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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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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.

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system of schools (lycées) for boys from well-to-do families. He had no reputation for Christian piety, but he made peace with the Roman Catholic Church, though insisting on free- dom of worship. He declined to bring back the traditional French aristocracy but rather created a service nobility, that is, an elite of titled individuals whose status depended en- tirely on the pleasure of the state. In 1804 he instituted the Civil Code (Napoleonic Code), a rational, uniform legal sys- tem to replace a tangle of often inconsistent provincial laws. The Code embodied Enlightenment principles of private property and individual liberty, including equality before the law and freedom of contract. It also regulated numerous details of daily life, including the rights and responsibili- ties of employers, employees, husbands, wives, parents, and children. More generally, the Code contributed to France’s social and cultural integration, and it eventually had a pro- found influence on European, French colonial, and Latin American legal systems.

Napoleon, however, was no radical republican. He loathed the idea of free speech if it permitted criticism of the state. He put stringent curbs on political expression, and his agents

state and created several new republics as French clients. The Austrian and Prussian monarchies retained their sov- ereignty but gave up territory.

In creating this empire, Napoleon built the largest army that Europe had ever known, drafting a total of about 2.3 million young men and selecting officers more for their military competency than their aristocratic pedigrees. This force had remarkable morale, the first in modern history to conceive of itself less as a professional, paid, or unwillingly conscripted force than as an instrument of the sovereign French people. In the occupied lands, men and women with republican sentiments at first welcomed the intruders, and Napoleon ordered economic and civil reforms, for example, abolishing serfdom wherever it existed in occupied areas. He also imposed heavy taxes and military conscription on dependent countries, however, and in most conquered terri- tories the local welcome soon wore thin.

Napoleon was of two minds about the revolution. On one hand, he admired enlightened rationality, the idea of civil equality, and the principle of popular sovereignty. He en- dorsed modern scientific research and created a state-supported

CORSICA (Fr.)

GIBRALTAR (Br.)

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G R A N D D U C H Y

O F F I N L A N D ( R u s . )

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Egyptian Campaign 1798–1799

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Jena 1806 Austerlitz

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Dependent states

Nominal allies of Napoleon

At war with Napoleon

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Major battle sites

MAP 20.2 The Napoleonic empire.

What might you conclude about Napoleon’s territorial ambitions from the location of major battle sites on this map?

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throne, though under a constitution that constrained his power somewhat. The principles of popular sovereignty, however, had already sunk deep roots in France. The new Louis and his royal successors never regained full popular acceptance, and more revolutions were shortly to follow.

The Idea of Nationalism The Napoleonic regime may have run roughshod over indi- vidual liberties, but the founding of the French republic, the country’s wars with its neighbors, and Napoleon’s program to centralize and integrate political and legal institutions helped bring about a new popular consciousness of national identity. Today, virtually all sovereign states share a funda- mentally nationalist ideology. And most people reflexively accept the idea that a world of sovereign nation-states is “in the nature of things.” But in fact, the concepts of nation-state and national- ism did not exist two and a half centuries ago, and they took on life only gradually beginning in the late 1700s.

Where and when did the inhabitants of particu- lar territories first conceive of themselves as possessing a common national identity? Historians have vigorous de- bates about this question, though many agree that wher- ever it happened—England? the Spanish American empire? France?—literate political and cultural leaders were the first to acquire and consciously express the idea of the nation as a special kind of community. There is no doubt that the revolutions in both North America and France, and later in Latin America, activated the powerful Enlightenment principle that the legitimacy of the state, that is, its lawful- ness, is derived from the will of the “people”—not from the monarch or any individual claiming to act as an agent of God. Eighteenth-century republicans, as well as advocates of limited monarchy, came to conceive of the “people” as a group of individuals sharing not only inalienable rights but also a common territory, historical experience, language, cultural distinctiveness, and hope for the future. This com- munity constituted the “nation.” National-ism took form as the doctrine that in order to preserve its rights and free- doms the national community is entitled to govern itself as a sovereign territory, to form a state. Corollary to that, the state and its government are legitimate only if they repre- sent the nation’s will.

