What might a french peasant have grumbled about in 1789

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part 6 The Modern World Takes Shape 1750–1914

I n the middle decades of the eighteenth cen-

tury, human life on earth began to change at

an accelerating speed. The transformations

of the past 250 years—in society, economy,

and human interaction with the physical

and natural environment—are comparable

in their historical signifi cance only with the

invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago.

In this book we associate these transformations,

which are still under way, with the modern era or,

simply, modernity. In Part 6 we survey the modern

period from about 1750 to 1914, the year World War I

broke out.

Scholars of history have long debated the factors

that distinguish the modern age from all earlier times. In

our view, the development on which all other transforma-

tions turned was the onset of what we call the “energy revolu-

tion.” In the later 1700s, humans found ways to tap an immense

stockpile of energy concentrated in fossil fuels—coal fi rst, then pe-

troleum and natural gas. Since then, exploitation of this underground

energy bonanza has permitted levels of population growth, economic

productivity, social complexity, military destructiveness, and human inter-

vention in the environment inconceivable in any earlier era. Today the average

individual uses something like 46,000 times more energy than our ancestors did

12,000 years ago, and most of that increase has occurred since 1750.

The modern era, however, also has several other characteristics, all interrelated

in complex ways with the energy revolution and with one another:

14,000 B.C.E. 2,000 B.C.E. 2,000 C.E.10,000 B.C.E. 6,000 B.C.E.8,000 B.C.E.

PART 6: 1750 to 1914

574

1750–1914

I our view, the development on which all other transforma-

tions turned was the onset of what we call the “energy revolu-

tion.” In the later 1700s, humans found ways to tap an immense

stockpile of energy concentrated in fossil fuels—coal fi rst, then pe-stockpile of energy concentrated in fossil fuels—coal fi rst, then pe-

troleum and natural gas. Since then, exploitation of this underground troleum and natural gas. Since then, exploitation of this underground troleum and natural gas. Since then, exploitation of this underground

energy bonanza has permitted levels of population growth, economic energy bonanza has permitted levels of population growth, economic energy bonanza has permitted levels of population growth, economic

productivity, social complexity, military destructiveness, and human inter-productivity, social complexity, military destructiveness, and human inter-productivity, social complexity, military destructiveness, and human inter-

vention in the environment inconceivable in any earlier era. Today the average vention in the environment inconceivable in any earlier era. Today the average vention in the environment inconceivable in any earlier era. Today the average

individual uses something like 46,000 times more energy than our ancestors did individual uses something like 46,000 times more energy than our ancestors did individual uses something like 46,000 times more energy than our ancestors did

12,000 years ago, and most of that increase has occurred since 1750.12,000 years ago, and most of that increase has occurred since 1750.12,000 years ago, and most of that increase has occurred since 1750.

The modern era, however, also has several other characteristics, all interrelated The modern era, however, also has several other characteristics, all interrelated The modern era, however, also has several other characteristics, all interrelated

in complex ways with the energy revolution and with one another:in complex ways with the energy revolution and with one another:in complex ways with the energy revolution and with one another:

Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, invented in the 1880s.

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■■ Humans have for the first time acquired the technical power not only to adapt successfully to the earth’s environment but, for good or ill, to transform it. In other words, our own species, rather than physical and natural forces, has since sometime in the nineteenth century become the chief instrument of change in the earth’s ecology, geology, and atmosphere.

■■ The growth rate of world population began to accelerate in the mid-eighteenth century far faster than in any earlier time. The world had about 770 million people in 1750 and more than 7 billion by 2012. About 28 percent of all humans who were ever alive have lived since 1750. This growth has carried with it much greater social complexity, seen, for example, in the rise of giant cities. Between 1000 and 1700 c.e., the world had no more than three cities with populations in excess of 1 million. In 2000, there were 299 such cities.1

■■ Rates of technological and scientific advance have accel- erated greatly since the eighteenth century, and no slowdown appears in sight. This rush of novelties began in connection with the energy revolution and the accompanying industrial revolution with its countless transformations in manufacturing, farming, and communication. Today, innovations in science and technology proliferate at breathtaking speed. Material advances, together with huge inputs of fossil fuel and to some extent nuclear energy, account for the accelerating rate of long-term global economic growth since the late eighteenth century.

■■ Networks of world-girdling commercial, cultural, biological, and migratory exchange have become much denser and more complicated in the past 250 years. Global exchanges, especially messages transmitted in- stantaneously through electronic networks, have made possible a great acceleration of “collective learning.” This is the ability that humans, unlike any other living species, possess to amass, store up, and transmit in- formation, much of it useful to human well-being, some of it harmful.2

■■ States, that is, territories whose inhabitants live un- der the authority of a central government of one type or another, have come to exercise both military power and command over the lives of their own citizens on a scale unknown in premodern times.

■■ A new kind of political thought emerged in the eighteenth century centered on the twin ideas that God and nature have bestowed on human beings certain indisputable rights and that the source of any government’s authority is rightfully the “people,” not kings or high priests. This ideology gradually captured the whole world’s imagination, provoking wars and revolutions but also animating both private capitalist enterprise and the political experiment to organize the world in sovereign nation-states, nearly two hundred of them.

In exploring the period from 1750 to 1914, we should keep

in mind that the meaning and direction of the modern age are

unknown to us because it is still in progress. Revolutions in

economy, social organization, microbiology, or electronics may

already be happening, though we cannot yet see their shape or

significance. We should remember, for example, that the com-

puterized and digitized world we live in today would have been

unimaginable to the nineteenth-century scientists who first

har nessed electrical energy and unknowingly made possible

smart phones, genetic decoding, and Facebook.

14,000 B.C.E. 2,000 B.C.E. 2,000 C.E.10,000 B.C.E. 6,000 B.C.E.8,000 B.C.E.

PART 6: 1750 to 1914

Estimated Population in Millions

1500

1250

1000

500

750

250

1600 1700 1750 1914

Part 6 1750 to 1914

Afroeurasia

Americas

Oceania

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20Waves of Revolution1720–1830

A free and lively newspaper culture has been a feature of democratic societies in modern times, but is this medium disappearing? Communication experts have been asking this question ever since the Internet emerged as a carrier of news, opinion, and advertising. In the United States, print editions of most major news- papers have been steadily losing circulation, and some have gone exclusively online. Futurists have predicted that newsprint will vanish entirely before the end of the current century.

If newspapers endure only in cyperspace, they will have had a relatively short history as a print medium. Daily or weekly broadsheets with small circulations first appeared in western Europe and British North America in the late 1600s and

Coffeehouses were important sites of political conversations in the eighteenth century.

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in other parts of the world barely two hundred years ago. Newspapers flourished in connection with the epic transfor- mations that took place in human society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. News writers could gather more information and put it in print faster as roads improved, ships got faster, postal services were set up, and, in the early nine- teenth century, steamships, railroads, and the telegraph were invented. Newspapers helped meet the capitalist world’s constant demand for quick information about political con- ditions, wars, prices, and the movement of commodities. The popular revolutions that erupted in North America and Europe in the late eighteenth century spawned many new broadsheets to inform the public of late-breaking events and to promote one political view or another. In the following cen- tury, steam-powered presses rolled out thousands of copies of news sheets. The handful of newspapers published world- wide in the 1700s grew to an estimated 3,168 by 1828 and to more than 31,000 by 1900.

