13

The Industrialized World

(1800–1945 AD)

How the human species finally freed itself from the shackles of nature, provoking a race to exploit the capital riches of the world

 

ARE HUMANS FUNDAMENTALLY different from other animals? Today people seem divided on the issue. Some feel secure in their belief in man’s separateness, even superiority, perhaps persuaded by the fact that no other animal has ever tried to send its own species to the moon and back, let alone succeeded in doing so.

Others think that Charles Darwin’s discoveries, first published in 1859, proved beyond all reasonable doubt that humans evolved from animals and that the difference between man and monkey is only a matter of degree – or of brain size, to be precise. Humans, they say, may be good at inventing things that other animals cannot, but then was making an atomic bomb really such a smart idea? And what’s all this recent anxiety about the climate and global warming? If humans are to blame for melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns and dreadful new droughts which may mean that soon hundreds of millions of human beings, not to mention other species, will perish, perhaps they’re not so clever after all.

This dispute is at the core of the current debate about man’s relationship with nature. Will the future of life on earth be best secured by man using his ingenuity to tackle and take responsibility for the great problems of climate change, energy supplies and shrinking biodiversity? Or should mankind revert to a simpler, less frenetic way of life, restoring to nature its traditional role of regulating and balancing the planet’s life-support systems, regardless of the success or failure of any individual species?

The foundations of this mother of all debates date back about 200 years. Until then most civilized people were clear in their minds that in terms of living species mankind was a cut above the rest.

Followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam believed that God had given man dominion over all other life and with the advent of guns and gunpowder he finally had the means to back this claim up. Once Europeans had connected the earth’s previously separate continents, using their ships to transport artificially bred crops and animals from one part of the world to another, man’s command over nature must have seemed almost complete.

Large human populations covered most of the globe. Even where they had been all but wiped out by disease, as in the Americas, stocks were rapidly replenished by fresh supplies of slaves or colonists from Africa and Europe. Numbers tell the story. Despite wars, plague and other natural disasters by 1802 the world’s population had risen to a staggering one billion people – that’s a rise of at least 500 per cent in less than 2,000 years.

But in 1798 an English economist called Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published an essay that predicted imminent disaster. Within fifty years, he claimed, the human race would have increased to such an extent that there would not be sufficient food to sustain it. The problem, wrote Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population, was that the human population was growing far more quickly than the supply of food the earth could produce. If disasters resulting from human vices, such as war, didn’t cut humanity’s numbers sufficiently, then nature would take over, in the form of disease, famine and starvation, until the proportion of population to food supply regained its proper balance.

Malthus’s essay came as a great shock to many people in Europe and America. They believed, mostly for religious reasons, that thanks to the gift of a superior intellect and a divine soul mankind was different from all other living things. But what if Malthus was right? It was almost as if his dire warnings were a direct challenge to the most creative minds of Europe and its American offshoots to make sure that his predictions couldn’t come true.

The advent of mass production

For centuries China led the world in technological and scientific innovation. Printing, gunpowder and the compass, three inventions which helped shape the modern world, all came from the East (see pages 202, 203, 205). But it wasn’t from the East that man’s newest inventions designed to overcome the limits of nature were to come. After all, who in China had ever heard of an Englishman named Malthus?

Since the mid-fifteenth century China had shunned approaches from the West. Its government’s instincts were not directed towards the expansion of markets overseas. Following the rise of the Qing Dynasty in 1644, the strategy was simple: keep China’s borders secure from invasions and other foreign influences, keep tribute payments from neighbours flowing in and, above all, prevent its prodigious numbers of peasants from clamouring for regime change. Without the pressure of external enemies, which had plagued the Song, the Qing’s message to China’s rural poor was as consistent as it was conservative: learn the works of Confucius, who teaches obedience to the family and the state, and if you’re lucky you may win a well-paid job as a minor official in the enormous civil service. Otherwise, stick to growing rice.

The contrast with Britain in 1800 could not have been greater. This small island nation, naturally protected by the sea, was now at the centre of a worldwide system of fleets, markets and colonies. A knock here or there, such as the loss of its American colonies, was simply redressed by the acquisition of new imperial territories elsewhere (Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia) or policies such as the abolition of slavery and the pursuit of capitalist free enterprise. When Britain was threatened by an energy crisis after its supplies of wood had been almost exhausted by the demands of shipbuilding, iron making, beer brewing, glass production, brick making and salt extraction, an alternative energy source was found underground in the form of coal. By 1800 most industries in Britain had converted from burning wood and charcoal to coke or coal.

