War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  It took almost ten more years of war, involving some of the biggest battles in European history (600,000 men fought at Leipzig in 1813), to show that Napoleon was wrong. The only way for war to defeat commerce was for French fleets to seize control of the seas and terminate Britain’s trade, but because this trade was so profitable, Britain could always build more and better ships and train more and better sailors than France. Napoleon’s naval efforts came to nothing, and because Britain’s global commerce survived, Europeans quickly found that they needed British trade more than Britain needed them. One nation after another found ways to get around the Continental System and keep dealing in England’s markets.

  Napoleon’s fights to enforce the system soon took him beyond the culminating point of people’s war. Since 1799, he had shown that he could co-opt people’s war to make himself an emperor, but Europe’s more established monarchs now learned how to do the same to bring him down. When Napoleon occupied Spain in 1808 to keep it inside the Continental System, he was sucked into a quagmire of popular revolt (Figure 4.11), and Spanish insurgents, stiffened by British regulars, tied down hundreds of thousands of French troops for the next six years.

  Figure 4.11. People’s war: Spanish insurgents wage guerrilla (“little war”) on French troops in Madrid, May 2, 1808.

  Worse followed when Napoleon, still trying to enforce the system, invaded Russia. (As mentioned in Chapter 3, it was this blunder that inspired Clausewitz to come up with his theory of culminating points: enraged when his native Prussia submitted to France, he joined the Russian army in 1812 as a volunteer and realized that his own anti-French anger was just part of a vast reaction that Napoleon had himself created by going too far.) The tide turned rapidly: just two years after Napoleon took Moscow, the Russians had taken Paris and Napoleon was in exile. But the tide then turned again, and in a hundred dramatic days in 1815, Napoleon stormed back into France, raised another army, and almost—but not quite—broke the British at Waterloo before being bundled back into a much more remote exile.

  So it was that Britain’s newfangled, open-access empire of trade survived the great challenge posed by Napoleon’s marriage of old-school militarism and up-to-date people’s war. By the time Bonaparte died, in 1821 (helped along, some said, by British poison), Britain bestrode much of the world like a colossus. Acting as a globocop was paying off: policing the waterways with British warships cost money, but it was worth it, because between 1781 and 1821 Britain’s exports tripled and its workers became the most productive on the planet.

  Britain was becoming a nation unlike any seen before—and also solving a problem that had never been seen before.

  The Sun Never Sets

  Bigger markets, Smith had argued, made for a finer division of labor, which lifted productivity, profits, and wages in a virtuous spiral. But what would happen when tasks had been subdivided as finely as possible and no further efficiency gains could be squeezed out?

  Smith had not worried unduly about this, because the problem had never arisen. But by the time Napoleon died, his successors were worrying very much indeed. The high wages that British workers earned were already pricing some of their goods out of European markets. The only way for British firms to stay in business, it seemed, was to pay their workers less, and the average Londoner of the early nineteenth century was earning 15 percent less than his grandparents had. Having won the war, Britain seemed to be losing the peace.

  Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and a string of other political economists speculated that there was an iron law of wages. The division of labor, imperial expansion, and becoming a globocop might all push wages up for a while, but in the end income would always be driven back down to the edge of starvation. The nineteenth century, some predicted, would be an age of misery. But this did not happen, because an odd concatenation of forces compelled the invisible hand and invisible fist to work together in new ways.

  The story starts with clothes. Because everyone needs them, textiles are a major sector in all premodern economies, and because sheep do well in wet, grassy countries, Britons had for centuries worn wool. But as it made inroads into Asia, Britain’s East India Company saw an opportunity and started shipping rolls of brightly colored, inexpensive cotton cloth back to the home isles. It was a huge hit.

