftermath of the Congress of Copenhagen when peace had broken out, many of those countries embarked on huge military projects just to create employment for the jobless mobs roaming the streets of their cities. A popular object of such moves was, naturally, the adoption of steam engines for both land and sea warfare, as this had proven so decisive in the wars. This proliferation also meant that the use of steam vehicles for civilian purposes (admittedly only very rich civilians to begin with) accelerated in turn.
France was arguably in the same position as Britain, yet benefited that her own economy had essentially been cast aside and defaulted on with the Revolution in 1794, which meant she had had nearly two decades to reorganise her own economy to deal with the situation. The Republic had run austerely on the plunder of la maraude for years, hampered by the fact that few countries were willing to trade with her, while Royal France had benefited from the continuous influx of trade goods from the French East India Company. While the stipulations of the Congress of Copenhagen meant that a tithe of these riches were diverted to Britain in reparations – a situation which arguably benefited Britain more than actually taking the French colonies by force as she had threatened, not entirely credibly, to do – the riches of the Indies nonetheless helped lift the restored kingdom out of the poverty of the Revolutionary days and doubtless cemented the popularity of the monarchy.
But then France was hardly alone in being strengthened by her trade with the mysterious East. The second of the two events which rocked the early nineteenth century was the opening of the Orient to full-scale trade for the first time, something which Europeans had been attempting since Columbus’ time (indeed, Columbus’ voyage had been one such attempt, and had blundered into America quite by accident). A series of events caused by hapless Russians and the filmishly implausible adventures of Moritz Benyovsky meant that China and Yapon were both shattered, while Corea had been strengthened and was cautiously open to limited trade. In the south of China, the burgeoning Feng Dynasty had come about through European assistance and repaid that by opening itself to trade, something that benefited the cash-strapped coffers of the still very informal empire as much as it did the Europeans, no matter how counter it was to the usual Confucian protectionist sensibilities of the East. The Dutch and Portuguese continued to struggle over the Nusantara, but elsewhere European trade companies began to form accords such as the East Indian Board and the Phoenix Men.[237] There was a general, informal, quiet gentleman’s agreement that everyone needed to fund the reconstruction of their home countries through trade, and to actively compete or stir up native enemies against each other that might wreck the whole system was simply not worth the risk. There was another informal understanding that if anyone did try it, the other companies would gang up on them and shut them out (as indeed happened with the Dutch in India).[238]
Because of this new state of cooperative harmony, for the first time in decades, convoys of East Indiamen flowed in peace from China and India to the Western world, free of harassment by hostile men-o’-war. Of European origin, at least. Piracy remained a problem, and in 1817 the Treaty of Milan established an International Counter-Piracy Agency (ICPA), a joint council based in the city of Genoa which would carry representation from all concerned naval powers. By mutual agreement the ICPA would then second vessels from different navies and assemble mixed fleets to suppress pirates, the combined force being a guarantor that no one nation could then unilaterally seize the pirates’ former base as a colony.[239] While the results of this were predictably often difficult due to language problems, divergent interests and lingering dislikes over the late wars, it proved more important when anti-piracy operations were extended from their original intended field – the Mediterranean, against the Barbary pirates – to a global agency, tackling pirate groups from the East Indies. In 1821 an ICPA task force consisting of Danish,
Italian and Russian ships (the chosen national contributors tended to be deliberately sent to areas where their home nations had no trade interests to avoid a conflict of interest) pursued a group of Malay pirates into the Gulf of Siam. There they blundered into a conflict with the small naval forces of the Siamese Empire (which, ironically, had mainly had an anti-pirate role themselves). A minor war was fought over the next two years before the establishment of full diplomatic relations led to peace and an agreement that the Ayutthais and their allies would police their own waters and the ICPA would not violate them. Naturally, this has been rather twisted by the Siamese into a national story of how they heroically fought off all the nations of the West all at once, which is technically correct, even if each nation only sent one or two ships. The conflict also led to a considerable expansion in Siamese shipbuilding, though this had already picked up due to the enemy Burmans of Ava starting to operate a fleet.[240]
The ICPA’s fierce actions against the Barbary pirates, such as the bombardment and burning of Algiers by a joint Neapolitan-French force in 1818, served to draw protest from the Ottoman Empire, which was at least the nominal suzerain of the princes of the Barbary States. However, by that point the Empire was on the brink of its Time of Troubles and the ICPA was never threatened with anything more cutting than a strongly worded note. At the same time the ICPA served to resolve a minor diplomatic crisis in the Mediterranean. Great Britain had controversially occupied Malta in 1784; the British did maintain the Knights of St John as the rulers of Malta and merely made them a protectorate, but nonetheless kept them on a short lead and this hamstrung the Knights as an anti-piracy force in the Mediterranean, leading to an explosion in Barbary activity.[241] Other nations were naturally angry with the British for this. The ICPA managed to find a compromise solution, making Malta its main forward base and thus effectively neutralising and internationalising the islands while at the same time they remained a nominal British protectorate, saving British face.