A Short History of the World (17 page)

Any joy felt by the thirteen British colonies at having rid themselves of the French threat was dampened by a royal proclamation in 1763, forbidding settlers on the continent to colonise Indian lands to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. The increasing dissatisfaction with British rule felt by frontiersmen, land speculators, and colonists in general, and the inability of the British to quell this dissatisfaction, became a tinderbox which would require very little to ignite it.
 

The Europeans Dominate India

The Seven Years War had also extended into India where the British expelled the French. The Mughals – a Persian rendering of the word Mongols – had ruled much of India since 1526, when the Muslim prince, Babur, who had descended from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, conquered northern India and defeated the Delhi Sultan at the Battle of Panipat. The Mughal Empire had seen its height under Babur’s grandson, Akbar, who through his enlightened views and religious tolerance became known as Akbar the Great.
 

The English had taken advantage of the stability of Akbar’s rule through the East India Company (EIC), a trading company founded in 1600 under Elizabeth I, that had been assigned a monopoly on all trade with Asia. The EIC rapidly focused on India after it became apparent that its attempts to gain a foothold in trade with the Spice Islands would be unsuccessful due to Dutch pre-eminence in the region. Why wage a spice war that they would probably lose when plenty of trade was to be had in India? This happened to coincide with a huge increase in European demand for cotton cloth made by Indian weavers, as it was inexpensive, washable and lightweight compared to the itchy wool that was ubiquitous in Europe at the time. Before long, the EIC had established trading posts along the Indian coast, with the main ones – Bombay, Madras and Calcutta - eventually developing into major cities in their own right.
 

When the Mughal overlords introduced a less tolerant form of Islam in the mid-18th century, they alienated many of the indigenous and majority Hindus. A number of regional states rose up and sought support from the British and the French, both of whom were richly rewarded for providing aid. It was the rivalry between the French and the English that allowed the EIC to extend its control over more and more of India.
 

The Hindu Religion

Hinduism is the world’s oldest existing religion. Although its origins are unclear, it is believed to have originated in or near the Indus Valley in northern India some 4,000 years ago and the vast majority of people confessing the faith are still found in India to this day.
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Unlike other major religions, Hinduism has no founder or prophets. Its adherents believe in a supreme God called Brahman who takes on many qualities and forms, represented by a number of deities that all emanate from him.
 

Hindus believe in reincarnation, an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth, driven by how one lived one’s previous life. According to Hindu belief, at some point mankind will learn from its mistakes and bring an end to suffering. This, in turn, will bring final salvation. For thousands of years Hinduism enforced a hierarchical and discriminatory caste system driven by superstition, tradition and religious beliefs, and this still lingers on today. It has even been suggested that the focus of fate within the caste system throttled initiative, and this may have played a part in the ease with which both the Mughals and the British managed to dominate India.

The French and the British fought each other several times in the 1740s and 1750s until the British, under Clive of India, decisively beat the French at the Battle of Plassey
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in 1757. The battle was important in that it allowed the EIC to gain dominance over the French in India. As a result of the war the Bengali treasury was forced to pay huge compensation, which further financed British expansion in India and allowed the British to put their own candidate on the Mughal throne. For the next hundred years, the EIC invested in the infrastructure of India, in the hope that such investment would facilitate trade.

The American War of Independence (1775-1783)

Despite the money flowing in from India, Britain nevertheless struggled with the huge war bills that came about as a result of the Seven Years War and the defence of its colonies in America became a burden. The British government sought various ways of getting its colonies to contribute to their own defence, from taxing sugar to requiring all legal documents to be stamped for a price, but it was forced to repeal several of these acts as the American colonies rejected taxes from a government in which they had no representation.
 

Ironically, it was the repeal of a tax, not its imposition, that caused the greatest conflagration. The EIC owed the British government taxes, but smugglers competing with the EIC to import tea into America caused the sales of tea sold through the proper channels to decrease. If the EIC were able to export tea direct to America, thereby avoiding the taxes it was paying in London, its price would diminish and sales of tea by the EIC would increase, subsequently decreasing the time it took for the EIC to pay its back taxes.

Concerned with how this would affect their business, the smugglers, with the popular participation of those opposed to British rule, dumped 340 chests of EIC tea into Boston Harbour in December 1773 as a sign of protest. The ‘Boston Tea Party’, as it became known, engendered a vigorous response from London, including the closing of the harbour and the dispatch of British troops to impose order and enforce obedience to parliament – a highly significant act for a population used to relying on the army for its defence.
 

In April 1775 the British army went to seize a cache of arms in Concorde, a small town near Boston, on the north-east coast of America. Shots were fired and the American Revolution began. Nobody had any idea that it would take eight years of brutal battle before Britain would recognise the independence that the American colonists declared on 4th July 1776.

The war lasted so long because neither side was willing to submit. In the end the British were defeated by a mixture of a 3,000 mile-long supply line, terrible winters to which they were unaccustomed, and sheer bad luck. The Americans on their side had been fortunate to have the brilliant leadership of George Washington, who went on to become the first president of the United States of America in 1789. To make matters worse, the French, the Spanish and the Dutch all declared war on Britain. Little did the British know that they would not see peace until 1815; little did the French know that their aid to a people at war with its monarchy would come back to bite them.
 

In the 1783 peace settlement that officially ended the war, the Americans received all the land between Canada and Florida east of the Mississippi. It is worth noting that while American territory doubled (and would double again when the Americans bought Louisiana from the French in 1803), at that point Spain still owned a larger territory in the Americas than the Americans themselves did.
 