Men and women naturally owed loyalty to a variety of different groups—family, village, artisan guild, religious community, and so on. But nationalism announced that in- dividuals owed their highest allegiance to their nation-state. Indeed, they should be prepared to die to defend it. These ideas, that the national community has the right both to

censored art, drama, and the press. The number of Parisian newspapers dropped from seventy-three in 1800 to four in 1811. He created a secret police and crushed all organized political opposition. The Civil Code reaffirmed the princi- ple of men’s intellectual and moral superiority over women, imposing new restrictions on divorce and prohibiting wives from bringing suits or disposing of property without their husbands’ consent. For women of the revolution, this repre- sented a discouraging backward step.

Napoleon’s fall. In 1810 France loomed over Europe, but within six years the empire vanished. Napoleon conquered far and wide, but the imperial system was never stabilized. The emperor had no significant success against the British navy. Nor did his campaign to prohibit commerce between Britain and the rest of Europe, a policy called the Conti- nental System, work well in the long run. As we shall see, Napoleon also lost control of Saint Domingue and its sugar exports. In 1800 he signed a treaty with Spain to recover the western part of the Louisiana Territory but then sold it to the United States three years later at a bargain price. And in Europe, people who turned against Napoleonic rule organized protest and resistance inspired by France’s own revolutionary ideals. In Spain, for example, patriotic insur- gents aided by Britain fought French occupying troops for six years. This was the first armed conflict to be called a guerrilla or “little war” owing to Spanish tactics of hit-and- run, sabotage, and assassination.

In 1812 Napoleon made the disastrous decision to invade Russia, enraged that Tsar Alexander I had broken an exist- ing alliance. The invading force of 650,000, the largest field army in European history, fought its way to Moscow only to face an evacuated and burned city, a dearth of supplies, and a long winter retreat to Germany, which reduced the army to barely 10,000 men fit for combat. This debacle heartened France’s enemies and triggered more wars of liberation. Losing the support of his own ministers and generals, Na- poleon abdicated in 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba off the Italian coast. The following year the Napoleonic era had its famous coda, when the general eluded his mind- ers on Elba and raised a new army, only to suffer terminal defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. Taking no more chances, the victorious powers sent him to St. Helena, a tiny island in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.

When Napoleon was confined on Elba, Klemens von Metternich, the prime minister of Austria, called a meeting of European states in Vienna to negotiate the region’s post- war political order. The Congress of Vienna did not restore borders and sovereignties exactly as they had existed before the French Revolution, but the heads of the most impor tant states agreed on two things: first, to collaborate to stop any of their number from behaving aggressively in the future and, second, to suppress radical republicans and other ex- tremists wherever they reared their heads. Louis XVIII, brother of the executed king, was placed on the French

nation-state A sovereign ter- ritorial state whose inhabitants share, or are ideally expected to share, common language, cultural traditions, history, and aspirations for the future.

nationalism An ideology cen- tered on the natural rights of a people or “nation” to constitute a sovereign state.

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abolished an entire social system founded on slavery. Nev- ertheless, the price of liberty ran high: thirteen years of bru- tal wars and a devastated economy.

Plantation society. In the eighteenth cen- tury, French planters exported sugar,

coffee, tobacco, and cotton from Saint Domingue, which occupied the

western third of the island His- paniola. (The other two-thirds was the Spanish possession of Santo Domingo.) Together with Martinique and Guada- lupe, France’s two smaller Ca- ribbean dependencies, Saint Domingue produced more exportable wealth in commer- cial crops than Spain’s entire