The rise of the newspaper was one event in a large cluster of changes that we associate with modernity. This chapter spans the period from approximately 1720 to 1830 and fo- cuses on the momentous political and social changes that occurred in the world in those 110 years. This was an era of accelerating global population growth, a nearly continuous surge in the volume and value of global commerce, a dra- matic increase in the number of people using money to buy and sell goods in the market, and the creation of far more complex networks of transport and communication. These developments inspired radical new thinking about how to or- ganize society and manage change, and they brought higher standards of living to millions in some parts of the world. They also, however, aggravated political and social stresses for many more millions and triggered conflict among classes, ethnic peoples, and rival states.

In the first part of the chapter we explore the relationship between rapid change in the world economy, especially the complex intermeshing of societies through commerce, and the mounting problems that the world’s large states faced in financing bureaucracies, fielding armies, and keeping public order. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Eu- ropean states, especially Britain, France, Habsburg Austria, Prussia, and Russia, projected more military power relative to the large Asian empires than ever before. They also com- peted violently with one another for shares of accumulating global wealth. European states, North American Indians, and South Asians all clashed in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, a “world war” that helped set the stage for several popular revolts.

The second part of the chapter investigates the first wave of revolutionary movements that took place on both

sides of the North Atlantic between 1775 and 1815. Political, economic, and cultural forces reverberating back and forth across the ocean intricately linked the rebellions that erupted in British North America, France, and Haiti. Those movements drew on new ideas about natural rights and the “sovereignty of the people” that had emerged from the Enlightenment (see Chapter 19), ideas that have shaped protest, revolution, and the organization of governments ever since.

The final part of the chapter explores the second wave of revolutions, which engulfed nearly all of Latin America. These insurgencies took place in social environments that differed greatly from British North America and Haiti, but as in the British colonies, they were led mainly by American- born, property-owning men of European descent. The wars of independence ended Portugal’s rule of Brazil and nearly obliterated Spain’s enormous American empire, replacing it with multiple states founded on modern patriotic ideas of self-government by and for the people.

Chapter Outline

World Economy and Politics, 1720–1763 A Commercializing World Troubled Empires in Asia Global Sea Trade and the Eighteenth-Century “World War”

rEvolutions on thE north atlantic rim The Global Context of Popular Revolt The War of Independence in North America The French Revolution The Idea of Nationalism The Birth of Haiti

WEighing thE EvidEncE Toussaint Louverture Writes to the French Directory

thE sEcond WavE: rEvolutions in latin amErica Colonial Society on the Eve of Rebellion The Wars of Independence

individuals mattEr José de San Martín: Liberator of the Southern Andes

Many Young States

• • •

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DF 578 Chapter 20 | Waves of Revolution

MAP 20.1 Major states and colonial territories after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).

Empires claimed huge swaths of territory—some in contiguous stretches of land and others overseas. Desire for even more territory and wealth fueled rivalries among empires. What geographic features on this map of states after the Seven Years’ War might explain the global nature of that confl ict among European powers?

A Panoramic View

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World Economy and Politics, 1720–1763

Focus To what extent was the growth of the world economy connected to changes in the relative power of large states during the eighteenth century?

Scholars have conventionally dated the political and social upheavals that enveloped much of the world in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the outbreak of rebellion in Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in 1775. More recently, however, historians have offered ev- idence that beginning about 1720 several of Afroeurasia’s large and prosperous states experienced growing economic problems, political turbulence, and social stresses. In several place these troubles led to regional rebellions and new wars.

Observers of the world scene would not likely have fore- seen the impending instability. Its early signs appeared against a background of intense and accelerating global economic activity. The world was rapidly commercializing. The buying and selling of raw commodities, manufactured products, and labor in response to changing prices and market conditions was surging upward both locally and between regions. The later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries also witnessed a phenomenon in which families with relatively modest incomes began to purchase more material goods on the market and to pay for them by work- ing harder and for longer hours than they ever had before.

Global commercialization raised the stakes for all states determined to stay in the competitive game and to acquire greater wealth. It put added pressure on them to control more farm land and mines, dominate trade routes, protect markets against foreign merchants, and grab new colonies before their rivals moved in ahead of them. These objectives, however, required rulers continually to expand bureaucra- cies, recruit new troops, and upgrade expensive military technology. The costs of government therefore mounted at an accelerating rate, especially where armies had to defend long frontiers or overseas colonies. The expense of simply maintaining a state’s status as a major regional player, regard- less of further expansion, obliged governments to impose heavier taxes on their populations of peasants, town dwell- ers, and money-making merchants. Heavier fiscal burdens, however, triggered rural uprisings, urban riots, or colonial protests that cost the state even more treasure to suppress. Signs that powerful states were losing the struggle to pay for their own centralizing and military success appeared first in Asia and then in Europe.

A Commercializing World By the early eighteenth century, nearly every state in Afroeur- asia, whether giant empire or tiny kingdom, was connected in some degree to the global commercial system that moved commodities, manufactured goods, and laboring men and

women from one place to another. A combination of private profit-seeking and commercial competition between states motivated the emerging modern commercial system. The merchants who ran it relied increasingly on gold, silver, and other forms of money to make their transactions. Commer- cialization depended on an assortment of capitalist institu- tions and practices—partnerships, joint-stock companies, banks, credit, currency conversion mechanisms, insurance policies, merchant information networks, and strategies to persuade consumers to buy new products.

The commercializing trend, however, was still at a prim- itive stage compared to today. Tens of millions of people lived by subsistence farming or herding and had no more than occasional contacts with the market. Others were shut out of the commercial system because their labor was con- trolled or owned by others. In eastern Europe and Russia, for example, millions of serfs had to turn much of their farm production over to estate-owning nobles, who then sold it for export to western Europe at profit only to them- selves. The African slave trade was part of a highly com- mercialized system that benefited African rulers, American plantation owners, Atlantic merchants, and European man- ufacturers but not the slaves who brought in immensely profitable harvests of tropical sugar and tobacco.

Industrious revolutions. The demands and habits of consumers around the world began to change rapidly in the eighteenth century as many new and alluring products came on the market. For example, hardly any Europeans had ever tasted Chinese tea in 1664, when British East In- dia Company officials presented two pounds of it to King Charles II. In the next few decades, however, tea caught on in Britain as an energy-supplying and mildly addictive beverage mixed with sugar. Imports from China rose from around 38,000 pounds in 1690 to 37.4 million by the 1750s.1 As choices of new foods and other goods multiplied, con- sumers throughout the world became fussier about the wares they wanted to buy. In regions like southern China, Japan, India, western Europe, and the British North Amer- ican colonies, where commercialization was proceeding fast, people who made money acquired more extravagant tastes for fine textiles, art, and home furnishings that only land-owning aristocrats had previously been able to afford. In West Africa, local merchants might refuse to sell captives to European slave shippers unless they could buy Indian calico cotton textiles with particular prints, not last year’s outmoded fashions.

On a global scale, more rural farmers and artisans sold at market whatever surpluses they might manage to produce. More people abandoned their fields altogether and earned wages to buy food, clothing, and furnishings. In western Europe, for example, ordinary men and women purchased more goods from foreign places, including tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee, wine, Indian cottons, cheap porcelain table- ware, and exotic furniture. Wherever people who were not

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goods. This persistent industriousness and the resulting rise in demand for goods stimulated international commerce and gave more incentive to people to master complicated specializations or make technical improvements in farming or manufacturing.

