A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (60 page)

At the beginning of the 20th century a handful of ruling classes dominated the world. The broad current of human history flowed through a narrow channel shaped by a few European countries. The war itself was the supreme expression of this—a
world war
resulting, essentially, from the imperial ambitions of the rulers of Britain, Germany and France.

But by the end of the war waves of revolt were sweeping through the colonial world and threatening these rulers’ dominance: an armed rising in Dublin in 1916 was followed in 1918-21 by guerrilla war throughout Ireland; there was an upsurge of demonstrations and strikes against British rule in India; a near revolution against the British occupation of Egypt; and nationalist agitation in China which began with student protests in 1919 and culminated in civil war in 1926-27.

Resistance to Western domination predated the war. The colonisation of Africa had only been possible through a succession of bitterly fought wars; British rule in India had been shaken by the great revolt of 1857; and a wave of attacks on Western interests and practices, known in the West as the ‘Boxer Rebellion’, had swept China at the turn of the century.

However, such resistance characteristically involved attempts to reinstitute the sort of societies which had succumbed to foreign conquest in the first place.

But with the 20th century new currents of resistance attempted to learn from and emulate the methods of Western capitalism, even when they took up traditional themes. At the centre of these were students, lawyers, teachers and journalists—groups whose members had studied in the language of the colonial rulers, dressed in a European manner and accepted the values of European capitalism, but had aspirations which were continually blocked by the policies of the colonial rulers. There were many thousands of these in every colonial city, and their demonstrations and protests could take over the streets, pulling in much larger numbers of people with more traditional attitudes.

In India, by far Britain’s most important colony, there was a nationwide campaign of resistance in the mid-1900s when the imperial authorities, as part of their general divide and rule strategy, partitioned the subcontinent’s biggest province, Bengal, into Muslim and Hindu areas. The campaign involved a boycott of British goods under the slogan ‘Swadeshi’ (‘own country’), with pickets, demonstrations and bitter clashes with the British-officered troops. It drew together both a previously moderate organisation based on the English speaking professional middle classes, the Indian National Congress, and people such as B G Tilak, who combined a willingness to countenance ‘terrorist’ methods with encouragement of upper caste Hindu antagonism towards Muslims on the grounds that Hinduism was the ‘authentic’ Indian tradition. But wide sections of India’s privileged classes still clung to the British connection. When the world war broke out both Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi (who returned to India from South Africa in 1915) backed the British war effort. The authorities found enough recruits to expand the Indian army to two million, and sent most to join the carnage in Europe.

A new mood in China led to the collapse of the Manchu Empire. Both the old and the new overseas-educated middle classes lost faith in an empire which could not prevent the Western powers and Japan carving out ever larger ‘concessions’ and imposing ‘unequal treaties’. A military revolt in October 1911 was followed by the proclamation of a republic with newly returned exile Sun Yat-sen as president. For 20 years Sun had been organising various secret societies committed to national independence and liberal democracy. But his hold on power slipped, and within a month he passed the presidency to one of the old imperial generals, who set himself up as dictator, dissolving parliament.

In Egypt a wave of anti-British nationalism arose in the first decade of the century, which the authorities crushed by banning newspapers, imprisoning one of the leaders and exiling the others.

The Irish rising

If India was Britain’s biggest colony, Ireland was its oldest, and had suffered in the mid-19th century as much as any part of Asia or Africa. It was here that the first modern rising against the colonial empires occurred, on Easter Monday 1916.

For more than a century there had been two traditions of opposition to British rule in Ireland. One was constitutional nationalism, which aimed to force Britain to concede limited autonomy (‘Home Rule’) by winning seats in the British parliament. The other was republicanism, committed to preparing for armed rebellion through an underground organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood or ‘Fenians’.

Prior to the war neither method had been successful. The various Fenian conspiracies and revolts had all been easily broken by the British state, and their leaders imprisoned. The constitutional nationalists had been no more successful. In the 1880s they had obtained nominal support for ‘Home Rule’ from the Liberal wing of the British ruling class. But this would not deliver on its promises, even in 1912-14 after the British House of Commons had passed a Home Rule Act. Instead it temporised with the Conservative opposition, which talked of a threat to the British ‘constitution’, with the anti Home Rule ‘Orange’ Loyalists, who openly imported arms from Germany, and with senior army officers, who made it clear in the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ that they would not impose the Home Rule law. Yet when war broke out in 1914 the constitutional nationalists rushed to support the British war effort and helped persuade thousands of Irish men to volunteer for the British army.

Then during Easter 1916 some 800 armed rebels seized control of public buildings in the centre of Dublin, notably the General Post Office. Most of the participants were republicans, led by poet and schoolteacher Padraic Pearse. But alongside them fought a smaller number belonging to an armed militia, the Irish Citizen Army. This had been established after the nine month Dublin Lockout by James Connolly, the founder of Irish socialism and a former organiser for the US Industrial Workers of the World.

The organisation of the rising went askew. The commander of one participating group countermanded the order to mobilise, reducing the number of participants by two thirds, and attempts to land German arms were thwarted by British forces. But, above all, the population of Dublin reacted to the rising with indifference. This led one exiled Polish revolutionary, Karl Radek, to describe the whole affair as an abortive
putsch
. By contrast Lenin, also still in exile, insisted it represented the beginning of a series of risings against colonial rule that would shake the European powers.