American empire. As in all plantation societies in the Ameri-

cas, a small minority of Europeans and their descendants stood atop

the political and social pyramid. But in 1790 this group numbered only about forty thousand, or around 7  percent of the colony’s total numbers. It included plantation owners, colonial offi cers, and merchants, but also a larger group of relatively poor whites, who made their livings in farming, trade, or government. Beneath whites in rank order was the mi- nority population of free people of Afri- can or mixed racial descent, known also as affranchis (freed people). This group embraced a range of economic statuses,

from unskilled ex-slaves and female sex partners of white men to successful farmers with slaves of their own. The slave population, both people born on the island (creoles) and new arrivals from tropical Africa, occupied the society’s bottom level. Living in a colony a little larger than Maryland, this population numbered close to 500,000—nearly twice as many slaves as in the entire United States in 1790. To meet world demand for sugar and coffee and to make up for the typically short lifespan of slaves, planters depended on steady labor imports. Between 1785 and 1790, for example, slave ships annually brought about thirty thousand slaves to the colony from West Africa.

Relations between and within these three broad social categories were tense in the late eighteenth century, the strains all related to Saint Domingue’s prominent place in world trade. The poor white population included many people who had migrated from France to seek their fortunes but resented the planter elite, which controlled the bulk of wealth. The affranchis, despite their free status, suffered systematic social discrimination at the hands of all whites.

govern itself and to claim citizens’ ultimate allegiance, sep- arated modern nationalism from older forms of patriotism, for example, popular displays of loyalty to a monarch or emotional attachment to an ethnic homeland.

In 1789 the population ruled by the king of France spoke several different lan- guages and had strong regional iden- tities. The revolution sometimes aggravated those differences, but it also planted the idea that cit- izens should take pride in their common “Frenchness.” The mobilization of a citizen army, achieved by a combination of conscription and emotional appeals to the French nation, strengthened this new kind of identity. As one young soldier from eastern France wrote to his parents, “Either you will see me return bathed in glory, or you will have a son who is a worthy citizen of France who knows how to die for the defense of his country.”4

Napoleon consistently represented himself as the supreme embodiment of the French nation. His conquests broad- cast nationalist ideas across Europe, fi rst by introducing revolutionary principles of citizen equality and access to justice, later by unintentionally rousing popula- tions he had subjugated to put forward their own nationalist credos in opposi- tion to French occupation. Guerilla war in Spain, secret societies in occupied It- aly, and dogged resistance in Russia were all incubators of nationalism, which in the nineteenth century gradually cap- tured the imagination, not only of literate men and women, but also of urban workers, peasants, and colonized peoples.

The Birth of Haiti While the French Revolution was playing itself out, another

popular insurgency, inti- mately connected to events in France, took place be- tween 1789 and 1804 in the colony of Saint Domingue, later renamed Haiti, in the

Caribbean Sea. In contrast to the British North American colonies, Saint Domingue was not a European settler colony but a tropical plantation society whose inhabitants were overwhelmingly of African origin, most of them slaves. We may characterize the Haitian rebellion as the most revo- lutionary of all movements on the Atlantic rim because it

Plantation society. tury, French planters exported sugar,

coffee, tobacco, and cotton from Saint Domingue, which occupied the

and their descendants stood atop the political and social pyramid. But

in 1790 this group numbered only about forty thousand, or around 7  percent of

In 1789 the population ruled by the king of France spoke several different lan- guages and had strong regional iden- tities. The revolution sometimes aggravated those differences, but

will have a son who is a worthy citizen of France who knows how to die for the defense of his country.”4die for the defense of his country.”4die for the defense of his country.”

Napoleon consistently represented

a cockade from the French revolution. Both men and women pinned ribbons like this one to their hats or lapels to show their support

for the Revolution. The idea of a shared political commitment was an important

building block of emerging nationalism. What symbols of shared identity have served to mobilize nationalist feeling in the United

States or other countries?

insurgency An organized, usually internal rebellion against

a government or its policies, sometimes employing guerrilla

or terror tactics.

