War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  The lesson seemed clear: Europeans had the edge on the battlefield, but unless they could combine that with an edge in the war of germs, it availed them little. Distance, disease, and demography made the Asian empires invulnerable. The most that Europeans could hope for was to fight over the crumbs that fell from their tables.

  But then everything changed. Sooner or later, bad luck, bad blood, or bad judgment catches up with every empire, and in 1707 it was the Mughals’ turn. After ruling India for almost half a century, the great Aurangzeb finally died. The occupant of the Peacock Throne had spent his last years falling out first with his own son and then with the rajas, nawabs, and minor sultans who did the actual work of running the subcontinent for him. At his passing, his former agents grabbed the opportunity to opt out of the Mughal organization. Law and order collapsed and violence spiked. It was every man for himself.

  By 1720, local grandees were intriguing and fighting against each other, against their nominal overlords in distant Delhi, and against their own unhappy subjects. Players in this game of thrones ran up huge debts to finance their moves. “I am falling at [my creditors’] feet, till I have rubbed the skin from my forehead,” one complained in the 1730s. Needless to say, the various East India Companies were only too happy to exploit this diplomatic opening by lending to the would-be nawabs—especially when they handed the money straight back to the companies to hire European troops.

  But these were anxious days for the companies too. On the upside, companies that backed the right men could become kingmakers, perhaps even winning rights to administer and tax the lands around their coastal enclaves, but the downside was that all the fighting disrupted the trade that kept the companies going, threatening them with ruin. Tight-lipped men in tricorn hats slipped back and forth between European forts and rajas’ palaces, betraying and being betrayed in turn in a murky world of shifting politics.

  “The princes became independent,” observed the British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, “but their independence led to their ruin.” Few if any of the companies’ men were actually seeking to ruin the princes, yet this was precisely what happened in the Carnatic region of southern India. Here things were even messier than usual, because the intriguing nawabs and sultans had the option of dealing not just with the British (based in Madras) but also with the French (in Pondicherry) and of playing the two East India Companies against each other. In 1744, when news arrived that Britain and France were again at war in Europe, both companies decided to put boots on the ground in the Carnatic, which promptly blew up in a multi-cornered conflict.

  This Anglo-French confrontation added another wrinkle—Europe’s ongoing revolution in military affairs—to the diplomatic opportunities presented by the Mughal meltdown. Had India fallen apart in the 1640s, Europeans might not have been strong enough to capitalize on it, but by the 1740s their professional armies were unstoppable. These forces were tiny, rarely more than three thousand men, and most troops were in fact local recruits rather than Europeans, but when it came to a fight, the well-armed, well-trained, highly disciplined company men consistently routed native armies ten times their size (even when the Indians brought along armored elephants). The Europeans were like a “wall which vomited fire and flame,” a survivor of one battle said.

  The Carnatic War raised the stakes for the companies. Whoever came out on top in the Anglo-French fighting would dispose of the entire Carnatic, not just its coastal trade, but it also became clear as the war dragged on that the costs for the companies would be enormous. Both companies had gone to India to make money, so commercial logic demanded a negotiated end to the war. In 1754 the French company began looking for an exit strategy. But the British did not.

  For 150 years, Europe’s great powers had fought over trade and colonies so they could make money to fund their wars at home. Britain had done better than anyone at this, becoming, one writer claimed in 1718, “the most considerable of any nation in the world [because of] the vastness and expansiveness of our trade.” Yet if this were true, some Britons asked, did it not imply that conventional wisdom was wrong? Instead of trade in India being a means, contributing to the end of winning wars in Europe, perhaps wars in Europe should be the means, and winning more trade in India should be the end.

  Really profound shifts in strategic thinking typically only come along every century or two, but one was now under way in London. Amid intense debate, a loose alliance of commercial interests dragged Britain in fits and starts toward a new business model, in which fighting in Europe was solely a way to distract France so that Britain could snap up its colonies and trade without interference.

  The British government lent money and men to France’s other enemies in Europe, while the British East India Company stayed the course in the Carnatic and bestowed the throne on its chosen nawab. The company then extorted massive kickbacks from him, seized his tax revenues, and swamped his economy with its agents. Money rolled in, and when a new, pro-French nawab in Bengal—the richest part of India—started making trouble in 1756, the company leaped at the chance to repeat its Carnatic strategy.

  But the nawab struck first. He swept down on the company’s base in Calcutta and on the pitchy, stifling night of June 20–21 crammed over a hundred prisoners into a cell made for eight. By dawn, half had suffocated or died from heatstroke. The company dispatched Robert Clive—an unlikable but undeniably daring hero of the Carnatic War—to avenge the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  Clive did not just toss the nawab out of Calcutta; he also joined a Bengali uprising against him and, adding the company’s men to the rebels, took on an army twenty times the size of his own. The resulting battle at Plassey was slightly farcical. The nawab’s gunners accidentally blew up some of their own artillery, which stampeded the elephants dragging the guns. The rest of the nawab’s army then ran away when the nawab’s key ally—who also happened to be the company’s pick as the next nawab—changed sides. The company now took over tax collection in Bengal, and Clive helped himself to a reward of £160,000 (as I write, the equivalent of about $400 million) from its treasury.