Asia’s economic weight. The center of gravity of global production and commerce remained in Asia until after 1750. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, remark- able demographic and economic growth took place in East and South Asia. China, India, and Japan together accounted for about 55 percent of the world’s total population, com- pared to western Europe’s 12 percent. China’s population more than doubled in the eighteenth century, from about 160 million to 350 million. One measure of comparison be- tween Asian and western European economies is farming productivity, the agricultural output of an average worker in a given time period. In 1750, productivity in the Yangzi River valley, China’s richest agricultural region, was about the same as it was in England and the Netherlands, the two most productive countries in Europe. Real wages of agricultural workers were approximately the same in southern China and west- ern Europe, as was life expectancy, at about forty years. China put out more than 30 percent of the world’s manufac- tures, whereas India and Europe produced about 23 percent each (see Figure 20.1). Knowledgeable Europeans recog- nized China’s economic muscle. Adam Smith, the Scottish economic thinker, observed in 1776 that “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.” As for India, it was by far the world’s largest exporter of hand-woven cotton tex- tiles. As of 1750, weavers in southern India may well have enjoyed higher standards of living than their counterparts in Britain.2

Japan’s economy achieved stunning growth in the sev- enteenth century under the government of the Tokugawa shogunate, though it slowed after about 1700. This probably happened in large part because the archipelago’s popula- tion could no longer fi nd much new arable soil or forests to exploit. Industrious Japanese peasants continued to in- crease their output but mainly by making small technical improvements or working longer hours to raise their pro- ductivity. Commercial fi shermen also exploited the seas around Japan more intensively, catching fi sh that enriched supplies of food protein and fertilizer. Unlike western Euro- pean countries, Japan had no overseas colonies from which to draw resources. Even so, the country remained highly commercialized, and it continued to trade with China, Ko- rea, and Southeast Asia until the later eighteenth century. As of 1750, a larger percentage of Japan’s population—about twenty-six million in all—lived in cities than did the pop- ulations of southern China or Britain. Edo (Tokyo) swelled to more than one million inhabitants, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

wealthy aspired to consume more goods, they became par- ticipants in what historians have called industrious revo- lutions. This means that laboring men and women bought more goods rather than making them at home. They did this chiefl y by working harder and more productively. Younger family members might toil longer hours on the farm, and adults might spend more working days earning wages. Fam- ilies might fabricate a single specialized product at home but purchase rather than make their own candles, tables, or chairs. We have good evidence from western Europe, China, and Japan that men worked longer hours and more days of the year and that more women and children took up wage labor to satisfy hankerings for a wider selection of consumer

indian fabrics infl uenced British fashion. A young woman’s jacket and matching petticoat exemplify eighteenth-century European fashion. The fabric, which is hand-painted cotton chintz, came from the Coromandel coast in southeastern India. The fl owers are a typical Indian design. An English tailor made the outfi t around 1780. What might account for the popularity of exotic fabrics in England in that period?

real wages Wages estimated in the amount of goods those wages will buy rather than in the face value of money paid.

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abundant. Furthermore, along the Atlantic coasts, Euro- pean merchants sold shiploads of cotton cloth and iron goods in exchange for slaves. These imports gradually de- pressed once-flourishing African textile and iron-working industries. Rulers and merchants tried to meet the inces- sant demands European slave buyers made, and this led to more wars, population displacements, famines, and crime. In West and Central African coastal regions, slave trading significantly reduced male populations. This meant that the burden of agricultural labor fell more heavily on women than ever before. In short, in the mid-eighteenth century, economic output in East and South Asia remained strong and western Europe’s economic star was rising. By contrast, violent trafficking in people weakened the commercial po- sition many African societies may otherwise have had in the advancing wold economy.

Troubled Empires in Asia Among the great Asian states, China under the Qing dy- nasty (1644–1911) remained prosperous and largely free of internal strife until nearly 1800. However, the three giant Muslim empires of the era experienced serious financial and governing problems in the early eighteenth century. The Safavid empire of Persia flourished under the talented ruler Shah Abbas (reigned 1587–1629) and for several de- cades thereafter (see Chapter 17). The costs of maintaining a larger gunpowder army continued to mount so relentlessly, however, that the government eventually allowed it to de- teriorate. In 1722, a motley force of mounted rebels from Afghanistan overran Isfahan, the Safavid’s fabled capital, and the dynasty collapsed. Until late in the century, Persia remained divided among competing military lords, none of whom managed to rebuild stable central authority.

To the east, the Mughal empire of South Asia, whose Muslim military elite ruled tens of millions of Hindu farm- ers and town dwellers, reached its greatest territorial extent under the rule of Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). The imperial regime had always negotiated the loyalty of locally pow- erful estate owners by generously awarding them rights to tax revenues from land. The government, however, found it increasingly difficult to make these grants as the costs of conquest and administration mounted. Aurangzeb kept restless local elites in line through great force of will, but his successors had few of his talents. After he died, local mag- nates and even provincial governors found they could defy central authority. Many of them also amassed wealth inde- pendently in South Asia’s expanding commercial sphere, buying and selling crops of maize, tobacco, and chili pep- pers (all introduced earlier from the Americas) and doing business in cotton textiles.

As landlords accumulated new resources and the Mu- ghal government creaked and sagged under its heavy fi- nancial burdens, regional rebellions multiplied. In 1739 the Persian warlord Nadir Shah invaded northern India and fe- rociously sacked Delhi before retreating. In the first half of

Commercializing tropical Africa. In the early eigh- teenth century, peoples of Africa south of the Sahara Desert were already well entangled in the web of global com- merce, though not in the same way that Chinese or South Asians were. The European capitalist entrepreneurs and merchants who developed the Atlantic economy bought gold, textiles, and numerous other commodities from Afri- can coastal merchants and the rulers of such monarchies as Ashanti, Dahomey, and Benin (see Chapter 18). Neverthe- less, by the seventeenth century, Europeans visitors wanted slaves more than any material product, and as commercial plantations multiplied in the Americas, the demand for slave labor increased constantly. In the 1700s, more than six million men and women were forced to cross the Atlan- tic to work in bondage until they died. Traffic in captives also thrived from West Africa across the Sahara Desert to the Muslim Mediterranean and from the eastern side of the continent to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and India. In the mid- eighteenth century, the total number of Africans taken from their homelands may have numbered about seventy thousand annually.

The slave trade was not only a human tragedy but also a disaster for African economies. It deprived particular regions that were agriculturally rich of hundreds of thou- sands of productive farmers, artisans, and community lead- ers, as well as women of child-bearing age. Just when the populations of China, Europe, and other parts of Eurasia were swelling, tropical Africa’s population, which was about fifty million in the mid-eighteenth century, either held steady or declined slightly. Most regions from which slaves were taken would have gained economically from higher populations because arable land and pasture were

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shares of world manufacturing output, 1750–1900. In what countries did manufacuturing increase during the late eighteenth and ninteenth centuries? Where did manufacturing stay relatively constant? Which regions lost significant shares of global production? What factors can help explain these changes? Source: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage Press, 1989), 149.

