War: What is it good for? (38 page)

This was not exactly Adam Smith's vision of a world held together by self-interest, but it was closer to it than the empires of earlier ages. By 1850 the invisible hand and the invisible fist were cooperating in entirely new ways. The Royal Navy kept the seas free and punished people who offended against the open-access order (between 1807 and 1860, it effectively shut down the Atlantic slave trade, seizing sixteen hundred ships and returning the 150,000 slaves on them to West Africa), but the system was so big that there was never any possibility of Britain directly ruling it. The home islands were undoubtedly its center, but what coordination London did impose depended on providing incentives to the formally independent parts to act in ways that kept the system as a whole going.

The goal toward which Britain tried to nudge the world-system was simple enough. “The great object of the Government in every quarter of the world,” the prime minister told Parliament in 1839, “was to extend the commerce of the country.” But doing this nudging was anything but simple. British leaders had to coordinate four wildly different tools. The first
was the United Kingdom itself, home to the biggest industrial economy on earth and a booming population that sent out more migrants than any other nation. The Royal Navy, stronger than the next-strongest two or even three fleets combined, kept open the sea-lanes for emigrants, imports, and exports—meaning not only cotton, steel, and machines but also a seductive soft power, which gave the world business suits, sandwiches, and soccer as well as Dickens, Darwin, and Kipling.

The second tool, located on the other side of the world, was India. As well as running an enormous trade deficit with Britain, as early as the 1820s the subcontinent paid for an army of over 200,000 men. This was, in effect, Britain's strategic reserve. When Napoleon needed to be thrown out of Egypt in 1799, or Chinese markets forced open in 1839, or the shah of Persia bullied in 1856, or Russia shut out of Afghanistan in 1879 (or, for that matter, when Rommel needed to be stopped at El Alamein in 1942), most of the men who did the job were Indians.

The flood of British emigrants—altogether, about twenty million of them—built the third tool, resource-rich white settler colonies on other continents. Their explosive economic growth mattered more and more as the nineteenth century wore on, and in the twentieth their young men were as important as India's in defending the world-system.

Finally, there was a fourth tool: a sprawling network of capital, experts, shipping, telegraphs, financial services, and investment. This vast, invisible empire extended far beyond the areas colored pink on the globe. Entire countries—Argentina, Chile, Persia—became so dependent on British markets and money that historians often call them an informal empire. They did not take direct orders from British politicians, but they rarely dared defy British financiers. By the 1890s, shipping and services brought three-quarters as much money into Britain as merchandise exports.

Keeping this elaborate world-system working was a tricky balancing act. It required Asian empires to remain weak, Europe to remain at peace (or at least not to be forced into a single, hostile empire by a new Napoleon waging people's wars), and the United States to remain strong but cooperative. And since Britain could rarely compel any of these actors to play their appointed parts, everything depended on a delicate mixture of gunboat diplomacy, market pressure, and enlightened self-interest.

There were constant crises. The worst was in India, where a great mutiny in 1857 might have expelled the British altogether had it been better led. In Europe, an ugly war had to be fought in Crimea between 1854 and
1856 to stop Russia from disrupting the balance of power, and on the American front war scares were constant. In 1844, arguments over the latitude of the U.S.-Canadian border grew so heated that “Fifty-four forty or fight!” became a presidential campaign slogan. In 1859, troops dug in and gunboats were sent to the same border after a British pig wandered into an American potato patch. And in 1861, with America's house divided against itself, war loomed again when Union sailors boarded a British ship.

But war never came. While damping down an earlier crisis in 1858, this time over British sailors boarding American ships, the American president, James Buchanan, had reminded Congress that “no two nations have ever existed on the face of the earth which could do each other so much good or so much harm.” Congress agreed, and after making due allowance for local circumstances, most governments in Asia and Europe came to similar conclusions. For almost everyone, there was more to gain from buying into the British system than from trying to break it.

Pax Britannica

“I think there's an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did,” Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, said in 2013. “But of course,” he added, “there were bad events as well as good ones.”

He was speaking at Amritsar, where, nearly a century earlier, British troops had gunned down thousands of unarmed Indian protesters, killing 379 of them. Immediately, Cameron's words were assailed from every side. To some, they smacked of hand-wringing liberal self-loathing; to others, they indicated his gross insensitivity and nostalgia for imperialism.

Prime ministers expect to be pilloried for everything they say, but there is probably no way to try to evaluate the legacy of Europe's Five Hundred Years' War without being accused of political bias. Accepting that, I will steel myself for the worst and come right to the point: the Five Hundred Years' War was the most productive—in the sense I have used that word in this book—war the world had so far seen, creating the biggest, safest, and most prosperous society (or world-system) yet. In 1415, the globe had been fragmented, with each continent dominated by a cluster of regional powers. By 1914, this ancient mosaic was gone, replaced by just three or four powers with truly global reach (France, Germany, the United States, and,
of course, the United Kingdom), tightly linked in a system dominated by Britain. Europe had (almost) conquered the world.

The marriage of invisible hand and invisible fist made the modern world-system very different from any premodern empire, but the Five Hundred Years' War that created it had nevertheless followed a broadly familiar pattern. First came a conquest phase, driving up rates of violent death; next, in many cases, came an era of rebellion, with more great bloodlettings; and finally came an age of peace and prosperity as violence declined and economies were reconstructed on a larger scale.

The timing of the phases depended on where you lived. The wave of conquest broke on South and Central America in the sixteenth century, on North America in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, on India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on China in the mid-nineteenth century, and on Africa in the late nineteenth century, with the major rebellions generally coming hard on the heels of the end of the conquests.

