Response to Moshin

Thanks for your interest Moshin. The original lectures come from Professor Jeremy Alderman of Princeton University from his class "The History of the World: from 1300 to Present" taught on Coursera from Sept to Dec of 2012. Of course he owns the copyright to the lecture notes. That being said, I have downloaded them and I will put the most relevant portion (lectures 9 and 10) below. If you are interested in the full set - you may want to join the Coursera course if it is offerred later this year. 

 

Also, the notes are themselves not fully edited, and in the process of writing the essays, I have modified the format of the originals quite a bit - I can't guarantee that they are fully accurate. Also, outside the context of the class, these are probably not materials intended to be cited in a scholarly context.

 

Enjoy!

Lecture 9 – Segment 1

 

In 1767, a man called George Washington wrote a letter to another man, and he said the following: Any person, wrote George Washington, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and, in some measure, marking them for his own, that means establishing that this man owns this good land. In order, let me start again. Any person who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and, in some measure, marking them for his own, staking them out for himself, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it. These were prophetic words. George Washington was capturing the mood of a time, a time we might call the first great land rush, in which people around the world would, in a frenzy, turn frontiers into assets. Now we've seen this happen before in this course, we talked about the spread of the mulberry and rice frontier in Southern China, the ways in which land that had belonged to Indians was turned into sugar plantations. There were precursors before, land rushes before. But from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, this land rush became global. It was of truly global proportions, and it would affect frontier lands all around the world. For those of you from Virginia, I want to bring your story into global history, because Virginia, when George Washington was a man from Virginia, was a harbinger of things to come. Here is a map of the colony of Virginia, once much, much larger than it is now. We have to recall how immense Virginia was. In fact, it's boundaries in many respects was unclear as you pushed westwards, it's only now about 40 percent of it's original size, but Virginia was the incubus for land hunters. That's how George Washington imagined himself. I repeat. Those who neglect the present opportunity of hunting out good lands. Those are Washington's words. But of course Virginia was important for this global enterprise, its biggest agent was a firm called Fairfax Proprietary, which hired George Washington, and others, like Daniel Boone, to become land hunters. So before George Washington acquired a career or created a career as a, as a great revolutionary, or even as a planter. George Washington made his fortune by

speculating in frontier lands. A process that would gather in earnest in the 1750s, and sparking ongoing wars with Shawnee peoples, Mingos who defended Indian villages, yes, the village is still present in global history, trying to defend models of subsistence, self-sufficiency against the onslaught of this commercializing frontier, of turning land that the gods had given them into assets that could itself be bought and sold. So not only were books circulating on the commercial market, so were titles to land, carved up out of the landscape of the colony of Virginia, and this would happen in many corners of the globe and provoke resistances around the globe. Companies now were being created, now no longer necessarily state chartered monopoly firms, created though with the explicit aim to survey and divide the lands that would be taken from incumbent populations. One of the pioneering firms was the Ohio Company of 1748. And here we have an image of North America. If you look around the map of North America in 1750 you'll see how it was carved up by different European empires. New France, New Spain, the English colonies, and in some cases corporate colonies in, in the sense Rupert's land was in a slightly different legal category. That area around the Hudson's Bay. What I want you to notice though is a, an is important shift between the relationship between colonialism and corporations. The turn, that George Washington was identifying as important in the shift in European empires, he was a member of a European empire, we think of him now as an American Patriot, but let, going back in time of course, he was a subject of the King. What he saw was that empires were making a shift, from empires of trade to empires of settlement. Turning lands that belonged to villagers of incumbent populations into assets that could be bought and sold for yet another turn in the page in the development of an international division of labor. In some senses, anticipated by the ways in which Caribbean lands were being plowed under for sugar plantations. That model was now spreading like wildfire in the eighteenth century. Indeed, British North America was not the only place where this transpired. I've said that this is a global enterprise and it hit Africa in a big way. South Africa would become the destination for these land hunters. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company created its own colony. Corporations are creating colonies themselves. And began the process of settling South Africa with European pioneers. At the beginning, the company slapped on restrictions to its pioneers that it was shipping to South Africa, because it had its eye on the importance of commercial transactions with the Hohoe people, these were the native traders of South Africa, who were trading with the Dutch East India Company for profit. And the East India Company was introducing Dutch settlers to South Africa. So here you have an image of a, of a trader trading for livestock with the native population.As Dutch settlers moved in to South Africa, they began to press up against the lands of the Khoi people, and with time, the company lacked the resources, and the will. That's a political proposition as well. To defend the Khoi peoples from the European settlers.

And by 1774, the settlers were creating their own commando units, to protect their livestock and their farms. They were pastoralists in the main from the native peoples who were being pushed further and further into the interior. Creating their own armies, their self-defense units. And so, we see this very similar cycle, one that George Washington saw unfolding in the Hinterlands of Virginia and South Africa, of initial efforts to curb the settler appetite for land. But the inability to curb them, with the creation of local military forces, militias. George Washington would be the member of a militia. A local-level military force, in the service of the land grabbers. The land hunters. And these settlers in South Africa would soon call themselves, Trek Boers. Here we see an image of a Trek Boer moving into the frontier lands of South Africa. It could be an image, except that climate if a little different, that we might see painted at the same time in North America. Their self protection units did, in the end, much more than protect private property of the settlers. They also created property. These commando units not only defended pastoral lands from raids by African villagers, but they also created property, because they often took the Hohoe people and enslaved them. War in the defense of private property in these frontier lands sometimes became itself a commercial opportunity. In seizing lands, dispossessing the native peoples. The native peoples would fight back and would themselves be subjected to raids and enslaving expeditions. Everything that was once self sufficient, oriented, village based was being commodified. By the 1820's, the European frontier in South Africa reached as far as the orange river. And soon, the settlers were organizing expeditions that would plunge deep into the hinterlands of Africa. And these would be called treks. And so we see the initiation of a cycle, of interracial warfare in Africa, raiding of slaves, culminating in the creation of an Apartheid state after the second world war. And at the heart of this cycle, was land grabbing. And we see similar examples of this in Australia, New Zealand, Northern Mexico, Argentina, Canada. What was different about these inter sections of culture. Well now more than mixing, the kind of mixing patterns that we saw in earlier. European imperial enterprises, here we see land grabbing and excluding native peoples from sharing the imperial spaces and is very important for the Portugese and the Spanish and the Dutch and others, in that first round of imperial expansion before land was the target, mixing of people, the coexistence of people was extremely important for those empires, But the eighteenth century changes this dynamic, and we begin to see a more exclusionary model of expansion, driving incumbent peoples out of the lands where they once lived for the creation of neo-Europes. And this process is going to intensify in the nineteenth century. So George Washington was part of a globalprocess. Between 1750 and 1900.Between 1750 and 1900, between 1.5 billion and two billion acres of the world's most arable land and pastures would be newly exploited. I repeat that figure. 1.5 to two billion acres, would make the passage from being in a sense, untilled lands to being cultivated lands. Submitted to the routine process of cultivation, of crops. Of, of pasture land for hides and meat. For commodity production. These neo-Europes would bring to a new level the logic of a new international division of labor. In the specialization of commodities for other people's production by commodifying land itself and excluding the people who lived there before. What does this mean? Well, this means among other things the transformation of the European diet. Now we've moved, from, the idea of preciosities, being shipped aboard vessels on the backs of camels. The only things that, could be transported long distance, because of their, their, their, value-to-bulk ratio were preciosities. Now, suddenly grains, meats, hides. These bulky, low-value commodities could be moved around. Fibers, for clothing. So Europeans eat differently, they eat meat. They ate grains. They would clothe themselves in wool and in cotton, which increasingly came from the neo-Europes of the world. Resting on a change from negotiating and diplomacy inside the conquering enterprise that negotiating and diplomacy with incumbent now to outright seizure and dispossession of incumbent property. So George Washington was a famously effective land grabber and speculator. For the possession of land, for commodity production, and creating a sideline, to sideline the diplomatic efforts of imperial states and treaties, now designed to favor this process of land grabbing. So let's pause here for a minute. I want you to consider the ways in which Europe has now turned the wheel in some fundamental way. Have we come full cycle, in a sense, from plunder to possession?