Another incentive to be creative came from the ban on slave trading (see page 253), introduced in 1807, which stretched the nation’s most ingenious minds to find ways of replacing slave labour with machines. This was considerably boosted by a system that gave individuals who came up with new ideas the chance to grow rich. Patents, which gave inventors a monopoly over sales of their ideas for a number of years, were first introduced in England by James I in 1623. By 1714 it was mandatory for inventors to publish their designs in exchange for their monopoly entitlement, encouraging creative minds to share their ideas as well as devise new and useful inventions.

It was within this innovative, entrepreneurial environment that Bolton barber Richard Arkwright (1732–92) came up with a revolutionary way of manufacturing cloth, inventing the world’s first water-powered cotton mill. Arkwright’s mill, opened in 1781 in the village of Cromford in Derbyshire, transformed the process of textile making by spinning thin, strong threads which were then fed into an automatic loom. In spite of a series of disputes over the rightful claim to the invention, by the time Arkwright died in 1792 he was a very wealthy man, with a fortune estimated at £500,000. From nothing, he had become one of the richest men in the world.

Despite the ingenuity of Arkwright’s loom, his invention could work only next to suitably fast-flowing rivers or streams. Indeed, from the start of human history until about 1800 everything to do with man’s relationship with the rest of the world had always been to some extent subject to nature’s own operating systems. Energy came directly from the natural, solar-powered processes of the earth – either from life itself, animal or human, or from nature’s life-sustaining cycles of wind and water.

Automation made possible by water power led to the advent of assembly lines with teams of labourers trained to do the same repetitive tasks day in and day out. Products could be made more quickly, more cheaply and in greater volumes than ever before. Whereas a craftsman had to be skilled in many disciplines to make a finished item, bustling around his workshop, taking time to find the right tools for different stages of the job in hand, the assembly-line worker simply waited for the arrival of the next half-made object as it passed down the line, ready to do his one simple task again and again and again. Little skill required. No time wasted.

It wasn’t just in Britain that the idea of mass production had caught on. Eli Whitney (1765–1825) was a mechanical genius from Massachusetts, USA, who became familiar with the ideas of mass production after having worked in his father’s nail-making workshop during the American Revolutionary War. By 1798 the newly independent United States, anxiously watching the rapidly escalating war between Britain and Napoleonic France, had recognized the need for armaments to secure its fledgling liberty. To the amazement of the American Congress, Whitney demonstrated how he could assemble ten separate guns from a single heap of interchangeable parts. They were so impressed that they awarded him a contract to produce 10,000 muskets.

But ships, windmills, waterwheels, canals and mass production in newfangled factories were all still products of man’s ability to harness the forces of nature. Even the first steam engines, pioneered by Scottish inventor James Watt in 1769, used the weight of atmospheric air to provide a limited source of power for pumping water out of mines. If mankind was to prevent Malthus’s catastrophic predictions coming true it was essential to find ways of breaking free of nature’s constraints and tapping into the resources that she herself used to create and sustain all life.

Full steam ahead

When Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) turned up the pressure on his Puffing Devil steam engine in 1801, the truly transformative effects of man’s potential power over nature could at last be seen. This machine did not rely on the earth’s natural forces at all. High-pressure steam meant that Trevithick’s engine could be mounted sideways on a track and be made to pull a wagon without the help of gravity, atmosphere, wind or water. All it needed were the energy-rich raw materials of the earth itself, the leftovers of life once lived (coal, oil and natural gas are all such products). Simply by burning wood or coal in an oxygenated atmosphere, water could be heated in a high-pressure kettle to produce a fully independent source of portable power.

Railways transformed the landscapes of Britain, Europe and America. By 1890 they criss-crossed the whole of Britain, providing a convenient, fast, reliable transportation service that ran according to a timetable of human needs regardless of natural conditions. In the United States rail transport allowed the proper exploration and exploitation of the vast inner continental area, opening up new lands for plantations and mining. By 1890 the US railroad system stretched some 230,000 miles. Networks in Russia, Europe and in other Western colonies such as India and South Africa developed in parallel, providing mass overland transportation across the trading world.

Steam also powered the provision of electricity, pioneered by a clutch of American, French, Italian and German scientists. Having perfected the design for a cheap, mass-produced lightbulb, American inventor Thomas Edison went on to establish the world’s first distribution system in 1882, linking fifty-nine customers in New York with mains electric power. In the same year, a steam power station came into operation in London, supplying energy to street lights and private houses nearby.

Today as much as 86 per cent of all electricity is still generated by steam-powered turbines heated by coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear fuels. Electricity gave rise to the first system for worldwide telegraphic communications, initially based on chemical battery power, trialled in France as early as 1810. In 1866 a transatlantic cable was laid on the seabed, linking Britain with the United States, thanks to the development of steam-powered ships, which had by then entered service in the British Royal Navy. By 1900 instant electronic communications networks linked every inhabited continent on the globe.

The power of steam was matched by the development of another artificial transportable power-production system, the internal combustion engine. In 1876 German scientists Nikolaus Otto and Gottlieb Daimler developed a four-stroke engine that used oil, in its refined state of petroleum, as an energy-rich explosive mixture from which they produced a lighter, faster system for motive power. Ransom Olds built the first American automobile factory in 1902 and Henry Ford applied mass-production techniques beginning in 1910. Road networks were upgraded by governments keen to promote trade and transport, urged on by people’s desire to express their personal liberty by being able to travel independently where and when they chose.

Small, highly efficient engines that could power cars were soon mounted on wings, further defying nature’s limits on man’s mobile capabilities. In 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully piloted the first controlled, powered flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Aircraft became a vital component of military forces, providing reconnaissance and the possibility of delivering bombs from on high. War needs meant that the dynamics of mass production were quickly applied to aircraft manufacture. During the Second World War (1939–45) mass-production techniques allowed the United States to build almost 300,000 military planes in just five years.

Continents were now so close that it became possible to travel to the other side of the world in less than a day. In 1879 the US was producing nineteen million barrels of oil a year. By 2005 worldwide production was almost eighty-three million barrels a day.

The ultimate form of power, which does not occur naturally on earth, was pioneered by Albert Einstein (1879–1955). In 1905 this German-born genius spelled out a number of new theories that revised man’s basic understanding of the laws governing the physical universe. Isaac Newton’s theories of motion and gravity, although apparently correct for large objects, broke down at the atomic level, said Einstein. Most critically of all, he calculated that the enormous quantity of energy stored in an atom to hold its constituent parts together was a massive source of untapped power. The amount of energy inside a single atom was, Einstein worked out, equivalent to its mass multiplied by the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) squared, i.e. E = mc2.

In August 1945 the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were the first people to feel the power of this awesome, supra-natural force when atomic bombs were dropped on their cities by the American air force, each one killing as many as 70,000 people in an instant. Thousands more died in the deluge of invisible but lethal radioactive energy that lingered for years to come. In 1951 a means of harnessing this energy for peaceful purposes was demonstrated by a test reactor in the US state of Idaho. It showed that nuclear energy could provide another source of heat to evaporate water into steam for generating electricity.

Molecular miracles

Man’s ability to compete with nature was enhanced further by the discovery by German scientist Friedrich Wöhler (1800–82) that chemicals produced by life itself could be created artificially in a laboratory. While trying to concoct the compound ammonia cyanate in 1828, Wöhler, quite by accident, synthesized urea. The scientific world was astonished. Until then people had believed that a fundamental ‘vital’ force separated animate from inanimate matter. The artificial creation of a chemical of nature out of inanimate substances in a laboratory had been considered quite impossible.

The birth of organic chemistry, triggered by Wöhler’s discovery, signalled the opening of a second front in man’s knowledge of how to use the same materials as nature for his own ends. Life’s ‘modelling clay’ is constructed from two main elements – carbon and hydrogen – which combine with traces of other elements and oxygen in an almost infinite variety of chains, curls and rings to produce the diverse stuff of living things. One of the richest sources of such ingredients is crude oil. Wöhler’s discovery meant that it was now possible for mankind to learn how to model with this clay too – not yet for making life itself, but for synthesizing useful but unnatural materials.

In the 180 years since Wöhler’s accidental synthesis of urea, mankind has modelled countless new substances and materials – from plastics to explosives – using oil or its aerated equivalent, natural gas, as ingredients. Two German scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, developed a new artificial process for producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen which could be used as an artificial fertilizer. Today, more than a hundred million tonnes of artificial fertilizers are produced each year for spreading on fields all over the world. The Haber–Bosch process is now reckoned to be responsible for sustaining up to 40 per cent of the world’s population – that’s as many as three billion people.

Cracking the genetic code

Direct artificial intervention in the processes of life was the third frontier in man’s push over the last 200 years to break free from the natural limits endured by his ancestors. Building on the pioneering work of Englishman Edward Jenner (1749–1823), Frenchman Louis Pasteur (1822–95) devised vaccinations that worked by injecting people with artificially weakened forms of diseases to provoke their bodies into building defences to ward off potential infection. By 1979 such vaccinations had eradicated smallpox from the world, possibly man’s biggest triumph over one of nature’s most persistent and devastating historical plagues.

Direct biological interventions were spurred on by Rosalind Franklin (1920–58), a British biophysicist whose X-ray images of DNA helped James Watson and Francis Crick to model nature’s ultimate polymer, DNA, in 1953. Their work unlocked the control system inside every living cell that directs the process of evolution itself, thereby leading to the rise of the modern science of genetic engineering.

Since then scientists have replicated life in a test tube by cloning cells; genetically modified crops to make them grow fitter, faster and larger; and fought diseases with drugs and therapies that lengthen human lifespans. To cap it all, the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990, has codified the complex genes that make up humans themselves, giving modern scientists the keys with which to unlock the inner secrets of evolutionary mechanics.

Modern man’s achievements would seem to suggest that he is indeed rather different from any other species that has ever lived. After all, what other living things have managed to interrupt, modify, compete with and even usurp nature’s age-old operating systems? As for the dire warnings of Thomas Malthus: when he died in 1834 the world’s population had just passed the one billion mark. By 1928 it had reached two billion; by 1961 three billion; by 1974 four billion; by 1987 five billion; and by 1999 six billion. The growth rate is such that for each extra billion humans added, it takes roughly half as long to add a billion more. Dramatically falling child death rates have been accompanied by substantially longer life expectancy. Artificial fertilizers, medicines, improved hygiene, fossil fuels, industrialized cities, mass production, organic chemistry and vaccinations are the cause. As of 2006 the world’s net population grows by approximately 211,090 every day. Malthus was right. None of this would have happened if nature had had her way.

The matter of race

Once mankind was unshackled from the limitations of the earth’s natural forces, steamships could travel anywhere regardless of prevailing winds, railways could transport goods at high speeds without the need for human or animal power, and industrialists could manufacture limitless numbers of cheap finished goods using artificial as well as natural materials, unskilled labour and automatically powered machines.

Britain’s industrial lead didn’t last long. By 1870 France and the United States of America had caught up. Their factories were manufacturing everything from pots and pans to clothes, ships and weapons. New countries such as Italy (united in 1860) and Germany (formed in 1871) also joined the club of rapidly developing nations. Each followed a similar pattern: merchants grew rich off the profits of new enterprise while their workers stewed with discontent about low pay, poor working conditions and the lack of a real political voice. Liberty, equality and fraternity were still hollow words. Real power lay with cabals of aristocrats and hungry merchants who dominated parliamentary politics, or with imperialist tsars and autocratic kings.

It hadn’t escaped the notice of some late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commentators that the inventions that were changing the world all seemed to originate in the ‘genius’ of white Caucasian people – British, French, German, Italian or American. Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, collected hundreds of human skulls from all over the world in an attempt to understand the source of Europe’s apparent intellectual superiority. He claimed to be able to determine the respective mental abilities of different human races based on their average cranial capacity: the larger the brain, he said, the greater the intelligence.

Voyeuristic Europeans and Americans had ample opportunities to see the apparent inferiority of other races for themselves. During the 1870s human zoos displayed African Nubians and American Inuits alongside wild animals. They could be found at imperial exhibitions held in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York and Warsaw, which drew as many as 300,000 members of the public. The 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris was visited by a remarkable twenty-eight million people. One of its main exhibits was a ‘Negro Village’ featuring 400 native Africans. Other exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and Paris (1907 and 1931) displayed natives in cages, often naked.

Deep racism was one of the factors at the heart of America’s devastating Civil War (1861–5), which almost caused the Union to break up irrevocably. The status of African slaves had been under scrutiny ever since the Declaration of Independence statement in 1776 that ‘all men are created equal’ (see page 249). When Britain abolished slave trading in 1807 and then slavery throughout its Empire in 1833, pressure for change elsewhere grew greater. America’s Northern states had little to lose from the abolition of slavery, having quickly industrialized with help from Britain. Not so the cotton-, tobacco- and sugar-plantation owners of the South, where slave labour underpinned the white way of life. Although the US Constitution was unequivocal about the equal rights of men, the legality of slavery was deemed a state matter, not a federal concern. Eleven Southern states refused to outlaw slavery using some ingenious mental gymnastics to justify their stance.

The questions as to whether new states should be admitted as ‘slave’ or ‘free’ further inflamed debate. When Abraham Lincoln, a Northerner, became President in 1861, eleven Southern states, led by South Carolina, formed their own confederation and declared themselves separate from the Union.

Between April 1861 and the spring of 1865 almost one million people died in a most bitterly fought civil war. The Northern states secured victory thanks to their superior industrial technology. Four million black African slaves were freed and three new amendments adopted into the US Constitution: outlawing slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment), granting black citizenship (the Fourteenth) and granting all men – but not women – the right to vote regardless of race, colour or creed (the Fifteenth). By 1877, after a painful period of ‘reconstruction’ in the South, all the former Confederate states had been sworn back into the Union.

But ideas of white supremacy endured. US Supreme Court Rulings in 1896 and 1908 allowed legal discrimination through the provision of public facilities that were ‘separate but equal’. In reality this meant that until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s many states in America ran a system of apartheid in which blacks were forbidden by law to attend the same schools as whites. They were also not allowed to share a taxi with whites or enter public buildings by the same doors. They had to drink from separate water fountains, use separate toilets, be buried in separate cemeteries and even swear in court on separate Bibles. They were excluded from public restaurants and libraries and barred from public parks with signs that read ‘Negroes and dogs not allowed’.

How Europeans claimed Australia and Africa

Between 1788 and 1900 Australia’s Aboriginal population is estimated to have fallen by as much as 90 per cent owing to a combination of disease, land appropriation by overseas settlers and violence. The news of the discovery of gold in 1851 provoked a new wave of European colonization which increased Australia’s population from 431,000 to 1.7 million two decades later. Roads, railways and telegraph lines quickly followed. Native people, as in America, found themselves in the middle of a confusing, unsympathetic world. European illnesses such as smallpox, influenza, measles and venereal diseases did most of the killing, although it is estimated that some 20,000 Aboriginals who got in the way were variously massacred by European whites.

Many white settlers hoped that over time Aboriginal culture would disappear altogether. Between 1869 and 1969 Christian missionaries, supported by the Australian government, systematically made Aboriginal children wards of the state, forcibly taking them to internment camps and orphanages where they were raised apart from their parents as agricultural labourers or domestic servants. In an effort to stamp out their culture, they were forbidden to speak except in English. According to a government inquiry published in 1997, more than 100,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents between 1910 and 1970. In a candid admission of what happened to these ‘stolen generations’, the report concluded: ‘These violations continue to affect Indigenous people’s daily lives. They were an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out Indigenous families, communities and cultures, vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of Australia.’

Europe’s conquest of inland Africa was no less traumatic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa was still a patchwork of as many as 3,000 distinctive human groups speaking over 1,500 different languages. Most of the continent was dominated by Bantu farmers and herders, who over several centuries had spread from their ancient homeland in west Africa displacing hunter-gathering bands such as the bushmen (Koisans) and Pygmies.

France pioneered the first major European incursions in 1830, when its troops invaded Algeria, then a vassal state of the weakening Ottoman Empire. By 1834 French troops controlled a population of three million Muslims, and Thomas Bugeaud, the colony’s first governor-general, began constructing roads for transporting goods and materials for export to Europe. By 1848 more than 100,000 French people had settled in the territory, cultivating the land and exporting cotton harvested by forced African labour.

Following the success of this first invasion, Europe’s other capitalist nations found themselves in a race to grab as much land and labour, and as many commodities for as many markets, as possible. By the 1870s a renewed fervour for colonization – known as the Scramble for Africa – was fuelled by the demands of European industrialization (see plate 12).

The scramble was whipped up further by the arrival of a new power on the European stage – Germany. On 1 September 1870 France was humiliated at the Battle of Sedan by German-Prussian forces, which surrounded and captured the French Emperor Napoleon III and his army. Following this Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) Germany became unrivalled master of the River Rhine, around which lay prime land for industrialization with excellent transport links and power from natural fast-flowing rivers.

Flushed with victory, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck united twenty-five separate German states into a single mighty nation headed by the all-powerful Wilhelm I of Prussia. Africa’s fate as the next theatre of European colonization was sealed by a conference in Berlin in 1884–5 orchestrated by Bismarck, at which the major powers of Europe agreed the terms under which the continent was to be sliced up between them like a melon. The stage was now set for the rapid and comprehensive creation by European powers of what has since become known as the Third World.

A condition of the Berlin Congress was that colonized land be put into ‘economic use’. That meant either cultivating cash crops such as coffee, cacao, rubber, cotton and sugar to generate profits, or extracting minerals such as copper, diamonds and gold to pay for and feed Europe’s appetite for industry. As Africa was occupied, its people, soil and society were pressed into producing goods mainly suitable for export to other countries. Africans were also denied the chance of investing in strategies to feed and sustain their own growing civilizations.

Nineteenth-century Europe’s financial and material gains were made at the expense of the native populations of Asia, America, Africa and Australia. Grand buildings like the Royal Palace of Brussels still stand proud, lavishly refurbished by King Leopold II with his profits from Congolese ivory and rubber (see plate 12). By the time most African countries received their political independence in the second half of the twentieth century, their land had been exhausted, their raw materials removed, their economies sucked dry by loans, and trade agreements locked their populations in poverty. Worse still, their people had been ripped out of their traditional tribal and ethnic groupings, rearranged into new colonial territories and armed with Western guns. European colonization extended the misery of Africa, which had begun with the demand for slaves in the Muslim world to the east and America to the west.

Ideological misgivings

Karl Marx, a Jewish German social philosopher and economic theorist, wrote a famous diatribe against the capitalist nations in the heady climate of a Europe swept by revolutions. His Communist Manifesto directly challenged the ruling elites. Marx proposed a new type of society that would finally put an end to centuries of pernicious inequality between the rich and poor.

A series of disastrous crop failures, most importantly the potato blight that crippled Ireland, Belgium and Germany, led to popular rebellions in Italy, France, the German states and Poland in 1848. The cause of the unrest, according to Marx, was plain to see. Human history, he said, was a long series of struggles between rich and poor. As a result of industrialization that struggle was now being waged between capitalist businessmen (the bourgeoisie) and impoverished factory workers (the proletariat). The constant economic growth upon which Europe and America had based their strategies was now tottering. Capitalism’s imminent collapse, said Marx, would lead to a new social order across the whole world in which equality and true freedom for the masses could be attained, if only the workers of the world would unite.

Shenanigans in the Far East

Shortly after Marx wrote his prophetic manifesto, humanity’s largest ever civil war broke out in China. Between 1850 and 1864 an estimated twenty million people perished in the Taiping Rebellion – that’s twenty times more than in the American Civil War of around the same period.

Chinese tea, silk and porcelain were highly sought-after commodities in Europe, but there was a problem: Chinese society was built on a philosophy of self-sufficiency. Since the mid-fifteenth century China had been a civilization independent of overseas fleets and trade with far-flung vassal colonies. Food and luxury goods were all manufactured in the home market. The Chinese Emperor himself explained as much in a letter he wrote to King George III of England in 1793, in response to a British request for trade: ‘You, O King, live far away across the mighty seas . . . The difference between our customs and moral laws and your own is so profound that our customs and traditions could never grow in your soil . . . I have no use for your country’s goods. Hence there is no need to bring in the wares of foreign barbarians to exchange for our own products . . .’

Such self-satisfaction provoked the most extreme imperialist reaction. If the Chinese didn’t want Western goods, then something had to be done to make them want them.

Officials in Britain’s Honourable East India Company came up with the dishonourable solution of drug trafficking. An elaborate system was established whereby British traders would buy Chinese tea in Canton and issue credit notes to local traders, who could then redeem them against opium smuggled in by agents from Calcutta. Between 1750 and 1860 thousands of tonnes of opium grown in the poppy fields of Bengal were smuggled into China in exchange for silk, tea and porcelain. The trade was a masterstroke of ingenuity. Rather than the British paying for goods in valuable silver, locally grown opium could be used as currency instead. And the problem of China’s self-sufficiency was solved by a freshly cultivated dependency on highly addictive drugs.

By the 1820s more than 900 tonnes of opium a year were flooding into China from Bengal. In 1838 the Chinese imperial government introduced the death penalty for anyone caught trading the drug. When the British refused to stop shipments, the Chinese government imposed a trading embargo. Two years later a British fleet arrived with the object of forcing the Chinese to revoke the ban. After the British seized the Emperor’s tax barges, the Chinese government was forced to sue for peace in 1842. A treaty re-established trade links, ceded Hong Kong to Britain and allowed Christian missionaries to preach unhindered on Chinese soil.

These agents of God did more harm than all the poppy fields of India combined. In 1850 Hong Xiuquan, an unorthodox Christian convert, was so entranced by missionary teaching that he claimed to be the long-lost brother of Jesus Christ. Blessed with a charismatic personality, Xiuquan raised a giant peasant army to challenge the Qing government, which was, largely thanks to Britain, now impoverished and ineffective. Between 1853 and 1864 Xiuquan and his rapidly swelling band of followers established a rival state across southern China with its capital at Nanjing. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace replaced the teachings of Confucius with the Christian Bible. Women were treated for the first time as equal to men. Opium, gambling, tobacco and alcohol were all banned.

But once installed in his new capital the movement’s divine leader lost his zest for rule, instead choosing to spend more time with his extended family in his harem. In 1856 Britain used China’s civil war as an opportunity to make more military mischief in a conflict known as the Second Opium War and attacked the port of Guangzhou. This conflict ended in 1860 with the occupation of Beijing by Western forces, who compelled the Chinese government, still battling Xiuquan’s rebels in the south, to sign a new treaty which legalized the import of opium, authorized foreign warships to sail along the Yangtze River, established eleven new ports for trade with Britain, France, Russia and the United States, and paid a large indemnity in silver to compensate Britain for its recent loss of profits. How times had changed since the Chinese Emperor confidently penned his letter to George III in 1793!

Meanwhile, French and British forces supported the struggling Qing government and together finally put an end to the rebellion in 1864, but not before it had become one of the deadliest wars in human history in which an estimated twenty million people died.

By now China, exhausted by war and still reeling from the effects of opium, was easy prey for the vultures. By 1887 the French had their own Far Eastern empire, luring Vietnam and Cambodia (known as Indochina) away from China’s sphere of influence. Ten years later German forces occupied the strategically important mainland coastal region of Jia Zhou. By this time the Japanese had established control over Korea.

All of which explains why another devastating Chinese rebellion broke out between 1899 and 1901. Traditionalist rural peasants, calling themselves the Boxers, wanted to rid their homeland of the pernicious influence of the West and its alien capitalist culture. Their forces invaded the imperial capital Beijing in June 1900, killing tens of thousands of Chinese Christians and taking thousands of Western foreigners living in the city hostage. An international force scrambled to the rescue. By August it had defeated the Boxer rebels, but then, in an echo of the disaster of the Fourth Crusade (see page 219), this cabal of mostly European nations went on to plunder Beijing itself, setting fire to its palaces and forcing the Emperor and Dowager Empress to flee.

The price of international ‘rescue’ was set at reparations of some £67.5 million, to be paid in precious silver by the imperial government of China and split amongst the members of the eight-nation alliance. Such a sum could be raised only by punishing new taxes on the rural population. Within ten years the imperial Chinese government had become so weak and was so loathed by its people that a popular revolution finally put an end to the 2,000-year-old institution, replacing it with a republic in January 1912. After decades of civil war and invasions, this fledgling republic itself succumbed to a communist takeover on 1 October 1949 led by party chairman Mao Zedong.

In the Far East Marx’s predictions as to the course of capitalism and the rise of the suppressed proletariat had proved uncannily accurate. In Europe, similar revolutions turned out to be no less profound.

Towards total war

Popular zeal for a return to a fairer way of life boiled over during the First World War. The Great War, as it became known, was fought mostly in Europe between 1914 and 1918. It was only slightly less devastating than China’s Taiping Rebellion, with eighteen million people left dead, twenty-two million wounded and the slaughter of some eight million horses.

It began after the heir to the imperial Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was murdered by a Serbian student in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. What was intended as a brief incursion by Austria-Hungary into Serbia to seek revenge turned into a struggle between the nations of Europe.

Against the combined forces of imperial Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire was pitched an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, and from 1917 the United States, in a titanic struggle for control of Europe and its overseas colonies. In such a climate, popular revolutions took place. First to fall was Russia, after two separate revolts during 1917. Military humiliations inflicted by Japan in the east and Germany in the west had severely weakened the authority of Tsar Nicholas II. Inflation, food shortages and a battered economy ripened the conditions for revolt while rapid industrialization had increased urban populations but failed to provide them with a better quality of life.

When the women of Petrograd revolted over the shortage of bread in February 1917 they triggered a massive outpouring of popular discontent. In March Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate. The political radical Vladimir Lenin was smuggled back to Russia from Switzerland, where he was living in exile. By early November Lenin and his army of Bolshevik revolutionaries led by Leon Trotsky had seized formal power in Russia. In May 1918 the Tsar and his family were executed in cold blood – whether on local or central orders, no one knows. Now civil war broke out between the Marxist Bolsheviks’ Red Army and the monarchist Whites backed by Britain, France, the USA and Japan. In June 1923 the Bolsheviks finally gained control of the country, leading to the world’s first experiment with communism, in which new technology promised to provide the magic ingredient to make Marxist dreams of class equality at last come true.

Universal healthcare, equal rights for women and education for all formed the backbone of Lenin’s socialist ideals. But Russia, being a predominantly peasant, rural society, did not have the industrial capacity to achieve such reforms. The New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, allowed surplus agricultural yields to be sold by farmers as an incentive for them to produce more grain to help build Russia into a rich enough society to afford the technology it needed to make the dream of classlessness come true.

But Lenin died in 1924. His successor Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) purged the Communist Party and established a dictatorship as total as any in imperial times. Although his successive five-year plans, begun in 1928, transformed the Soviet Union from a backward, peasant society into a major industrial power, countless millions died of starvation owing to his confiscation of grain and food from farmers between 1932 and 1934. Stalin’s Communist Party became a brutal ruling class, suppressing anything and everything that threatened its grip on power. Those who resisted were either executed or dispatched to labour camps in Siberia. By 1939 an estimated 1.3 million people had been interned in such camps, which were known as the Gulag.

Hitler’s attempt to restore German pride

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) felt deeply let down by his country’s leaders, who in the opinion of many in the German army had accepted a humiliating armistice agreement in 1918 which had burdened Germany with impossible war reparations. According to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, not only did Germany accept full responsibility for the Great War (article 231) but it had to pay reparations of a staggering 269 billion Reichsmarks in gold (£11.3 billion).

Waves of strikes had crippled the munitions factories of Germany, turning what Hitler had believed was almost certain victory into a humiliating surrender. Those responsible were, in his eyes, Jewish Marxists. What’s more, Jewish bankers, he believed, were responsible for the rise of the capitalist powers themselves, with their moneylending and pursuit of profit. Thanks to them, Germany had been dragged into a war with an ignominious end, after which it was forced to admit guilt and pay enormous reparations that could be honoured only by borrowing more capital from Jewish bankers in the United States.

But what, exactly, was Hitler proposing instead?

Hitler outlined his belief in a system called eugenics, a philosophy that advocated selective human breeding, in a book he wrote in 1923 called Mein Kampf (My Struggle). ‘Nature concentrates its greatest attention not to the maintenance of what already exists, but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species. So in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation – which, owing to human characteristics is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred – and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development.’

Hitler’s grand plan was to force back the frontiers of Europe’s globalized world and go back to the philosophy of ancient Sparta with its pure racial stock providing national security and social welfare (see page 151). But to wind the clock back now would require intervention on a massive scale. Hitler took it upon himself to bring this about.

Elections in July 1932 gave Hitler’s Nazi Party an overall government majority and on 30 January 1933 Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor. Almost immediately the effects of his ideas when put into practice began to come clear. Germany’s population, like many others’, was rising fast. Hitler believed that his country needed more space since industrialization had led to overcrowding of the homeland. Eastward expansion became his top priority. Domestic economic revival and the provision of new land could both be accomplished through a massive programme of rearmament, designed to intimidate, and, if necessary, force Germany’s neighbours into territorial concessions.

To put his plans into effect, Hitler introduced a totalitarian regime. He used emergency powers to suspend all democratic elections and then banned opposition parties. Next he introduced a secret police force to enforce conformity. Beginning in 1933, Hitler inaugurated a mass sterilization programme with the co-operation of the leaders of Germany’s medical establishment. By 1945 more than 400,000 people had been sterilized against their will to eliminate them from the chain of heredity. Physically weak, homosexual, religious, ethnically mixed and criminal stock was being weeded out of the system.

In an extension of the programme, between 1939 and 1941 an estimated 75,000 to 250,000 people with ‘intellectual or physical disabilities’ were slaughtered through a system of forced euthanasia called Action T4. Later this was extended to what is now called the Holocaust during the Second World War, when between nine and eleven million people were executed in gas chambers, most of them Jews but also Christians, homosexuals and prisoners of war, as well as Polish and Romany people. Systematic genocide was at the apex of the Nazi regime’s efforts to cleanse the racial stock of Germany and return to a mythological time when its people were genetically pure.

The implementation of theories of eugenics and racial hygiene, many of which were popular in pre-Second-World-War Europe and the United States of America, left deep and lasting scars in humanity’s increasingly globalized civilizations. More than sixty-two million people are thought to have died in the Second World War, making it the most devastating human conflict in all history.

Two wars, not one

But these deaths were really the result of two wars, both of which ultimately stemmed from the inexorable rise of industrialization. Hitler’s European war was a struggle against what he saw as a Jewish plot to rape the world for profit, which must, he believed, be stopped from perverting the natural order of humankind for ever. The second war took place in the Far East, where Japan’s brilliance at copying Western-style industrialization was equalled only by China’s inability to protect its people from foreign interference.

Japan’s aim was to colonize the Far East in much the same way that Europe had sliced up Africa. It wanted to secure permanent access to the raw materials it required for economic growth independent of the meddlesome powers of the West. That meant controlling the vast agricultural and mineral wealth of China, which, largely thanks to Soviet and Japanese intervention, had become embroiled in a drawn-out and bitter civil war starting in 1927.

In 1931 Japan invaded the north-eastern Chinese province of Manchuria and installed a puppet regime. In 1937 it launched an invasion of China with 350,000 soldiers and began a series of aerial bombing raids on cities all over the country. But Japanese advances had stalled by mid-1938, as Chinese resistance grew stronger under nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. By 1940 the war in mainland China was a stalemate and Japan was increasingly being strangled by economic sanctions from Western powers, which controlled its energy and oil supplies via their colonies in India, Burma, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

With Europe’s major powers distracted by the struggle against Hitler, Japan waded into the Second World War with a surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941. It hoped that, in their desperation to avoid the opening of a second front, Western nations would lift their sanctions, giving Japan free rein to complete its conquest of China. Despite initial successes, Japan never achieved a decisive victory and was ultimately forced to surrender after the United States dropped atom bombs on two cities in the summer of 1945.

By then Hitler’s Reich was already finished. His attempts to reverse generations of interracial mixing solved nothing and just provoked yet more war, violence and slaughter. The scale of devastation was immense. Its effects dramatically altered the final fraction of our history – the last one thousandth of a second to midnight – still to come.