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resources. The sultans installed in their fabulous Topkapi Palace in Constantinople became increasingly isolated from administrative affairs. Ministers of state who tried to make reforms repeatedly lost out to entrenched political and re- ligious groups. The Janissaries, the slave army that had led the empire to military glory in earlier times, deteriorated from a highly disciplined fighting corps to a bloated as- semblage of competing factions, each with business and commercial interests and an inclination to riot in the streets at the slightest challenge to their privileges. As in the Mu- ghal empire, weakness at the top allowed elite land-holders in the rural lands of both Anatolia (modern Turkey) and southeastern Europe to collect rents and taxes on their own account, rather than on behalf of the state. European gov- ernments and trading firms clamored for lower tariffs on imports, which deprived the Turkish state of an important source of revenue. Chronic price inflation, caused partly by the flow of American silver into the Ottoman economy, made life more expensive for thousands of bureaucrats and soldiers on fixed salaries and pensions. In addition, the land- owning elite demanded larger rents from local

the eighteenth century, the Mughal empire splintered into a number of regional power centers. Some of them offered ceremonial allegiance to the Mughal sultan in Delhi, others not even that. The Marathas, a confederation of Marathi- speaking clans based in central South Asia’s Deccan Plateau, most vividly exposed Mughal weakness by creating a re- gional empire of their own that spanned nearly all of central India. In Mysore in the far southwest, Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan founded a state in the 1760s that fielded an army of sixty thousand and equipped it with artillery.

In contrast to the Safavids and the Mughals, the Otto- man empire, the third great Turkic-ruled state, remained a major Afroeurasian military power throughout the eigh- teenth century. After a long and losing war with Habsburg Austria, the empire had to cede several of its European provinces in 1699 (see Chapter 19). But it gained some of them back in the following decades and only began to suf- fer severe and permanent territorial losses in the war with Russia that ran from 1768 to 1774.

Nevertheless, growing fiscal difficulties and the rapidly changing world economy steadily wore down Ottoman

sultan selim iii (r. 1789–1807) receiving dignitaries at the topkapi Palace. The Ottoman court in Constantinople was the focal point of imperial administration. Here the Sultan is attended by courtiers, officials, and Janissaries.

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Europeans could monopolize direct sea commerce between the Indian Ocean and Europe, but they had to compete with Asians for the lucrative “carrying trade” between one part of Asia or eastern Africa and another. And when it came to negotiating prices, Europeans had to depend on local rulers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who dominated the production of commodities and their transport from inland fields or mines to the ports where European ships awaited.

In response to shrinking profits, both the Dutch and Brit- ish East India Companies took aggressive action. On Java, the Dutch sent armed bands from Batavia to the mountain- ous interior to seize direct control of more of the island’s trade and to tax Javanese peasants. In 1725 they began to force highland farmers to grow coffee for export. In the same period the British firm strengthened the fortifications around its trading posts in South Asia, especially Bombay (Mumbai), which faced the Arabian Sea, and Madras (Chen- nai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) on the Bay of Bengal.

Calcutta emerged as the company’s most profitable port, attracting a burgeoning trade in fine cotton and silk goods from the fertile and populous Ganges River delta. Local Indian merchants funneled textiles to the port, and Indian bankers supplied European traders with commercial capital. Calcutta and the company’s other posts were formal depen- dencies of the Mughal emperor. But as imperial authority waned, the company began to defy the Delhi government, behaving much like Marathas and other rebellious South Asian power groups. In 1757, British East India Company accountant turned military leader Robert Clive took advan- tage of both Mughal weakness and divisions among local princes to seize Bengali territory using paid Indian troops supplied with British guns. This initiative gave the company control of inland markets, huge farm estates, and, more im- portant for company finances, taxing rights. Clive himself became immensely rich.

In the following decades, company forces carrying up- to-date flintlock handguns advanced far up the Ganges val- ley. In 1799 troops invaded Mysore and killed Tipu Sultan after he tried and failed to get military help from France. The British Parliament fretted that by seizing territory rather than just trading from coastal stations the company was pulling the country into financial quicksand. But com- pany shareholders were delighted, and company revenues helped pay for British naval operations around the world. Consequently, European colonization of India crept for- ward, partly by military action and partly by negotiations with local chiefs and princes who were badly outgunned.

The Seven Years’ War. In its drive for territory and trade, the British East India Company faced opposition not only from South Asians but also from France, which had its own commercial stake in Indian Ocean commerce. Clashes between French and British naval vessels off the coast of India were among numerous episodes in a panoramic con- flict among European states that lasted from 1756 to 1763. Because these states waged war in several far-flung places

peasants. Many rural men and women fled the countryside for Constantinople and other cities, where they swelled the ranks of the underemployed.

Despite these numerous problems, the Ottoman empire continued in many ways to function as before. Uprisings and urban disturbances occurred with growing frequency, but dissenters hardly ever questioned the legitimacy of the Otto- man government. All kinds of institutions bound subjects of the sultan together—guilds, Muslim Sufi organizations, and local kinship groups. The Muslim legal system worked effi- ciently, and the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities within the empire regulated their own affairs. The main de- velopment was a process of decentralization in which power became more diffused through the empire to the advantage of local elite groups, clans, and estate magnates.

Global Sea Trade and the Eighteenth-Century “World War” The major European states expended huge sums periodically fighting one another in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and, in the case of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, expanding and defending their commercial and strategic interests. In the 1600s the Atlantic and Indian Oceans became theaters of intense competition among the main European naval powers. In the Atlantic, rivalry over the trade connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas in- volved almost exclusively the western European states. The scene in the Indian Ocean and the China seas, however, was quite different. There, the chartered trading companies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands had the biggest ships and marine artillery, but the great majority of merchants and sailors operating in the southern seas were Chinese, Malays, South Asians, Arabs, and East Africans, including people who worked as crew members on European-owned vessels. In the ports of Southeast Asia, Chinese merchant and busi- ness communities grew steadily throughout the eighteenth century. For example, by 1800 the Chinese residents of Bata- via, the Dutch East India Company’s big port on Java in Indo- nesia, numbered nearly 100,000, far more than the population of Dutch company employees.

European belligerence in the southern seas. Euro- pean competition for southern seas trade in cotton, silk, spices, porcelain, and tea intensified as the century pro- gressed, in part because trading firm profits slumped grad- ually. Since the sixteenth century, Europe failed to offer many products other than silver that Asians wanted to buy. European merchants pumped more specie from American mines into the Asian economy. But as they did that the value of silver relative to gold began to decline so that a given unit of silver coinage bought fewer Asian goods. Moreover, the European East Indies companies learned early that de- spite their shipboard firepower, they could not come close to controlling the southern sea routes or the multitude of local traders and vessels that crowded into the network.

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Revolutions on the North Atlantic Rim

Focus What major similarities and differences exist in the origins, development, and short-term consequences of revolutions in British North America, France, and Haiti?

In the four decades following the Seven Years’ War, the po- litical and social stresses attending global economic change exploded in violent popular uprisings. Britain’s thirteen North American colonies revolted in 1775 and after six years of war achieved self- government as the Western Hemisphere’s first republic. France burst into revolu- tion in 1789, an event that not only turned French so- ciety inside out but also trig- gered war and political upheaval that gripped Europe for more than a quarter of a century. In the French Caribbean sugar island of Saint Domingue (Haiti), both slaves and free men and women of African descent banded together to fight colonial armies for thirteen years, finally achieving inde- pendence in 1804.

