War: What is it good for? (39 page)

Like any competent stationary bandit, the company cracked down on these roving bandits. But—like all too many stationary bandits—the company's activities were so violent (and profitable) that observers often wondered whether the cure was not worse than the disease. Heaps “of rupees, sacks of diamonds, Indians tortured to disclose their treasure,” one London pamphleteer lamented; “cities, towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, jaghires and provinces purloined; Nabobs dethroned, and murdered, have found the delights and constituted the religions of the Directors and their servants.”

Already in 1773, the British government tried to regulate the company into being a better stationary bandit. The company's officers “shall not accept, receive or take directly … from any of the
Indian
princes or Powers, or their Ministers or Agents (or any of the natives of
Asia
) any Present, Gift, Donation, Opportunity or Reward,” Parliament ruled. The men on the ground, however, took little notice until in 1786 Parliament decided on its own crackdown. It impeached Warren Hastings, the company's governor, charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors—basically, with making a wasteland.

Edmund Burke led the charge, for all the world like Cicero come again to bring down the modern-day equivalent of the venal Roman governor Verres. “I impeach him in the name of the English nation,” he thundered, “whose ancient honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself,
in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy of all.”

And that was just Burke's opening statement. The trial went on, with one lurid revelation after another, for seven shameful years. In the end, despite an ocean of evidence, the House of Lords acquitted Hastings, but it was no victory for the company. Britain had had enough of this kind of pacification. Parliament passed another India Act, taking over the right to appoint governor-generals and setting the stage for the rise of the famously incorruptible Indian Civil Service.

The Parliament in London, like Leviathans in every age, remained more interested in lowering its administrative costs than in creating open-access order among its subjects. In one notorious case, begun in 1808, the judge who prosecuted a particularly vicious English settler for beating and starving an Indian servant to death seemed less worried that the defendant's actions were “injurious … to the peace and happiness of our native subjects” than that he had “defied my authority [and] conducted himself in a manner highly disrespectful to the Court.”

But whatever their motives, judges sent out from Britain did gradually roll back the company's rough-and-ready martial law and reduce the violence of Indian life. The most visible consequence was a blanket ban on the Hindu ritual of sati, in which a widow would throw herself onto her husband's funeral pyre. Several Mughal emperors had legislated against sati (“in all lands under Mughal control, never again should officials allow a woman to be burned,” Aurangzeb had ruled in 1663), with some success, but the British blanket ban of 1829 more or less eradicated it.

Documents written by educated Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have little to say about rates of violent death, but a remarkable number of their authors seem to have concluded that the British Empire was, on balance, no bad thing. The extraordinary Calcutta-based scholar Rammohun Roy, for instance, embraced British liberalism, education, and law and joined the British crusade against sati. Roy did not hesitate to criticize the Europeans; he rebuked the British in 1823 for being slow to teach the “useful sciences” to Bengalis and had a smart put-down for a bishop of Calcutta who mistakenly congratulated him on converting from Hinduism to Christianity (“My lord,” Roy said, “I did not abandon one superstition merely to take up another”). But when all was said and done, Roy thought that the ideal outcome for India would be to remain within the British Empire, in a position like Canada's. “India, in a like manner
[as the Canadians],” he wrote in 1832, “will feel no disposition to cut off its connection with England, which may be preserved with so much mutual benefit to both countries.”

Other Indians—such as the members of the Young Bengal movement, who shocked their elders in the 1830s by championing Tom Paine over Hindu scriptures—went much further in their admiration of all things Anglo. But their opinions, just like Roy's and Lieutenant Murray's, remain mere impressions. Until social historians do the kind of painstaking archival work that vindicated Elias's claims about Europeans becoming less violent, or until physical anthropologists catalog much more skeletal evidence of violent trauma, we have to continue to rely on qualitative evidence, just as we do in studying ancient times. But even so, the weight of the documentation does seem to be overwhelming. Despite their smugness, Kipling and Murray really were onto something. Once the conquests died down and the rebellions were suppressed, European empires generally drove down rates of violent death.

That said, the colonies and frontiers always remained rougher than Europe's imperial heartland. By 1900, homicide was taking the life of only one western European in sixteen hundred, but one American in every two hundred was still dying violently at that point. And even within the white settler colonies, there were stark differences between the urban cores and the wilder peripheries: murder was no more common in New England than in old England, but parts of the West and the South were ten times as dangerous. (According to one story, a southerner, quizzed about this by a Yankee, “replied that he reckoned there were just more folks in the South who needed killing.”)