  Wool merchants, unhappy about this competition, struck back by doing the kind of thing that Smith hated most: distorting the market by lobbying Parliament to ban Indian cotton. Cotton cannot grow in Britain, so clothiers responded by importing raw cotton (which was still legal) from the Caribbean colonies and spinning and weaving it in Britain, but British workers could not do the job as cheaply (or, frankly, as well) as Indians. In the 1760s, thirty pieces of woolen clothing were being sold for every one of cotton.

  The bottleneck in cotton production was spinning, the labor-intensive, repetitive job of twisting cotton fibers together to make strong, even thread, and it was opened (according to legend) in 1764, when a spinning wheel belonging to one James Hargreaves fell over. As he watched it continue turning for several seconds as it lay on its side, Hargreaves said, he had an epiphany: he could make a machine that flipped a spindle from vertical to horizontal and then back again, over and over, replacing the human fingers that laboriously twisted the fibers. In fact, a single machine could have dozens of spindles, doing the job faster than a human.

  Hargreaves had hit on a solution to the downside of high wages: he would augment human labor with machine power, raising productivity. Hargreaves’s spinning jenny was a hit (perhaps too much so; Hargreaves was unable to enforce his patent), and in 1779 a vastly superior device (Crompton’s mule) also came onto the market, spinning cotton that was not only cheaper but also finer than anything made in India.

  All this seems very far from the history of war, but before its relevance becomes clear, we must stray still farther from the battlefield, into the world of underground streams. In the eighteenth century, coal-mine owners were also facing the problem of high (by the standards of the day) wages. As wages rose, Britons had more babies; as population grew, people cut down forests to clear farmland; and as wood grew scarce, coal replaced it for heating and cooking. All this was good news for colliers, who dug their mines deeper to bring up ever more coal, but by 1700 mine after mine was flooding. Paying high-priced laborers to bail out the diggings was ruinously expensive, as was using high-priced land to grow oats to feed dozens of horses pulling bucket chains. The answer, first installed at a coal mine in 1712, was an engineering marvel—a machine that substituted cheap coal for expensive muscles. It burned coal to boil water, making steam that drove a piston that pumped water out of the mine shaft, allowing more coal to be dug up and burned.

  Coal and clothes came together in 1785, when the first cotton mill owner hooked up his mules, jennies, and throstles to steam engines. Productivity exploded. The price of spun cotton fell from 38 shillings per pound in 1786 to under 7 shillings in 1807, but sales grew even faster. In 1760, Britain had imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton; by 1787 that jumped to 22 million pounds (in 1837 it reached 366 million pounds). Steam power then leaped from industry to industry as engineers figured out new applications. British wages, which had been sliding since the 1740s as Smithian improvements ran into diminishing returns, stabilized, and after 1830 surged upward. The Industrial Revolution had arrived.

  Steam power smashed the last barriers to European commerce. For centuries, the vast distances separating Europe from East Asia had kept Western trade to a mere trickle, while the interiors of Africa and Asia had been beyond the merchants’ reach altogether. Steam changed that. Engineers immediately saw that steam engines could be mounted on wheels and that these wheels could paddle ships across oceans and carry trains down tracks. Steam could do the work of the winds and waves in transport, much as it was doing the work of muscles in manufacturing. Steam could swallow space.

  The British led the way. “The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in,” announced Charles Dickens in
his great novel—Dombey and Son—of pride, prejudice, and global commerce. “The sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre … A.D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei—and Son.”

  Dickens wrote these words in 1846 (anno Domini, that is). In 1838 a British steamship had crossed the Atlantic in fifteen days, ignoring headwinds and currents to average an unheard-of ten miles per hour. The next year, an even more extraordinary ship sailed from England for China: the Nemesis, an all-iron steamship, armed with cannons and rockets. So odd did this boat seem that even its captain conceded that just “as the floating property of wood … rendered it the most natural material for the construction of ships, so did the sinking property of iron make it appear, at first sight, very ill adapted for a similar purpose.”