The effects varied as much as the timing. In the Americas, invaders visited unspeakable horrors on the natives (and, it should be said, the natives repaid them in kind when they could), but, as we saw earlier in this chapter, the great killer was disease. If, as I think we should, we count the victims of pestilence and famine among the war dead, the figures are shocking. Between 1500 and 1650, the Native population of the New World fell by half. Those historians who call the conquest an “American holocaust” have a point.

In South Asia, the East India Company's conquests from the 1740s onward must have killed hundreds of thousands of natives, usually for minimal losses on the European side. Out of a population that started this period around 175 million and steadily grew, however, all the shooting and sabering can only have added a fraction of 1 percent to the death rate. One historian has claimed that the British massacred some 10 million people after the 1857 mutiny, or 1 Indian in 25, but although the reprisals were savage enough to shock many Britons, almost all experts put the true figure almost an order of magnitude lower. A death toll running into the hundreds of thousands remains appalling, but even at their worst the British killed less than 1 Indian in 250.

As in the European conquest of the Americas, the biggest killer was not direct violence but its consequences, which in India meant famine more often than disease. Between the Great Bengal Famine of 1769–70 and the All-India Famine of 1899–1900, a horrifying thirty to fifty million Indians
starved. Roughly a billion people lived in India across these 130 years, and so one in twenty or one in thirty people died from war-related famines—
if
, that is, this horror should be laid entirely at the British door.

Bad weather, particularly El Niño events, was the immediate cause of most of these disasters, but some historians argue that a combination of the disruption caused by conquest and the callousness and/or stupidity of the conquerors turned unavoidable climate-driven crises into entirely avoidable human catastrophes. The blame game has been ugly ever since it began in the 1850s, but even the most anti-European critic would have to concede that the conquest of India was much less lethal than that of America.

In China, the pattern was different again. European (and, to a lesser degree, Japanese) invasions between the 1840s and the 1890s killed hundreds of thousands. About 750 million people lived in China across this half century, meaning that the wars directly killed roughly one person in a thousand, but here the biggest death toll began when the Qing dynasty fell apart and rebels rose up all over China. These civil wars took tens of millions of lives. China's population fell by 10 percent between 1840 and 1870, with violence and its train of starvation and disease causing most of this loss.

To complete this catalog of horrors, we should note the huge variations between the experiences of different parts of Africa. In some places, Europeans met almost no resistance and had minimal impact on the people they supposedly ruled. The vast French holdings in West Africa, for instance, were something of a virtual empire, in which virtually no officials administered virtually no subjects in the virtually empty wastes of the Sahara Desert. But in other places, the story was gruesome. The extreme case was the Congo Basin, seized by Belgium in 1884. Here a brutal system of punishing natives for not delivering rubber quotas might have cut the population in half by 1908, mostly through starvation and disease.

No one can deny that the Five Hundred Years' War made the world more dangerous for the people being conquered. Europeans, like ancient Romans, regularly created wastelands. But—again like the Romans—the legacy of war was peace. In most cases, once the gun smoke had cleared, shattered institutions had been rebuilt, and new antibodies had evolved, the conquered found themselves ruled by powerful new Leviathans that aggressively suppressed violence—much as Dravot and Carnehan did in Kafiristan.

To many westerners, this civilizing mission made imperialism a moral cause. “Take up the White man's burden,” Kipling urged the United States in 1899,

Send forth the best ye breed

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need…

Take up the White man's burden,

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain
.

To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain
.

Within days of its publication, the poem was inspiring parodies (“Pile on the brown man's burden,” went one, “To gratify your greed; Go, clear away the ‘niggers,' Who progress would impede”), and it is hard to read Kipling's words today without squirming. Yet he was far from alone in seeing the world this way. Thousands of official memos, deposited in dusty or mildewed district offices from Mauritania to Malaya, record the earnestness with which functionaries at every level threw themselves into veiling the threat of terror and checking the show of pride. “These petty principalities are enjoying the full measure of British protection and are in a state of the most profound tranquility,” wrote one Lieutenant Murray in an 1824 report, looking back on ten years of pacification in Nepal. “Murder is seldom committed and robbery unknown, and several Rajas are content and their subjects receiving all the blessings of a mild and happy rule. The cultivation has improved in a fourfold degree, and the mountains are clad in stepped verdure to the base.”

But did Murray—or Kipling—know what he was talking about? Or were both men simply lying to justify an empire from which they profited at the subjects' expense? Answering this question is difficult, not least because of the sheer variety of places in the nineteenth-century world-system. In Australia, where Europeans almost annihilated the natives, or Ascension Island, uninhabited by any vertebrate before the British arrived, pacification was a very different business from, say, in Indochina, where
a few thousand Frenchmen parachuted into the middle of thirty million natives.

And even within a single region, it could be hard to tell what was going on. As usual, India is the best-known (and most controversial) case. Here the East India Company, focused on maximizing profits, threw itself into pacification. The same Mughal breakdown that had given the company its opening in the 1740s had also filled the subcontinent with warring princes, and—although reliable statistics are once again sorely lacking—all the evidence suggests that rates of violent death had leaped up as law and order broke down. The squabbling nawabs and sultans had hired thousands of irregular cavalry to fight each other, and, thrown out of work, many of them turned into bandits, terrorizing the peasantry. Eighteenth-century India's roads were infested with highwaymen (some said to be
thugees,
members of a cult devoted to strangling travelers in honor of the goddess Kali), and the countryside was awash with guns.