A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (31 page)

The basic causes of the crisis of the 17th century were never dealt with, and the old symptoms soon reappeared—immense expenditures on the imperial court, the spread of corruption through the administration, costly wars on the borders, increased oppression of the peasants by local administrators and tax collectors, a failure to maintain the dykes and regulate water courses, and recurrent and sometimes catastrophic floods.
¹⁵⁸
A new wave of peasant rebellions began with the rising of the ‘White Lotus’ in 1795, and one of the greatest revolts in Chinese history was to follow within half a century.

Mogul India

Mogul India was a very different society to China. It did not have the great canal and irrigation systems,
¹⁵⁹
a centralised bureaucracy inculcated with literary traditions almost 2,000 years old, a class of large landowners, or a peasantry that bought as well as sold things in local markets.

A succession of Islamic rulers had overrun much of northern India from the 13th century, imposing centralised structures on the local peasant economies of the Indian Middle Ages. The Mogul emperors developed the system, ruling through a hierarchy of officials who were given the right to collect land taxes in specific areas with which they had to maintain the cavalry essential for the military functioning of the state. They were not landowners, although they grew rich from the exploitation of the peasantry. There was also another landed class—the
zamindars
—in each locality. They were often upper caste Hindus from the pre-Mogul exploiting classes, who helped to collect the taxes and took a share for themselves.
¹⁶⁰

The great mass of rural people continued to live in virtually self sufficient villages. Hereditary groups of peasants would produce food for hereditary groups of village smiths, carpenters, weavers and barbers in a self contained division of labour that did not involve cash payments. All the elements of the medieval caste system remained intact.

But the peasants did need cash for their taxes, and had to sell between a third and a half of their crops to get it. Those who failed to pay, as one observer recorded in the 1620s, were ‘carried off, attached to heavy chains, to various markets and fairs’ to be sold as slaves, ‘with their poor, unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children in their arms, all crying and lamenting their plight’.
¹⁶¹

The great bulk of the surplus extracted from the peasants in this way went to the imperial court, the state bureaucracy and its armies. As Irfan Habib explains, the state ‘served not merely as the protective arm of the exploiting class, but was itself the principle instrument of exploitation’.
¹⁶²
Few of these revenues ever returned to the villages. The state used them in the cities and towns of the empire.

The result was a growth of trade and urban craft production, and a system that was far from economically static. The Mogul period witnessed ‘the achievement of an unprecedented level of industrial and commercial prosperity, reflected in general urbanisational growth’.
¹⁶³
There was an ‘intensification, expansion and multiplication of crafts’, and of both internal and international trade. ‘There were as many as 120 big cities’,
¹⁶⁴
and ‘great concentrations of population, production and consumption [in] Lahore, Delhi and Agra, and to a lesser extent in Lucknow, Benares and Allahabad’.
¹⁶⁵
Contemporary observers regarded Lahore ‘as the greatest city in the east’.
¹⁶⁶
One European visitor estimated the population of Agra to be 650,000,
¹⁶⁷
and Delhi was said to be as big as Europe’s biggest city, Paris.
¹⁶⁸

The biggest industry, cotton textiles, was exporting products to Europe by the 17th century: ‘As many as 32 urban centres manufactured cotton in large quantities’
¹⁶⁹
‘no city, town or village seems to have been devoid of these industries’
¹⁷⁰
and ‘almost every house in the villages used to have its spinning wheel’.
¹⁷¹
At the same time, ‘The organisation of commercial credit, insurance and rudimentary deposit banking reminds us of conditions in Renaissance Europe’.
¹⁷²

But one factor was missing to make this economic advance lasting—there was no feedback into the villages of the industrial advance in the towns. ‘So much is wrung from the peasants’, wrote one contemporary witness, ‘that even dry bread is scarcely left to fill their stomachs’.
¹⁷³
They simply could not afford to buy improved tools. ‘There is no evidence that the villages depended in any way on urban industry’,
¹⁷⁴
and so the growth of the city trades was accompanied by stagnation and impoverishment of the villages. In general, the city ‘was not a city that produced commodities for the use of society, rather one that devastated the countryside while eating up local produce’.
¹⁷⁵

