How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (60 page)

Medicine

For centuries, sub-Saharan Africa was superbly defended against Western intruders by a microorganism to which native-born Africans were largely immune. Beginning with a Portuguese expedition to explore the Congo River in 1485, Westerners had to abandon one exploration of Africa after another because of appalling death rates from malaria. For example, in 1832 the British merchant-adventurer Macgregor Laird sailed a steamboat up the Niger River. Of the forty-eight Europeans aboard, only nine returned—the rest having died of disease, mainly of malaria.
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Of eighty-nine English missionaries who went to West Africa between 1804 and 1825, fifty-four died and fourteen went home in ill health.
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The historian Philip Curtin reported staggering death rates of 48 percent for British military personnel stationed in Sierra Leone between 1817 and 1836 and 67 percent for troops assigned to the British installation on the Gold Coast.
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No African military defenders, no matter how well armed and trained, could have imposed such losses. Africa was effectively invulnerable.

Then came quinine. During the seventeenth century Jesuits in Peru had discovered the effectiveness of the bark of the cinchona tree for treating malaria (the bark is a natural source of quinine). But few European physicians accepted claims made for the effectiveness of the ground bark, and for many years an amazing array of quack treatments were preferred. Only in the 1830s did clinical tests by French army doctors demonstrate quinine’s effectiveness. Soon cinchona bark became a major export from Latin America, rising from two million pounds in 1860 to twenty million in 1881.
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With the widespread use of quinine, sub-Saharan Africa no longer was the “white man’s grave,” and the rush to colonize the entire region began.

There were, of course, a number of other diseases that deterred Western colonialism in Africa and Asia—sleeping sickness and yellow fever among them. These, too, were overcome by Western medicine.

Steamships

To colonize the world, Westerners needed to be able to get there and back in some reasonable time—and usually by sea. In the days of Francis Drake, it took a long time to sail anywhere. Galleons such as Drake’s
Golden Hind
were doing very well to attain speeds of five miles per hour. Even then, sailing ships could not sail directly toward their destination but had to keep tacking owing to the direction of the wind. They also could expect to be delayed by periods without wind, or to be blown off course by gales. In this era, a trip from England to India took from six to eight months. Worse yet, even the largest sailing ships were relatively small—the
Golden Hind
was only a hundred feet long.

Although the British and the Portuguese managed to sustain colonies in that era, colonization became far easier when steam engines began to power oceangoing ships. Even more important was the introduction of the screw propeller to replace paddle wheels. This revolution in voyaging began in 1843 with the launching of the SS
Great Britain
. That steamship not only featured a screw propeller but also was built of iron and was 322 feet long. The
Great Britain
could steam at twelve to thirteen miles per hour and sail directly toward her destination. In 1845 she crossed the Atlantic in fourteen days (compared with about sixty-five days for sailing ships). The globe was now much smaller.

Although private entrepreneurs were responsible for these innovations, Western navies soon joined in. In 1869 the British Admiralty launched HMS
Devastation
, an ironclad ship that was 307 feet long and was powered by two steam engines turning two screw propellers. It had an armor belt twenty inches thick around its waterline.
Devastation
mounted two heavily armored turrets, each housing two twelve-inch guns firing six-hundred-pound shells, as well as many smaller guns. This heavyweight could achieve a speed of sixteen miles per hour.
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Devastation
was only the start of what became a frantic arms race. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia constructed fleets of battleships, as did the United States and, to everyone’s surprise, Japan. The ships rapidly got bigger, faster, and more heavily armed. On May 27, 1905, the Russian fleet, having sailed halfway around the world, gave battle to the Japanese
fleet off the Pacific coast of Siberia. All ten of the Russian battleships were sunk or surrendered, while no Japanese ship was even badly damaged.

The very next year, however, the British made all other navies obsolete as they launched the HMS
Dreadnought.
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She was 527 feet long, built entirely of steel. Propelled by four screws, each driven by a steam turbine,
Dreadnought
could reach a top speed of twenty-four miles per hour. Her battery of ten twelve-inch guns had an effective range of more than three miles. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Britain had twenty-nine battleships of the
Dreadnought
class. The Germans had sixteen. But the only sea battle to take place—off the coast of Denmark, near Jutland—was inconclusive as neither the Germans nor the British were willing to commit to a full-scale fight.
¹⁷

Of course, World War I was not a colonial war but a war among European nations (partly over which ones would have the better colonial empires—the Versailles Treaty stripped Germany of its colonies). Battleships were built for such a war, but for gaining and dominating colonies, much smaller vessels able to sail up rivers played the critical role.

Gunboats

China had long imposed severe limits on Western trade and contact, restricting Western merchants to small areas in a few port cities. In fact, Westerners might have been excluded even from these ports had it not been for the Europeans’ overwhelming naval power. Eventually some British officials realized that steam power held the key to penetrating China’s major rivers. With their fleet of large sailing ships unable to navigate rivers well, the British in 1839 began construction of a revolutionary ship called the
Nemesis
. The Scottish shipbuilder John Laird had developed a new technique to bend iron plates and rivet them together to build iron ships (as opposed to ironclad ships, which were built of wood and then armored). The
Nemesis
was the first iron ship to carry guns. Powered by two steam engines, she was 184 feet long and 29 feet wide but had a draft of less than 5 feet, even when fully loaded, making her ideal for navigating on rivers.
¹⁸
In January 1841 the
Nemesis
went up the Pearl River, just below Canton, and laid waste to a whole series of Chinese forts, sank a number of Chinese war junks, and asserted British invincibility. When the Chinese refused to sue for peace, the British brought in more gunboats modeled on the
Nemesis
. This flotilla sailed up the Yangtze River in 1842, devastated Chinese opposition, and imposed a peace treaty on the Chinese court.
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Western gunboats, including several American vessels, patrolled the Yangtze for the next century: in 1937 Japanese planes bombed the American gunboat USS
Panay
, which was anchored near Nanking. Gunboats also played an important role in penetrating Africa and on the Ganges River in India.