The likelihood of being killed in war fell almost as fast as the chance of being murdered. When we throw in all the battles, sieges, and feuds, about one western European in twenty was dying violently around 1415, but between 1815 and 1914, Europeans fought few major wars. The muddy, bloody Crimean War of 1853–56 killed 300,000, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 another 400,000 or more, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 a further half million. This was a lot of slaughter, and yet, even after adding in every single war, less than one European in fifty (and probably closer to one in a hundred) can have died in conflict between 1815 and 1914.

Wars within and between white settler colonies (as opposed to wars they waged against nonwhites) were almost as rare. In the Americas, the
horrific War of the Triple Alliance between 1864 and 1870 (in which Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay blocked Paraguayan expansion) claimed about half a million lives, and the American Civil War (1861–65) took closer to three-quarters of a million. In Africa, the Second Boer War (1899–1902) killed at least sixty thousand. Overall, Europeans who settled overseas were more likely to die violently than those who stayed home, but not much more so.

The Five Hundred Years' War was far bigger than the wars that built the ancient empires. Mass armies with iron weapons had allowed the Romans, Han, Parthians, and Mauryans to project power on a subcontinental scale, but oceangoing ships, guns, and steam power extended Europeans' reach across the entire planet. Ancient wars produced societies tens of millions strong, with rates of violent death, I suggested, in the 2–5 percent range, but the Five Hundred Years' War produced societies hundreds of millions strong, with rates of violent death in the European core in the 1–3 percent range. Rates were slightly higher in the American and Australasian white settler colonies, and those in direct-rule colonies higher still.

Patchy data, lack of scholarly study, and the sheer variety of places involved—ranging from hells on earth such as the Congo through Margaret Mead's Samoa to sleepy outposts in Nepal—combine to make meaningful estimates of rates of violent death in the nineteenth-century empires almost impossible. This means that the number I offer in
Figure 4.14
—somewhere between 2.5 and 7.5 percent—is perhaps the most speculative in this whole book. It simply means that on average, nineteenth-century direct-rule colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania were more violent than the ancient empires but less violent than Eurasia in the age of migrations. One day, archival research and skeletal studies will allow us to make much better estimates, but we are not there yet.

What Calgacus said about Rome's wars of conquest was just as true of Europe's: both made wastelands. But on the other hand, what Cicero said about Rome's empire was also true of Europe's: both eventually drew their subjects into larger economic systems, which, in most cases, made them better-off. It is hard to argue with the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson when they say in their influential recent book,
Why Nations Fail,
that “the profitability of European colonial empires was often built on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies.” And yet, as
Figure 4.15
shows, this was what economists like to call creative destruction. As new economic systems replaced old ones, income and productivity rose all over the world after
1870. There were certainly exceptions (the Congo again springs to mind), and the bulk of the gains did flow to the rulers of the new world-system. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the rising tide of the Five Hundred Years' War was lifting all the boats, making the world richer than ever as well as safer.

So it was that in August 1898, Nicholas II, tsar of all the Russias, drew what seemed to be the obvious conclusion and ordered his foreign minister to make an unprecedented announcement to the dignitaries who danced attendance on his court. “The preservation of a general peace and a possible reduction in the excessive armaments that now burden every nation,” it said, “are ideals toward which all governments should strive.” Nicholas therefore proposed an international conference—“a happy overture to the century ahead”—to discuss the end of war and mass disarmament.

General delight ensued. Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of the international bestseller
Lay Down Your Arms
(one of Tolstoy's favorites) and soon to become the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, called Nicholas “a new star in the cultural heavens,” and in 1899—on the tsar's birthday, in fact—130 diplomats convened at a sylvan château near The Hague, in the doggedly neutral Netherlands, to work everything out.

After two months of dining, dancing, and decreeing, they emerged with a string of agreements, if not to end war, then at least to limit its barbarity. They agreed, enthusiastically, that another meeting was called for. This duly convened in 1907 at the same delightful spot, and such was its success that everyone made firm plans to gather there again—in 1914.

Footnotes

¹
By convention, historians speak of England and Scotland as separate countries before the Act of Union in 1707, and as Britain after that. (Ireland was added to the union in 1801.)

²
That is, the Mughal emperor.

³
The
Monitor
and the
Merrimack
were both originally Union ships, but after the
Merrimack
was sunk, the Confederates raised its wreck and refitted it as an ironclad, launched under the name CSS
Virginia
.