The long term effect was to ruin the peasant productive base of the empire.
¹⁷⁶
At the same time as Shah Jahan was using the tax revenues to glorify Lahore, Delhi and Agra and build the Taj Mahal, an observer reported that ‘the land was being laid waste through bribery and revenue farming, as a result of which the peasantry was being robbed and plundered’.
¹⁷⁷
Peasants began to flee from the land. Habib tells how, ‘famines initiated wholesale movements of population…but it was a man-made system which, more than any other factor, lay at the root of the peasant mobility’.
¹⁷⁸

The cities grew partly because landless labourers flooded into them looking for employment. But this could not cure the debilitating effect of over-taxation on the countryside. Just as the empire seemed at its most magnificent it entered into a decline that was to prove terminal.

The effects became apparent during the reign of Shah Jahan’s son (and jailer) Aurangzeb.
¹⁷⁹
Many histories of the Moguls contrast Aurangzeb’s Islamic fanaticism, anti-Hindu actions and endless wars with the apparently enlightened rule of Akbar a century earlier, based as it was on religious tolerance and controls on the rapaciousness of local officials. No doubt these differences owed something to the personalities of the two emperors. But they also corresponded to two periods—one in which the empire could still expand without damaging its agrarian base and one in which that was no longer possible.

Eventually urban industry and the towns began to suffer from the agricultural decline—except, perhaps, in Bengal. In Agra after 1712 there was ‘talk only of the present deserted state of the city and the glory that existed before’.
¹⁸⁰

At first, few peasants dared challenge Mogul power. ‘The people endure patiently, professing that they would not desire anything better’, a European traveller reported in the 1620s.
¹⁸¹
Discontent at this time found expression in the rise of new religious sects. They used vernacular dialects rather than the dead language Sanskrit, and their prophets and preachers came mainly from the lower classes—including a weaver, a cotton carder, a slave, and the grain merchant Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism.
¹⁸²
The sects challenged the traditional Brahman-based religious ideology and stood for ‘an uncompromising monotheism, the abandonment of ritualistic forms of worship, the denial of caste barriers and communal differences’.
¹⁸³
But they also shied away from the language of outright rebellion. They taught ‘humility and resignation’, not ‘militancy or physical struggle’.
¹⁸⁴

This changed as the conditions of their followers worsened: ‘The sects could not always remain within the old mystic shell…They provided the inspiration for two of the most powerful revolts against the Moguls, those of the Satnams and the Sikhs’.
¹⁸⁵
By the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, ‘half-crushed Sikh insurgents’ were already a problem in the hinterland of Lahore.
¹⁸⁶
There was a revolt of the Jat peasant caste in the region between Agra and Delhi (one writer boasted that the suppression of a revolt involved the slaughter ‘of 10,000 of those human-looking beasts’),
¹⁸⁷
a great Sikh rebellion in 1709,
¹⁸⁸
and a revolt of the Marathas, ‘which was the greatest single force responsible for the downfall of the empire’.
¹⁸⁹

The fighting strength of the rebellions was provided by peasant bitterness. But the leadership usually came from
zamindar
or other local exploiting classes who resented the lion’s share of the surplus going to the Mogul ruling class. ‘Risings of the oppressed’ merged with ‘the war between two oppressing classes’.
¹⁹⁰

The merchants and artisans did not play a central role in the revolts. They relied on the luxury markets of the Mogul rulers and lacked the network of local markets which allowed the urban classes in parts of Europe to influence the peasantry. The old society was in crisis, but the ‘bourgeoisie’ was not ready to play an independent role in fighting to transform it.
¹⁹¹
This left
zamindar
leaders with a free hand to exploit the revolt for their own ends—ones which could not carry society forward.

As Irfan Habib concludes:

The way was open for armies from western Europe to begin empire-building of their own, and to have the backing of sectors of the Indian merchant bourgeoisie when they did so.

18th century

Chinese agriculture and industry recover for half a century.

Revolts by Sikhs and Marathas lead to break up of Mogul Empire in India.

Economic stagnation in much of eastern and southern Europe.

Peter the Great begins building of St Petersburg 1703, tries to introduce west European science and techniques to Russia.

Unification of England and Scotland 1707.

Defeat of attempted Stuart Restorations 1716. Agricultural revolution in Britain, spread of enclosures to almost all land.