Rapid-Fire Small Arms

In 1898 the British writer Hilaire Belloc summed up Europe’s immense military superiority over the rest of the world:

Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not.

The Maxim gun was the first modern machine gun. Invented in 1884 by Hiram Maxim, an American who emigrated to Britain, it was water-cooled, belt-fed, and capable of firing six hundred rounds per minute. In the Battle of Shangani in southeastern Africa in 1894, fifty British soldiers with four Maxim guns mowed down five thousand Matabele warriors armed only with muzzle-loading rifles and spears. Even so, the Maxim gun and other advanced weapons played a secondary role in the spread of European colonialism. A tiny company of British troops armed only with single-shot rifles had been almost equally lethal against the Zulus fifteen years before.

The real breakthrough had come with the invention of the breech-loading rifle in the 1820s. Rather than pouring powder down the barrel of a musket, followed by a paper wad jammed in with a ramrod, then a lead bullet, and then another wad, the soldier loaded the new rifle by opening the breech (the rear portion of the barrel) and inserting a paper cartridge containing both powder and bullet. This dramatically reduced reloading time and allowed the soldier to reload while kneeling or even lying prone. Breech-loading rifles could produce many volleys while muzzle loaders produced one. According to the social scientist Daniel Headrick, the breech-loading rifle was as superior to the musket as the musket was to the bow and arrow.
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Then, with the invention of the brass cartridge in 1866, repeating and rapid-fire weapons became possible. One Maxim gun was the equivalent of three hundred riflemen firing twice a minute.

Telegraphs and Cables

Until modern times, slow communications were the bane of organized social life. Word of an invading army often did not arrive much before that army marched over the horizon—messengers not being able to greatly outpace the invaders. It is worth noting that modern marathon races are 26 miles and 385 yards long because that is the estimated distance covered by the Greek messenger Pheidippides in 490 BC when he ran to Athens to bring word that the Greek army had defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. It is said that he gasped out “victory” and then collapsed and died.

Slow communications long hindered colonialism. British officials in India could expect to wait at least a year for an answer to a letter sent to London. In the United States, during the War of 1812 fighting continued in Louisiana for some weeks before the combatants received word that a peace treaty had been signed. Then, in 1837, the American Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) invented the telegraph.

It was already well known that an electrical signal could be sent over a wire when Morse, a Yale graduate and successful portrait painter, became interested in this phenomenon. The problem was that a signal could not be sent very far over a wire—only a few hundred yards—before it dissipated. Morse invented the relay, a mechanism that repeated the signal. With repeaters inserted along the wire, there was no longer any limit on the distance a message could be sent. As for the message, this was no telephone wire—you couldn’t talk over it. All you could do was interrupt the electrical charge sent along the wire. Morse turned this into a message-transmitting signal by using shorter and longer interruptions of the electrical charge—the famous dits and dahs of the Morse code. For each letter of the alphabet, Morse designated a code group: A = dit, dah; B = dah, dit, dit, dit; and so on to Z = dah, dah, dit, dit. With this code, it was possible to spell out any message. Soon operators became so skilled that they could send messages at a rate of about forty words per minute—the record is seventy-five words. Morse named his system the telegraph. Soon telegraph lines stretched from one major city to another, in Europe as well as the United States, and messages were flowing, each for a modest charge.

But that did nothing to speed up communications across the oceans—messages between London and India still took six months or more each way. Then, in 1850, the Brett brothers laid a cable across the English
Channel. Highly insulated to protect against water damage, it continued to work until well into the twentieth century.
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A rush to lay submarine cables began: one was laid across the Atlantic from Britain to America in 1857–58, and an incredibly long series of cables was laid from Britain to India in 1859, at the staggering cost of £800,000. But when the cables to America and to India failed, the British government appointed a committee to solve the problems of submarine cables. Headed by the illustrious physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), the committee quickly overcame the difficulties involved, and the rush to lay submarine cables resumed. By 1865 London was linked by cable with both India and the United States. Soon thereafter Britain was linked to every outpost of its huge and rapidly growing empire.

The Age of Imperialism

The Age of Imperialism was shorter and more recent than many realize, coming to full flower from 1870 to 1914.
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As for the extent of Western imperialism, the prominent historian D. K. Fieldhouse observed that it is “easier to list the few places which were not and had never been under European domination than to name those which were. Turkey, parts of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Siam, Japan, a number of small islands, the Arctic and the Antarctic.”
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Everything else was either part of the West or a colony. Even some of the places that weren’t actual colonies were subject to a considerable degree of Western control—China being a good example.

By the nineteenth century few European nations actually qualified as colonial powers. Spain’s once-immense holdings in Latin America were long gone. Having lost Brazil in 1822, Portugal had only a few bits of Africa, and Belgium had just one colony, the Congo. Germany and Italy did not acquire their colonies until the 1880s, most of them gained during the partition of Africa. In contrast, the Dutch colonies were spread around the world, their most important ones being in Asia. The French Empire came to be second only to the British in terms of area, even though the French had lost or sold all their North American possessions. The French held Indochina, invaded Algiers in 1830, and during the 1880s gained most of northwest Africa. And then there was the enormous British Empire.