A Short History of the World (20 page)

For the British, the trade in opium and tea provided such significant revenues that they could not take this affront lying down. They responded by sailing into the port of Canton with several warships, easily defeating the Chinese with the aid of their modern weaponry and forcing the Chinese to open their ports to British trade. Furthermore, the Chinese were required to cede the island of Hong Kong and to pay an indemnity for the opium they had destroyed. All this was in addition to accepting the distribution of an addictive drug throughout their land. This did not go un-noticed in Britain, where a newly elected member of parliament, William Gladstone, wondered if there had even been “
a war more unjust in its origin, or a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace.
”

The humiliation of the Opium War shattered China’s false sense of superiority and encouraged the rise of anti-Manchu sentiment that had been simmering beneath the surface since the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At the same time, China faced a huge population increase and a number of natural calamities. Added together, this resulted in a large increase in poverty and unrest that ultimately provided the setting for China’s largest uprising and the bloodiest civil war in history.

Civil War in China (1851)

In 1851, a rebellion was launched by Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, chosen by God to establish a heavenly kingdom upon earth, with himself as king. He would rid China of evil influences, including Confucians and Buddhists, replace the corrupt Manchu Qing dynasty, and restore China to its past greatness. Slavery, arranged marriages, opium-smoking, foot-binding and torture would all be abolished. The era of ‘Taiping’, or ‘Great Peace’, had begun.
 

Hong Xiuquan’s version of Christianity soon attracted over a million people, urged on by the hope of improved social conditions, land distribution and the equality of women. As a sign of rebellion the men grew their hair long and became known as the hairy rebels. The civil war that followed lasted 14 years and claimed an estimated 20 million lives.

The rebellion almost toppled the Qing dynasty, especially when the dynasty became distracted by another opium war with the British and the French. However, it failed to achieve its objectives. The rebels had attacked Confucianism, which was still widely accepted in the country, they had alienated the wealthier classes by advocating radical reforms, and their leadership had been increasingly weakened by rivalries. The result was the division of their forces and the refusal of the Europeans to deal with them, unsure if their concessions would continue under the Taiping. Hong Xiuquan ended up killing himself.
 

After losing control of many parts of China to local warlords after the death of Hong Xiuquan, the Qing government realised that they would not be able to keep control unless they embarked upon some kind of modernisation programme. Students were sent abroad to study Western ways, factories were established according to Western models and Western science was studied. However, the forces of conservatism proved to be too strong for any major change to be implemented.

By this stage, several European powers had noticed that China was weak and seized the opportunity to gain territory at its expense. Russia was the first to take advantage, invading Manchuria in north-eastern China in the 1850s. France colonised present-day Vietnam and established a protectorate over Cambodia in 1864, and Britain gained control of Burma in 1885, incorporating it within India and taking Malaysia for good measure. The Netherlands took the East Indies. Japan, having been through its own modernisation programme, defeated China at the end of the century, forcing China to recognise Japanese interest in Korea and to cede Taiwan. For this and other reasons, the Chinese refer to the 19th century as the ‘century of shame and humiliation’.
 

Revolution in India (1857)

Almost immediately after the Crimean War of 1855, the British were faced with a serious rebellion in India. Since the arrival of the Europeans on the subcontinent, the interests of the local population had generally been subordinated to those of the newcomers. Christian missionaries had further challenged the local religions and way of life, unwittingly and unintentionally alienating a large percentage of the population. When the English army introduced rifle cartridges, allegedly greased with pig and cow fat, this incensed Muslim and Hindu sentiments respectively, and the resentment which had been simmering for decades came to a boil.
 

In 1857, a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey, the European-trained Indian armies mutinied in an effort to win back control of their own country from the British. Pledging allegiance to the Mughal emperor, they murdered the British inhabitants of Delhi, after which the uprising spread rapidly throughout India. Initially somewhat panicked, the British eventually managed to put down the rebellion as it lacked support and good leadership.

In 1858, as a direct result of the Indian mutiny, the British government abolished the Mughal dynasty that had by this time ruled India for 300 years. The emperor was exiled to Burma and the British government assumed the direct administration of India, a country with ten times its population. British rule in India prevailed over a good two-thirds of the country for the next 90 years in what came to be known as ‘the Raj’, a term derived from the Sanskrit term ‘raja’ which means King.

The British government installed a viceroy and dissolved the East India Company. India was too valuable to Britain, both in terms of providing raw materials and in terms of its size as an export market, to risk losing it. To avoid any doubt as to who ruled India, Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1877.
 

