A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (46 page)

The ground was cleared for a new approach that would lead to victory, although not for another two years. The defeat of a Confederate army at Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 still left the South with a vast territory. Unionist generals such as Grant and Sherman could see that it would only be taken by an all-out war directed not just against its armies but against the social structure which sustained them. The final defeat of the Confederacy came only after Sherman’s troops made their famous march through Georgia, looting, burning plantations and freeing slaves.

The shift from McClellan’s approach in the first year and a half of the war to Grant’s and Sherman’s at its end was as great as the shift in France from the methods of the Girondins to those of the Jacobins. Lincoln himself was very different in character and approach to Robespierre, and Grant and Sherman were conservative-minded professional soldiers. What they came to see, however, was that revolution had to be imposed on the South if the society which existed in the North was going to prevail.

Karl Marx noted how Lincoln was driven to make revolutionary moves without even being aware of it:

Reconstruction and betrayal

There was, nevertheless, a contradiction in the established bourgeois society of the North, with its own deep class antagonisms, imposing revolutionary change on the South. This was shown in the immediate aftermath of the Northern victory, and Lincoln’s assassination, in the spring of 1865. A split opened up within the political establishment. Lincoln’s vice-president and successor, Andrew Johnson, followed a policy of conciliating the defeated states. He pushed for them to be allowed back into the Union—and given a position of great influence in Congress—with no change in their social structure apart from the formal abolition of slavery. Given that the plantation owners retained great wealth and most of the former slaves had no land, the result was bound to be a virtual return to the situation before the war.

Johnson immediately ran into opposition from northern blacks and abolitionists, from radical Republican congressmen influenced by the wave of revolutionary democratic feeling generated by the war, and from some of the army officers occupying the South. The opposition soon also included mainstream Republican politicians who did not want the near 100 percent Democratic states back in Congress, industrial capitalists still determined to hegemonise the western territories, and ‘get rich quick’ businessmen who had descended on the South in the wake of the northern armies (the so-called carpetbaggers). This coalition was strong enough to defeat Johnson’s schemes (it came only one vote short of impeaching him in Congress), win the presidential election for the Republican candidate Grant in 1868, and enforce ‘reconstruction’ on the South for the best part of a decade.

In these years, Northern arms kept the old planters from controlling state or local governments. Southern Republicans took their place, black as well as white. Freed slaves were given the vote and used it. Blacks held positions as judges and in state governments. There were 20 black Federal congressmen and two black senators. For the first time, Southern legislatures took education seriously, opening networks of schools for poor white and black children alike. The plantocracy fought back, encouraging the Ku Klux Klan to terrorise blacks who took advantage of their new rights and whites who aided them. There were killings, like the massacre of 46 blacks and two white sympathisers in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 1866. But so long as the Northern army occupied the South, the terror could not destroy gains which blacks were determined to hold on to. After all, 200,000 blacks had been in the Union army, and they knew how to fight.

However, precisely because it was a
bourgeois
army of occupation, there was one thing the army could not do—confiscate land to provide the freed slaves with a way of making a living independent of the old masters. Sherman had briefly carried through such a measure, giving land to 40,000 ex-slaves, only to see it overturned by Johnson. From then on, the only land available to former slaves was government-owned land, which was often of inferior quality. Most were forced to rely on the former slave-owners, working as sharecroppers or labourers for them. What had been an oppressed slave class became, for the most part, an oppressed peasant and labouring class.

This was not the worst of it. By the mid-1870s the Northern capitalists felt they had achieved their goal in the South. Radical reconstruction had prevented any renaissance of planter power to rival to their own. Their industries were expanding at a speed which would soon lead them to overtake Britain. Their railways now stretched all the way to the Pacific coast. There was no possibility of the South dominating the western territories and they no longer saw any need for an army of occupation, since whoever ran the South would do so as their junior partner.