  The Nemesis was on its way to East Asia because of an extraordinarily sordid quarrel. Chinese governments, deeply suspicious of Western traders, had for generations penned them into tiny enclaves in Macao and Guangzhou and limited what they could buy and sell. The merchants, however, found that whatever the Chinese government might say, Chinese customers were eager for their goods, especially opium. Since the world’s best opium grew in British-controlled India, business was good—until, in 1839, Beijing declared a war on drugs.

  Chinese officials confiscated a fortune in opium from British drug dealers. After some dubious lobbying, the dealers persuaded the government in London to demand compensation, plus a base at Hong Kong, and the right for traders and merchants (including drug dealers) to enter other ports. The Chinese—understandably—refused, confident that distance would protect them, but the Nemesis and a small British fleet quickly showed that this assumption no longer held.

  The technological gap between the two sides in this Opium War was just astonishing. Chinese junks, one British officer observed, looked “exactly as if the subjects of [medieval] prints had assumed life and substance and colour, and were moving and acting before me unconscious of the march of the world through centuries, and of all modern usage, invention, or improvement.” Chinese forts crumbled under the intruders’ guns, and in 1842 Beijing gave Britain what it demanded.

  Steamships now flooded China’s coastal cities with Western goods, and in 1853 an American flotilla, looking for coaling stations, steamed boldly into Tokyo Bay. It cowed the Japanese government without even firing a shot. Back in Washington, the president ignored his commodore’s suggestion that he now annex Taiwan, but the lesson was clear: no country with a coastline was now safe from the West.

  Nor, for that matter, were countries without coastlines. What steamships did at sea and up rivers, railroads did in the interior. Here, though, aggression was spearheaded less by Europeans than by their settlers overseas. Europe’s governments had discovered early on that colonists separated from home by thousands of miles felt little need to follow orders. Since the sixteenth century, Lisbon, Madrid, London, and Paris had issued rafts of regulations on trade, tea, slaves, and stamps, but Brazil, Mexico, Massachusetts, and Quebec had ignored them. Even when kings’ demands were quite mild—that colonists pay for their own defense, for instance—white settlers regularly refused and fought back against efforts to coerce them. After Britain lost the United States, it only held on to Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand by giving them most of what the American rebels had demanded. France sold off its last North American holdings in 1803; by 1825, Spain had lost all its American holdings except Cuba and Puerto Rico, and at that point Portugal’s stake had been wiped out altogether.

  European governments had hesitated to push inland, worrying about the costs of conquest, and sometimes even about the rights of local people. The white settlers, however, had fewer qualms. Americans were streaming across the Appalachians even before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence, and the Chickamauga Wars (1776–94) began a century of attacks on natives. In the 1820s white Australians followed the same path, conquering Tasmania and breaking into their continent’s interior. In the 1830s, South African Boers struck out on their own to escape British regulation and at the Battle of Blood River shot dead three thousand Zulus for a loss of just three wounded Afrikaners. In the 1840s New Zealanders went to war with the Maori and the United States reached the Pacific, finally stretching from sea to shining sea.

  A great native retreat was under way, but what turned it into a rout was the railroad. In the 1830s Americans laid down twice as much track as the whole of Europe combined, then doubled this in the 1840s and tripled it again in the 1850s. The iron horse moved millions of migrants westward and carried the supplies the army needed as it herded Native Americans into ever-more-remote reservations. By the 1880s, railroads were also bringing miners from Cape Town to dig up gold and diamonds in Transvaal and taking Russian settlers and soldiers to Samarkand. In 1896 a British army striking into Sudan to crush an Islamist uprising even built a railway as it went.

  The last barrier to Western expansion—disease—collapsed between 1880 and 1920. In the space of a single lifetime, doctors isolated and conquered cholera, typhoid, malaria, sleeping sickness, and the Black Death. Only yellow fever (responsible for thirteen out of every fourteen deaths in the Spanish-American War of 1898) held out until the 1930s.