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“nations” and elected their own “kings” and “queens” fol- lowing African practice. When rebellion broke out, these societies served as cells for organizing resistance.

The long revolution. Like the French Revolution, the movement on Saint Domingue passed through several dis- tinct phases, all of them closely interlocked with events in France. In the fi rst phase, from 1789 to 1791, both white colo- nists and affranchis, receiving news of the National Assembly, held high hopes of benefi tting from the new regime in Paris. Both groups sent delegations to France to try to infl uence politics, and Haitian whites set up elected regional assem- blies. Planters, poor whites, and affranchis, however, saw the revolution from different angles of vision. The richest land- owners talked much about liberty, meaning greater colonial self-rule or even independence in imitation of the United States, though on terms that left slavery intact. Poor whites wanted full equality with the planter class. The affranchis

They could not, for example, legally marry into white fam- ilies. Talk in Europe of the rights of man resonated loudly with affranchis as soon as it reached the colony.

The grievances of the slave majority produced not merely resentment but dismay and fury. Planters and their hench- men struggled to contain those feelings by brutal repres- sion. Creole slaves who caused no trouble might get jobs as household servants, work bosses, or petty enforcers. But most African-born slaves, who did not initially know Hai- tian Creole (the French-based, African-infl uenced language spoken in the colony), labored under the whip in the fi elds and mills. Slaves, however, did not lack for means of de- fi ance. In the later eighteenth century, shippers brought in large numbers of captives from the lower Congo River re- gion. Many of them, predominantly young males, had been soldiers in Africa and possessed military skills. Slaves on the plantations who spoke the same language or came from the same part of Africa created informal secret societies or

year France saint domingue (haiti)

1789 may Meeting of Estates-General June National Assembly formed July Fall of the Bastille august Declaration of the Right of Man

1790 July National Assembly enacts Civil Constitution of the Clergy

1791 July Louis XVI accepts constitutional monarchy but resists reforms october Legislative Assembly meets under Constitution of 1791

may French National Assembly grants full political rights to free blacks in Haiti august Slave uprising on Saint Domingue; Toussaint Louverture emerges as military leader

1792 april France declares war on Austria september France becomes a republic

1793 January Louis XVI executed april Committee of Public Safety appointed and Terror begins

september British and Spanish troops invade Saint Domingue

1794 February Slavery abolished in French colonies July Radical leader Robespierre executed

1795 october Directory government takes power

1796 march Napoleon named commander of armies in Italy

1798 may Napoleon invades Egypt

1799 december Coup against Directory; Napoleon becomes First Consul

1800 august Toussaint becomes commander-in-chief in Saint Domingue

1802 February French forces invade Saint Domingue to reestablish control may Napoleon reinstates slavery in French colonies June French forces arrest Toussaint and deport him to France

1803 april France cedes Louisiana to the United States november French troops leave Saint Domingue

1804 may Napoleon crowned emperor of France January Dessaline proclaims Haiti’s independence

1805 october British navy defeats French at Battle of Trafalgar

1812 June Napoleon invades Russia

1814 september Congress of Vienna convenes

1815 June–october Napoleon defeated and exiled to St. Helena

TABLE 20.1 Key Dates in the French and Haitian Revolutions

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with revolutionary France, invaded Saint Domingue to fur- ther their own strategic interests in the Caribbean.

Between 1794 and 1802, the third phase of the revolu- tion, the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture (too-SAN loo-ver- CHURE) dominated the military and political scene. A creole slave who gained his freedom at the age of thirty, Toussaint rose to a commandership in the rebellion. A gifted guerrilla tactician who knew how to read, he success- fully bridged the social divide between slaves and the other elements of society. When the French National Convention abolished slavery in all overseas colonies, Toussaint joined with French republican officials on the island to fight Span- ish and British occupying forces. Yellow fever also served the resistance, killing 15,000 of 25,000 British soldiers. In 1800 the French government appointed Toussaint governor of Saint Domingue, though he founded no democratic re- gime. A newly written constitution concentrated nearly all power in his hands. Recognizing commodity exports as key to the island’s economic viability, he also tried with mixed success to impose schemes of forced labor and sharecrop- ping on liberated slaves to get them back to work on the plantations.

wanted equality with all whites. In May 1791, in fact, the Na- tional Assembly granted legal equality to free blacks whose parents were also free, an action most colonial whites furi- ously opposed. In the meantime, these three groups fell to fighting with one another on the island, each one claiming to represent the true spirit of the French Revolution.