The Global Context of Popular Revolt In the later decades of the eighteenth century, the world population, which had been rising since the fifteenth cen- tury, began to rise at a faster rate. But about the same time, economic growth appears to have ended a long upward cy- cle and leveled off. Wherever population advanced faster than food production, prices for the necessities of life spi- raled upward. Squeezed financially more than ever, cen- tralized states with armies and bureaucracies to support opted for the usual solution: They imposed heavier taxes on their populations and collected them more ruthlessly.

Faced with the twin burden of higher prices and heavier tax bills, rural farmers, urban workers, and enterprising busi- nesspeople from North America to China expressed their discontent in petitions, demonstrations, riots, and insurrec- tions. To suppress such unrest, states had to raise even more cash or risk loss of their authority. If they boosted tariffs and commercial fees, governments easily alienated entrepre- neurs and merchants, whose importance to commerce gave them political influence. Literate and well-informed people were usually better positioned to protest state taxes and fees than peasants were. This was certainly the case in overseas colonies, where settlers of European descent gradually built their own power bases and distinctive cultural identities.

At the low end of the social scale, peasants, serfs, and slaves instigated numerous uprisings in the later eighteenth century against taxes and brutal labor. In Russia under the rule of Catherine II (r. 1762–1796), tax increases, relentless military conscription, and rising grain prices accompanied

and because the combatants perceived it as a grim struggle for finite resources on a global scale, some historians have characterized it as the eighteenth century’s “world war” (see Map 20.1).

The conflict had its prelude between 1754 and 1756 in the forests of the Ohio River valley, a region already under contention among France, Britain, Spain, and several Na- tive American peoples. Fur traders operating from Britain’s North American colonies wanted access to the Ohio and the Mississippi beyond. French troops began building forts to keep them out. When a British colonial militia under the leadership of an inexperienced, twenty-two-year-old colo- nel named George Washington marched into the Ohio coun- try, a French force beat it badly, obliging the commander and his survivors to straggle back across the Appalachian Mountains. After a second French victory the following year, the exasperated British crown sent in a much larger force, setting off more fighting in North America, where the conflict became known as the French and Indian War.

In 1756, hostilities broke out in Europe, when Maria The- resa, the Empress of Austria, attacked Prussia to get back the rich province of Silesia, which Austria had lost fourteen years earlier. France and Russia joined the Austrian side, and in response England allied with Prussia. Under its king and brilliant military strategist Frederick the Great, Prussia held the advantage over Austria, though all the belligerents exhausted their war treasuries. The fighting stopped with- out significant change to Europe’s political map.

Meanwhile, British and French forces clashed in North America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, West Africa, and South Asia. The British government spent lavish sums on the Royal Navy, which in the end outgunned and out- lasted France, whose finances were in dire shape. By seiz- ing Quebec City and Montreal on the St. Lawrence River in 1759–1760, Britain forced France to abandon Canada and to negotiate for peace. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France ceded Canada and French Louisiana east of the Mississippi River to Britain. Britain’s ally Spain was awarded the western part of Louisiana. In South Asia, France agreed to pull its warships back from the coast. It did not, however, lose its Caribbean island possessions. This outcome made a huge difference to France since the value of slave-grown sugar alone was much greater than all the wealth extracted from Canada. (The treaty also allowed France to retain sovereignty over St. Pierre and Miquelon, two tiny islands just off the coast of Canada’s Newfound- land and Labrador province. These little fishing bases re- main French overseas territories to this day.)

Both France and Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War strapped for cash, but Britain was now the world’s top maritime power. The Royal Navy had sufficient ships and seaborne artillery to protect British merchants, plantation growers, and fur traders almost anywhere in the world these entrepreneurs cared to operate. Ships could also move raw commodities and manufactures in and out of British home ports with less risk than ever from foreign interlopers.

republic A type of government in which sovereign power rests with a body of citizens pos- sessing rights to vote to ap- prove laws and to select public officials and representatives.

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Years’ War. France’s withdrawal from almost its entire North American domain immediately affected relations between Britain and both Native Americans and white colonists. In- dians living in the Ohio River region had preserved self- rule by astutely playing France and Britain off against each other. But this game ended in 1763. Fearing that France’s retreat would encourage Britain to seize more land, the Ot- tawa chief Pontiac organized a multitribal military alliance, which attacked European settlers and captured several British forts. After British reinforcements and colonial mili- tias intervened, the war ended in an uneasy truce. Not long after it started, the crown proclaimed that the lands west of the Appalachian mountain crest were to be off limits to colonial settlers. It did not want colonists starting new and expensive wars with Indians. Nor did it want them to trade or otherwise fraternize with the Spanish on the Mississippi or divert fur trade from licensed British companies.

Though the imperial army never seriously enforced this proclamation, its enactment nonetheless infuriated colonial

her campaigns of imperial expansion. Consequently, thou- sands of Russian peasants in the Volga River region rebelled in 1773–1774 under the leadership of Emelian Pugachev, a onetime imperial army officer. Catherine crushed the insur- gents, but only after they spent a year pillaging the country- side, burning towns, and killing estate lords. In China, late-eighteenth-century problems of rising population, fal- tering living standards, and imperial tax demands ignited several regional revolts. In 1796 the religious sect known as the White Lotus Society sparked a massive peasant rising north of the Yangzi River, preaching the imminent coming of a savior in the form of the Buddha. The rebellion endured for eight years, exposing unexpected frailty in the Qing dy- nasty’s economic and political health.

The War of Independence in North America The rebellion that broke out in Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in 1775 followed directly on the Seven

Peasants attack nobles and clergy in the Battle of Kazan, 1774. Pugachev’s Rebellion, like many other eighteenth-century uprisings, challenged political and social elites who exploited peasants. Russian artist Fyodor Antonovich painted this scene in 1847. He shows a priest trying to protect a nobleman from an armed crowd. How would you describe the artist’s point of view regarding the rebellion?

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1740 the ideas of the Enlightenment, the intellectual and cultural movement to replace irrational traditions and au- tocratic rulers with individual rights and reasoned govern- ment (see Chapter 19), became a popular subject of colonial debate. Consequently, political leaders nurtured deepening grievances over British “tyranny” and violation of both the rights of colonial Englishmen and the natural and universal “rights of man.”

In 1774 the crown responded to growing public agitation by cracking down on the colonies harder than ever. As boy- cotts and street protests spiraled into armed clashes, some colonists began to think about the unthinkable—separation from the Britain. Early in 1776, Thomas Paine, an English immigrant to Philadelphia, published Common Sense, a polit- ical pamphlet arguing brazenly that George III was a “royal brute” and that monarchy was a “ridiculous” form of gov- ernment. The booklet sold 500,000 copies in a few months.

leaders. They thought the whole point of victory over France had been to open trans-Appalachia to land-hungry farmers, including thousands of Europeans who migrated to North America every year. The colonial population of white set- tlers and their American-born offspring, plus African slaves and free blacks, swelled from about 150,000 in 1680 to more than one million by 1750. The colonies prospered from ag- riculture, craft and the export of timber, furs, fish, grain, and tobacco, and they all firmly supported Britain in its war with France. The rewards of loyalty, however, seemed mea- ger. The economic boom that accompanied the war’s early years dissipated, but colonial numbers continued to soar, causing serious price inflation and declining living stan- dards for many ordinary men and women.