How King Cotton led to Civil War in America (1861-1865)

While the mid-19th century saw revolution and war in Europe, civil war in China and uprisings in India among other conflicts, America was also to have its own catastrophe, which stemmed from a clash between an increasingly industrialised North and a cotton and slave-dependent South.
 

In Europe, more efficient machines had led to growing demand for both raw and finished cotton – demand that the markets struggled to fulfil. Sensing huge profits, a large number of plantations in the deep South began to focus on cotton. Yet, while the cotton gin had solved the major problem of separating cotton from its sticky seeds, the cotton still needed to be picked. Basic maths by the plantation owners showed them that the more pickers they had, the more land they could harvest, and the richer they would become. As a result, demand for slaves, which had seen a decline in the late 18th century, skyrocketed. The slave population in America almost doubled between 1810 and 1830 and by the 1850s slaves made up approximately half the population of the four main cotton states.
 

By 1840, the United States produced more cotton than any country in the world, and the value of cotton exports exceeded the value of all other American exports combined, effectively financing America's early development. Cotton planters became some of the richest men in America. What they did not foresee, however, was that the emphasis on cotton and slavery in the South had led to a dangerous dependence on a one-crop economy and did little to incentivise diversification. The opposite was true of the North (where the climate would not support cotton), which had become increasingly industrialised and therefore less dependent on slaves.
 
As slavery became less and less acceptable globally, the South became more isolated, both nationally and internationally.
 

The slave trade with Africa had been abolished by the United Kingdom in 1807
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and by the USA in 1808. Despite this, existing slaves had not actually been not freed and an internal slave trade had developed within the states where slavery was prevalent; the ban on the importation of slaves had only increased their price. The election of Abraham Lincoln over a pro-slavery contender to the presidency of the USA in November 1860 was the last straw for the South. While the large majority of Northerners were indifferent to the issue of slavery – the emancipation movement was a vocal but distinct minority – it was enough of an issue in the south to cause major amounts of angst. Led by South Carolina, seven states left the Union and in February 1861, a month before Lincoln gave his inauguration speech, the Confederate States of America were formed, with Jefferson Davis as their president.
 

When Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, a Union stronghold on an island in the harbour of Charleston in South Carolina in April 1861, Lincoln had no choice but to go to war. He was determined to do everything in his power to prevent the country being split asunder. This held far more importance to him than the issue of slavery. Lincoln even wrote a famous letter in which he stated that he would keep slavery if it would end the war. Slavery was far from the only issue that got him elected in the North and most northerners who fought for the Union fought for preserving the Union, not freeing the slaves. Conversely, the large majority of Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders and had little interest in preserving slavery. They most likely fought because they viewed the Union armies as invaders. In many ways the Civil War was a battle of elites for economic power. Eleven southern states eventually joined the Confederacy, splitting the United States in two.
 

The North was in a stronger position from the start. It had a larger army as well as at least twice the population. It was also more industrialised, which meant it could produce more war materials, and had a better transport infrastructure, which meant it was easier for it to resupply its troops. The North also controlled the Navy, which proved significant in blockading the South and preventing aid and supplies from arriving from Europe. Despite this, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee led the South to a number of initial victories, even invading the North in 1862 and 1863.
 

However, Lee’s advance ended in July of the same year at the bloody three-day battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was here, several months later, at the dedication of a new cemetery to honour the fallen, that Lincoln made his famous ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ Gettysburg address, which is regarded as one of the most famous speeches in American history. Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s most senior general, who went on to become the eighteenth US president, took command of the Union forces nine months after Gettysburg and waged a total war against the South until it was brought to its knees. The war officially ended on 9th April 1865 when Lee surrendered to Grant. Lincoln was assassinated five days later, at the age of 56, by a Southern sympathiser.

The Civil War was the most catastrophic event in American history; more than 600,000 Americans died, the majority through disease, a greater number than those who have died in all other American wars combined, and more than the American losses in both the First and Second World Wars. Hundreds of thousands were also wounded. The South was destroyed and the period of reconstruction that followed lasted over ten years. The economic devastation lasted much longer, well into the 20th century. The war did, however, end the debate over slavery.

The Expansion of America (1783–1867)

American independence had been accompanied by a huge growth in population, doubling to eight million between 1790 and 1814, and subsequently increasing to 23 million by 1850.
 

Much of this latter growth had come from an influx of Europeans seeking to escape Europe after 1815 and attracted by the almost unlimited demand for labour in an expanding economy. A substantial number of Irish arrived in America from 1846 onwards in an attempt to escape a terrible famine that occurred between 1846 and 1851 as a result of the devastation of Ireland’s potato crop. The result of this influx of people was an economic boom that led to the major westward expansion of the United States.