The withdrawal of the Northern army left a free hand for the Klan and other racist forces. Racist terror on the one hand and economic power on the other allowed the big landowners to re-establish their political control. They first restricted and then abolished black (and often also poor white) suffrage throughout most of the South, established formal segregation in every area of social life, and created an atmosphere of racial antagonism which prevented poor whites (the majority of the white population) engaging in joint economic, social or political struggle alongside blacks. Occasionally an upsurge of bitterness at their lot would lead some poor whites to break through the racist ideological barrier—in the ‘populist’ movement of the 1880s and 1890s, and in the upsurge of trade unionism in the 1930s and 1940s. But on each occasion the white oligarchy knew how to unleash racial hatred and re-establish the divide. Ninety years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, blacks were still prevented from exercising their civil rights—and the Federal government in Washington still showed no interest in the matter.

Northern capital gained mightily from the civil war. There was a brief period in which it seemed the ex-slaves would also benefit. But after helping to destroy one form of oppression, modern industrial capitalism showed it had every interest in establishing another. Racism was integral to its operations as well as to that of the old slave-owners, and the main party of industrial capital, the Republican Party, soon forgot its slogans of the 1860s.

The splendours of the Orient still had an allure for west Europeans in 1776, when Adam Smith published his
Wealth of Nations
. Textiles, porcelain and tea from India and China were sought after in the west, and intellectuals like Voltaire
¹¹⁵
treated the civilisations of the East as at least on a par with those of Britain, France and Germany. Adam Smith called China ‘one of the richest…best cultivated, most industrious…nations of the world…Though it may stand still, it does not go backwards’.
¹¹⁶
A century later the picture was very different. The racist stereotypes applied to the indigenous peoples of Africa and North America were now used for those of India, China and the Middle East.
¹¹⁷
In the intervening period Britian had seized virtually the whole of India as a colony and humiliated China in two wars, France had conquered Algeria, and Russia and Austria-Hungary had torn chunks off the Ottoman Empire. The development of capitalism which had turned the societies of western Europe and the United States upside down now allowed the rulers of those societies to grab control of the rest of the world.

Britain’s Indian Empire

India was the first of the great empires to fall into western hands. This did not happen overnight, as a result of straightforward military conquest, nor was it simply the result of technological superiority.

Western commentators in the mid-19th century (including Marx) were mistaken to believe that India was characterised by ‘age-old’ stagnation. Even after the collapse of the Mogul Empire there had been some continuation of economic development with the ‘growing wealth of merchants, bankers and tax-farmers’.
¹¹⁸
But these lived in the shadow of six warring kingdoms, none of which allowed them a decisive say over its policies or even provided real security for their property. This opened the door to the intervention of the British East India Company, with its troops and its arms. Many merchants saw it as able to protect their interests in a way Indian rulers would not.

At the beginning of the 18th century the Company had still been a marginal force in the sub-continent. It relied on concessions from Indian rulers for its trading posts along the coast. But over time it established increasingly strong ties with the Indian merchants who sold it textiles and other goods from the interior. Then in the 1750s a Company official, Robert Clive, played one claimant to power in Bengal off against a rival, defeated a French force and gained control of the province—which was by far the wealthiest part of the old Mogul Empire. The Company collected the taxes and ran the government administration, while an Indian
nawab
continued to hold the formal regalia of office. Britain had gained the beginnings of a new empire in India just as it was losing its old empire in North America, and had done so at little cost to itself. The Company aimed to cover all its costs from taxing the Indian population and relied on an army made up overwhelmingly of ‘Sepoy’ Indian troops.

The success in Bengal led to success elsewhere. Other Indian rulers saw the Company as a useful ally, and used it to train their troops and regularise their administrations. Indian merchants welcomed its increased influence, as it bought growing quantities of textiles from them and helped guarantee their property against inroads by Indian rulers. The Company further cemented its power by creating a new class of large-scale landowners out of sections of the old
zamindars
.

It was not difficult for the British to consolidate their position further, when necessary, by dispensing with obdurate local rulers and establishing direct Company rule.