A sudden and massive slave insurrection announced the second phase of the rebellion. In the summer and fall of 1791, slaves looted plantations, burned cane fields, and murdered planter families. Armed white militias retaliated quickly, killing slaves in much greater numbers. Slaves may have responded to rumors that the king of France had al- ready emancipated them. Secret societies appear to have kept alive African political ideas that kings should have limited powers and rule justly. These groups, together with creole slaves who had good knowledge of colonial society, helped organize fighters and provided commanders.

Saint Domingue remained in near anarchy from 1791 to 1794. French troops arrived to try to calm the situation, but soldiers died of yellow fever and other tropical dis- eases at an alarming rate. The scene became even more complicated in 1793, when Spain and Britain, both at war

revolution in saint domingue. Slaves and French forces alike had to contend with rugged terrain, tropical climate, and infectious diseases in order to survive and fight. Toussaint Louverture stands in the center of this painting, fending off a French assault. How might Toussaint have used the island’s geography to his military advantage?

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and pulling his army from Saint Domingue. The following year Haiti declared independence under the command of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of Toussaint’s former offi cers. Unfortunately, the long revolution left both towns and planta- tions in desolation. The sovereign Haitian population, largely illiterate and abjectly poor, had to struggle on for decades in nearly total political isolation, its government a dictatorship in republican guise. France did not recognize Haiti’s indepen- dence until 1825, the United States not until 1862.

Saint Domingue fought its war of independence in the fi nal revolutionary phase from 1802 to 1804. Napoleon, who wished to reinstate the slave regime, sent troops to invade the island. They seized all the ports and captured Toussaint, send- ing him to France, where he died in prison in 1803. Neverthe- less, backcountry resistance continued, and French soldiers fell ill and died by the thousands. After France and Britain went to war in 1803, Napoleon decided to cut his losses and revise his priorities by selling Louisiana to the United States

Weighing THE EVIDENCE

Toussaint Louverture Writes to the French Directory After the French Revolution’s most radical period ended and the more conservative Directory came to power, the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture feared that the government in Paris would reverse the National Convention’s 1794 decree to abolish slavery in the colonies. Some political factions in Paris wanted to do exactly that. In November 1797, Toussaint wrote to the Directory, reassuring it of his loyalty to the republic and its high ideals but at the same time insisting that the freedom of his people must not be compromised.

The attempts on that liberty which the [French] colonists pro- pose are all the more to be feared because it is with the veil of patriotism that they cover their detestable plans. We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfi dious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven pre- pared by the hand of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they med- itate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the re- turn of slavery.

It is for you, Citizens Directors, to turn from over our heads the storm which the eternal enemies of our liberty are pre- paring in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully it with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrifi ced to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. . . .

I send you with this letter a declaration which will acquaint you with the unity that exists between the proprietors of Saint Domingue who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner. You will see there a resolution, unequivocal and carefully constructed, for the

restoration of slavery; you will see there that their determi- nation to succeed has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows. . . .

Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifi ce them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not en- slave us anew. France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefi ts. . . . But if, to reestablish slavery in Saint Domingue, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible; we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it. . . .

It is suffi cient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, be- fore the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liber- ticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confi ded to me for the defense of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.

Source: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Do- mingo Revolution, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 195–197.