 

Lecture 9 – Segment 2

 

Adam Smith called those worlds, the neo Europes were occupying wastelands. Wastelands in the sense that they were their potential was all latent. And it took the pattern of colonization, settlement, privatization of these lands to turn them into to productive assets. The transformation of wastelands into fertile, arable lands was a kind of ecological windfall for the Americas, in this same, from the Americas for Europe. In the same way that silver had been a windfall in an earlier cycle of European expansion earlier. The product of conquest and colonization of the Americas although in this case it spread, it was a model that spread to Africa and beyond. It created radically new opportunities to improve the diet and expand markets that would shape everyday life in Europe. And it was the backdrop to a phenomenon that would later be called the Industrial Revolution. That's a misleading term. I'm going to warn you because in some senses the revolution was neither particularly industrial, nor was it particularly revolutionary except at the end of the process. So, one of the things I want you to think about is we go through the segment and later in your reading and, and in the exercises is to consider how appropriate the idea of the Industrial Revolution was for the cycle I'm about to describe. But, we see none the less, a transformation. And this is why it's not just industrial. A transformation, not just in the making of manufacturers. And I already alluded to that, in an earlier lecture when I described, the production of cotton, textiles and books itself, the specialization, and the, the tasking of the division of labor. But this was not just applicable to manufacturing, it was applicable to transportation, to agriculture, to services. It was taking place in all, sectors, of the European and the neo-European economies. Agriculture indeed underwent a series of powerful breakthroughs. It was also much more prolonged, these transformations than something that happend in any given year. The transformations that we're talking about were also in some fundamental way very incomplete. It would take much longer and it was much more uneven than the earlier historians who imagined a big break with the industrial revolution ever thought. But what's crucial about the cycle, none the less, I want to point to a few basic elements here. What's crucial is an innovation, in the cycle, in, an innovation in the cycle of the ways in which people harnessed energy. In a sense the transformation began with the windmill. Around the year 1200 it populated the landscape of northern Europe and would culminate with James Watt's steam engine, in the 1770s. Energy from wind to cold. The cumulative effect of this switch from the humble windmill, now that we're going back to windmills, when I think about this issue about the renewability of energy sources, but this switch from organic to inorganic technologies was a powerful one. A movement away from reliance, on plants or animals for energy source and ultimately animals relied on plants as an energy source to keep themselves going and that's was important here to realize that we were still talking about really primitive use of energy source but there is some movement of foot behind the scenes moving away from plants and animals for the use of production to mining stores of energy in minerals. Two basic breakthroughs to bear in mind. One is that, the organic world, in the organic world all outputs are drawn from the system that require equivalent inputs. If you look at this image of the farmer, with his horses, pulling his agricultural device, those horses require energy that they consume by eating in the fields, foraging and so forth. And their output of energy is in equal proportion to the amount that these animals are able to consume. For every pound of nitrogen taken from the soil for agricultural purposes, it has to be balanced by a pound of nitrogen, taken from the air, and restored to the soil. Later, we would figure out ways to embellish the cycle with fertilizers. But for the time being, we had to find ways to get the nitrogen, nitrogenous material floating out there in the atmosphere and get it back into the soil so that plants could draw it up and be eaten by animals that could pull tools. This is how the system worked. So there was a fundamental limitation to this organization of energy use. The inorganic world would free humans from the necessity of this basic balance. There was therefore fewer and fewer potential constraints on output. Now I say potential constraints because eventually centuries later we would become aware that our drain of the accumulation of the reserves of the energy sources from the globe, would present certain constraints, climate change for instance. That not all resources were inexhaustible in supply. That will come later. But for the moment the discovery that taking energy that's accumulated under the ground in the form of minerals like coal was a way of breaking the natural balance that had to be observed. Second, is that improvements in production methods in this new inorganic world was much easier. Speeds could be controlled once you could harness energy in this new way. Variables were easier to manipulate and the result was a massive upturn in productivity growth rates and this was clearest in the production of cotton textiles. The production in Britain cotton textiles between 1770 and 1790 in two decades alone, the output increased tenfold. While the price, of cotton textiles, decreased by 90%. In other words, we were able to increase our output and decrease the price at the same time. And one way we could do this was by being able to harness new cheaper sources of energy that could break this renewability cycle that was required under the old regime. And it's that, that leads to the breakthrough in manufacturing. This image of the cotton mill captures the new age of the time. In fact look at the balance of forces. So, Dan, I'm going to, if you stick on this, I'm going to flip back and forth between these two slides. I want students to pay close attention. Look at the balance between the relationship in this scale between men and machines. Is a proportionate size of this device to men compared to this one. One Of the hallmarks of this age is now the use of energy could be harnessed to drive machines that could greatly augment, the productivity of a single man. And the factory. Combined, this new use of energy with this new technology. Intensifying that internal division of labor that I talked about. Remember the pin factory from, Adam Smith? The printing press of the encyclopedie. Now, attach all of that to new energy sources and new machines, deepening the specialization of text and you have a productivity revolution. And this is going to have profound effects on the international division of labor. Remember, I've been trying to connect this local internal close-up division of labor to what's happening globally. First of all, in the demand for new commodities, inorganics, a vast expansion of mining and fuel industries, coal and eventually oil, had to be gotten very often from very far away. So, now you have a whole sector of the economy devoted to finding energy. So, demand for new commodities, also the supply as a result of these cheaper staples. The production of these Neo-Europes meant cotton could come from the US south, food could come from the Caribbean, wool could come from Patagonia, cotton could also come from Brazil, and Egypt. All of this meant a transformation in the supply of those basic goods that went into producing the clothes that we wore that would be produced on machines that one man would operate. And third, out of Europe would emerge. As a result of this revolution, cheap cotton goods. New commodities that were unimaginable a few generations earlier which themselves could be exported. Europe used to rely on precious metals and other commodities to export to Asia in return for those priced commodities from Asia. Now Europeans could produce this kind of stuff. Alright? And in order to sell this cheap stuff they had to find markets. Markets to sell cotton textile. And as cotton textiles would be carried aboard European vessels back to other corners of Afro-Eurasia, they had to compete with local producers of textiles. Suddenly local artisanal cotton producers, I could take you back to an image from an earlier lecture, had to compete with this new, cheap, manufactured cotton producers. What we now think of as the threats and dangers of globalization, in some senses began a long time ago. And the beginnings of a new international division of labor where countries or regions specialize in the production of manufactured goods and other societies specialize in the production of primary staple goods and exchanging with each other in a new international division of labor. This is a new pattern of inter dependence so what mainly restricted to work to how states interacted now we see that much more profound. So, lets pause here and I wanted you to consider In what ways does this do, do this new global international division of labor reflect a new internal local inter, , division of labor. What, in what ways do we see the global division of labor and local division of labor reflecting each other.

 

Lecture 9 – Segment 3

 

So, the result of all of these compound forces and pressures on empires around the world intensify the stakes of global competition and heighten then, the cycle of mercantilist wars. The result was, in the end, a cascade of revolutions of all sorts. In a way, the globalization of empires across the world meant the globalization, of warfare. And this was clear along all of the borderland areas that we've been talking about here, from the Saint Lawrence to the Ohio River Valleys, to the river Plait in South America, India, Africa, all of the contested zones. But in particular, the areas where the Neo-Europes, those new model colonies began to brush up against each other. Those became the most fraught regions for these global empires. Well, the escalation of global wars inevitably meant a global fiscal crisis. All of the states that got sucked in like a vortex into this global conflict began to suffer as a result. The turning point was what was really the first World War, I know I've been alluding to, you know, Valeria's laughing here because I keep wanting to bring it up. We're on the road, yes, to the first World War. This really was it, the Seven Years War that saw fighting from Manila to Montreal. In the United States, this conflict is called, known of as the French and Indian War. And here, you have an image of the kind of back country brutality that often characterized these colonial wars that we're talking about. So, the Seven Years War really was the first moment in which empires began, among other things, to swap colonies and territories as part of a peace process on a large scale. The result of the Seven Years War that ended in different parts but say, 1762, '63, was that there was a series of immediate losers. The first big loser was Canada. So, though that image I showed you earlier in the lecture of General Montcalm, General Wolf dying on the plains of Abraham, at that battle, new France fell to the English. And France passed its Canadian colonies, the biggest of them all physically but the population was very small, on to what appeared to be the immediate winner of this global contest, which was Great Britain. Spain too, would suffer as a consequence, humiliated in the war as a result of British occupations of several of its prime colonies including its huge naval stations in Havana and Manila. But, Spain and France would in a sense, wait for their moment to get their advantage on the British. And, of course, the British, though they won, one might say was kind of Pyrrhic victory because though they defeated their rivals, they immediately faced a challenge of how to fund the huge debts that they had incurred from the fighting. And, how to fund the support for this sprawling global empire. The result of the French and Indian Wars in the back countries of the colonies, was augmenting pressure back home in London to reform the empire along the lines that we've talked about when we were discussing the alignment, the enlightenment which was to apply these new rational criteria for governing empires, and among other things, was trying to get the colonies, these colonies, to pay for themselves, right? To stop the hemorrhaging of resources from the Metropole to pay for this contestation in the outskirts. And the result was, a series of tax hikes. We, we live now in an era where states are facing also a fiscal crisis, it's, the euphemism is, is a debt crisis. But, really it's, it's, underneath it all, it's a fiscal crisis that the revenues that you're bringing in, in Europe, now the United States around the world it's a hot button issue, are simply not enough to pay for the expenses, the re, that are going out to support your various services. In these days, back in the eighteenth century, it was largely military. And, we didn't yet have welfare states, we're going to get to that later in the course. Everywhere around the world, empires had to raise revenues. And even the victors, like Great Britain from the Seven Years War, began to raise taxes, particularly on the colonies to get them to pay for themselves. And when the colonies objected to these new taxes, and then revolted, here, this was the opportunity for Spain, and especially for France, to get their revenge for the humiliation during the Seven Years War. And one could argue, that the French and Spanish involvement in what would eventually become the War for American Independence was decisive in pushing a heavy thumb on the scale of history in favor of the revolting colonists, for what they did was bankroll what would become

the American revolution. They also offered, the British, sort of, the French and the Spanish offered to the American rebels who were objecting to taxes. They were objecting to the enforcement of old monopolies, like the defense of the monopoly of the east Asia, the East India Company's sale of Asian tea. The incident in Boston Harbor that every American schoolchild grows up learning about. This was the opportunity. And the French and the English, the French and the Spanish also offered direct military assistance, especially naval assistance which turned out to be crucial in the fate of the war. Especially after 1778, when the fate of the American Revolution could have been lost. What's important, though, from the British calculus was that they soon began to see the ways in which the French and the Spanish intruded on what started out as largely a local colonial conflict, was that the threats as a result of the globality of their empires, meant a menace in India, threats in Turkey, danger being posed by French and Spanish patrolling vessels in the slave trading ports all around the Senegal river in Africa. That Britain had to count, doing accounting of its struggles in British North America against the costs of having to defend itself in imperial outposts all around the world. Indeed, so much so, that Spain threatened to take back the Gibraltar at the tip of the peninsula which it had lost in 1704. In some respects, though, this was a war or became a war for American independence, it was part of a larger conflagration, and in some respects, the epic evens in British North America were not the main theater of this war. After Yorktown, the last really decisive fate and final battle in the war, what the British saw was that they were literally going to be bled to death in this conflict, as a result of the globalization of the colonial conflict. And a reminder indeed, at Yorktown itself, General George Washington had, at his command 16,000 troops at Yorktown, half of those were French. That's how important the French and Spanish factors were in the outcome of the conflict which erupted in 1776. What's more from a British perspective was the increasing fear that losing British North America or pressing on with the fight in British North America threatened loses elsewhere in the world, in Africa, Asia, and most especially in what was emerging as increasingly the priced possession, and this is why there is so much hysteria in London around the Hastings trial, India. So, what happened in 1776 nonetheless was the first of it's kind. Out of the imperial rivalries between the French, the English, the Spanish, the Portuguese and others, possessions would break loose beginning with the thirteen colonies of British North America which were, I would remind you, rather small at the time in the larger scope of things. And indeed, one of the remarkable tales in global history is the rise of this very marginal set of colonies to global prominence within a century and a half. Something we'll talk about more in future lectures. But the breakaway of the colonies, itself, invoked then a new historic model. It was not necessarily what the colonies had set out to do, they started in the defense of the rights of freeborn Englishman. It was a defense of the natural rights of freeborn Englishman against the caprice of parliament and King George [inaudible] and issuing what they believed to be unjust laws, fiscal laws. The result therefore, was that the American revolutionaries, without necessarily intending it to be this way, had worldwide repercussions. First of all, that the American Revolution created a whole new model of self determination. An idea that the people themselves were endowed with rights To determine who governed them. Secondly, very importantly, from the point of the view of the British, once they were thrown off, well, for the British and in a sense, the Americans, once the old British state constraints on the frontiers were

lifted. Remember, the Dutch and the British, in a sense, had acted to try to restrain colonists from scrambling to, to claim lands. They, to say, they did it in a not always completely devoted fashion to protect Indian villagers but nonetheless, tried to exercise some measure of diplomacy in managing the hinterlands. But with, with the British Empire withdrawn from the scene then, from the thirteen colonies, all that territory of Virginia, the Ohio Valley that we talked about earlier, was now that constraints on settler expansion were lifted. Second, from the point of view of the British, they no longer needed to have formal control over the colonies. With these constraints lifted, the British could themselves, look at their formal colonies like what would emerge as the United States of America, now in a sense as a partner. They didn't have to rule them directly in order to benefit from commerce and trade with their former colonies. They don't have to formally govern the colonies, they could get the best of what colonial possessions offer which was, commercial interaction without having to pay for the cost of fighting in the frontiers. What they let these new states of the United States of America conduct. Win-win proposition. Thirdly, very important, so number one, let's just go over these again. Number one, was a new definition of self-determination. Number two, was a new model of interaction between neo-European societies and the old motherlands that removed the necessity of formal control over the colonies in order to keep the commercial relationship. And the third, was part of a more general environment for thinking about freedom. Freedom, part about nation states and self government. But, there was also a profound transformation in these doctrines that had to do with personal liberties and personal freedoms. For women, to choose their husbands, increasing discussion about free will. Free will of women as well. And that became a source of some contest, contestation between men and women and whether fathers got to choose who daughters married. That the age of revolutions was beginning to spread a language of liberty in directions that people had not really intended or even imagined. And of course, the notion that slaves could be free of their masters. Within the revolution, within this struggle of colonists against what was seen as arbitrary authority of, of, of the imperial powers, within the revolution was a spreading slave insurrection. Across the plantation belts of the United States, slaves would flee the fields of those plantations where they worked before and even after the armies moved through. We know increasingly, historical research is revealing that there was an insurgency within the Civil War that the independent struggle was represented. There was a civil war within a global inter-imperial war. It's like an onion, right? You start peeling it and the conflicts compound and build on each other and get more complicated as you go deeper and deeper into it. The global inter-imperial war, a civil war within the empires. And then within it, an insurrection over the meanings of liberty and the extent of these liberties. So, let's put this into international context. We see, just to remind you, a civil war within a British Empire, within a larger chronic international conflict over territorial claims of sovereign nations. Before I pause here, let me just read to you a quote from James Madison in addressing the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. So, Mr. James Madison looking at this onion effect, alright? The onion effect, global and computer war, civil war within empire, insurgency behind the lines. It's very clear to him and he writes,

Carthage in Rome tore one another to pieces instead of uniting their forces to devour weaker nations of the earth. So, Carthage in Rome, not unlike Paris and London. The houses of Austria and France were hostile as long as they remain the great powers of Europe. England and France have succeeded to the preeminence and to the enmity and to the rivalry, and it is to this principle we owe, perhaps, our liberty. In light of James Madison, a Princeton alum, in light of James Madison's words, let's ask ourselves, as we take a break here. In what ways was the American Revolution a global event?

 

Lecture 9 – Segment 4

 

So, we might argue that the birth of nations like the United States, perhaps the first nation, was the effect of global imperial crises, not the cause of a global imperial crisis. This is really important for you to understand. So, I'm going to put Valeria on the hot seat here. Valeria, what do you think I mean when I say, that the birth of a nation is the result of an imperial crisis and not the cause?

>> Well if I think about what you told us last segment this increasing desire on the part of empires to rationalize the way in which they manage their possessions and the rivalries between empires might have forced unhappy colonial leads to think of a different way of living their lives, and approaching their governments.

>> Yeah, that's right. I mean, and in fact, I, I, the, the reason why I'm, I'm, I'm stressing this is I, I think because a lot of, let's say, nationalist historians, say, not global historians think that, that nations break away and become free because they're acquired some built up national identity and they want to be free from their colonial masters, alright? So, they, let's say, the American colonists began to feel themselves more and more like Americans and not as Englishmen and therefore declare their freedom and in declaring their freedom, create a crisis in the British empire. So, what I am trying to do is flip what we call, the causality, right? So, that, that, that, that, in fact, you have to see the global context to understand why to understand the course of events that would lead up to, as you put it, the colonists getting unhappy with the regime in which they were living. And the reason why I, I, I'm dwelling on this is, is because this is the story that happens in a lot of other theaters as well. So, it turns out, in some respects, the story of the freedom of the United States and the separation from the British empire had family resemblances to other events elsewhere in, but starting in the Americas. And they were going to see it begins to spread around the world. Let's move to some other theaters and see how this works. Because the British empire was not the only regime in a global crisis as a result of the war particularly, the Seven Years War. The French too were caught up, everybody was caught up in this global conflagration. But the French too, after all, not only had they lost the Seven Years War, but they had gone out and bank rolled the American colonists and their separation. Boy, did they have debt problems. They had such big debt problems that the king of France, Dan, can I put you on the hotseat back there? Who was the king of France on the eve of the French Revolution?

>> Louis?

>> Yes, very good, very good. Louis the XVI. Louis the XVI had a problem on his hands, alright? He had, his state was all but bankrupt. His state was bankrupt because, just to go back to the fiscal crisis, it was having to spend so much more not only to support its territories around the world, large standing armies at home. But it had huge debts now. We've been talking about the escalation of debt, right?And the role that merchant capital plays in global history. So, he's got a problem on his hand. What does, what does Louis do? Well, the first thing he does is convoke something called the Estates General. Actually, Dan, if we can zoom in on this one while I'm talking, so students can get a sense here that what's going on inside the Estates General is the representations of the people. Surrounding this grand assembly hall, the Estates General represented the different estates of French society that were being asked by the king to pay taxes, in the same way that the American colonists had been asked to pay new taxes, too, to pay off these debts. And there ensued, within the Estates General, a political debate about representation. Okay, so, when the colonists in, let's roll back a little bit, back in 1776 and they're protesting against British taxes, what's the line they use? Anybody? Dan, Valeria, one of you guys want to? What's the line that the colonists use in opposition to parliament's taxes?

>> No taxation without representation.

>> Very good. Very good. That's exactly it. No taxation without representation. We're going to come back to that line a lot. We'll call it Dan's line, alright? Okay. That's exactly what happened here in the Estates General, a debate about representation. The fiscal crisis broke open a whole new way of thinking about who participates in politics. Who gets to represent themselves and have voice on the public stage, as a result of, I will repeat this, a global crisis at the fiscal military state. Regimes built up over centuries around this old model called the Ancien Regime now get swept into the storm. The result eventually, of the conflict here, will be to bring down the old regime in France. So, just to repeat where we've gone here. Mercantilist empires spread around the world become, increasingly inter-competitive the rivalries intensify and be, becoming more competitive with each other. And as they become more competitive with each other, become more engaged in inter-imperial war. Particularly, as they have to scramble after territories, as a result of the land grab. And as they do that, they plunge themselves into this escalating war which requires them, it poses the question of how to harness resources from the people to support this escalation. One of the consequences of this series or the sequence of events is that the conflicts between and within regimes themselves become even more militarized. Let's add one more layer of complexity to the cascade of events that we're talking about and we'll usher in a whole new cycle called total war. And I'm going to talk much more of a total war in the next lecture, so if you are taking notes on this I, I just want you to, to keep the concept in the back ofyour, of your mind. I'll explain in more detail what I mean next time. But I want to use it here to draw a contrast to the previous pattern of warfare, in which combatants fought with each other over boundary lines over succession of dynasties. Wars were not meant to be struggles. They were not waged 'til the death of entire systems of peoples, but once the French Revolution, well, they actually had begun earlier, but the French Revolution brought it to a new level. Now, it was the whole concept of a regime, the whole concept of who constituted people that was at stake. Now, you were not just fighting over boundary markers, not this fighting over who got to be king or queen or who's going to marry who. Remember, the, well, I haven't mentioned these, but there was a war of the Austrian succession, a war of the Spanish succession, alright? Now, you fought over who was people, who the people were and how these people would share a new national identity. Total war harnessed people to the war effort by calling these people co-members of something called a nation. A nation of all peoples within, living within the territorial boundaries of the state. And by virtue of living within these territorial boundaries, they possessed rights. Rights to defend themselves, rights to defend their, their liberties. But in a reciprocal exchange, they were also, in a sense, duty bound to defend that nation, to defend the co-membership within this political community against any external or sometimes even internal threat. The entire people could be mobilized to fight this fight in the defense of, the rights of men or citizen. The result was a spread of a whole new doctrine, that's the flip-side of the rights revolution. We have rights to represent ourself. This is the Dan doctrine, alright? You know, I pay taxes. Well, I get to represent myself. I get to defend my natural liberties, alright? These are all inscribed in this new doctrine of liberty. But the flip-side is, it will also mean that in the defense of these rights, it's going to escalate the conflicts over who belongs to this political community. And it will lead to the concept of the death, war to the death of regimes and entire peoples. We will gather as a result of this, the notion of extermination in the name of waging a war to end all wars. A war to end all wars. By the nineteenth century, and I'm moving a little bit ahead, so you'll see where we're going. We are going to see the birth of the notion of ethnic cleansing. Total war and total war is in a sense, a new form of imperial war and it is going to culminate in a series of very powerful conflicts, particularly, as Napoleon would mobilize now the French people, alright? To uphold certain concepts, alright, against other regimes. In the West against Spain, and in the East, a series of devastating battles against Russia after 1814. Total war. Let's spend a little bit of time on thisimage of the concept was, this was a war against people. And as the French armies moved in to the Spain and got bogged down into Spain what was to become called Peninsular Wars, this famous image by Spanish painter, Francisco Goya, exemplifies now the ways in which, this was a war between peoples not between kingdoms anymore. So, kind of, what sorts of images jump out to you, Valeria, in, in, in this painting?

>> Well, I think it's an image of great violence. There is the people in showed there are mutilated.

>> Yeah.

>> And, and nude. And the caption underneath also is a little bit, it mocks the, the scene in a way because it says great feat with dead people.

>> Yes. The body is a site for war. It's a battleground, too. In total war, with people against people, and I'll come back to this in more detail in a later lecture. But, the people, themselves, become the site for the exercising of mass political violence. This war then, that reaches a climax in these Napoleonic wars under the Napoleonic empire that are described in the textbooks that I'm not going into detail are fought all around the world. Let's take three quick examples.

 

The first is Egypt. These are theaters then, places where this new concept of total war gets played out and begins to shake up, shake up geopolitical relations around the globe. Egypt. In 1798, Napoleon led an expedition of an army of 54,000 troops to Egypt. All along with I should say, a, a whole revenue of archeologists and scientists and artists and writers, I mean, Napoleon knew by this stage that when you, if you were going to go to war, let's, let's, let's write about it, let's create epics as we're going along. This was a PR stunt, okay and as off he goes to Egypt. He'd won a series of battles in Italy and he was spoiling for a fight. He wants to spank the British. And, in particular, he wants to cut off the route that the British have accessed, that they use as access to India. By then, the prized colony of the British empire, by controlling the choke point which was Egypt. And so, he sends his companies, this elites, this, this army to Egypt. But we can also see, and we could roll back to a much earlier lecture in a sense, and see the ways in which the lure of the orient affected his imagination, alright? Saw himself, as being able to go after a feeble empire, the Ottomans, alright? And finally, so, he wants to go after the British. He sees an opportunity in being able to, the British were sending their traffic through Suez. And he also wants to take advantage of what was perceived to be a weak Ottoman force there. And finally, it was also clear that the republic of France needed to be saved with, in a sense, new imperial foundations by creating new, these were not going to be colonies, these were going to be liberated territories, wherever they could. Now, why Egypt, though? Well, among other things, Napoleon would say, quote that great reputations are only made in the Orient, because Europe is too small. Now, he had initial success against the Mamluk armies. This is a very romanticized account of what is called the Battle of the Pyramids. And you can see the pyramids in the background to give it some epic properties. And there's Napoleon Bonaparte right in the middle. And it was as we've described in Clive's expeditions in, in Bengal it will also led to a fit of collecting and gathering of materials that would be shipped back to France as part of this public relations enterprise. In the end, it did not lead to a permanent French toehold in Egypt. And indeed, it set in motion a whole debate in the Middle East starting in the Ottoman Empire, itself, is how the Ottoman Empire was, itself, going to respond to the French threat by re-imagining itself as a nation. And we begin to see the origins of Turkish nationalism and Arab nationalism in the wake of the French occupation, very brief, of Egypt. And I'm going to come back to that in a later lecture. 

 

Let's switch to another example, another case, Saint Domingue. In this case, it's actually a formal colony of France's, it's in fact France's pearl in the empire. It is where slavery was wost, most widespread. 500,000 African slaves toiled on the plantations on the colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean. Well, when the French Revolution erupts, in the name of representation and a universality of rights, all people are born free. Slaves said, why not us? Why are we exempt from these universal laws? We're going to talk about these tensions over the Universality of the Enlightenment. And they claimed these rights for themselves in 1792. And so began within the French Revolution, an analog to what we talked about earlier with the Civil War and the British Empire and insurrection over membership in the political community of France, as slaves, too, would claim the rights that were ascribed to Frenchmen. We, too, belong to this political community argued. And by virtue of that, we too enjoyed rights. Among other things, to be free from white European masters. And by 1800, the island was covered with a slave revolt. There were efforts on the part of other empires to take advantage of this civil war or insurrection within a civil war within a global war on the island of Saint Domingue. All of them failed, and by 1804, the insurrectionists of Saint Domingue declared their freedom. Not, I, I should say, without a terrible amount of violence, desecration of bodies, one version of total war within a colonial war. The results was, among other things, a cascade effect on the slave trade as one by one, Europeans that intensified a debate among Europeans and North Americans, all across the Americas about the legality and, and justification of the slave trade itself. And so, it was in the wake of this revolution in Saint Domingue, starting with Great Britain in 1807, that the Atlantic slave trade was declared illegal. And so, we begin to see then with the United States, with Haiti after the Saint Domingue uprising of slaves, the ways in which those old models of commercial networks that pulled the Atlantic world together were beginning to break up, and it would effect also Latin America.

This is the third case we are going to look at, because France having lost Saint Domingue, once Napoleon had lost Saint Domingue in 1804, he had sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803 was losing in other parts, in a sense set his sights on the Iberian empires. If he could connect somehow the Portuguese and the Spanish empires to France, he could save his grand ambitions. And so he invaded Spain and Portugal. The result was setting off a debate within the colonies of Latin America over their loyalty to France and their loyalty to Spain and Portugal, which were now being occupied by French armies. In the ensuing debate, colonists, imperial officials, and even Subaltern peoples slaves, and Indians within the empire also participated within a widespread discussion over rights, over representation. And over who got them in these pluri-ethnic, multicultural societies that were enormously socially stratified. The result of these debates was widespread warfare. And one of the emerging figures in this warfare was, Simon Bolivar, known as The Liberator, who led like George Washington in the United States, a series of campaigns against Spanish armies. Here once more, was a war within a war, within a war, and among other things, Simon Bolivar recognized that eventually, the only way to win this war for independence in Spanish America was to begin to free the slaves. Not just free the slaves, but give them weapons to join his armies and become co-members of this entity called the nation. And of course, one of the difficulties was, in Latin America, how to determine who exactly belong to, to this nation. But we have, in the end, by 1821, '22, finally, the breakaway of the Latin American colonies away from their Portuguese and their Spanish motherlands. 

So, let's conclude. Several important effects of this age of revolution, first, was the birth of new concepts of political community, particularly of the nation itself. That the nation and the people within it had, in some senses, more expansive possibilities than the old empires that rested on traditional dynastic foundations. Secondly, was the birth of new concepts of liberty and citizenship.

 

And these things were, in fact, connected to each other. And that these were universal rights of liberty, because they were, themselves, popular. Because the people coexisted together in something called the nation. All of this meant that there ensued a discussion about modern politics, a discussion about inclusion at home, who belong to the political community in these new nations, in these new homes. And for those empires that were now sprawling around the world, once the questions of inclusion got put on the table, was also then the question of exclusion. And this would set the stage for the drama of the nineteenth century.

Lecture 10 – Segment 1

 

Well, you just interrupted our discussion that Valeria and I were having about the relationship between global war and, and, and total war. And what we were talking about was the ways in which the French Revolution changed the nature of imperial rivalry because now, total wars were fought over the very existence of the colonies within empires really ratcheting up the conflicts between them. So actually, why don't we go back to the, the image we had of, of Goya from the, promised you that we would that we would talk about more total war in this lecture. To go back to the image here because what Goya is, is capturing here and, and many other painters are going to do this at the time was to reinforce the point that wars are now between peoples, fought over peoples. And that the bodies were sights for political conflicts. That was not fighting over territory or, or dynasty. But we were fighting over the meaning of membership and society and who belongs to them. And this was very important for understanding the ways in which the balance of forces was going to change globally. Among other things, it would mean in the colonies a shifting balance between the separate populations in the neo-Europes and the incumbent populations. There had been a kind of standoff between the, the newcomers and the incumbents in, in, in a loose, not always very peaceful coexistence of these different peoples in the hinterlands. But with the arrival of, of total war in these outskirts, we can see the beginnings of these exterminationist campaigns. A war, and here, we see a war to the death of people. Exemplified by the ways in which hinterland warfare in these back country areas of global colonies, lead to efforts on the part of the new arrivals to exterminate, to completely remove incumbent populations from the territories in which they lived. Particularly, fueled by the land rush that I talked about in an earlier lecture. One example of how this played out was a man called Jeffery Amherst. He was a hero of the British empire in its struggles against Indian peoples in the back country, made famous during the Seven Years War because he was part of the struggle to seize Quebec from the French. But he was almost, also famous as a fighter in the back country, in the back lands of the English colonies, he was a notorious Indian hater. The Colonial wars, therefore, were the places where Amherst would, in effort to exterminate Indians from the lands that they dwelled in to open up these territories for European settlement, in a sense, presaged dynamic that we are going to see take place in other corners of the world to exclude people, destroy people, remove people from the lands that they lived in. And that, in some senses, comes back to the heartlands of the Europeans themselves. And how that happened was because of the fundamental changes that the age of revolution ushered in, a change in the very definition of the relationships between rulers and people, between rulers and the ruled. Because once you propose the fundamental idea that the government somehow should be made by the people, what ensues is a conflict over who the people really is. So, along with the revolution in rights, I want to repeat this, we get a revolution in the practice of political violence. And that these are related to each other, violence and membership. So, what are, what is this rights revolution that I'm referring to? Well, these changes from the late eighteenth century altered the concept of the political subject and this would spread around the world. One of the points I'm trying to make here in the buildup to the Rights Revolution is to insist that it was the byproduct, itself, of global conflicts and global phenomena. That the Rights Revolution did not take place in a, in, in a vacuum. Well, one of the things that the French Revolution did was, declare that certain people enjoyed these rights. And these people would be defined now as citizens, citizens. This was the famous declaration of the rights of man and citizen. I hope we can get a, a, a sense of this Dan, by, by zeroing in. Let's, let's look at some elements of this image. First of all, the text itself, alright, is an articulation, an announcement of the elements of the basic rights that every citizen of the political community got to enjoy. If we could pan over to the right, you can also see, you know, one of the great things about being a citizen is you get to party, alright? This, this, this is an uplifting moment. And here, we have the Republican cap. One of the icons of, of the revolution. So, the age of revolution then ushers in a new concept of the political subject endowed with natural rights to protect themselves, endowed with these liberties. But the question still obtains the rights. How did the rights of the revolutionaries get identified? How do you choose who enjoys them? Well, one way to do this is to invent another category called, The Nation. Whose co-members get to enjoy these rights. And so, as I said in an earlier lecture, the birth of the nation, itself, was a product of this age of revolution for the United States and the French Revolutions, were fought in the name of a people, of a people, united as a nation. This fundamentally altered the notion of sovereignty. Fundamentally altered the notion of sovereignty, because hitherto, the concept of sovereignty resided in the ruler, alright, who enjoyed divine rights to rule. From the Ming and the Qing, enjoying the mandate of heaven, to Louis XVI, the Sun King, alright? Radiating from the skies downward. It was God's gift to the French people, alright? And played that card, you know, all the time. Now, the rights to rule were not divinely inscribed. All of this changes, once you propose that it was the people who enjoyed these rights, who were, themselves, the repository of sovereignty, that it was not in kings and queens. And that security and liberty must be possessed by all co-members of this thing called, The Nation of the political community. What's more, yet another revolutionary implication here? For Thomas Jefferson, these rights, one of the great authors of this age of revolution, these rights are self-evident, alright? They're self-evident, inscribed in the rights of man. It's, itself a term coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, somebody we've mentioned earlier. We'll come back to him a little bit more in this lecture. So here, we have concept of liberty defined now by these new subjects as the freedom from capricious state power. And that the individual, the body of the individual, was the repository of these rights. And one enjoyed these rights by virtue of one's co-membership in this new artifist, in some cases, invented given, given credentials that existed a long time ago, but there's a lot of activity that goes into the invention of this concept of the nation. Well, one of those state powers that these individuals, in whose bodies, and I'm emphasizing the point of the body, because we saw how the body was, itself, the battleground for politics. One of these state powers, that would become the subject of an enormous debate in late eighteenth century, was the right of the state to torture people. There ensued, as a result of these discussions about new rights, and who held them, and whether they were self-evident or whether they were contingent, was a debate over whether states had a right to torture people. And one might argue that it was out of this debate over torture, that we derive our modern, our modern concept of universal human rights. Let's go back to Mr. Las Casas. We've talked about Las Casas before, alright? Who made the case for the rights of Indians to be protected from the conquistadors as God's creatures. Well, I ask now, what happens when it doesn't matter what kind of creature you are? Well, by the mid of 18nth century, that was a question that was circulating, it was in the air. These norms governing creaturehood and the body, the autonomy of the body really began to change and reflected, for instance, in the advent of a new phenomenon, new literary phenomenon. The invention of the novel, alright? Rousseau, I've mentioned him before. His Julie published in 1761, and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. One might call Clarissa. Here, I'm, in this image I'm giving you a cover of the, kind of, the modern Penguin edition of the book in case you want to go out and buy it, and one might argue that, that Richardson was the first novel in world history. What the novel did that was so revolutionary was generate a new genre, a new sensibility inscribed in the literary form, you know which we now call the novel. And its point was to evoke and create a sense of empathy with the characters of the story. Very different from, let's say, a heroic genre which would, which, which, which is not about identification with the subject of the novel, but rather almost deification of the subject. Now, we're talking about focusing on passion, love, virtue, emotional empathy for the characters. And the beginning of an effort to try to regard each other, as in the case of Clarissa, as autonomous-feeling being, you know, rooted in the essential integrity, in the essential integrity of individuals and their bodies. One of, as a result of this enormous change in cultural norms, one of the first camps, social campaigns was to rid the world of torture and public spectacles of pain. Now, just, just bump back a little bit here, that image of Goya's is meant to be a public spectacle of pain. Meant to reinforce the awesome power of the soveirgn over his or her subjects. Well, this practice of inflicting pain through torture, was seen, increasingly,

as a barbaric act. One of the great books, that contributed to this change in social norms was Adam Smith. No, not The Wealth of Nations, we've talked about that earlier. Now, we're talking about his other famous work called A Theory of Moral Sentiments. Notice the title itself, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759. And it's first chapter, a very important chapter, uses examples of torture. Adam Smith invokes the examples of torture and asks, what if we knew, what if we knew that the victim of the torture was our brother, alright? What if? We can't know what he feels being tortured, so we have to imagine it, argues Adam Smith. This active imagination, empathy, and the novelistic form. Identification is the source of our sympathy for other people. Sympathy for others as a condition for being an individual. Our individuality was being defined by our capacity to, to identify with the pain of others. And in the 1760's, in Europe and across the neo-Europes, there ensued a widespread campaign to abolish the phenomenon of judicial torture. In British, in Britain in 1783, in France in 1789, judicial torture states, using

the body of a political subject as a site was abolished. Bodies were now seen as self-contained as enjoying a positive value of being themselves individualized. This change in the attitude to body was transformative for architecture, for the separation of bedrooms. The creation of the boudoir from the French word bouder, which means pouting. Special rooms for pouting, [laugh] bathing. A special room for the toilet that your body, to keep the body private. The separation of beds. This change in the sensibility about the body was the backcloth to the kind of purchase that the books that we've talked abut earlier, two of them in particular in an earlier lecture, Equiano's Memoir, or Mary Wollstonecraft's book about the vindication of the rights of woman. Why they would have such widespread appeal? It's precisely because these norms were shifting. The result was that White's talk would change the course of global history. So, let's ask ourselves. How then are these new concepts of rights and new practices of violence intertwined?

 

Lecture 10 – Segment 2

 

>> So, if there are new concepts of rights, new norms about the body and circulation, a question arises. Well, with kings and queens no longer seen as the custodians of sovereignty, who, who's going to protect these rights? How to protect these rights? Well, particularly since, in the old regimes that are now so stigmatized, it was precisely the aristocrats and the kings and queens who were among the first violators, right? They had been the ones to tax people illegitimately. And this was very important in the shift that, that, the support that was given to the idea of the nation as the place in which sovereignty was being invested. The nation was the vessel to protect citizens from violators, and everyone in the nation was equally endowed with these rights. The presumption then was for a kind of basic homogeneity, right? That we were all co-members of the nation, we're all basically similar with some important exceptions. Women, people of color, convicts. These were not quite full members and for a long time, they would be seen more as wards. But this question nonetheless arises, how did this shift in understanding rights and their location affect total war? And that's the question we're exploring here. Well, two basic ways. One was, in the transformation in the basic nature of armies themselves, armies that in the older regimes were dominated by the aristocracies, paid as mercenary armies or forced soldiers would be forced or pressed into service. One of the effects of total war was to invent the idea that armies were themselves, popular. They were not manned by men who were forced or paid to do service, they volunteered to fight. This is very important move and it was a political device to create the notion, the notion of a nation in arms. Let's take a look at one of a popular image or, or rather, an image that would have been very understandable for the people at the time from Prussia. Germany, the German states were invaded by Napoleon and it set of a debate, right? Over national identity in Germany, popular resistance to the invasion. And here, we see an image of Prussian reserves. They were called the land there. In the painting is itself, called The Nation in Arms. And, Can we, Dan, take a zoomed in shot of, of the painting? So here, what you see is a common image of the time of volunteers going off to fight for the defense of the Prussian nation against the invader, against the French invader with their family members wishing them well. You know, what else do you see in here? Anything else we ought to think about, Valeria?

>> Well, they all seem to be as you said, people from popular classes and.

>> Mm-hm.

>> And then to the, to my right, I think I see a Jewish man.

>> Aha. Yeah, very good. I don't know if we can get him close up, Dan. Can you get him in yeah. Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. This is the figure of a German soldier for one of the questions that arises once everybody is included in the nation is that Jews and Christian can coexist in this nation in arms. It's very important move. Actually, I find it very curious the, the discrepancy in the response of the mother to the child. Maybe it's very Jewish, you know, that she's not so happy about this guy going off to fight. The others, of course, are, are wishing their sons and husbands well. But it's a powerful image then, of the German nation, or in this case, the Prussian nation in arms. So, what's a nation in arms? Well, here, what we mean is, that all members of the nation enjoy rights to fight to defend the nation itself. They were obligated by virtue of being citizens, which is very important. We get a nation state, if it enjoyed legitimacy of its co-members, could thereby rally and recruit soldiers as human resources in its defense of the nation. In contrast to the old regimes, in contrast to the old regimes that relied on paid mercenaries or forced soldiers to do battle. This is really important. This is really important because what is means now is that political organizations have a capacity to penetrate society to draw resources, bodies of men and, and to some extent women, to do service in the name of the nation, that the old regimes did not have. They did not have. They're fighting for themselves. The consequence of that is going to be to raise the stakes. For belonging to the nation gives members increasing rights. Right? And therefore, to live outside the nation is to be bereft of rights. And so there was a drive, as I mentioned this earlier to, to establish a line. The line of exclusion of who is in and whose out that's why it's so interesting to see the Jew represented in the painting. Now, it's being integrated into the story of the nation. It's sort of, in the dark and in the corner of the image itself. But you can see the passage that even Jews are making into the nation state. Greater freedom for those inside the nation, and greater un-freedom for those outside. That the escalation of total war then, draws a harder line between insider and outsider. And so, full citizenship, if you are

inside, the stakes are very high, you want to stay inside. Full citizenship then is easier to uphold, if citizens regard each other as fundamentally similar. Racial, gender, religion. There is, ever since, it's taken us a long time. Well, I'm sort of, fast forwarding here to our days, to accept the idea of pluralism within the concept of citizenship. It already tells you that there's some tension that in, within the painting itself here. But here you have a concept of the homogenous nation being represented in Prussia. And so how is all of this related to war? Well, each war is seen then as a process of creating a nation full of citizens, a redemptive, fulfilling process for the nation ridding it or defending it from threats for without or exceptions from within, alright? Reinforced by the notion that a new kind of war could be the last war, I have mentioned this earlier. For once, we have a world of stable nations, each containing homogeneous rights bearing citizens within them capable of governing themselves, we can live in peace. The war to end all wars is to store, restore an essential harmony, a harmony, some might argue, that we were law, that, that we lost once Judeo-Christians were cast out from the garden of Eden. And so, the war to end all wars gives rise to a fraternity of liberty-loving nations. It's so ironic, right? That the age that brings an end to torture [laugh], that abolishes slavery, slowly, right? Is also the age that increases the scale and scope of warfare. Total War changes the interior and imperial conflict, wars become wars between empires with stakes ever rising. In a sense, there's a core disequilibrium within Europe where these processes got incubated and it sends riptides out to the wider world. And now, again, these are not wars fought over spoils, right? In the Napoleonic War, they're wars fought as Napoleon did over Spain, over Brazil, over India, and over Russia. This concept of total war would, in some respects, reach its acme in the invasion of Russia. Napoleon would march into Russia with 600,000 soldiers. This was the nation in arms. He would only return with 80,000. In Spain, he sent 500,000 troops, right? Again, only a small fraction would crawl back to France. Nations in arms fighting other nations in arms. The last time the world had seen armies on this scale was a thousand years earlier, in China. The stakes were rising, the scale of the violence that we're talking about is escalating. We're not going to see warfare on this scale again for another century, until World War I. But as the Napoleonic wars swept across the world, they compelled all that were involved, from the Ottomans to the Mexicans, to invoke the defense of their political community now in the name of the nation against that other invading nation. And the carnage became a redemptive struggle for national defense. Again, I repeat, there is an essential paradox at the heart of this dynamic that the rise of new rights coincides with the increasing repressive power. The fighting machines exemplified in this painting, the combination of liberty and lethality. So let me ask you, what role then might books, images, like this one, and the news about what's happening in far-flung corners of the world, what, what might these forces, these images and these stories, what might, what role might they have played in braiding together freedom and violence?

 

Lecture 10 – Segment 3

 

So, the questions of inclusion and exclusion, I want you to, to, to consider were posed or, or, or brought to light as a result of these new concepts of citizenship. And they were, in some senses, always present, especially in the colonies. Because it was there after all that social forces were juxtaposed against each other in the most dichotomous ways especially in the distance between the slave, utterly bereft of rights and the master, who, who enjoyed, among other things, the right to brutalize and rape slaves. And so, not surprisingly, it was, in fact, in the French Revolution that we see the French Revolution and the way it's spread to the Dominican Republic, that the questions of inclusion and exclusion are first so, supposed and electrified, and the global repercussions of the Haitian revolution, were monumental in this sense, because there's the fight over the freedom of peoples and new heroes of freed and freeing slaves. So, this idea of new nations, new sensibilities, new rights, extended all the way to those in the Colonies who were most deprived of those rights. That was how monumentally important the struggle and the iconography surrounding Toussaint L'Ouverture as the leader of the Haitian revolution was, in global proportions creating all kings of images of myths of sacrifice and struggle. And, of course electrifying slaves and other slave societies, and casting fear around the Atlantic world on the part of masters in other slave societies. That was one place where the French Revolution brought to light this question of inclusion and exclusion. It did the same in the Ottoman Empire, which was beginning to come apart at its edges. In Egypt, which had been drifting away as a province of the Ottoman Empire, drifting away, after the Mamluks drove French forces from Cairo after the 1798 expedition. Egyptian reformers began to think that perhaps they should take on the responsibility of governing this province, modernizing this province, that belonging nominally to the Ottoman Empire, but pulling it further and further away from the power of the capital of Istanbul, the capital, that is, of the Ottoman Empire. And the concept of Egyptian nationalism was born in part as a response to the French invasion. And the architect of, or the founder of modern Egypt was a man called Mohammad Ali Pasha, who lived from 1769 to 1849. He was a product of this age of revolution

and believed in Egypt, a concept of Egypt, as an autonomous political space whose centerpiece was, was the Nile. And he made special appeals to the British, alright, as a destination that Egypt might send its commodities, and as a place to which the British might look for investing funds. And, in fact, within the loose membrane of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Pasha began to think of a or concoct a whole new access a new kind of relationship between an autonomous Egypt and other sources of power in the world, particularly the British and the French, that pulling away from Istanbul forging a new model, a new relationship between Egypt and the rest. So, you can see as an example, the ways in which he encouraged economic relations with the rest of Europe, weakening the ties of Egypt to the Ottoman Empire. In some cases, some of the provinces, some provinces of the Ottoman Empire broke away altogether. This is exactly what happened in Greece that revolted in 1821 and won its independence from Istanbul by 1832. An independence, I might add, that was brokered by British diplomats. So, these humiliations, external invasions, internal breakaways of provinces like Greece and Egypt, these crisis gave the Sultans some room to maneuver to, room to reinvent the Ottoman Empire against traditional agrarian elites, against the old officer class that had so failed to defend the Ottoman Empire and against the traditional Islamic clerics as well. And so, the Sultans could begin the process of re-imagining the Ottoman Empire. Following in some senses, examples of Mohammed Ali, himself, of Bolivar, all drawing, in some sense, inspiration from Napoleon as the modernizing agent. It was the Sultan, Mahmud the Second who began the process of reforming the Ottoman Empire, revamping the fiscal structure, trying to get away from the older system of tax farming, updating and modernizing the military, creating schools, aright? Schools that would educate the population. All of these innovations borrowing from Europe, alright, to try to create a new model of an Ottoman Empire. A modern empire capable of competing on the global stage. They even tried to broker a deal with our friend, Mohamed Ali Pasha in renegotiating the pact between Egypt and Istanbul. And this would set the stage for what would become the great Tanzimat Reform enterprise that would seek to transform the bases of the Ottoman Empire starting in 1839.