By 1850 a policy of conquering some rulers and buying off others had extended the area of British domination throughout the whole sub-continent. The Marathas were conquered in 1818, Sind in 1843, the Sikhs in 1849 and Oudh in 1856. British ministers boasted that the Company’s approach was modelled on the Roman principle of
divide et impera
—divide and rule. Using bribery in some instances and violence in others, it played ruler off against ruler, kingdom against kingdom, privileged class against privileged class, caste against caste, and religion against religion, finding local allies wherever it moved. This enabled it to conquer an empire of 200 million people with ‘a native army of 200,000 men, officered by Englishmen and…kept in check by an English army numbering only 40,000’.
¹¹⁹

Enormous wealth flowed to the Company’s agents. Clive left India with £234,000 in loot—equivalent to many millions today—and governor-general Warren Hastings was notorious for taking huge bribes. This wealth was created by the mass of peasants. The cultivators of Bengal and Bihar paid out £2 million a year in taxes. The Company called its officials ‘collectors’ and applied the same methods of extortion as the Moguls had done, but more efficiently and with more devastating consequences.

This ensured that the poverty which had afflicted the mass of people in the late Mogul period now grew worse. Crop failures in 1769 were followed by famines and epidemics which cost up to ten million lives. An area which had stunned Europeans with its wealth only half a century earlier was now on its way to becoming one of the poorest in the world.

None of this worried the
nawabs
,
maharajahs
, merchants or
zamindars
who supped from the company’s table. They grew fat as it grew fat. But they soon discovered the hard way that their partnership with the British was not one of equals. The Company which raised up local rulers could also throw them down without a second thought.

Control of the Company lay in Britain, however much Indian merchants might benefit from its trading connections. This was shown dramatically in the first decades of the 19th century. The mechanisation of the Lancashire cotton mills suddenly enabled them to produce cloth more cheaply than India’s handicraft industry. Instead of India’s products playing a central role in British markets, British cloth took over India’s markets, destroying much of the Indian textile industry, devastating the lives of millions of textile workers, and damaging the profits of the Indian merchants. Without a government of their own, they had no means to protect their interests as the country underwent de-industrialisation and British capitalists displaced them from areas of profit making like shipbuilding and banking. Meanwhile the thin, highly privileged stratum of British officials became more arrogant, more bullying, more condescending, more rapacious and more racist.

They reaped the consequences of their behaviour in 1857. The Company’s Sepoy Indian troops turned on their officers after they ignored the troops’ religious convictions, ordering them to use cartridges greased with beef fat (anathema to Hindus) and pork fat (anathema to Muslims). The issue became a focus for the bitterness felt across India at the behaviour of white
sahibs
. Within weeks mutineers had seized control of a huge swathe of northern India, killing those British officers and officials they could lay their hands on and besieging the remainder in a few isolated fortified posts. Hindus and Sikhs forgot any animosity towards Muslims, installing an heir of the Moguls as emperor in the historic capital of Delhi.

The rising was eventually crushed. A panicking government rushed British troops to the sub-continent, and officers succeeded in persuading Indian soldiers in Madras and Bombay to put down the mutineers in the north. The most savage measures were then used to deter any future threat of mutiny.

However, the government saw that repression alone could not pacify India. There had to be some control over the rapacity of British business if it was not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and more emphasis had to be put on divide and rule—institutionalising communal and religious divisions even if it meant dropping attempts to make Indian social behaviour accord with bourgeois norms. Direct rule from Britain replaced that of the East India Company, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, and every effort was made to bind local Indian rulers and landowners into the imperial system.

But if the administration was regularised, the impoverishment of the mass of people continued. The proportion of the population dependent upon agriculture for a living rose from 50 percent to 75 percent.
¹²⁰
While 25 percent of the tax revenues went on paying for the army to keep the Indians down, education, public health and agriculture got a bare 1 percent each.
¹²¹
Famines swept the country. Over a million people died in the 1860s, three and a half million in the 1870s, and as many as ten million in the 1890s.
¹²²

Meanwhile there were secure careers, paid for out of the taxes on the peasants, for the sons of the British upper middle class—in the senior ranks of the Indian army and newly formed civil service. They brought over their wives and created the snob-ridden, racist enclaves described in Kipling’s
Plain Tales from the Hills
, Forster’s
Passage to India
, Orwell’s
Burmese Days
and Paul Scott’s
Jewel in the Crown
.