Thinking Critically What evidence do you see in Toussaint’s letter that he was familiar with ideas that inspired the American and French revo- lutions? Along with appeals to the principles of the French republic, what argument does Toussaint make for not reinstating slavery? How would you interpret Toussaint’s statement that the eagerness of some French factions to restore slavery “has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows”?

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cities in defiance of local imperial officials. In 1810, armed re- bellions broke out in Buenos Aires and Caracas. That same year Miguel Hidalgo, a Mexican parish priest, launched a peasant revolt against Spanish authority in the viceroyalty of New Spain (the imperial territories of North America and most of Central America).

After the Spanish king Ferdinand VII (r. 1808, 1814–1829) returned to his throne in Madrid, fifteen years of bloody fighting ensued between colonial rebels and Spanish troops. Only in 1828 did Spain finally abandon mainland America, leaving a cluster of new republics to replace the four colonial viceroyalties. The Spanish empire endured only on the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. As for Brazil, Napoleon’s attack on Portugal in 1807 obliged the royal gov- ernment to leave Lisbon, cross the Atlantic, and reconstitute itself in Rio de Janeiro. In 1822 Brazil achieved indepen- dence without a long revolutionary struggle, in large mea- sure because the reform-minded Prince Dom Pedro refused to accompany his father King João VI (r. 1816–1826) back to Portugal at the end of the Napoleonic interlude. Instead, he cooperated with the Brazilian propertied elite to head a new constitutional monarchy.

Colonial Society on the Eve of Rebellion In both Spanish America and the thirteen British colonies, revolts started when political and economic grievances against European imperial masters became intolerable. In both cases, property-owning white creoles led the move- ments after failing to gain relief from onerous taxes and mercantilist policies that choked business and trade. And in both cases, Enlightenment ideas about rights and liberties provided ideological fuel for insurgency. Latin American leaders also drew on the North American and French revo- lutions for models of resistance and republican government.

Nevertheless, the differences between the British and Spanish spheres of revolution were striking. First, the Span- ish empire was much larger geographically and culturally more complex than Britain’s thirteen colonies. Huge dis- tances separated cities from one another, overland transport was rudimentary, and the empire’s major regions, each with distinctive climate, ecology, and ethnolinguistic groups, maintained only irregular contacts with one another. The Spanish viceroyalties also differed from the British colonies in the makeup of their social hierarchy. In North America, people of European descent substantially outnumbered black slaves and Indians. In Spanish America as a whole it was the reverse. Of the seventeen million or so inhabitants, Indians accounted for about 44 percent, castas (people of mixed ancestry) 32 percent, whites 19 percent, and blacks 5  percent. These ratios varied from one part of the empire to another, but colonial law and cultural practice preserved a fairly uniform and inflexible social hierarchy: Peninsulares (whites born in Europe) stood at the apex of privilege and power, white creoles occupied the second level, and then castas, Indians, and blacks followed in descending order

The Second Wave: Revolutions in Latin America

Focus What factors contributed to the success of revolutionary movements in overturning Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule in the Americas?

Independence movements started later and struggled for freedom longer in Spain’s and Portugal’s American colonies than in Britain’s thirteen North American colonies or in Haiti. The prelude to Latin American revolutions was Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807–1808, which forced

the kings of both countries to flee. Lacking direction from Madrid, juntas took control of political affairs in several Spanish American

toussaint louverture in command. This portrait presents the Haitian leader dressed as a European military officer. An aide waits with a saddled horse. Toussaint sits before a glass of wine. Behind him is a comfortable-looking house. How would you compare this scene with the depiction of the commander on page 000?

junta A committee or council that seizes control of a local

or national government, espe- cially following civil upheaval or

revolution.

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below them on the social scale. In most of Spanish Amer- ica, the two white groups peered down on a mass of peas- ants, ranch hands, servants, and slaves whose numbers far exceeded theirs. They generally shared a determination to keep those classes in their “proper place” as compliant la- borers and social inferiors. As much as creoles chafed un- der Spanish authoritarianism, hardly any of them wanted a social revolution “from the bottom.” In the 1790s most creoles recoiled at news of the French terror and of slaves burning Haitian plantations. When the insurgent priest Hidalgo raised Mexican Indians and mestizos (people of mixed white and Indian descent) against Spanish oppres- sion and failed to stop killings of white property owners, many creoles turned against him. Spanish troops caught and executed Hidalgo in 1811, though the rural rebellion continued.

The Wars of Independence Despite creole fears of losing control of events, the pace of change accelerated rapidly after 1810. Many leaders hesi- tated at first to renounce allegiance to King Ferdinand VII but finally despaired of his ever agreeing to negotiate over the political liberties they thought they deserved. In 1814,

(see Chapter 18). Largely because of this combination of geo- graphical and human factors, colonial rebels found them- selves launching several uprisings rather than one.

The white creole property-owners at the forefront of the independence movements had distinctive aspirations. They harbored simmering resentments against peninsulares, who often lived in America temporarily but nonetheless cornered the high positions as officials, military men, and Catholic clerics. Peninsulares made up less than 5 percent of the white population, but they habitually touted their so- cial superiority and sometimes accumulated great wealth before returning to Spain. The crown enacted political reforms in the eighteenth century, but like the British in North America, they did this, not to extend local liberties, but to keep order, control the flow of trade, and tax subjects more efficiently. In contrast to the thirteen colonies, Span- ish America had never been allowed colonial legislatures where propertied creoles might exercise local authority or vent grievances. Creole leaders denounced these injustices, knowing that it was they, not peninsulares, who largely built the Spanish American economy—its haciendas, mines, plantations, and export trade.

Creoles and peninsulares, however, found common ground quickly enough when it came to complaints from the classes

Father miguel hidalgo and the declaration of the War of independence. This large mural shows two aspects of Mexico’s fight for independence from Spain. On the left, Father Hidalgo proclaims “The Cry of Dolores” on September 16, 1810, voicing the resistance of Indians and other commoners to the rule of a small minority. On the right, members of the elite debate the terms of independence. Mexican artist Juan O’Gorman painted the mural in Chapultepec Castle, a former royal residence converted to a national history museum in 1939. What political or social purpose might O’Gorman have intended this mural to serve more than a century after the revolution?

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DFThe Second Wave: Revolutions in Latin America 601

to Argentina doggedly continued to fi ght, and the govern- ment in Spain, battling both serious debt problems and urban protesters demanding limited monarchy, could not afford to send more soldiers to America. In the far south, José de San Martín ousted the Spanish from Chile and much of Peru. In the northern viceroyalty of New Granada, Simón Bolívar, a creole land-owner, welded together a rebel army of creoles, castas, cowboy cavalry from the Venezuelan plains, and even slaves, who were promised emancipation.

after the French withdrew from Spain and Ferdinand re- turned to Madrid, he sent a large force to smash the Amer- ican insurrections.

At fi rst, Spanish troops, in collaboration with peninsu- lares and creoles who remained loyal to the crown, went on the offensive. The rural revolt in Mexico became frag- mented, and the Spanish administration suppressed creole demands for free elections. After 1816, however, the mili- tary situation began to change. Rebel leaders from Mexico

José de San Martín (1778–1850) was born in Argentina, the son of an imperial lieutenant-governor. His peninsular parents took him to Spain when he was a child, and there he joined the army as a cadet at the age of eleven. He fi rst saw action in 1791 in a fi ght against Muslim forces for control of the North African port of Oran. Later he won distinction in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon. Attracted to the political reform ideas swirling through Europe, he left the army in 1811 and sailed for Buenos Aires, where creole rebels had declared in- dependence. He organized an army of resistance in far west- ern Argentina and in January 1817 led a force of fi ve thousand soldiers, a majority of whom were blacks and mulattoes, across frigid, 12,000-foot passes of the southern Andes to Chile. The Andes crossing severely weakened his army, but he nonetheless achieved an extraordinary logistical feat. In February his forces ousted Spanish and loyalist troops from Santiago, Chile’s main city.

