Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
1773:
‘Boston Tea Party’.
1775:
Fighting at Lexington and Bunker Hill.
1776:
American Declaration of Independence.
1781:
British defeat at Yorktown.
1780s to 1830s
: Spread of factory system and mining in Britain.
1789:
Storming of Bastille, beginning of French Revolution.
1791:
Slave revolt in St Domingue.
1792:
French revolutionary war, Battle of Valmy, execution of king.
1793-94:
Jacobins rule France, end of feudal dues, ‘terror’.
1794
Fall of Jacobins, ‘Thermidor’.
1793-98:
British take over Saint Domingue, defeated by ex-slave army.
1797:
British naval mutinies.
1798:
Rising against British rule in Ireland, formation of Orange Order to combat it.
1799:
Combination laws ban trade unions in Britain. Napoleon takes all power in France.
1801-03:
Napoleon tries to reimpose slavery in Haiti, imprisonment and death of Toussaint, Dessalines leads ex-slave army to victory.
1804:
Beethoven’s
Eroica
symphony.
1805:
Napoleon becomes emperor.
1807:
Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind.
1807:
Britain bans slave trade.
1810:
First risings against Spanish rule in Mexico and Venezuela.
1810-16:
‘Luddites’ attack machines in north of England.
1814-15:
Napoleon defeated. Restoration of old monarchs. Waterloo.
1811-18:
Publication of novels by Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
1819:
‘Peterloo’ massacre of working class demonstrators.
1830:
Revolution in Paris replaces one monarch by another.
1830s:
Novels by Stendhal and Balzac.
1830:
World’s first passenger railway.
1831:
Faraday discovers electric induction.
1832:
British middle class gets vote.
1834:
Poor Law Amendment Act establishes workhouses in Britain.
1838-39:
Chartist movement demands vote for workers.
1839-42:
Opium War against China.
1842:
General strike in Lancashire.
1840s to 1860s:
Novels of Dickens, George Eliot, Brontës.
Mid-1840s:
T’ai-p’ing rebels take control of nearly half of China.
1846-49:
Great Irish Famine.
1847:
The Communist Manifesto.
Spring 1848:
Revolutions across Europe, unsuccessful rising in Ireland, last great Chartist demonstration in London.
June 1848:
Crushing of workers’ movement by French bourgeoisie.
1848-49:
Restoration of old monarchies across Europe.
1850s and 1860s:
Spread of industry to Germany and France.
1843-56:
British complete conquest of northern India.
1857:
Indian Mutiny.
1857-60:
Second Opium War, colonial ‘concessions’ in Chinese cities.
1859:
Darwin’s
The Origin of Species.
1859-71:
Italy unified under king.
1861:
American Civil War begins. Tsar ends serfdom in Russia.
1863:
Lincoln declares end of slavery.
1865:
Defeat of American South.
1864:
T’ai-p’ing rebels finally crushed by British led troops.
1866:
Nobel discovers dynamite.
1867:
Meiji revolution from above ends feudal rule of Tokugawa in Japan.
1867:
Marx publishes
Capital
.
1870:
Franco-Prussian War. Fall of Louis Bonaparte.
1871:
Paris Commune, workers control city, then Republican government attacks city, killing thousands.
1871:
Bismarck establishes German Empire under Prussian monarchy.
1873:
First electrical machine.
Mid-1870s:
Troops withdraw from Southern states of US, rise of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation.
The military band played the tune ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ as British forces departed from Yorktown in 1781. And so it must have seemed to thousands of ‘Tories’ loyal to King George as they left with the troops. All the assumptions they had grown up with about the ‘natural’ order of society had been trampled underfoot by a victorious rebellion. Yet 99 percent of the rebels had shared those assumptions only eight years before.
One of the rebellion’s best known figures, the veteran publicist and politician Benjamin Franklin, had written in the 1760s, ‘Happy are we now under the best of kings’.
1
The thousands of Americans who read his newspaper articles and almanacs agreed with him right up to 1774. In his home colony of Pennsylvania ‘there was no conscious revolutionary tradition’.
2
The Virginian leader Thomas Jefferson was still asserting at the beginning of 1776 that Americans had neither ‘wish nor…interest to separate’ from the monarchy.
3
How did it come about that in the summer of 1776 representatives of the 13 colonies, assembled at a ‘Continental Congress’, adopted the Declaration of Independence drafted by the same Jefferson, with its assertion that ‘all men are created equal’? It was an overtly revolutionary statement at a time when deference to kings and aristocrats was near-universal in Europe.