Terra Australis Incognita

One unintended consequence of the American Revolution was a focus on the peopling of Australia. From the time of antiquity people had thought that Terra Australis Incognita – or an unknown land of the south – existed as a counterweight to the continents north of the equator. Already occupied by Aborigines for some 50,000 years, Australia had been cut-off from the rest of the world by rising sea levels after the end of the last ice age. It was not till 1606 that Europeans first became aware of the continent after a Dutchman, Willem Janszoon, landed on the west coast while seeking new trade routes to the East. However, he failed to realise that it was a separate continent.

In 1644 another Dutchman, Abel Tasman, explored the northern part of the continent and named it New Holland – a name the continent carried for over a hundred years. Tasman had also previously discovered New Zealand in 1642, which the Dutch had named Nieuw Zeelandia, most probably after the Dutch province of Zeeland, but Tasman never set foot on the island and the Dutch never followed up on this discovery.

The Dutch did not colonise Australia for two main reasons. First, they were more interested in trade with the established Asian markets; Australia seemed dry and barren, and so was predominantly used as a navigational aid in the journey from Europe to the East Indies, or otherwise as a stopping point to take on fresh water. Second, the 17th century was a time of war between the European powers and the Dutch had limited extra resources with which to colonise a new continent.

It was not until 1770 that the Englishman, Captain James Cook, having already claimed New Zealand for the British Crown in 1769, did the same for Australia, landing on the hitherto unexplored east coast and naming the territory New South Wales. When it became clear that the American colonies, which had previously served as a dumping ground for prisoners for many decades, were winning their War of Independence, Australia was soon promoted as a place for Britain to rid itself of its unwanted criminals.
 

In January 1788 a penal colony was set up near Port Jackson (later to be renamed Sydney after the British Home Secretary) to house the 736 convicts that had left England eight months previously. With the prisoners came a number of entrepreneurs seeking adventure and looking to take advantage of an inexpensive labour force. Thus began the proper settlement of Australia.
 

The indigenous Aborigines were treated like other peoples who had been discovered by European settlers elsewhere in the world – with murderous contempt. It was not uncommon for them to be hunted like animals, and many of them were wiped out further by European diseases to which they had no immunity.

It was not until 1840 that the Maori, the indigenous tribe of New Zealand, accepted sovereignty of the British Crown under the Treaty of Waitangi and became British subjects. Both Australia and New Zealand became a good source of wool and wheat to Britain, as well as providing men to support it during the world wars of the 20th century. Both countries remain tied to Britain to this day as part of the British Commonwealth.

VI

The Modern Period

AD 1780 - Present

The French Revolution (1789–1799)

The war that had helped the American colonies become independent from Britain also cost the French crown dearly; so dearly in fact that the French king, Louis XVI, was forced to look for new ways to raise money to pay for the costs of the state. Specifically, the king was keen to end the tax exemptions that the Church (the First Estate) and the nobility (the Second Estate) had hitherto enjoyed. When they refused to pay any tax, Louis called the nearest thing France had to a parliament, the Estates-General, which included the Third Estate of peasants, the middle class and urban workers, who between them made up over 95% of the population. When the Estates-General, which had last met in 1614, finally met in May 1789, it aroused great hopes of reform; at the time, the majority of the taxes were falling on the growing middle classes who hoped the parliament would give them a greater voice.
 

However, things did not go according to plan for the king. When it became apparent that the nobles and clergy held an unfair monopoly on voting rights, those who represented the Third Estate broke away to form their own National Assembly, taking up the slogan ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ and swearing not to disperse until France had a constitution that gave them the recognition they felt they deserved. At the same time a series of bad harvests had caused the price of bread – the staple diet at the time – to rise. The general challenge to the old order that had grown through the writings of French enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century only fuelled the revolutionary zeal of the people.

At one point, alarmed by rumours of an army gathering near the residence of the king at Versailles, outside Paris, the mob was urged to arm itself for its own defence. In an effort to gain supplies of guns and gunpowder, the mob stormed the Bastille, the main prison in Paris, on 14th July. While the prison held only seven prisoners at the time, the event served as a symbolic attack on the king’s authority and the date is generally recognised as the beginning of the French Revolution.

The king vacillated and gave in to the people’s demands to replace his army with their own militia. When he and his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, were marched by the mob from Versailles to central Paris so that they could be more closely watched, they realised that it was in their interests to flee. They eventually did so in June 1791. However, despite disguising themselves, they were recognised when only 20km from the border and returned to Paris, where they were duly imprisoned. The newly formed French Republic eventually executed the king in January 1793, and the queen suffered the same fate in October of that year. From that point onwards, ‘
the revolution in France had become war in Europe: not an old-fashioned, familiar kind of war between monarchs for territory, but a newer ideological war between peoples and kings for the ending of old institutions and the fulfilment of dreams of a new society
’.
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The reaction in Europe was one of shock: a king had been murdered by his own people. What’s more, the revolution threatened to expand beyond the borders of France. When Austria, ruled by Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, refused to return French émigrés whom France had accused of plotting against the revolution, France declared war. Fearful of the message of the revolution, nations across Europe joined forces in an alliance against France, beginning a war that would spread across the globe, cause terrible suffering and end only in 1815.
 

With the country surrounded by enemies, extremists rapidly gained power in France, and anyone who spoke against the revolution was declared an enemy of the people and sent to the guillotine. Ironically, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, two of the leaders of this movement of terror, were both executed in this way in 1794.