Cracking down on the colonies. The Seven Years’ War left Britain saddled with twice as much debt as it had had in the 1750s. Consequently, the young and eager King George III (r. 1760–1820) cooperated with Parliament to impose tighter political control over North America in order to extract more revenue from colonial property owners. George argued, not without reason, that the colonists had traditionally paid much lower taxes than people did in Britain and that they ought to carry a larger share of imperial costs, includ- ing the costs of their own military protection. King and Parliament resolved to end this “be- nign neglect” and rule the thirteen colonies as they did their Caribbean possessions and Ben- gal, that is, as territorial dependencies existing to serve the economic and political interests of the British empire. Between 1763 and 1774, Par- liament imposed a series of mercantilist laws on the North Americans—including the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Tea Act—intended to amass revenue and obstruct colonial mer- chants and manufacturers who competed with English businesses.

Until 1774 few colonists questioned Britain’s political authority. But for a century and a half, they had been building neo-European colonies in North America, societies culturally derived from the Old World but possessing their own distinctive styles and much pride in managing their own local affairs. In the decades before the Seven Years’ War, Britain had allowed co- lonial assemblies of elected, property-owning white males to initiate laws. Colonial leaders re- garded these deliberative powers as consistent with the principles of limited monarchy that England’s own civil conflict and Glorious Rev- olution in the previous century had affirmed (see Chapter 19). Like England, the colonies had lively public forums—newspapers, urban coffee houses, political discussion societies— that freely debated the issues of the day. After

British customs official John malcolm tarred and feathered, 1774. This political cartoon was published in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with the caption, “The Bostonians paying the Excise Man, or tarring and feathering.” The artist also depicts colonists dumping tea into Boston Harbor, though the Boston Tea Party had occurred earlier. Why do you think colonial protesters singled out a port official for such harsh treatment?

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balance one another. Also in stark contrast to European practice, the document’s First Amendment stated simply that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establish- ment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution left much power to the thirteen former colonies, but it also erected a federal government with suf- ficient executive and lawmaking authority to convince the leading European states to take it seriously.

An astonishing global innovation in its time, the Ameri- can governing charter announced that the new state aimed to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Pos- terity.” This admirable goal, however, sternly qualified the definition of “ourselves.” The Constitution made no mention whatsoever of Native Americans as members of the new civic community, and the federal government encouraged settlers to move into Indian land west of the Appalachians. Nor did the Constitution’s promise of liberty and prosper- ity extend to the enslaved. During the war, around eighty thousand African slaves fled to the British lines on the promise of freedom, though another five thousand, includ- ing free blacks, joined the rebellion. The founding fathers, however, put no restrictions on slavery in order to ensure that the southern states, whose economies depended on black labor, would accept the document. Colonial women were also excluded from civic life. They had contributed to the revolutionary cause in countless ways, boycotting British goods, making clothing for soldiers, and collecting money for the cause. But English political tradition, Enlight- enment thought, and Christian teaching coalesced in sup- port of the maxim that women belonged by the laws of God and nature in the “private sphere” of home and hearth. No state enfranchised women, with the remarkable exception of New Jersey. There, unmarried women and widows who met certain property restrictions could vote, though only from 1776 to 1807. The same social class of propertied males that had dominated political and economic life before the revolution emerged at the end of it still in charge.

In 1797 George Washington retired to his Virginia planta- tion after serving two terms as president of the United States. This voluntary departure, so uncharacteristic of power hold- ers in the eighteenth century, signaled that the new nation was indeed functioning as a republic. Even though non- whites and women were largely left out, moderate legal and political reforms favoring accountable government, individ- ual rights, and legal equality continued to accumulate.

The French Revolution France was another matter altogether. Its revolution and the American war shared the animating ideas of popular sover- eignty, liberty, and equality that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. In both cases, monarchies gave way to republics. But upheaval in France lasted for twenty-six years, counting the pe- riod under the rulership of

The storm finally broke when the Continental Congress, an assembly of colonial delegates, announced that the king had committed such a variety of “abuses and usurpations” that the territories had the right to detach themselves from royal authority altogether. This was the leading argument of the Declaration of Independence, a ringing statement of Enlightenment ideology: “We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are en- dowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happi- ness.” It was not inevitable that all thirteen colonies would join the rebellion. But they had many complaints in com- mon, as well as postal systems and newspapers that helped weld them into a single domain of cultural and political

communication. A fledgling sense of distinctly Amer- ican patriotism had also been building slowly, espe- cially among creoles, that is, colonists born in America.

Revolutionary war and a new kind of state. Under the command of George Washington, the rebels battled im- perial forces for six bloody years. At the same time, they contended with thousands of fellow colonials who for various reasons sided with the crown, many of them ulti- mately fleeing to Ontario or other parts of Canada. Eager for revenge over its humiliation in the Seven Years’ War, France allied with the insurgents in 1778. Spain and the Netherlands soon joined the pact, which effectively ignited another “world war,” mainly on the sea, between Britain and several European powers. The Americans would likely have lost their struggle, at least in the short run, without generous European financial and military help. For exam- ple, at Yorktown, Virginia, where the war effectively ended in 1781, the British army surrendered to a rebel force whose ranks numbered more French and Spanish troops than col- onists. Two years later, Britain agreed to a peace treaty that not only sealed the independence of the United States of America but also ceded to it crown territories as far west as the Mississippi.

After winning the war, the ex-colonies formed a loose union, but the central government first constituted under the Articles of Confederation had very limited authority. In 1787, delegates convened in Philadelphia to fashion a system that would yield one viable state on the world stage, rather than thirteen feeble ones. The result was a new constitution and its associated Bill of Rights. This document established a republic rather than a monarchy, defining the young state as a “social contract” between government and people. That made it radically different from the eighteenth-century global norm of autocratic kingship. Like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution explicitly affirmed Enlight- enment principles, including the idea that sovereignty is a possession of the “people” as citizens, not of a ruler com- manding the obedience of subjects. The Constitution insti- tuted three branches of government designed to check and

patriotism An emotional or sentimental attachment to a place, an ethnic people, or a

way of life; in modern times of- ten to one’s national homeland.

popular sovereignty The doctrine that the sovereignty or independence of the state is vested in the people, and that the government is responsible to the will of the citizenry.

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exemptions from almost all taxes. Royal officials repeat- edly proposed fiscal reforms but had little success. About 30 percent of peasants owned their own crop or grazing land, but rising grain prices in the 1770s and 1780s fell hard on the rest, as well as on the poor of Paris and other cities. In bad harvest years, failed farmers and destitute laborers clogged the roads seeking jobs or charity. France’s silk and cotton handloom industries generally flourished, but they expanded and contracted from year to year and suffered a

Napoleon Bonaparte, and it differed from the American experience in many ways. Funda- mentally the North Americans sought to found a new sovereign state and a new government, separated from the one that had ruled it as a colony. French rebels aimed to keep the sover- eign state of France but to change its govern- ment, initially attempting to reform it, then acting to replace it with a drastically different kind of regime. The American war was a harsh military struggle, but the French Revolution produced political and social mayhem, upend- ing the established order of society and tempo- rarily remodeling the map of Europe.