The rising was certainly to shake British rule in Ireland eventually. The measures a nervous British ruling class took to crush the rising—the bombarding by warships of the centre of Dublin and the execution of its leaders after they had surrendered under a white flag—created growing animosity to British rule. This deepened in 1918, when the British government prepared to introduce conscription in Ireland. Sinn Fein candidates committed to boycotting the British parliament swept the board in the general election of late 1918, with pro-British Unionist candidates even losing half the seats in the northern province of Ulster. The Sinn Fein representatives met in Dublin to proclaim themselves the new Dail (parliament) of an Irish republic, with one of the commanders of 1916, Éamon De Valera, as president. Meanwhile the armed rebels regrouped into a guerrilla force, the Irish Republican Army, led by former clerk Michael Collins, and pledged its allegiance to the Dail. Together they worked to make Ireland ungovernable through the boycott of British courts and tax collectors, armed action, and strikes against British troop movements.

The British reacted with all the ferocity characteristic of 300 years of empire-building, imprisoned elected Irish leaders, hanged alleged rebels, used murder gangs to assassinate suspected republicans, fired machine-guns into a football crowd and established a mercenary ‘Black and Tan’ force, which committed atrocities against civilians, burning down the centre of Cork. The violence was all to no avail, except in the north east where sectarian Protestant mobs armed by the British chased Catholics from their jobs and homes, and eventually terrorised the nationalist population into submission.

Accounts of British cabinet meetings
¹²⁶
reveal a ruling class with no clear idea of what to do. The Irish issue was embarrassing internationally, as it was a popular issue for US politicians seeking to undermine the British Empire. It caused immense political problems in Britain, where a considerable portion of the working class was of Irish origin or descent. It even created problems elsewhere in the empire when Irish soldiers in Britain’s Connaught Rangers regiment mutinied in India. Yet the majority of cabinet ministers saw any concession to Irish nationalism as a betrayal of the empire and an encouragement to colonial revolts elsewhere.

Finally in 1921 the British prime minister, Lloyd George, stumbled on a way out. In negotiations with an Irish delegation led by Collins he threatened a scorched earth policy of all out repression unless the Irish agreed to leave the six counties in northern Ireland under British rule, provide Britain with bases in certain Irish ports, and keep an oath of allegiance to the British crown. Under pressure from sections of the middle class, who feared what all out war would do to their property, Collins accepted the compromise and won a narrow majority in the Dail. De Valera rejected it, as did the majority of the IRA, who saw it as a betrayal. Civil war broke out between the two groups after Collins gave in to British pressure, accepted British weapons and drove IRA members from the buildings they controlled in Dublin. By 1923, when the republicans finally buried their guns, Lloyd George’s strategy had worked perfectly.

There was an independent government of sorts in Ireland, but it ruled over an impoverished country, cut off from the industrial area around Belfast and with little hope of overcoming the devastating effects of hundreds of years of British colonialism. Even when De Valera came to power through electoral means in the early 1930s nothing fundamental changed except that a few more symbols of British domination disappeared. For half a century the only way for most young people to secure a future was to emigrate to Britain or the US. Life for those who remained consisted of poverty on the one hand and domination by the barren Catholicism preached by the Irish church on the other.

Meanwhile the North of Ireland was run right through until 1972 by a Unionist Party under the domination of landowners and industrialists who used Orange bigotry to turn the Protestant majority of workers and farmers against the Catholic minority. James Connolly, executed after the 1916 rising, had predicted that partition would result in ‘a carnival of reaction on both sides of the border’. Events proved him right. British imperialism had been able to play on the fears of the propertied classes of Ireland and emerge virtually unscathed from the first great challenge to its power. It was a lesson it would apply elsewhere.

The Indian national movement

The national movements in India, China and Egypt were paralysed at the beginning of the war. But they had grown and intensified by the end of it. The war increased the direct contact with modern capitalism of millions of Asians and north Africans. Indian soldiers fought on the Western Front, in Mesopotamia and at Gallipoli. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Vietnamese and Egyptian people were used in a supporting role as labourers at the various fronts. The war also boosted local industries, as hostilities cut off the flow of imports and created massive new markets in war supplies.

The new industries brought with them the beginning of the same change in class structures which had occurred with the industrial revolution in Europe—the transformation of former peasants, artisans and casual labourers into a modern working class. This class was still a very small proportion of the total working population—less than half a percent in China’s case. But in absolute terms it was quite sizeable: there were around 2.6 million workers in India,
¹²⁷
and some 1.5 million in China.
¹²⁸
They were concentrated in cities which were central to communications and administration such as Bombay, Calcutta, Canton and Shanghai—where the working class already amounted to one fifth of the population and, according to Chesneaux in his history of the Chinese labour movement, was ‘able to bring much more weight to bear than its actual size in relation to the total population would warrant’.
¹²⁹

For the students, intellectuals and professional middle classes there were now two potential allies in any challenge to the imperial powers and their local collaborators. There were indigenous capitalists, who wanted a state which would defend their own interests against foreigners, and there were workers, who had their own grievances against foreign police, managers and supervisors.

These changes occurred at the same time as the war increased the burden on the mass of the population, for whom life was a continual struggle against hunger and disease. War taxes and loans meant £100 million flowed out of India to swell the imperial finances—paid for out of increased taxes and price rises, which hit workers and poorer peasants alike.
¹³⁰

The pent-up bitterness in India was expressed in a wave of agitation across the subcontinent in 1918-20. A textile strike in Bombay spread to involve 125,000 workers. There were food riots in Bombay, Madras and Bengal, and violent protests by debtors against money-lenders in Calcutta. Mass demonstrations, strikes and rioting spread over many parts of India.
¹³¹
A General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on thousands of demonstrators in an enclosed square, the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing 379 and wounding 1,200. The massacre led to more demonstrations, and to attacks on government buildings and telegraph lines. The first six months of 1920 saw more than 200 strikes, involving 1.5 million workers. A government report noted: