12

European Conquest and Revolt

(1450–c.1800 AD)

How a few maritime explorers accidentally found a New World, and European nations discovered how to exploit the world’s riches

POTOSÍ IS THE HIGHEST city in the world. Located in the mountains of Bolivia, at 3,967 metres above sea level, it should be a paradise of clean air and fresh mountain springs. But today this once-idyllic mountain retreat is one of the most polluted places on earth. Its water has turned to acid, its land is sterile, crops cannot grow and the mountainside is littered with highly toxic waste including cadmium, mercury, chromium and lead.

Towering over the town is the peak of Cerro Rico, known locally as ‘the mountain that eats men’. Inside were once the world’s richest silver mines, dug out by thousands of African and Native American slaves imported by Spanish explorers, who founded the place in 1546. The slaves came from anywhere that labour could be snatched – locally from the south in Peru, or from as far away as the west coast of Africa or even the islands of the Pacific. Their feet trampled powdered silver ore with deadly mercury into a brew of poisonous metallic slime. Then the mercury was burned off, releasing clouds of lethal vapours that eventually dissolved into the mountain streams, turning the water toxic. Between 1556 and 1783 more than 45,000 tonnes of pure silver were extracted from the mountain using this process, much of it shipped directly to Europe. No one knows how many men, women and children died from asphyxiation, poisoning and overwork in this godforsaken place, although the total has been estimated at a staggering eight million.

The pity of Potosí came about because between 1450 and 1650 Europe’s treasure hunters struck lucky. The arrival of Henry the Navigator’s booty in the form of African slaves and gold transformed Portuguese opinion about the best strategy for gaining new wealth. Investment in expeditions down the west coast of Africa yielded astonishing results. On one such voyage, in May 1488, the explorer Bartholomew Diaz was the first European to see the tip of Africa (see plate 11). He realized that here was a previously unknown sea route to the spice-rich lands of India and the Far East. Already flush with the profits from African gold and slaves, King John II of Portugal christened this new headland the Cape of Good Hope.

King John assembled the best scholars, mathematicians and map makers in his kingdom, and commissioned a series of expeditions in a climate of absolute secrecy. One, led by Duarte Pacheco Pereira, is thought to have revealed an unknown land to the west (Brazil). Much mystery still surrounds how much the court of John II knew about Brazil and the distances between Portugal and India via the eastern and western routes. This is partly because the information was regarded as top secret, but also because many court records were lost in a devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Lisbon in 1755.

Columbus, and the European rediscovery of the Americas

Such secret knowledge is what may have led King John to reject the overtures of a boastful Genoese seaman called Christopher Columbus, who came to his court in 1485 and again in 1488 claiming to be able to reach the East by a westward route across the Atlantic. He demanded to be appointed ‘Great Admiral of the Ocean’, to become governor of any lands he discovered, and to receive one tenth of all the revenues derived from his quests.

Columbus’s confidence that a route to the riches of the Far East could most easily be found by sailing west across the Atlantic was founded on a basic miscalculation. After studying the works of ancient Phoenician explorers and Arabic map makers, he concluded that the distance to Asia from the shores of Europe was just 3,600 kilometres (the actual distance from Spain to China, sailing west, is about 24,000 kilometres). Columbus had good reason to want the journey to appear reasonably short, since no patron would support a venture whose sailing time would make it impossible to provide sufficient food and water to sustain the crews of its ships.

In 1492 Columbus’s quest for financial support for his mission at last met with success. In that year the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella finally ousted the Muslims from Granada, thus turning all Spain into one Catholic kingdom (a conflict known as the Reconquista). With Spain no longer able to rely on gold tributes from the Moors of Granada, and with gangs of armed Christians hungry for lands to conquer, the idea of overseas exploration was enthusiastically received. Most important of all was the Spanish government’s desire to find a new route to the riches of the East, not only to destroy the stranglehold of Muslim merchants but to rival Portuguese exploration along the Gold Coast of Africa.

Columbus is widely thought of as the most successful of all the early European overseas explorers and the discoverer of what is now North America. In truth, he was neither. None of his four expeditions discovered gold or silver in any great quantities, and the only mainland he reached was a stretch of Central and South America on his fourth and last voyage (see plate 11).

Columbus’s voyages were significant in at least two respects, however. To begin with, he cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, which allowed European sailing ships to cross the ocean by sailing north-west and then returning by heading due east. Second, his discovery of land to the west began an epic rivalry between Spain and Portugal to explore the entire globe until it had been completely charted and mapped. In 1494 the two nations signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which, incredible as it sounds today, divided the world into two halves along a north–south line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic. Everything discovered to the east would belong to Portugal, everything to the west to Spain (see plate 11). This was the first clearly articulated globalization strategy entered into by two European nations, explicitly designed to secure control of the whole world for their own exclusive benefit. To seal the deal Pope Julius II even sanctioned the arrangement with divine approval by publishing a papal bull in 1506.

From discovery to slavery

Transporting and selling slaves, mostly from Africa, had been a profitable enterprise of Muslim merchants for centuries. However, European Atlantic explorers very quickly discovered a new use for slaves – as an agricultural labour force. In 1419 two Portuguese sea captains in the service of Henry the Navigator discovered the unoccupied Atlantic island of Madeira. It was Henry’s idea to extract wealth from this place by planting sugar cane – then so rare as to be considered a spice – which had been introduced into southern Spain from South-East Asia by the Islamic Caliphs of Cordoba (see page 193).

Growing sugar is especially labour-intensive because the canes must be planted by hand. Henry’s plentiful source of cheap African slaves meant that by the 1450s sugar production in Madeira provided a new model for creating wealth: valuable crops grown in the right climate tended by unwaged labour proved very lucrative indeed. It wasn’t long before every explorer serious about making his venture financially viable adopted the practice. Columbus himself introduced sugar cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage, the same trip on which he began to enslave the natives.

News of Columbus’s adventures travelled fast. Other countries began to sponsor their own expeditions, including Henry VII of England, who sanctioned a trip by Genoese navigator John Cabot, financed by merchants from Bristol.

Meanwhile, Vasco da Gama was the first Portuguese navigator to reach India, arriving at Calicut on 14 May 1498 (see plate 11). His voyage proved that the route round Africa was the quickest and easiest maritime passage to the East. Portuguese explorers soon established settlements along the coasts of the Persian Gulf, India and Indonesia, even reaching Japan.

Just as significant was the Portuguese (re)discovery of Brazil by Pedro Cabral, on 22 April 1500. By the 1530s sugar cane plantations cultivated by indigenous and imported slaves had become the Portuguese colonialists’ richest sources of wealth, reinforcing the new trend of crops grown on one side of the world for transportation to the other.

The Spanish invaders

Further north, soldiers from Spain, fresh from victory over the Muslims of Granada, were eager to increase their fortunes through overseas conquest. Using settlements established by Columbus on Hispaniola and Cuba as their bases, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were responsible for Europe’s most devastating conquests of all – adventures that resulted in the complete annihilation of the Aztec and Inca Empires of Central and South America (see pages 179, 183).

How did just a few hundred men and horses from Spain manage, within only a few years of landing on the American coast, completely to overwhelm empires that between them comprised an estimated twenty-five million people? It seems that for Cortés and Pizarro and their men success came from a lethal mixture of luck, cunning and forces of nature which stacked the odds heavily in their favour.

When Cortés arrived off the Yucatàn Peninsula in the spring of 1519 with eleven ships carrying about 110 sailors and 530 soldiers he had the good luck to chance upon a Spanish sailor who had been shipwrecked on an earlier expedition. Gerónimo de Aguilar had been captured by the Aztecs and had lived among them as a slave for the previous eight years, learning their language and customs. Cortés also captured a beautiful native woman, called Malintzin, who spoke both Nahuatl – the language of the Aztecs – and Mayan, which was spoken by people living on the peninsula. Using them as translators, Cortés could now make himself understood by just about anyone he might encounter on his quest for gold. Malintzin later became Cortés’s mistress and was baptized as Doña Marina. She bore Cortés a son, who became one of the first mixed-race Americans, mestizos. Today she is regarded by Mexican people as both the embodiment of treachery and a mother figure.

With the vital asset of easy communication Cortés was able to negotiate a military alliance with two native civilizations, the Totonacs and Tlaxcalans. Climate change was at least partly responsible for why these people were ready to help the Spanish invaders. They had recently been subjected to vicious assaults by their enemies, the Aztecs. The Flower Wars were the result of a series of severe droughts in response to which the Aztecs sought new victims from neighbouring tribes to be sacrificed to their gods in a desperate bid to secure rain (see page 178).

In November 1519 Cortés and his army reached the glorious capital of the Aztec Empire itself (see plate 11).

Tenochtitlan, a city built in the middle of water and accessible by three separate causeways, was a fabulous artificial world of canals, walkways and bridges, the Venice of Central America. Canoes carried goods and people under bridges and across a vast network of five interconnected lakes. Two terracotta aqueducts, each six kilometres long, took bathing water from nearby springs to the city centre, since Tenochtitlan’s 200,000 people were, like the Romans, devotees of spa baths.

At the time of Cortés’s arrival the Aztec Empire was ruled by a King called Moctezuma, who was renowned for his hospitality. After welcoming Cortés and his army as guests – one theory is that Moctezuma thought the Spanish were gods fulfilling an Aztec prophecy – the ruler soon found himself a captive in his own palace. Cortés demanded an enormous ransom in gold as the price of his freedom. As the weeks passed and treasure flowed into the Spanish coffers, resentment built up inside the city at the continued presence of Cortés’s warriors and their native allies, and at the huge ransom demand.

Stones and spears were hurled by the citizens at their puppet ruler, who Cortés paraded on a balcony in an effort to quell riots. A few days later Moctezuma lay dead. Accounts differ as to his death. Perhaps he was killed by the Spanish, who had come to regard him as a liability. Or maybe one of his humiliated subjects had scored a direct hit. Not long after, at the beginning of July 1520, hostile Aztec citizens caused the Spanish to flee the city, only for them to return the following year with an army significantly strengthened by a Spanish alliance with the Aztecs’ neighbouring enemies.

The impact of disease

Highly infectious diseases including smallpox, measles, typhoid and influenza originated in large mammals such as cows, pigs and sheep as long as 10,000 years ago. Following their domestication, the diseases jumped across the species barrier into human beings. The absence of these mammals in the Americas meant that, unlike Europeans, Native American people had built up no immunity against such infections. When Europeans arrived they unwittingly brought these diseases with them. Smallpox killed about 40 per cent of the Aztec population within a year.

Weakened by disease and besieged by Cortés’s army, Tenochtitlan eventually fell into Spanish hands. More than 240,000 Aztecs are estimated to have died during a final eighty-day siege.

The way was now clear for Spanish colonization and conquest of the whole region. A viceroy of New Spain, as it was called, was appointed in 1524, and over the next sixty years a mixture of Spanish military superiority and smallpox devastated the Native Americans. In 1546 silver mines like those at Potosí were discovered at Zacatecas, in north-central Mexico, the target of another swathe of Spanish settlers eager to get rich quick. As they arrived they raided local villages to acquire slaves for use as labour.

Meanwhile, far to the south, Cortés’s second cousin Francisco Pizarro had received imperial approval for a conquest of Peru in 1529 (see plate 11). With just 106 foot soldiers, sixty-two cavalry and three cannon, Pizarro defeated an Incan army estimated at 80,000. Faced with these apparently impossible odds, he borrowed tactics from his cousin Cortés, and on 16 November 1532 lured the Inca Emperor Atahualpa into a trap. Through an interpreter (another lucky find), arrangements were made for Spanish delegates to meet the Emperor in the central square of a hilltop town called Cajamarca, where gifts and tokens of friendship would be exchanged.

Atahualpa approached the town square accompanied by a small retinue of nobles and concubines. He had left his weapons behind as a mark of friendship and trust. Accounts of what happened next were written by the Spanish. They claim that the Emperor was handed a Bible and ordered to renounce his pagan religion and accept the word of Jesus Christ. When Atahualpa threw the Bible to the ground in confusion, Pizarro’s men charged on horseback from all sides of the square to the accompaniment of cannon fire. The surprise attack provoked panic. Never before had the Emperor and his household seen horses or heard gunfire. Many of the unarmed Incas were slaughtered and the Emperor himself was captured and imprisoned in a small room.

With no one to lead them, the Inca army fled in panic. Over the next few months Atahualpa’s ‘ransom room’ was piled high with treasure brought on the understanding of his eventual release. But when he was charged with twelve trumped-up crimes, including revolting against the Spanish, practising idolatry and murdering his brother Huascar, his fate was sealed.

Tribes once loyal to the leaderless Incas now switched sides and helped the Spanish forces conquer the Inca capital, Cuzco, where a new Spanish city was built. Pizarro later founded Lima as the capital of Spain’s South American empire because it was within easy reach of the sea.