 

Lecture 10 – Segment 4

 

 

Well, it was an age of revolutions. And one of the revolutions that got ushered in by these transformations was a market revolution. For the older model of mercantilism was increasingly decrepit, and in some cases, utterly vanquished. Merchants now with breakaways and reforms of, of different states around the world, merchants didn't need anymore state sanction to enjoy their privileges. After all, one of the subjects for the revolution, was itself, was getting rid of old privileges and old aristocracies. And there emerged a whole new ideology, an ideology of free trade. When Ali Pasha makes his deal with the British, it is to gain access to markets for the free exchange of commodities. This ideology of free trade, often drawing inspiration for Adam Smith, was reinforced by a transformation in finance. The rise of new financial actors like merchant bankers. Very different already from the chartered companies that we looked at earlier. So, this combination of the rise of banks, merchant bankers who were professional lenders of capital, the rise of ideologies of free trade, They would chose force a fundamental challenge to the balance of the entire global order. The old agrarian aristocracies of India, the Ottoman Empire, and China were now challenged by these new kinds of relationships, right? Now, not being threatened so much by formal empires, although they still lurked on the historic stage, but now being affected by private forces. The forces of the market place. For the penetration of market forces into these ancient aristocratic societies shook the foundations and the balance of the Eurasian system. I'm going to look at one example now of how that worked. China, and we're going to turn to India in the next lecture. Well, in China, as we've noted, the regime never underwent a kind of conquest in a way that the Americas had been conquered. We saw a slow declension, and then a revival under the Qing. And unlike the Iberian or the Ottoman empires, they were never, never directly swiped by European invasions. Instead, what we will see is a slow process of erosion of the sovereignty of the Qing empire. Partly from forces from within, regional and revolt breakaways, like the Ottoman Empire, like the Mughal Empire. Some might say, even like the old European empires in the Americas, fueled by spreading unrest as food got scarcer and more expensive. But, they would also be compounding new kinds of pressures from outside China, of private forces, and in some cases, state intrusions. One of the back drop phenomena is a reversing of the trade balance between Europe and China itself. Remember, there had been a traditional balance in which Europeans had to enter China with it's precious metals in order to buy all of the goods that it wanted. China's exports of commodities and an import of precious metals. That changed, fundamentally, over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, by 1828, for the first time, silver began to flow out of China and commodities from Europe began to flow in. Europe now had exports like cotton textiles and metal wares, manufactured goods that it could sell to the Chinese to com, out compete local Chinese manufacturers. And the Chinese, in order to pay for it, would draw upon silver reserves. The result was, the drainage of money, put increasing pressure on prices in China, made them scarcer, and foreigners would see in this process an escalation of opportunities. Ports like Canton were thriving with European business. Look at the flags of the European mercantile presence in China. The British would take, in order to gain economic tool hold, would take Macau. Portugal's old outpost at the mouth of the Pearl River would become an entrepot for British penetration into the Chinese market. And after 1807, English and American protestant missionaries would begin to flood into China with a dream of converting 150 million heathen. All of this was com, capped, in a sense, with the ignominy of an inflow of an illegal product into China, most notoriously opium. Remember that, narcotics has always been a very lucrative business. And opium, was, it offered a great high and it was also allegedly an aphrodisiac, and it was one of the products that the Chinese seemed to want from European merchants above all. Not just any old merchant, but in particular, the East India company which brought imported opium from India. So, it enjoyed a special role in this new economic balance of relationships. The government in China waged a relentless campaign to try to shut down the opium dens, to try to control the traffic of this substance conveyed by the East India company from India to China. Tried to shut down the opium dens. Part of the reason why was because they were concerned about the spreading addiction and also the economic cost, by 1832, 40,000 chests of opium were being shipped per annum to mainland Chinese markets to fuel Chinese addiction. And so, the prolif-, the opium dens proliferated, the government tried to wage a campaign to shut them down, the government was too weak to do this. They had, of course, no cooperation from local merchants who were making also a business off the traffic in drugs, course, foreign powers were also unwilling to collaborate with the Chinese cuz they were making money off the business, and the result was a series of opium wars. Initially, the government won some victories over merchants, won some victory over merchants. But the British is seeing that it might lose this business, sent its Navy to rescue the opium trade. And the result was, the arrival of British steam ships to, to the to the ports to try to defend the dead ends and culminating in the bombardment of Chinese ports and settlements around Canton. Chinese troops squared off against British marines. But using clubs and spears to defend themselves against British artillery had no, no chance of surviving. The result was a humiliating treaty known as the Treaty of Nanjing, signed in 1842, that forced China to pay enormous indemnities to the victors, the creation of treaty ports in China, the institutionalization of extraterritoriality that allowed foreigners to enjoy rights to defend themselves in China, in their own courts, right? That the Chinese state could not enforce their laws on foreigners in their own land. This was the triumph of free trade. This free trade, this access of, to the Chinese market being forced open, ironically, for European merchants. And this would further hobble the Qing state. The Chinese response was to try to shore themselves up, but you can already get a sense of the decline here, right? The great destitution. And, the result of which were dire circumstances for the state. And in these circumstances, we can see these are moments that are perfect for the uprising of Messianic and Millenarian movements, and that's exactly what happened in China in the 1840's. As people witnessing this humiliation of the state, the spread of consumption of illegal products like opium and no apparent ability to control it, people began to search out for a new moral order. A new compass, a new way of governing China. Well, an example of this was the uprising led by the prophet Hong Xiuquan, who would be very influenced by Christian missionaries in devising his own gospel. After he failed to pass Hong Xiuquan the civil examination, in 1837, he had a dream, a prophetic dream, a vision. A vision embellished by seeing himself as Jesus's brother, that he would deliver the Chinese into a new Utopian order. And so, he founded the society of God-worshipers in the 1840's to lead this messianic uprising against the Chinese state. His movement spread, it had enormous immediate appeal. So, here's an image of the bombing of Canton during the Opium Wars. I have the image here. The result of the prophet's uprising in the 1840's was the Taiping Rebellion. So, the prophet Hong established the Society of God Worshipers in the 1840's to bring into being this new moral community to replaced by what was seen as a decrepit old Qing regime, and the movement quickly spread across a great deal of China because people were searching for a new moral order. And they found their savior, in the form of the prophet who promised to deliver people from the bond, from their bondage, full of biblical illusions in his preachings. Giving rise to the formation of the Taiping heavenly kingdom, this spread, as I said. And by March of 1853, peasant armies took Nanjing with an army of almost 700,000, leading to a gruesome battle after which there was a massacre with tens of thousands of Qing soldiers and as many civilians. The target were these Manchu demons, remember the minority Manchu were still governing China, seeming to have betrayed the heart of the Chinese Han spirit. But the profit would emerge, then later on, as a kind of prophetic national figure as well, seen as a direct threat then to Qing authority. Betraying his obligations to his peoples, but the spread of the uprising frightened old, the old aristocratic forces who now saw the prospect that the world would be turned upside down. With the Qing unable to defend themselves against what would become known as the Taiping Rebellion. Also fears that, on the part of Confucian and Buddhist leaders, that the prophet was going to pull believers away from their rank and file. And it would be ultimately foreigners who would be so alarmed by the course of events. Fearing chaos in this marketplace where they had been selling commodities. And they rushed troops and weapons to China to put down the Taiping Rebellion, including the newfangled Infield rifle, to help the Qing armies crush this popular revolt. In the end, it took almost fifteen years to put down the Taiping Rebellion with massive dislocation of tens of millions of peoples. This was, in some sense is, the worst civil war in history, between twenty and 30 million people were left dead. But it would leave the Qing state even more crippled, even more illegitimate than where it started out. It would leave China more destitute than

 

ever. The Qing government was more indebted to foreigners than it was before, even more bereft of legitimacy than it had before. Their victory over the Taiping rebellion was in some sense is, a Pyrrhic victory. For they were forced among other things, now to allow foreigners to penetrate Chinese markets with even more preferential terms than ever. So we can ask ourselves, in closing, how free trade, this revolutionizing concept of freedom, crept into, insinuated itself into an old agrarian dynasty that was never conquered per say, but slowly crippled by the advent of these new practices and doctrines. Hollowed out from within to serve a new kind of commercial purpose. And we're going to return to the biography, of the Infield rifle in the next lecture