British economy overtakes France and then Holland.

Voltaire publishes first philosophical work 1734, praises English system. Bach develops counterpoint and fugue form in music.

Battle of Culloden, defeat of final attempt at Stuart Restoration in Britain, bloody destruction of remnants of Highland feudalism 1746.

Diderot begins publication of
Encyclopédie
to popularise ‘Enlightened’ ideas 1751.

British East India Company takes control of Bengal 1757.

Rousseau publishes
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
1755 and
The Social Contract
1762.

Voltaire publishes satirical novel
Candide
1759 pouring scorn on optimism. Banning of
Encyclopédie
1759.

Execution of two Protestants in France 1761 and 1766.

‘Enlightened despotism’—monarchs in Prussia, Russia, Portugal and Austria try unsuccessfully to reform rule.

Growth of Glasgow as a major commercial and industrial city.

‘Scottish Enlightenment’ of David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith.

Britain defeats France in war over control of new colonial lands 1763.

Height of slave trade, growth of Bristol, Liverpool, Bordeaux, Nantes.

Slave population of North America 400,000 (out of three million) 1770.

Arkwright founds first spinning factory at Cromford in Derbyshire 1771.

Attempts at ‘scientific’ justification for racism—Long’s
History of Jamaica
1774.

Watt and Boulton build first generally applicable steam engines 1775.

Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations
preaches order based on ‘free labour’ and ‘free trade’ 1776.

Revolt of North American colonies against British rule, Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
popularises

Enlightenment ideas for mass audience.

Declaration of Independence declares ‘all men are created equal’ (but is silent over question of slavery) 1776.

Henry Cort devises more advanced way of smelting iron using coal 1783. Beginnings of industrial revolution in Britain—40 percent of people no longer living on the land.

Mozart’s symphonies and operas,
The Marriage of Figaro
1786,
Don Giovanni
1787.

The century and a quarter after 1650 was very different in most of Europe from the century and a quarter before. Religious wars, peasant uprisings, civil wars and revolutions seemed a thing of the past.

There were bitter wars between European powers, such as the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the 18th century and the Seven Years War in its middle. There were also struggles at the top of society over the exact division of power between kings and aristocrats in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Portugal. There were even attempts by supporters of the Stuart dynasty in 1690, 1715 and 1745 to upset by military means the constitutional order established in Britain. But the passions which had shaken so much of Europe through the previous period now survived only on its fringes. It would have been easy for anyone contemplating the world in the mid-1750s to conclude that the age of revolution had long since passed, despite the absurdities and barbarisms of the times so brilliantly portrayed in Voltaire’s satirical novel
Candide
.

Yet the central features of the period were a product of the preceding revolutionary upheavals. That one-time bastion of counter-revolution, the Habsburg dynasty, was a shadow of its former self, losing the crown of Spain to a branch of the Bourbons. By contrast, the two states in which the revolutionary forces had broken through, the Dutch republic and England, were increasingly important—Holland taking over much of the old Portuguese colonial empire and England then challenging this.

The second half of the 17th century is sometimes called the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. Agriculture flourished with land reclamation from the sea and the adoption of new plant types and farming methods.
¹
Industry reached an ‘apex of prosperity’ when ‘the Zaanstreek, a flat watery district just north of Amsterdam,’ emerged as probably ‘the most modern industrial zone…in all Europe’, with 128 industrial windmills permitting ‘the mechanisation of many industries from papermaking to rice husking’.
²

England began to undergo an ‘agricultural revolution’ in the aftermath of the civil war. Farming was increasingly commercialised and new crops were widely introduced—from turnips and potatoes to maize. There was a spread of capitalist farming and a great wave of ‘enclosures’—the fencing off of old common grazing land by landlords and capitalist farmers, forcing the mass of poor peasants to become wage labourers.