No one can be sure how many Native American people died during the holocausts of war, disease and slavery that accompanied the Spanish invasions of Mexico and Peru, but estimates range between two million and a hundred million. More than 90 per cent are thought to have been the victims of European diseases, dramatically changing the course of human history and clearing the way for colonization. By 1546, largely thanks to silver mines, vast quantities of new wealth were being shipped back to the growing power of Spain.

Reformation, emigration and colonization

In 1527 Pope Clement VII refused a request from English monarch Henry VIII for a divorce from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s aunt Catherine of Aragon.

It was a momentous decision. Hot-tempered Henry was outraged, and declared himself, and not the Pope, supreme head of the English Church. He then used this as an excuse to plunder ecclesiastical property. More than 800 abbeys and monasteries made rich by centuries of forest clearing (see page 216) were confiscated in the famous Dissolution of the Monasteries. And with the money Henry built himself a massive fleet. By his death in 1547 the British Royal Navy could boast fifty-seven well-armed ships.

Meanwhile, popular hysteria about the abuses of the Church of Rome had quickly turned into a full-scale European religious schism known as the Reformation. It was exacerbated by a combination of German monk Martin Luther’s protests against corrupt practices such as the clergy’s sale of pardons in exchange for absolving an individual’s earthly sins and the mass printing of Lorenzo Valla’s damning evidence that the Papacy’s claim to its territories in Italy was based on a lie (see page 226). Faith in Jesus alone could save people from their sins, argued the eloquent Luther, not the payment of taxes or doing good works as decreed by the Catholic Church.

The rise of Protestantism reflected the growing independence and confidence of Europe’s emerging powers. Thanks to early explorers, nations such as Britain and France could now see opportunities for enriching themselves from trade overseas. John Cabot had already impressed the merchants of Bristol with his voyage to North America, and Jacques Cartier, a French navigator, sailed to Canada in a series of expeditions for the French King Francis I in the 1530s, becoming the first European to see the St Lawrence River (see plate 11).

The Reformation made revolt against Spanish (Holy Roman) imperial rule much easier to justify. Christianity’s single all-powerful God could now be deployed on all sides, each claiming for itself the one true Church. Emergent nations also pitched themselves headlong into the violent contest for access to global resources. Holland, Denmark and Sweden were the most fervently Protestant countries while France dithered, swinging in the wind between Catholic and reformed, sinking for a while into in its own desperate wars of religion (1562–98). Although England had been early to break ties with Rome, the question of which faith to follow continued to plague its politics well into the next century, provoking that country’s own civil war between 1642 and 1651.

Such conflicts came at an incredible cost. Silver from Mexico and Peru, which poured into Spain from the 1560s onwards, didn’t stay there long. It was quickly spent on firearms, armadas and mercenaries. The silver from the New World became the backbone of a new bullion-based economy across all Europe.

So quickly did Spain’s wealth spread that by the time Philip II of Spain died in 1598 his country was bankrupt, its fortune scattered across the warring nations of Europe. So many loans to fund wars of religion had been taken out from banks in Genoa and Augsburg that 40 per cent of all Spanish income was being spent on interest payments alone. Philip’s war legacy left Spain the sinking power of Europe.

Europe’s strategic direction was now clear: a continent carved up into autonomous national fragments, each pursuing whatever policies suited its own individual interests in a global competition to secure wealth overseas.

In the autumn of 1620 a band of English pilgrims and their families set off on a traumatic voyage across the Atlantic on board their ship the Mayflower. England was plagued by religious disputes and they hoped to find a better life abroad, taking their reformed Protestant religion with them. Puritans swelled their numbers over the next twenty years as England fell into a period of bitter Civil War, inflamed by matters of religion so that by 1642 about 21,000 had emigrated to North America.

Changing European appetites, tastes and attitudes

Sweet foods became commonplace in Europe with the arrival of cheap sugar from plantations overseas. Even poor people became addicted to tobacco and snuff, grown on plantations established on the east coast of North America, turning Europe into the soft-drugs centre of the world. Hot chocolate, a drink made from cacao beans, which grow naturally in Central America, was first sampled by Cortés while he was being entertained at the court of Moctezuma. By 1544 it was being drunk at the royal court in Spain, and within a hundred years people in France, England and other countries in western Europe had become addicted to its delicious flavour. French settlers established cacao plantations in the Caribbean, as did the Spanish in the Philippines. Demand led to more plantations and again the market grew.

With new European tastes came a renewed confidence in the belief that perhaps humans were, after all, set apart from and superior to all other forms of life on earth. It was an old idea, reinforced by the Christian Bible, now available in mass-produced editions printed in vernacular languages for all to read. Protestant preachers zealously confirmed from the opening Book of the Old Testament, Genesis, that God made man to have dominion over all the world, its creatures and nature’s bounty.

Religious confirmation that the natural resources of the earth were indeed at man’s disposal was ratified philosophically with the beginnings of empirical Western scientific thought. A radical book published in 1543 by Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) demonstrated how the earth revolved around the sun. No longer was mankind at the end of a long, divine chain of being. Instead, the world was part of a much larger mechanical system of planets and stars, rotating according to physical laws, as first proposed by Greek philosophers like Thales (see page 149).

The greatest of all the philosophers who celebrated Europe’s new-found confidence was René Descartes (1596–1650). This French philosopher, scientist and mathematician considered mankind could gain insights into the workings of nature by breaking it down into small parts that could be understood through observation and reason. Descartes believed that only humans have minds, reducing all other things, animate or inanimate, to mere machines that can be manipulated, dissected and exploited without feeling or scruple.

Natural consequences

Although the destruction of natural woodland was a process that first began when human civilizations appeared 10,000 years ago, Europe’s maritime strategy to develop colonies and trading posts all around the world accelerated the process into a violent new phase. Although cooking and heating were the most immediate human demands, requiring a constant supply of firewood, the chief reasons for such widespread deforestation were shipbuilding, iron smelting, salt extraction and agriculture. In the period 1650 to 1749, between 18.4 and 24.6 million hectares of forest disappeared in Europe.Compounding the problem was the lack of any coordinated replanting policy to ensure supplies for future generations.

Iron making, the manufacture of glass, bricks and ceramics, and salt extraction all placed huge demands on ancient forests, as wood was needed to fuel the furnaces these processes required. Europe’s annual production of iron has been estimated at 40,000 tonnes a year in 1500, but by 1700 it had more than tripled. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was decreed that to protect against future conflagrations all new buildings must be made of brick and stone, not wood. Ironically, this substantially increased the amount of timber required, because of the vast quantities of firewood needed to fuel the fires for baking so many bricks.

Deforestation in North America was driven by the first European settlers’ need for pastureland for the fast-breeding domesticated animals they had brought with them as life-support systems. Columbus brought eight pigs to Hispaniola in 1492. They quickly spread to Mexico, taken there by conquistador expeditions, until their numbers in the wild became, in the words of the Spanish, infinitos.

On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus brought with him some cows and horses. Within fifty years huge herds of cattle could be found as far apart as Florida, Mexico and Peru. The grassland pampas of South America provided perfect feeding grounds so that by 1700 these herds totalled an estimated fifty million animals. Domesticated sheep were first taken to America in the 1540s. They multiplied so fantastically that by 1614 there were 640,000 of them in the area around Santiago in Chile alone. Horses escaped and migrated from Mexico to the Great Plains, where they were re-domesticated by Native Americans, bringing a new way of life to the surviving tribes, most of which had fled to the interior of the continent to escape the encroaching European settlers.

From the prairies in the north to the pampas in the south, the Americas were swamped by new hoofed animals: goats, sheep, mules, horses, pigs and cattle brought from Europe and Asia. Within 250 years parts of America’s landscape had been stripped bare, transformed beyond recognition by the never-ending grazing of these huge migrating herds.

Potato famine, and the rise of monoculture

Growing commodities for worldwide export, such as tobacco (from the Caribbean), sugar cane (from the Americas and Asia), cotton (from North America), rubber (from South America), coffee (from Africa) and chocolate (from Mexico) provided the economic backbone of Europe’s colonies. Crops like these not only meant more forest clearing, but many quickly exhausted the soil, leading to further expansion to find new areas of fertility. Usually only three or four tobacco crops could be sustained by a piece of land before it was abandoned, to be replanted in twenty or thirty years’ time. In the meantime, more land was cleared.

While grazing animals and crops grown for export in the Americas caused a huge change in the natural landscape, domesticated plants taken across the world to be cultivated in Europe and Asia had consequences that were just as profound. Over thousands of years native Central American women had painstakingly domesticated wild teosinte into maize (see page 172) and as many as 300 varieties of potatoes were grown in Peru. Now, thanks to European globalization, Europe and much of Asia could reap the benefits of these nutritious crops too.

Maize was brought to Europe by the Spanish. It quickly became a valuable crop grown all around the Mediterranean, primarily as fodder for livestock. The cold climate of the Little Ice Age (c.1350–1850) meant that maize didn’t take off in northern Europe until after 1850, when warmer conditions were re-established. However, it was successfully grown in southern China from about 1550 onwards. Between 1400 and 1770 the population of China exploded, from seventy to 270 million people – a rise of nearly 400 per cent, much of it accounted for by highly nutritious maize, which could be grown on higher, drier ground than rice.

The potato was introduced to Europe by a Spaniard returning from South America in about 1570. It eventually transformed European diets owing to its high nutritional value and the ease with which it could be grown and harvested, although at first European snobbery seems to have prevented its rapid uptake since it was a favourite food of the natives of the Andes, who were widely regarded by the Spanish as savages.

The South American potato’s big European break came with its adoption by the peasants of Ireland, who frequently suffered food shortages. By the early 1800s Ireland was desperately addicted to a potato-based diet. When, in the 1830s, a fungal disease struck crops on the east coast of North America, its spores quickly spread on the winds as far as Peru, which is where the rot should have stopped. But such spores could now be spread by ships travelling across the Atlantic. By 1845 potato blight – probably carried on ships importing potatoes from Peru – had reached Germany, Belgium, England and then Ireland, where its progress caused complete collapse. During the great potato blight of 1846–9 more than one and a half million Irish people are thought to have died of starvation, disease and malnutrition after the total failure of three potato harvests in a row. More than a million more left Ireland, hoping for a better life in the American colonies or Australia.

Of the hundreds of different types of potatoes cultivated by the natives of South America, only as few as four varieties were ever brought across to Europe. This lack of biodiversity was one big reason why a single fungus could cause such widespread devastation.

How animals were annihilated for their skins

As Europeans flocked to colonies established on the other side of the world, whether as adventurers, entrepreneurs or refugees, many animal species which had evolved over tens of millions of years became endangered or extinct. Flightless birds were especially vulnerable. The fearless dodo, a relative of the pigeon and native to the island of Mauritius, fell victim to Portuguese (and then Dutch) invaders who arrived from 1505.

Animals with furry skins were in particular peril. As a result of the cooling climate of the Little Ice Age, furs became an increasingly important commodity for trade in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards. European demand for furs drove Russian Cossacks to conquer the hugely hostile and previously unexplored environment of Inner Siberia. Novgorod, in western Russia, became a centre for the export of squirrel furs, exporting 500,000 skins a year by 1400. Urged on by rich merchant families such as the Stroganovs, Cossack peasants from south-eastern Europe moved through Siberia, trapping furs and selling them in European markets in exchange for guns. Their descendants eventually formed the backbone of imperial Russia’s armies.

From as early as 1534 French settlers in North America had traded beaver furs with Native Americans. When hunters had exhausted one region they quickly moved on to another, travelling further inland until populations became exhausted. Fortified trading posts were established along the St Lawrence River by rival British and French trappers, who sided with native tribes in their efforts to out-hunt each other.

The same story applied to seals, walruses and whales, which all declined rapidly from about 1500 owing to the insatiable human appetite for skins, tusks and oil. In 1456 Atlantic walruses could still be found in the River Thames; now there are only 15,000 left worldwide. Today, artificial materials have replaced wild animal skins in many parts of the world. The practice of farming animals for their skins, rather than hunting wild stocks, has also been encouraged to prevent further extinctions.

High time for a political rethink

Command of the high seas had now helped European rulers and merchants escape from medieval Muslim encirclement. Slave labour and the exchange of easy-to-produce arms and ammunition supplied Europe’s traders with bullion, exotic foods, spices, silks, tea, coffee and chocolate from colonies in the New World and the Far East. Generally, these were not available to the population at large – how could they afford them? Instead, the masses continued to suffer as much as ever from famine, poverty and disease.

Growing inequality between Europe’s rulers and their poverty-stricken subjects was exacerbated by the relentless warfare waged by European nations both within Europe and around the world. Unprecedented devastation was exported as far as the Americas and India in the Seven Years War starting in 1756. This conflict was described by British statesman and historian Winston Churchill as the first true world war, with more than one million lives lost.