France and Europe on the eve of revo- lution. Europe in the middle decades of the eighteenth century was a region of multiple states whose royal dynasties claimed abso- lute authority over their subjects. Only in Brit- ain and the Dutch Republic did assemblies of elected, property-owning males formally participate in collective government. Never- theless, the accelerating growth of capitalist enterprise and global trade, together with the spread of new ideas about sovereignty, rights, and government-by-reason, posed a challenge that hereditary rulers, land-owning aristocra- cies, and high officials of established Christian churches—the guardians of what historians call the European Old Regime—could hardly have foreseen.

France under the Bourbon dynasty had the largest population in Europe (about twenty-six million) and possessed great wealth in agricul- ture and manufacturing. Even after its territo- rial losses to England at the end of the Seven Years’ War, it retained rich sugar colonies in the Caribbean, slave-buying ports in West Af- rica, and extensive international trade. But like so many other authoritarian states of that era, it faced deep debt, soaring public costs, and a population that continued to grow just as the global economy generally slowed. The monar- chy hoped that by joining the rebellious North American colonies against Britain, it might re- claim at least some of the strategic influence it had exercised in the North Atlantic before 1763. The major consequence of the intervention, however, was a lot more debt.

France depended more than Britain did on millions of peasants to contribute to the state treasury. The central government, however, had no fair, uniform system for imposing taxes and collected them inefficiently nearly ev- erywhere. Private entrepreneurs contracted with the gov- ernment to collect public revenue but kept large percentages for themselves. Nobles and well-placed clergymen enjoyed

the burdens of the third Estate. This satirical cartoon represents the three estates— clergy, nobles, and commoners—as women. The French caption reads, “Let’s hope this game finishes soon.” The artist included several details that signaled class differences to eighteenth-century viewers. For example, compare the aristocrat’s dainty slippers to the peasant’s wooden shoes. What message might the nun’s hand gesture or the aristocrat’s decorated hat suggest?

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this advisory body was known, since 1614. When Louis XVI, a man more interested in the workings of mechanical locks than the political system, failed to halt the country’s slide toward fiscal bankruptcy, public pressure from the mid- dle class and some noble families finally persuaded him to summon the Estates-General into session.

Toward France’s First Republic. By authorizing the Estates-General to elect deputies and convene in Paris, King Louis tacitly admitted its legitimacy as a representative body. Grasping this concession, leaders of the third estate, who were mainly professionals, intellectuals, and business- people, convened in June 1789 to form a National Assembly and to take the country’s fate into their own hands. Some of the high clergy and nobility supported them. This upstart legislature proceeded to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens as preamble to a future constitution. Echoing the American Declaration of Independence, the document announced that the “nation,” that is, the people of France, possessed sovereignty, not the king. Furthermore, all citizens had natural rights to “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” This manifesto affirmed the principles of freedom of the press and religion and fair legal procedures. In the ensuing months, the National Assembly confiscated Catholic Church lands (to help pay down the public debt), made priests employees of the state (Civil Con- stitution of the Clergy), gave citizenship to Protestants and Jews, and thoroughly reorganized France’s administrative and tax system. Millions of peasants were relieved of tra- ditional customary fees, which landlords had collected for centuries. Buying and selling political offices was outlawed, and nearly all public officials, including judges and Cath- olic bishops, had to submit themselves to election. Under the Old Regime, France had 300,000 nobles with exclusive political and social privileges. The National Assembly abol- ished these privileges and in 1791 terminated noble titles altogether.

Meanwhile, French peasants and urban workers also mobilized themselves and entered the political fray. The country’s common classes were bigger by many millions than they were in Britain’s thirteen North American colo- nies, and they nursed profound social and economic griev- ances. Terrible harvests in 1788–1789 caused widespread hunger and more bitter complaints against the crown, while the meeting of the Estates-General excited zealous hopes. There, popular mobs pulled down the Bastille prison, a sym- bol of royal oppression, and in several cities mobs rioted over bread prices. In the countryside, farmers burned the chateaus of aristocrats. In October 1789 a small army of working-class women marched on the Palace of Versailles, compelling the king to move his court into the city.

Many women, however, came to the opinion that despite their political activism the revolution was quickly leaving them behind. In cities and towns across France, women ex- pressed their dismay in newspaper articles and pamphlets, and some formed revolutionary associations that paralleled

serious downturn in 1786. Despite these volatile economic conditions, the two Bourbon kings Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) and Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) tried to solve their debt prob- lems by saddling the common population with additional taxes that even the most fortunate peasants could barely pay. Meanwhile, big land-owners complained bitterly that inflation cramped their deluxe lifestyles.

Peasants grumbled, rioted, and turned to banditry. But France’s urban bourgeoisie, or middle class of merchants, entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, bureaucrats, and intellec- tuals, had more influence with the monarchy. This class benefited from global commercialization, and it grew about threefold in the eighteenth century. Across Europe, educated middle classes, together with sympathetic members of the aristocracy, had for several decades been fashioning a new public style of culture centered on sociable discussion and debate on the great issues of the day—science, social reform, religion, and the arts. In time, the public opinions of middle- class people who read popular newspapers and attended scientific and political meetings began to have an impact on the decisions of at least some of Europe’s hereditary rulers. France had a knowledge-seeking, capitalist-minded middle class—indeed a much larger one than in North America— ready to speak out on questions of rights, liberties, and good government. The royal household, which dwelled in splen- dor in the Paris suburb of Versailles, tried intermittently and with little success to refute the Old Regime’s fundamental contradiction—the denial of legitimate political voice to so- ciety’s economically most productive sector. The educated public relentlessly pressured government ministers to face up to severe fiscal problems. There was even a spirited un- derground press that viciously lampooned the royal family, blaming France’s troubles on its depravity and greed.

Ships sailed constantly back and forth across the North Atlantic, and the North American rebellion seized the French public’s imagination as soon as it began. Here was a new country putting the “rights of man” into action. The Dec- laration of Independence circulated in French newspapers. Soldiers returning from the American war spread stories of patriotic heroism and the triumph of reason over despotism. Benjamin Franklin, who resided in Paris during part of the war, became a French celebrity. Moreover, French critics of autocratic government cheered Enlightenment-inspired uprisings in the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands, and Poland between 1787 and 1791, then watched in anger as royal armies crushed these movements. Poland, one of Europe’s largest states in the seventeenth century, vanished from the political map as Russia, Prussia, and Austria vio- lently partitioned it among them between 1772 and 1795.

France had a tradition extending back to medieval times of royal consultation with the three main divisions of society, called the three estates. But no king had bothered to call a meeting of the Estates-General, as

three estates The principal social classes or orders consti-

tuting societies in premodern Europe: the Roman Catholic clergy, the titled nobility, and

everyone else.

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hostile neighbors, the revolutionary government declared war on Austria in the spring of 1792. By the following year, France was also at war with Prussia, Britain, Spain, and the Dutch Republic. In response, the legislature drafted a citi- zen’s army, a remarkable development in itself in a global era of professional soldiers, mercenaries, and slave regi- ments. The prolonged fighting energized millions of men and women to defend the revolutionary cause by forging guns, sewing uniforms, eating less bread, and volunteering for the army, which grew to more than 700,000 combatants by late 1793. War with so much of the rest of Europe gave life to the abstract concept that all people of France, jointly possessing sovereignty and inalienable rights, therefore possessed a shared identity. Still, solidarity remained far from universal. Many young men shunned military service, peasants protected antirevolutionary priests and nuns, and in the spring of 1793 a full-scale rebellion broke out in rural western France in the name of king and church.