  And Bengal was just the beginning. Over the next two years, Britain worked with its allies to keep France tied up in Germany while seizing for itself key Caribbean islands and the whole of Canada. A British army beat the French again in India, and the Royal Navy smashed the French fleet not once but twice. Rarely has a strategy been so successful. “Could it be believed,” Burke asked the speaker of the House of Commons in 1783, “when I entered into existence [in 1729] or when you, a younger man, were born [1735], that on this day, in this House, we should be employed in discussing the conduct of those British subjects who had disposed of the power and person of the Grand Mogul?”2

  The Invisible Fist

  Between the Portuguese capture of Ceuta and Burke’s speech in 1783, western Europeans had conquered millions of square miles of territory and tens of millions of people. They had reinvented productive war, rather than just reviving it; they took it global, creating entirely new kinds of bigger societies. And while their wars were raging across the oceans and in America, Asia, and Africa, in the western European homelands rates of violent death fell faster and further than ever before.

  The fifteenth century was perhaps Europe’s bloodiest since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier, with bands of unemployed mercenaries ravaging France and Italy and civil war tearing England apart. “O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!” Shakespeare imagined the mad king Henry VI crying out in 1461, as fifty thousand men hacked at each other for hours in a snowstorm to decide his claim to the throne of England. And well he might cry out, given what archaeologists have found on the battlefield of Towton. One soldier, now known only as Towton 25, went down in a hail of blows that smashed his skull eight times. First came five stabs in the face, none of them fatal, but then a gigantic blow from behind ripped off the back of his skull and drove bone splinters through his brain. He fell forward, but another swipe flipped him over
before a final sword stroke slashed his face in half, going in through an eye socket and bursting out through his throat (Figure 4.8).

  Figure 4.8. Bloody times: the skull of Towton 25, hacked apart by eight blows in 1461

  But it could have been worse. His comrade Towton 32 took thirteen head wounds, one of them deliberately slicing off an ear. Nor were the contending kings immune. In 1485, in the last battle of the civil war, Richard III (identified in 2013 by his curved spine and DNA) was tied up, stabbed clean through the head with a sword, and hacked again with a halberd. Then, after he was dead, he was stabbed through his buttocks and tossed into a pit.

  By the time Burke spoke in 1783, no one imagined that such violence could return to western Europe. Across the previous three centuries, government—desperate to raise cash for huge armies and navies, fierce new ships and guns, and professional officers and men—had reasserted itself. This was Elias’s “civilizing process,” the coming of an age of reason, order, and prosperity that would have astonished Kings Henry and Richard.

  It was an uneven process. The seventeenth century saw another wave of failed states, prompting Hobbes to write Leviathan, but by 1783 pirates and highwaymen were becoming things of the past (Blackbeard was shot—five times—in 1718 and Dick Turpin hanged in 1739), and homicide rates had collapsed. In the 1480s, roughly one western European in a hundred was being murdered; in the 1780s, that fate awaited just one in a thousand. Burke’s England was probably the safest place the world had ever seen.

  Western Europeans were, in a sense, rerunning the tape of ancient history. Like the Romans, Mauryans, and Han before them, they were creating bigger Leviathans. Just as in ancient times, the process was brutal and exploitative, but, again as in ancient times, in the long run it drove down rates of violent death and delivered prosperity. Intellectuals were acutely aware of this, devoting polemical pamphlets and learned treatises to what they called “the battle of the ancients and the moderns,” arguing over whether—or when—they had surpassed the achievements of antiquity. (For what it is worth, the social development index that I describe in my earlier books Why the West Rules—for Now and The Measure of Civilization provides answers they might have liked: yes, and in 1720.) In another sense, though, Europeans were going well beyond the Romans: as with productive war, they did not so much revive Leviathan as reinvent it.

  By building empires across the oceans instead of building a traditional territorial empire within their own continent, western Europeans created an entirely new kind of economy, which generated wealth on a staggering scale. Britain alone saw its exports boom from about £2 million in 1700 to nearly £40 million at the century’s end.

  What made the new economy different from anything seen before was the Atlantic Ocean. Europe’s conquest of America had turned the northern part of the sea into a kind of Goldilocks Ocean, big enough to have very different ecologies and societies around its shores, but small enough that ships could cross it, trading at every point and generating steady profits (Figure 4.9).

  Figure 4.9. The Goldilocks Ocean: the triangular trades that generated unprecedented wealth, kick-started a market revolution in Europe, and transported twelve million Africans into slavery in the Americas

  Historians usually describe this as “triangular trade.” A businessman could start in Liverpool with a boatload of textiles or guns and sail to Senegal, exchanging them, at a profit, for slaves. He could then carry the slaves to Jamaica and trade them (again at a profit) for sugar, which he could bring back to England to sell for more profits, before buying a new consignment of finished goods and setting off to Africa again. Alternatively, a Bostonian could take rum to Africa and swap it for slaves, bring the slaves to the Caribbean and exchange them for molasses, and then bring the molasses back to New England to make into more rum.