How could a merciful, just, Christian God condone a world such as this? If Jesus Christ could perform miracles, why did he permit such inequality, wars and suffering? A fashionable new philosophy among European thinkers and politicians proposed that while a divine force had originally created the universe, it could not be responsible for intervening in its workings. Deism, as this concept came to be known, rejected supernatural events, miracles and any concept of divine revelation.

Such ideas fused with the scientific observations of Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton, which showed that nature’s laws were more rational and logical than divine or inspired. Perhaps a more scientific system of social order could unlock a better, more acceptable way of life for everyone – not just kings, clerics and merchants, who justified their luxurious lifestyles on the basis of either divine authority or the principle that might is right.

During his country’s violent civil war from 1642 to 1651 English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) developed the idea that a ruler’s political authority came not from God but from rational laws of nature. Hobbes argued that people voluntarily delegated their authority in the interests of their own self-preservation. Then in 1689 English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) proposed a form of government based on a ‘social contract’ between rulers and the ruled. In Locke’s view a ruler’s authority not only came from the people, but could, if the contract were breached, also be legitimately taken away by the people.

Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689) began a period now known as the Enlightenment, in which the concept of popular sovereignty became a powerful new force in the politics of Europe and its colonies. What gave people the right to own property was, said Locke, the fact that they worked to acquire it, extract wealth from it and defend it. Personal liberty was the inalienable natural right of all men for the protection of their private property. If governments breached that right, it followed through reason that people were justified in taking authority back into their own hands.

How freedom on one side of the pond . . .

Political ideas like these fell on fertile ground in the British colonies of North America. Taxes imposed to help recover the huge debts incurred by the gruelling Seven Years War were bitterly resented by American settlers, who were also fighting their own battles against dispossessed natives. Discontent grew greater when the British government refused to supply sufficient forces during major clashes such as Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763–6), when Native American forces tried to drive European settlers out of Ottawa. By 1776, all thirteen American colonies felt sufficiently aggrieved to form a coalition and declare their independence from Britain.

The founding fathers of the United States succeeded in their aim of creating a separate state, independent of Britain, largely thanks to the gunpowder and battleships supplied by Britain’s arch enemy, France. They justified their rebellion through the arguments of writers who took their lead from Locke. Fashionable deists Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the chief architects of America’s declaration of inalienable human rights, which, they said, had been so undermined by Great Britain that the creation of a new independent sovereign state was not only justified but an obligation under ‘Nature’s God’. The United States Bill of Rights (1791) enshrined the principle of personal liberty in a series of ten amendments to the new nation’s constitution. Individual rights for the protection and exploitation of private property formed a cornerstone of American liberty and personal freedom.

However, some issues that should have been dealt with were brushed under the carpet. Women, slaves and Native Americans were not, in reality, equal in the eyes of America’s founding fathers, despite the powerful opening statement of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’. The tolerance of slavery later contributed to the outbreak of a bitter American civil war that cost nearly a million lives (see page 267).

. . . was very different from freedom on the other

Popular French disgust at the excesses of the King and his court, and the privileges enjoyed by the Catholic Church provoked revolutionary zeal just as impassioned as that in the United States. But ideas of freedom on this side of the world were very different from those incubating in America. Tying natural rights to parcels of land was far less important to the mob which liberated the prisoners from the Bastille in Paris on the night of 14 July 1789. After all, theirs wasn’t a fight against a distant colonial power or fierce bands of dispossessed natives. Their struggle was to do with making sure everyone got fed and ridding their country of privilege. Liberty, equality and fraternity became their rallying cry. And anyone that stood in its way was brutally swept aside.

Following the storming of the Bastille, a new assembly abolished all special rights and privileges of the nobles, clergy, towns, provinces, companies and cities. In the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, published on 26 August, the basis of French liberty was firmly founded on abolishing inequality between classes of people and not, as in the United States of America’s new constitution, on the inalienable rights of private landowners.

Popular freedom, in all its forms, was an infection that quickly spread across the world. On 20 July 1810 the citizens of Colombia (then called New Granada) declared their independence from Spain. More colonies in Central and South America followed: Venezuela in 1811, Argentina in 1816, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 1821, and Brazil in 1822.

Propaganda and national heroes

It didn’t take long for Europe’s other ruling classes to figure out how to make use of notions of liberty, equality and individual rights to boost their own grip on power.