Industrial output also grew—by an estimated 0.7 percent a year from 1710 to 1760, 1.3 percent a year between 1760 and 1780, and 2 percent from 1780 to 1800. The proportion of town dwellers grew from about 9 percent in 1650 to 20 percent in 1800.
³
Initially there was widespread opposition in Scotland to the 1707 unification with England, but it resulted in a substantial and sustained growth of industry and trade. On visiting Glasgow 15 years later Daniel Defoe could describe it as ‘a city of business; here is a city of foreign and home trade…that encreases and improves in both’.
⁴

Industrial innovation began to gain a momentum of its own in the now united kingdom, laying the ground for the industrial revolution in the last quarter of the 18th century. The first working steam engine was developed in 1705 (although it was another 60 years before James Watt made it efficient enough to work anywhere but in mines). Iron was smelted using coke rather than charcoal in 1709 (although it was to be 40 years before it was of sufficiently high quality for general use). In the decades from the 1730s to the 1760s, successive inventors managed to break down the task of spinning into component parts and begin to mechanise them, with Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Arkwright’s water frame (1769), and Compton’s mule (1779).
⁵
Along with such great changes there were lesser, piecemeal changes in many of the older, mainly handcraft based industries: the spread of the stocking frame, the weaving of less costly ‘new drapery’ cloths, the introduction of the flying shuttle which doubled the productivity of the handloom weaver, deeper coal mines using more sophisticated equipment (coal output grew from 500,000 tons in 1650 to five million tons in 1750 and 15 million in 1800).
⁶

In the new climate of intensive competition for foreign trade, technical innovation was no longer a haphazard, accidental occurrence which took decades or even centuries to find acceptance, but a requirement for success.

Holland and Britain were not modern industrial societies. The majority of the population still lived in the countryside and the poor quality of roads meant it still took many days of uncomfortable travelling to journey from provincial towns to capital cities. They were nothing like modern democracies either. British governments were dominated by the great landowning aristocrats, who were usually able to decide how the lesser gentry and burghers who elected the House of Commons would vote, while the great merchants held similar sway in Holland.

Nevertheless, both countries were qualitatively different from what they had been a century, let alone two centuries, before—and qualitatively different from their European neighbours. The legal subjection of the peasantry to individual lords had gone completely. There were genuine national markets, without the hodgepodge of petty states which characterised Germany and Italy or the internal customs barriers that criss-crossed France. A very large number of people had some experience of urban life—fully one sixth of England’s population had spent at least some time in London by the end of the 17th century. Rural industries absorbed the labour of many people even in agricultural districts, and the sea ports and navies employed large numbers of the lower classes in occupations dependent upon trade rather than agriculture. London overtook Paris as the largest city in Europe, and although most production was still carried on by individual craft workers in their own homes or workshops, their work was increasingly coordinated by merchants or other wealthier artisans. There were ‘clothier’ entrepreneurs in the west of England employing 100, 400 or even 1,000 weavers and finishers, and with incomes greater than many of the gentry.
⁷

The great families who dominated governments were careful to adopt policies which kept the ‘middling’ traders, manufacturers and capitalist farmers happy as well as the large merchants. In the 1760s and early 1770s the burghers of the City of London agitated furiously against the aristocratic and gentry interests which controlled parliament and government, and their spokesman, John Wilkes, spent time in prison—but they had the backing of some of the great families and eventually managed to impose their will on the others without a need for revolutionary measures. The great ideological and political struggles of the 16th and early 17th centuries meant they had already won the most important battles.

Things were very different in the European countries where the revolutionary upsurges had been thwarted. For most of these the 17th century was a period of economic decline—of falling population as deaths exceeded births, of a contraction of the urban crafts, of low investment in agriculture as lords and the state between them took all the surplus and the peasantry wallowed in endless poverty (and in places suffered the ‘second serfdom’). Total agricultural output was probably lower in 18th century Poland, Sicily or Castile than it had been two centuries earlier. In Bohemia one person in ten died of hunger in the famine of 1770-72: such was the price of counter-revolutionary victory.

France, south western Germany and northern Italy were ‘intermediate’. They did not suffer the economic regression which characterised Castile, the Italian south and eastern Europe. But their agriculture and industry were more backward, on average, than England’s and Holland’s. Innovative farming techniques and capitalist relations spread in some regions close to large towns. There was some increase in handicraft production and even, in a few cases, the establishment of larger mining or industrial enterprises. Some ports oriented on Atlantic trade expanded considerably, especially on the west coast of France. By the 1780s, 20 percent of the French population were employed in mainly small-scale industry—as against 40 percent in England. Major parts of Europe were moving in the same direction on the road to industrial capitalism, but at very different speeds.