  The consequences were felt all over the tropics, but most powerfully in Africa. As late as 1870, hardly any Europeans had gone more than a day or two’s walk from the coast, but by 1890 steamships and railroads were moving thousands of them inland, and medicine was keeping them alive when they got there. For centuries, the only way to get ivory, gold, slaves, and anything else Europeans wanted had been by cutting deals with long chains of African chiefs, each of them taking a slice of the profits, but now the Europeans could take charge themselves.

  As often happens, solving one problem just created another. Quinine and vaccines worked just as well on French and Belgians as on English and Americans, with the result that traders who braved deserts, jungles, and hostile natives kept finding that other Europeans had got there ahead of them. In a rerun of what had happened in America and India centuries earlier, the men on the ground lobbied their governments to take over great slices of Africa and keep other westerners out.

  Annexation often needed only a few hundred Western soldiers. Africans and Asians had worked hard at catching up with European firepower since the 1750s (after a particularly hard-fought battle in India in 1803, the British commander confessed, “I never was in so severe a business in my life or anything like it, and pray to God, I never may be in such a situation again”), but Western firepower just kept getting better. In the 1850s, proper rifles—that is, guns with grooves inside the barrel to make bullets spin, increasing their range and accuracy—came into general use, with devastating results.

  Steam-powered factories churned out rifles by the ten thousands, each one perfectly machined and far less likely to misfire than preindustrial muskets. Americans particularly shone at this mass production; British observers were astonished in 1854 when a workman at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts randomly chose ten muskets made at the factory across the previous decade, disassembled them, threw the parts into a box, and reassembled them into ten perfectly working guns. The British immediately bought American machinery and founded the Enfield Armoury. “There is nothing that cannot be produced by machines,” Samuel Colt told them.

  When both sides had rifles and knew how to use them, as in the American Civil War, thousands of men could be mowed down in minutes. September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in the history of American armies, with nearly twenty-three thousand men killed or wounded at the Battle of Antietam (usually called Sharpsburg in the South). In Africa and Asia, though, Europeans rarely faced much return fire from rifles. General Henry Havelock’s comment in 1857 after annihilating a huge
Indian army that ambushed his tiny British column—“In ten minutes the affair was decided”—could be applied to dozens of mid-century slaughters, from Senegal to Siam. The Gatling gun (patented 1861), Carnehan and Dravot’s beloved Martini-Henry rifle (introduced 1871), and the fully automatic Maxim gun (patented 1884) made the firepower gap between the West and the rest so wide (Figure 4.12) that only rank incompetence, of the kind British officers exhibited against the Zulus at Isandlwana in 1879 and Italians against Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896, could close it.

  Figure 4.12. Mind the gap: by 1879, when this photograph was taken, the firepower gap between Western and non-Western armies was enormous. Here, the Zulu prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande (center) and his men display their motley collection of shotguns, hunting rifles, and antique muskets. Dabulamanzi would soon be repulsed from Rorke’s Drift, despite outnumbering the defenders ten to one. Only when Western officers were extremely incompetent could non-Western armies win.

  By the nineteenth century’s end, Western armies went more or less wherever they wanted, and Western navies had even more freedom. European ships had had no serious rivals since the seventeenth century, but the nineteenth-century introduction of steel-plated steamships and explosive shells made resistance futile. The first clash of ironclads, the point-blank shoot-out between the Monitor and the Merrimack3 during the American Civil War, had amazed onlookers, but by the 1890s battleships were displacing fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand tons, steaming at sixteen knots, carrying four twelve-inch guns, and fighting duels at five miles’ range. European governments spent fortunes on these ships, only for them to become instantly obsolete in 1906, when Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, complete with turbine engines, eleven-inch armor, and ten twelve-inch guns. Five years later British battleships switched from coal to oil, and by then, with a single exception that I will return to in Chapter 5, the maritime gap between the West and the rest was absolutely unbridgeable.