In the revolution’s early days, the great majority of French people took the monarchy for granted as the natural foun- dation of the social order. They could not imagine doing away with it. Revolutionary leaders, however, soon became

numerous male-dominated clubs. Olympe de Gouges, a writer and daughter of a butcher, railed against the failure of the Declaration of Rights to grant any to women explic- itly. In 1791 she penned the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. This document emulated the language of the 1789 declaration but inserted women throughout. The first article of the National Assembly’s pro- nouncement stated that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” De Gouges wrote, “Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.” For holding seditious beliefs, De Gouges was eventually executed, and French women waited another 151 years to get the right to vote.

In 1792 the revolution turned more radical, violent, and politically polarized. Leaders of a newly elected Legislative Assembly (constituted in the fall of 1791 and later renamed the National Convention) attempted to guide events but felt increasingly threatened by adversaries both at home and abroad. Many pious peasants turned against the revolution because of new restrictions on the Catholic Church. Thou- sands of aristocrats and army officers fled abroad to plot counterrevolution in league with Europe’s deeply conser- vative Old Regime monarchs. To preempt an attack by its

Parisian women leading an armed crowd to versailles, october 1789. Women’s actions were important in many facets of the French Revolution, from mass protests like the march depicted here to publication of political treatises. The women pulling the cannon and others carrying pikes and pitchforks are wearing commoner’s clothing. At the left of the scene, activists are encouraging an upper-class woman to join the march. What does this image suggest about the role of social class in the Revolution?

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deepened the mood of chronic crisis and helped push even more radical leaders to power. In 1793 the National Con- vention turned over much of its authority to a twelve-man Committee of Public Safety, which moved to eradicate all perceived opposition. Falling under the leadership of the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), the committee set out to cleanse the nation of traitors and antirevolution- ary opinions, replace Christianity with a Cult of Reason, and transform all citizens into eager republicans through cul- tural reeducation. To erect this “Republic of Virtue,” Robes- pierre and his agents demanded distinctly republican songs, festivals, art, plays, names, and dress. “If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue,” Robespierre declared, “amid revolution it is at the same time [both] vir- tue and terror.”3 To its credit, the National Convention also abolished slavery in early 1794, conferring rights of citizen- ship to all black males in the French colonies.

Over a period of seventeen months, the committee’s agents arrested more than 300,000 people and executed 17,000 of them. Eventually, however, the Terror devoured its own and burned itself out. In July 1794, Robespierre himself climbed the steps to the guillotine along with many of his supporters.

divided between those ad- vocating a constitutional monarchy in which the king’s power would be limited (the British model) and those pressing for a republic (the United States model). Radical republi- cans formed the Jacobin Club (named after a Pari- sian spot where the associ-

ation first met), and its branch groups spread across France. From 1789 to 1792 the national legislature moved deeper into uncharted political waters, finally eliminating the mon- archy altogether in the fall of 1792, instituting a republican constitution, and, in the following January, decapitating the hapless Louis along with his Austrian queen Marie Antoi- nette. Monarchs in the rest of Europe reacted to this spec- tacle in horror.

The year of the Terror. Civil rebellion and foreign wars, made worse by spiraling shortages of money and bread,

King louis Xvi’s execution, January 1793. The National Convention convicted Louis of treason after he attempted to flee from France. This public spectacle inaugurated the Reign of Terror—a particularly violent period in the Revolution. Notice the contrast between the gruesome display of the king’s severed head and the calm order that appears to prevail among the military onlookers. Why would contemporary observers have regarded Louis’ execution as a turning point in the Revolution?

constitutional monarchy A type of government in which a monarch, usually a member of a family that enjoys hereditary

succession, serves as head of state. Under the terms of a constitution or body of laws,

however, the monarch surren- ders part or all of his or her

governing power to a legislature and judiciary.

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DF 592 Chapter 20 | Waves of Revolution

Returning to Paris at a moment of domestic unrest, Napoleon engineered a coup d’état (koo day-TAH), abolished the Directory, and in 1799 assumed sweeping powers under a new constitu- tion. During the ensuing decade, he made himself master of much of Europe, even restoring the principle of mon- archy by crowning himself hereditary emperor of France in 1804 (see Map 20.2). By keeping public order and win- ning battles, he continued to enjoy broad popular support. He absorbed some neighboring territories into the French

France under the Directory. In the next phase of the revolution, the National Convention managed to write a new constitution, restoring a wobbly stability under an ex- ecutive council called the Directory. Meanwhile, republican armies continued to advance victoriously across Europe, and in the Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland the invad- ers set up revolutionary “sister republics.” The Directory reversed the most radical enactments of the Republic of Vir- tue and returned to the fundamental principles of the First Republic. The “people” remained sovereign, the principle of civil equality remained intact, elections were held, and women were allowed to exert influence through political writings and activism. The Directory, however, was also corrupt and politically inept.

Napoleon’s European empire. In 1799 France retreated measurably from the trend toward civil freedom and democ- racy when Napoleon Bonaparte took power and launched sixteen years of empire building. Napoleon followed in the tradition of rulers, notably Charlemagne in the eighth cen- tury and the Habsburg monarch Charles V in the sixteenth, who envisioned Europe as a unitary imperial state compa- rable to other giant Afroeurasian empires. He also yearned to restore to France the global power the last two Bourbon kings had squandered. Indeed, at the height of his authority, Napoleon liked seeing himself depicted in art as a Roman emperor.

Born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, Napoleon rose to power through the ranks of the revolutionary army. In 1795 he took command of French forces in Italy and made himself a national hero by displaying military genius and overrunning a large part of the peninsula. In 1798 the Di- rectory dispatched him with a huge force of forty thousand troops to invade Egypt, which was then a self-governing province of the Ottoman empire. The Directory had several strategic aims. Conquest of both Egypt and Syria would help counterbalance the loss of Canada to England and pro- vide a valuable source of grain for the home population. By occupying the northern end of the Red Sea, France could also challenge Britain’s lines of communication with South Asia and revive maritime power in the Indian Ocean.

Ruled by a Turkish-speaking military elite that prized cavalry warfare, Egypt fell quickly in a barrage of with- ering French musket and cannon fire. The conquerors set quickly to work to reorganize Egypt’s administration and finance along lines they regarded as modern. Napoleon also brought with him a large contingent of engineers, scientists, doctors, architects, and language experts to study Egypt and prepare to transform it. The experiment, however, was short lived. The British navy destroyed Napoleon’s fleet, Egyptians organized popular resistance, and French sol- diers died of infectious diseases in large numbers. In 1801 the occupiers left. Among Egyptian officials and intellectu- als, however, France’s shocking display of military might triggered a long debate over the merits of modernizing Egypt along these lines.

Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne. This portrait by the French artist Jean-August-Dominique Ingres shows Napoleon in his coronation regalia, holding the scepter of Charlemagne in his right hand and the hand of justice in his left. He also wears a golden wreath of laurels, invoking the emperors of Rome. Why do you think the artist portrayed Napoleon displaying symbols of past imperial glory so soon after the Revolution swept the French monarchy away?

coup d’état The sudden over- throw of an existing government by a small group. A “stroke of state” in French.