The colonies had been founded in the century and a half before with the backing of the British crown. Ultimate political authority in each lay with a governor appointed in London. But effective power lay with different groups in each colony: with independent farmers in rural New England, and the merchants and artisans in its coastal towns; with rival large landowners in New York state, who treated their tenants in an almost feudal fashion, and with merchants tied to Britain’s Atlantic trade in New York City; with the Penn family (who appointed the governor) and with a handful of wealthy Quaker families in Pennsylvania; and with slave-owning plantation owners in Virginia and North and South Carolina, who excluded poor whites from any say. There were also bitter social clashes within colonies: between landlords and tenants who rose in revolt in New York’s Hudson Valley in 1766; between the Philadelphia elite and western settlers in Pennsylvania; between ‘regulator’ small farmers and ‘Grandee’ plantation owners in the Carolinas. On top of these, there was the continual fear of slave revolts for the Southern plantation owners, such as that which occurred in South Carolina in 1739. Such conflicting interests had scuppered an attempt to establish unity between the colonies in the early 1750s.
In each colony people thought of themselves as ‘British’, not ‘American’. After all, the colonies had grown and prospered within the orbit of Britain’s ‘Atlantic’ economy. Their combined population had grown steadily until, at three million, it was a third of Britain’s. Their merchants and landowners enjoyed considerable riches, and their farmers and artisans felt better off than their forebears had been on the other side of the Atlantic. It seemed in nobody’s interests to overturn the applecart.
From a crack to a chasm
Yet the very fact of economic expansion was pushing the merchants, landowners and manufacturers on each side of the Atlantic to develop different sets of interests and, with them, divergent attitudes.
4
There was a growing fear in London that the colonies might pursue policies detrimental to British commercial interests. There was growing suspicion in the colonies that the British government was neglecting their needs. Until the mid-1770s people like Franklin, who acted as the representative of several of the colonies in London, regarded these fears and suspicions as misunderstandings. But they were not completely fanciful on either side. A clash between the colonies and Britain was inevitable at some point.
The emerging world market system was not one, as Adam Smith and his followers implied (and still imply today), without an economic role for the state. Trade networks spread across the whole system, but they were concentrated around certain cities where merchants, financiers and manufacturers not only bought and sold but also mixed socially and applied pressure on political authorities. Their interests were served by the growth of rival national states, each with a much tighter political structure than that which had characterised feudalism, and with a national language to go with it. It was inconceivable that Britain’s capitalists would not apply pressure on the gentry who ran its parliament to advance their interests—and it was equally inconceivable that the capitalists of the American colonies would fail to respond with political counter-measures of their own.
In both economics and politics, particular events often bring much longer term trends into sharp focus. So it was in the 1760s and 1770s. The Seven Years War of 1756-63 between Britain and France had centred on control of colonies, especially in North America, and of the trade that went with them. Britain defeated France in the West Indies, took control of Bengal and conquered Canada, laying the basis for a world empire. But there was a mighty bill to be paid for doing so.
A logical move for British ministers was to make the American colonists pay some of the costs of the war. After all, they reasoned, the colonies had gained enormously since a French scheme to take control of the Mississippi valley and prevent the colonies expanding westwards had been thwarted.
So Britain imposed a series of taxes on the colonists—a tax on molasses (raw sugar used in making rum) in 1764, a ‘stamp tax’ on a range of transactions in 1765, a Quartering Act which made the colonists pay for the cost of keeping British troops in America, and a tax on imports in 1767.
Each of these caused enormous resentment. People were short of cash at a time of economic depression, and the taxes threatened to damage certain industries. France was no longer a military threat, and the British government wanted the extra income to lower taxes on big landowners in Britain. Above all, the colonists were having to pay taxes for policies in which they had no say.
In Britain, colonists argued, the House of Commons could veto any government proposal on finance. Surely the assemblies of the different colonies should have the same power in the Americas. Otherwise, their fundamental ‘liberties’ were being trampled on. The language of protest was not yet revolutionary. People saw themselves as defending their ‘liberties’ as ‘Britons’. But it led them to unite and mobilise for the first time against Britain.
The mobilisation occurred at different levels of society. At the top, delegates from the colonies assembled for a Continental Congress and called for a boycott of trade with Britain until the taxes were withdrawn. This approach made any action depend upon the small group of merchants who handled the trade.
But other forces also mobilised. Groups sprang up in all the colonies in 1765 and 1766 which called themselves the ‘Sons of Liberty’.
5
They were not made up of rich planters, large landowners, or even prosperous merchants, but of men who ‘occupied a place between the elite and the genuine plebeians’—‘dissident intellectuals, small intercolonial merchants and artisans’.
6
They were very similar to the ‘middling sort’ who had played such a key role in the New Model Army of the English Revolution. There was a tradition of popular protest and riots in the colonial towns. The Sons of Liberty acted almost as a political party, directing such ‘traditional crowd action toward the British question’ and serving ‘to generate new political consciousness among many ordinary Americans’.
7
The actions of the crowd went beyond a passive trade boycott. In Boston people demolished a building thought to be an office for selling stamps and attacked the house of a stamp distributor.
8
In New York they tore down the houses of those they saw as traitors and clashed with British soldiers stationed in the city.