  Europe’s conquest of America had created something entirely unanticipated—an integrated intercontinental market, generating a geographical division of labor and making men rich on every shore. It gave each of the lands abutting the North Atlantic a comparative economic advantage and encouraged entrepreneurs to specialize—in capturing slaves in Africa, clearing plantations in the Caribbean and North America’s southern states, and manufacturing in Europe and America’s northern states.

  To work well, the new economy needed new kinds of government that would make specialization easier. West Africa saw the rise of powerful kings; the Caribbean and the American South saw the coming of planter oligarchies; and in northwest Europe and the American Northeast, commercial elites challenged absolutist monarchs. Each shift generated conflict. Africans raided their neighbors to abduct slaves, settlers in America seized the natives’ lands, and Europeans boarded and sank each other’s ships to seize trade routes.

  Everywhere that the new Atlantic economy touched, all fixed, fast-frozen relations were swept away. In western Europe, cheap shipping brought a world of little luxuries within reach of everyday folk. By the eighteenth century, a man with a little cash in his pocket could do more than just buy another loaf of bread; he could get miraculous drugs—tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar—brought from distant continents, or homemade marvels such as clay pipes, umbrellas, and newspapers. And the same Atlantic economy that provided this bounty also produced people ready to give a man the cash he needed; because traders would buy every hat, gun, or blanket that they could get to ship to Africa or America, manufacturers were always willing to pay people to make more of them.

  No longer did men automatically follow their fathers into farming if drifting into towns promised better wages. Some set their families to spinning and weaving to earn cash; others joined workshops and walked away from the fields. The details varied, but across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europeans increasingly sold their labor to employers and worked longer hours. And the more they did so, the more sugar, tea, and newspapers they could buy—which meant more slaves dragged across the Atlantic, more acres cleared for plantations, and more factories and shops opened. Sales rose, economies of scale were achieved, and prices fell, opening this world of goods to even more western Europeans.

  The real source of riches, the philosopher Adam Smith concluded in 1776 in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was not plunder, conquest, or monopolies; it was the division of labor. This division of labor, he said, was itself the “consequence of a certain propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” In pursuing profit, people start to specialize on the jobs that they do particularly well or inexpensively and exchange the fruits of their labors for goods and services that other people produce particularly well or inexpensively. By creating markets for these goods and services, they simultaneously lower costs and raise quality, making everyone better-off. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner,” Smith observed, “but from their regard to their own interest.”

  “By directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value,” Smith explained, a man “intends only his own gain; [but] he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” The implication was obvious: the more that governments got out of people’s way and left them free to truck, barter, and exchange, the better the invisible hand would work, and the better-off everyone would be.

  Or would they? For five thousand years, one of the big perks of ruling had been the right to plunder successful subjects. Even the most assiduous stationary bandits sometimes gave in to the temptation, but the Smithian vision of the world now asked the mighty to make a bet. Stealing from your subjects, it advised rulers, gives you a bigger slice of the pie, but if you settle for a smaller slice, you will in the end eat more, because the pie will become much bigger. In those parts of western Europe where kings wielded the greatest power�
��particularly Spain—this did not sound very plausible. But in countries where kings were weaker—England, and especially the Netherlands, which did not even have a king—governments were more willing to roll the dice by granting the nouveaux riches truckers, barterers, and exchangers more and more freedom to exploit the new Atlantic economy. (France, home of the original nouveaux riches, was somewhere in the middle.)

  Fortunately for the delicate sensibilities of the wellborn, men who made money in trade could usually be relied upon to buy country estates and put on powdered wigs as soon as the opportunity presented itself. But capitalizing on the Atlantic economy did not just mean cutting deals with these people of no name; it also meant inviting them into the inner circle. Economic freedom led inexorably to demands for political freedom, and kings who tried to hold back the tide might lose their thrones (like England’s James II, in 1688) or even their heads (like England’s Charles I, in 1649, and France’s Louis XVI, in 1793).

  Yet not everything was wine and roses for the wealthy merchants either. The traditional way to rule a kingdom had involved farming out the right to collect taxes, judge disputes, and administer market monopolies to local worthies, who normally lined their own pockets but also kept government expenses down. Freeing people to truck, barter, and exchange meant sweeping away much of this archaic machinery and giving free rein to the invisible hand, but something had to replace the old way of guaranteeing law and order, and the only something available was central government. Allowing markets to work well was more complicated than it appeared. It was not just a matter of government stepping aside; rather, government had to step in, creating a whole new structure of more impartial functionaries, judges, and civil servants. Without this, the “open-access order” (as the noted social scientists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast call the new system in their book Violence and Social Orders) could not function.