European History Assignment 1

18th Century French Defeats and Decline of the Monarchy

Maps 00, 01 Eighteenth Century Europe and its Trading Networks. The American historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has written a four-volume study of what he called “the modern world system” and which the general public now calls “globalization.” The second of these, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750 (2nd Edition 2011) examines how west European states created and dominated a new global trading system that eventually dwarfed that of the Old World. The exponential expansion of wealth this afforded was an important factor contributing to the emergence of money and education over birth and inherited status that was consolidated by the social upheaval that erupted in 1789. By the 18th century, military/political struggles between the British and French over control of this global system, called by some historian “the eighteenth-century world wars,” resulted in a series of French defeats that helped under-mined popular respect and support for the monarchy, contributing to its collapse by 1791. The the maps and text below illustrates this process by which the French monarchy came to be seen as increasingly ineffectual in some quarters of French society.

02, 02b – The Franco-British struggle in North America culminating in the French loss of Canada in 1763 is one example of how the French monarchy appeared incapable of defending the country's interest to some of its critics.

03, The Decline of the Spanish Empire after 1600 touched off a series of European wars for control of the small but very rich slave-based plantation economies of the Caribbean, dramatically expanding the Atlantic slave trade in the process. The British and French were by 1700 the chief actors in these conflicts which produced another series of French defeats, the last of which was the Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 that dove-tailed with the French Revolution itself.

05-08, The Spectacular Decline of the Mughal Empire after 1707 brought decades of warfare across South Asia characterized by bitter communal violence between supporters of the Muslim Mughal court vs. coalitions of Hindu princes. European trading companies fearful of loosing commercial rights granted by the Mughal shahs during the hey-day of their empire responded by providing military and financial support to competing sides in these wars. This made South Asia another site of the Anglo-French world wars in which again, French influence and trade was pushed out by the British. After 1757 French interests were reduced to four southern enclaves that remained in French hands until they were annexed by independent India in 1954.

Samir Amin's book Eurocentrism already touched on offers a dialectical analysis as to why modern bourgeois society consolidated by the French Revolution emerged first in Europe. While dissecting and dismissing old claims of European exceptionalism, i.e. European superiority, he does point to a certain type of exceptionalism to explain that development. Take a good look at map #09 of the old Silk Road commercial network, parts of which pre-date China's Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) and stretched from the archipelagos east of the Chinese coast to the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance. At the geographical and cultural center of these networks were the old civilizations that defined civilization itself for most of human history, with the Fertile Crescent and the North China plain being the twin cores of that system. Examples: all surviving written languages today use alphabets derived from either the Sumerian cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) or from early Chinese pictographs. Likewise, the most widely followed ethical systems today derive either from religions that emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean (Judaism-Christianity-Islam) or Chinese Confucianism. So how to explain the fact that in the modern period (after say 1500) the ancient centers of civilization get overtaken and eventually dominated by an historically marginal region; how to explain a Europe-centered world – Eurocentrism?

As argued in the discussion about “1788,” the under-laying structures of large-scale societies were remarkably similar for most of human history despite the unique characteristics of any and all of them. But the versions of those structures that evolved in Europe were weaker, less developed forms of those structures. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire there were no long-lasting continental-sized European empires inside that region like that of Imperial China, the various South Asian empires, or that of the Ottoman Turks and their predecessors in the Mediterranean despite efforts to create them; Charlemagne's Frankish Empire lasted barely a generation. That of other conquerors from Charles V of Spain (early 16th century), Louis XIV and Napoleon in France (mid-17th to early 19th centuries), to Hitler in Germany (a mere dozen years in the 20th) come even remotely close to that of the old civilizations. Another example is pre-industrial European economies that were a fraction of the size and wealth of the old centers of civilization. Amin also points out that the legitimating ideology of traditional society in Europe, namely European Christianity, incorporated logical inconsistencies into its basic doctrines from its very inception – the fully human and fully divine conception of its central figure or the idea of three distinct beings rolled into one (the Trinity), these contradictions explained away as “mysteries.” Technological know-how regressed dramatically after the fading away of Western Roman society in which everything from monumental building with concrete to maintaining the Roman aqueducts disappeared for centuries and had to be re-learned.

But …. a dialectical analysis led Amin to conclude that it was Europe's relative backwardness that explains the early collapse of traditional social forms there, and their displacement by those of bourgeois society.:

· The division of European society into small to mid-sized nation-states meant that when one of this faulted or declined , as with Portugal and Spain by 1600 European global expansion continued under others, France and Britain.

· The mysteries built into European Christianity, ie. Its logical inconsistencies, allowed for rapid and radical interpretations that could service as legitimating ideologies supporting profound social changes without requiring the complete abandonment of a belief -system. Thus Protestants' abandonment of the much of Catholicism's theology and practice was presented as a return to core doctrines rather than their overthrow thereby adapting the older belief to the needs of new social groups and realities.

· Recall that Queen Isabella of Aragon/Spain had to put up her jewels as collateral to raise enough money to outfit Columbus with three ship and a couple-hundred men in 1492. Meanwhile, decades earlier China's Yongle Emperor had financed dozens of ship with thousands of sailor in seven expeditions under Admiral Zheng He as far west as the East African coast before these were suppressed by his successor, the Hongxi Emperor. The relative poverty of the former state forced its rulers into dramatic and risky innovations while the great wealth and power of China convinced its ruling classes that there was little of interest or value in “barbarian” lands. Similarly, Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Hungarian-born convert to Islam, was the first to develop a printing press with moveable type in Arabic in 1729 in Istanbul, nearly 300-years after Guggenberg had developed his system just across the Ottoman border in the German-speakng lands of Europe. Those who ruled the great and powerful lands that had long defined higher civilization saw no need to pursue change or even know much about those they understood to be backward, poor, and uncouth, which they largely were compared to themselves.

Europe was for a very long time a lesser-developed, poorer and weaker version of a traditional society; this turned out to be to its advantage, for it was there that the radical breaks that created “modernity” first consolidated into bougeois society for that reason. Conversely, it was the long-term resilience of the old centers of civilization based on traditionalist social forms that accounts for their ability to withstand great shocks over time, until the radically new forms of power that emerged from bourgeois society in Europe over-whelmed them in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is the “exceptionalism” at the heart of how western Europe came to dominate the globe according to Samir Amin's dialectical reading of modern world history. I believe he was quite right in this.