9
The anger against the British was intermingled with bitterness against the elite which flaunted its wealth at a time of general hardship. Crowds attacked a theatre frequented by such people. ‘New York’s most radical paper, the
New York Journal,
dramatised the British issue, but it also carried essay after essay attacking the evils of high rents, rising prices and short employment’.
10
As any protest movement rises, action changes people’s ideas, and the change in ideas leads to more action. This was certainly true in Boston and New York in the 1760s. In New York people erected ‘liberty poles’ in protest at British actions. Each time soldiers destroyed them, new poles were raised. British government attempts to establish a new structure of tax collectors simply strengthened people’s feeling that they were being imposed on from outside. In Boston feelings rose to a crescendo in March 1770 when troops fired on a crowd which had thrown snowballs at them and killed five people—the ‘Boston Massacre’.
The British government retreated for a time, under pressure at home from many City of London merchants and the rioting London crowds which followed John Wilkes. It dropped all the new taxes except one on tea, and the American agitation subsided.
Yet that could not be the end of the matter. The resentment at any attempt to impose taxation was greater than ever among those who had experienced repression in Boston and elsewhere. Within British ruling circles the fear that the colonies were intent on pursuing their own interests regardless of Britain was also greater than ever. If they were not taught a lesson, disobedience would become an unbreakable habit and the whole point of having colonies would be lost.
From snowballs to musket balls
There are times in history when one small action can cause an explosion, just as a pinprick can burst a balloon. That small action occurred in Boston harbour in November 1773. An East India Company ship was delivering a cargo of tea, with which the governor’s sons intended to break the boycott against the remaining tax. While thousands protested on the shore, 100 activists dressed as Native Americans boarded the ship and threw the tea overboard.
Respectable leaders of colonial opinion were horrified. It was ‘an act of violent injustice’ stormed Benjamin Franklin.
11
But it found a powerful echo among those already bitter at the British government—and it was the last straw for that government. It appointed a General Gage as governor of Massachusetts, with a mandate to bring the colony to heel, dispatched troops to Boston and passed the Intolerance Acts which decreed that colonists breaking the laws would be hauled to Britain for trial.
The issue was no longer taxation. It was whether the inhabitants of the colonies would have any say in the laws governing them—as Jefferson put it, ‘whether 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain give law to four million in the states of America’
12
(conveniently forgetting that in his own Virginia, black slaves and many poor whites had no say whatever). All the colonies were threatened. There was a wave of outrage throughout them, and committees sprang up to give expression to it. The tea boycott spread, and the 13 colonial assemblies agreed to send delegates to another Continental Congress.
The people at the Congress were, by and large, respectable property owners. They had risen to prominence within the structures of the British Empire and had no desire to overthrow them. Given the choice, they would have preferred things to continue in the old way. But that was not an option. They called for a new trade boycott. But the severity of the measures taken by the British government meant that such a boycott could not just be left to the merchants. It had to be reinforced by the organisation of mass resistance. In every ‘county, city and town’, people had to elect committees to agitate against buying or consuming British goods.
13
This was not a problem for the planters of Virginia, who joined with Massachusetts in pushing for the boycott. They controlled all the structures of the colony apart from the governor. They could impose their will without disturbance. But elsewhere it raised a thousand and one questions.
In Massachusetts popular opinion was near-unanimous against the British measures. But judges in places such as Worcester county had decided to implement the new laws. What should be done? In New York many of the wealthier merchants profited from Britain’s imperial trade and were reluctant to follow the boycott, while the powerful landowning families would follow the lead of the British governor. Again, what was to be done? In Pennsylvania, much of the Quaker merchant elite would put ‘loyalty’ to Britain above the call of their fellow colonists. What was to be done there?
The call for committees to impose the boycott implied, whether the Continental Congress recognised the fact or not, the revolutionary replacement of old institutions by new ones.
Class and confrontation
In Worcester county armed farmers had to prevent the courts functioning, even though it meant confronting not British officials but local judges intent on continuing successful careers.
14
In New York City ‘carrying through the decisions that led to independence meant getting rid of…the old…authorities as much as it did breaking with parliament and the king’. The energy to do so ‘came from the “people”, both in the crowds and in the revolutionary committees’. It was ‘mechanics’ (artisans), meeting every week in plenary session, who pushed for the establishment of an ‘official’ committee, and then for the replacement of its Royalist members by ‘mechanics, traders and lesser professionals’.
15
In Philadelphia a meeting of 1,200 mechanics prodded younger members of the merchant elite into calling a mass meeting of several thousand to set up a committee.
The move from a ‘peaceful’ boycott to war also resulted from direct action from below. After British troops shot down parading militiamen at Lexington in Massachusetts, it was an artisan, Paul Revere, who made a famous ride to warn armed local farmers that a column of British troops was on its way to seize arms hidden at Concord, near Boston. It was those farmers who fought the British at the battle of Lexington and then descended on Boston to besiege the British garrison at Bunker Hill. In each case, members of the middling and lower classes had to push aside hesitant upper class people connected with the British establishment.