For a start, it now became easier for rulers to recruit much larger armies. Since the 1530s firearms had made it possible to turn peasants into foot soldiers with only a few days’ training. But armies stayed small, because the bigger they were, the more they cost to equip. Standing armies were a wasted expense when a country was not at war. However, once people became infected with the idea that ultimately they were sovereign, it became much easier for rulers to galvanize the masses into taking up arms and sacrificing themselves for the sake of an idea, or for the colours on a national flag or the melody of an anthem. In this way, ideas of national service were born.

In 1798 the French Republic passed a law declaring in its first article, ‘Any Frenchman is a soldier and owes himself to the defence of the nation.’ Napoleon Bonaparte, a general who seized political power in a military coup in 1799, was a genius at rallying France to the cause of defending its new libertarian principles. He was the first European statesman to introduce the idea of a conscript army. It quickly caught on. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15), the French Emperor – as Napoleon became – managed to raise as many as 1.5 million troops, mostly from France. At the end of the wars, some 900,000 Napoleonic troops faced forces of about a million from a coalition of other European countries. No wars had ever been fought on such a scale before.

The birth of fighting for causes – good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny – ushered in a new age of propaganda and popular heroes. After Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the British government built a statue and a square in the heart of London as a permanent reminder to its people of this hero who had led them in the defence of their country against tyranny. National champions like Nelson and Wellington, the British general who finally crushed Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, were given state funerals and buried in the nation’s most sacred places.

Towards a world of free trade and free people

Another challenge for some of Europe’s rulers was how to recover from the economic dislocation caused by the loss of the colonies on which much of their wealth was based.

France had lost Haiti and ceded most of its American colonies in a desperate bid for cash. The French colony of Louisiana was sold by Napoleon to the United States in 1803 for $15 million to help fund the wars against the British. Thanks to Latin America’s independence movements Spain’s overseas empire began to crumble from the start of the nineteenth century. And Britain could now no longer rely on exclusive supplies from the plantations of the newly independent United States of America.

One solution was to find new colonies elsewhere. Napoleon occupied Egypt in an attempt to protect French trade interests and block British routes to its colonies in India. Meanwhile, the British consolidated their position in India, extending the rule of the Honourable East India Company across most of the subcontinent by 1813. The conquest of Burma to an extent compensated Britain for its loss of North American timber supplies by gaining access to thousands of square kilometres of precious hardwoods.

Also, no longer able to send convicts to North America as indentured servants, Britain’s gaze turned southwards to find an alternative place for the disposal of the large numbers of poor people locked up in the country’s overcrowded jails. From 1788 to 1868 regular shipments of British convicts turned Australia, which had been home to an estimated one million previously undisturbed Aboriginals, into another satellite of Europe’s global village.

But strategies like these didn’t resolve the problem of what to do about trade with former colonies, such as the United States of America, which could no longer be exploited on an exclusive basis. What’s more, with its millions of African slaves, the United States was at a huge economic advantage now that it was free to export its goods to the highest bidder anywhere in the world.

Thanks to tireless Quaker campaigners and evangelical Christians such as William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the British parliament voted in 1807 to outlaw slave trading throughout the British Empire. By 1833 Britain had declared not just the trade but slavery itself illegal throughout its empire. The British parliament now positioned itself as liberty’s true champion, and in a determined effort to level the economic playing field British foreign policy was now directed at persuading its trading partners to follow suit.

The restoration of profitable trading relationships with former colonies was also assisted by the pen of a Scottish professor called Adam Smith. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith proposed a new economic philosophy, arguing that some countries were naturally more efficient at making certain goods than others. If a country with a warm, dry climate suitable for growing raw materials like cotton was free to sell it to a hilly country that had plenty of rainfall to power watermills to manufacture finished clothes, then, said Smith, both countries would be better off.

Smith extended the idea of liberty to mean free trade between nations – the removal of monopolies, taxes and tariffs. Smith’s economic liberty became the cornerstone of a new science called economics. Capitalism based on free trade between separate nations was a direct challenge to the protectionist concept underpinning the empires of Europe, in which wealth came exclusively from a nation’s private colonies. In a world where some empires were beginning to break apart and new nations like the United States had no colonies of their own, this idea of free-market capitalism had considerable attractions.

A different kind of revolution was responsible for the success of the economic system called capitalism, which eventually became globally predominant. The Industrial Revolution was no less violent than the American or the French, but instead of trying to overthrow political authority, its sights were set on using scientific progress to unfetter humanity from the limitations of being part of the natural world.