The British
sahibs
despised those they called ‘natives’. But they still relied on certain of them to control the mass of the population. The old
rajahs
or
maharajahs
remained in palaces, rebuilt in ever more luxurious fashion, along with their numerous wives, servants, horses, elephants and hunting dogs—sometimes even nominally ruling (most famously in Hyderabad), but in practice getting their orders from British ‘advisers’. Dotted across the countryside of the north, the
zamindars
lived in a lesser luxury of their own, dominating the peasantry and reliant on the British, even if they occasionally moaned about their own status. Then there were the village brahmins and headmen who would help the British collect their taxes, and the
zamindars
their rents. All of them manipulated old caste (or religious) divisions to gain leverage for themselves in negotiations with those above them and to aid their exploitation of those below—so that by the end of the 19th century caste ties were generally more systematised than at the beginning. At the same time a new middle class was emerging, whose members hoped for advance as lawyers, clerks or civil servants within the structures of British rule, but found their hopes continually frustrated by racial barriers.

The subjection of China

China avoided being absorbed like India into a European empire. Yet the fate of the mass of its people was hardly more enviable.

The wealth of China had excited the greed of western merchants from the time of Marco Polo in the 13th century. But they faced a problem. While China produced many things Europeans wanted, Europe did not produce much the Chinese wanted. The British East India Company set out to rectify this by turning wide areas of the newly conquered lands in India over to the cultivation of a product that creates its own demand—opium. By 1810 it was selling 325,000 kilos of the drug a year through Canton, and soon turned China’s centuries old trade surplus into a deficit. When Chinese officials tried to halt the flow of opium, Britain went to war in 1839 for the right to create addiction.

Chinese officialdom ruled over an empire older and more populous than any in the world. The country had only ever been conquered by nomad hordes from the north. Its rulers expected to be able to defeat a seaborne challenge from a country more than 7,000 miles away easily. They did not realise that economic developments at the other end of Eurasia—developments which owed an enormous debt to Chinese innovation in centuries past—had given rise to a country more powerful than anyone had ever imagined.

A memo to the emperor from a leading official predicted easy victory:

But after three years of intermittent fighting and negotiations it was the Chinese who acceded to British terms—opening a number of ports to the opium trade, paying an indemnity, ceding the island of Hong Kong and granting extra-territorial rights to British subjects. It was not long before the British decided these concessions were insufficient. They launched a second war in 1857, when 5,000 troops laid siege to Canton and forced a further opening up of trade. Still dissatisfied, they then joined with the French to march 20,000 troops to Beijing and burn the summer palace.

China scholars disagree about the reasons for the easy British victories. Some ascribe them to superior weaponry and warships, a product of industrial advance.
¹²⁴
Others stress the internal weaknesses of the Manchu state, claiming the difference between the industrial levels of the two countries was not yet enough to explain the victory.
¹²⁵
But there is no dispute about the outcome. The concessions gained by Britain weakened the Chinese state’s ability to control trade and to prevent a growing outflow of the silver it used for currency. There was an escalating debilitation of industry and agriculture alike. The defeats also opened the door to demands for similar concessions from other powers, until European states had extra-territorial enclaves or ‘concessions’ (in effect, mini-colonies) all along the Chinese coast.

The suffering of the peasantry from the decay of the Manchu Empire was intensified by the foreign inroads into it. Conditions became intolerable, especially in the less fertile mountainous areas on the borders between provinces. China’s peasants reacted as they had always done in such circumstances in the past. They joined dissident religious sects and rose up against their masters. What followed is normally called the ‘T’ai-p’ing rebellion’. In fact it was a full-blooded revolutionary assault on the power of the state.

The movement began among peasants, labourers and a few impoverished intellectuals in southern China in the mid-1840s. Its leader was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, a school teacher from a peasant family, who saw himself in a vision as the brother of Jesus, commanded by God to destroy demons on Earth and establish a ‘Heavenly Kingdom’ of ‘Great Peace’ (T’ai-p’ing in Chinese). He preached a doctrine of strict equality between people, equal division of the land, communal ownership of goods and an end to old social distinctions, including those which subjugated women to men. His followers had a sense of purpose and discipline which enabled them to attract ever-greater support and to defeat the armies sent against them. By 1853 the movement, now two million strong, was able to take the former imperial capital of Nanking and run about 40 percent of the country as a state of its own.