The Chilean land-owning class offered San Martín the country’s presidency, but, declining political offi ce, he planned an attack to liberate the viceroyalty of Peru. Because a thou- sand miles and the stark Atacama Desert separated Santiago from Lima, capital of Peru, he collaborated with the British navy in 1820 to transport his army up the coast. A cautious com- mander, he landed north of Lima, then waited a year hoping that because he was nearby the urban population would rise up against their Spanish masters. This did not happen, but when he fi nally advanced on the city, the viceroy and his forces fl ed. He entered Lima in July 1821, though only after the local creole leaders declared independence. “I have no ambition to be the conqueror of Peru,” he protested. “The country has now become sensible of its true interests, and it is right the inhab- itants should have the means of expressing what they think.”

San Martín reluctantly agreed, however, to take command as Protector of Peru. In this offi ce he immediately started making liberal reforms. He liberated Indians from tribute pay- ments and forced labor, and he proclaimed that children born of slaves after independence must be free. In a decree fore- shadowing the new era of nationalism, he declared, “The ab- origines [indigenous population] shall not be called Indians or

natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be known as Peruvians.” Lima’s con- servative creole class, however, largely opposed the Protector’s reforms, and his honeymoon with them ended quickly.

In mid-1822 San Martín went to northern Peru to meet with Simón Bolívar, whose army was moving south through Ecuador. No one knows what the two generals said to each other, but according to an eyewit- ness they emerged from the meeting “frowning gravely.” They had con- fl icting visions of the ex-empire’s political fu- ture. In any case Bolívar held the stronger military hand and was eager for political power. He carried through Peru’s liberation, effectively concluding the Spanish American wars of independence, then took offi ce as president of both Peru and Gran Colombia. San Martín, meanwhile, returned to Lima, resigned his offi ce two months later, and eventually made his way back to Europe. Bolívar, after struggling to hold Gran Colombia together, died of tuberculosis in 1830. San Martín passed away quietly in his daughter’s house near Paris in 1850, outliving Bolívar by twenty years.

Thinking Critically What factors do you think might have motivated San Martín to leave South America after the Spanish defeat rather than remain to play a political role in one of the new republics?

José de san Martín: Liberator of the southern Andes

Individuals MATTER

General José de San Martin.

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DF 602 Chapter 20 | Waves of Revolution

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

Caribbean Sea

Gulf of Mexico

Independent Latin American states in 1830

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

U N I T E D S TAT E S

M E X I C O 1821

E M P I R E O F B R A Z I L 1822

OREGON TERRITORY

UNITED PROVINCES OF CENTRAL AMERICA

1823–1839

BRITISH HONDURAS (Br.)

BRITISH GUIANA (Br.)

FRENCH GUIANA (Fr.)

VENEZUELA 1830GRAN COLOMBIA

1819–1830

ECUADOR 1803

BOLIVIA 1825

URUGUAY 1828

ARGENTINA 1816

PATAGONIA (Disputed between Argentina and Chile)

CHILE 1817

PARAGUAY 1811

PERU 1821

DUTCH GUIANA (Neth.)

COLOMBIA

PUERTO RICO (Sp.) CUBA (Sp.)

GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS

ISLAS MALVINAS/ FALKLAND ISLANDS

HAITI (1804)

Buenos Aires

Montevideo

Rio de Janeiro

La Paz

Lima Bahia

Caracas

Santiago

San Antonio

Havana

Veracruz Mexico City

San Francisco

Guatemala City

Quito

Panama City

Bogotá

0 1000 2000 mi

0 2000 km1000

La Plata fractured into Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia (see Map 20.3). The United Provinces of Central America lasted as a unitary state until 1840 and then broke into five small republics. By contrast, enormous Brazil, de- spite deeply embedded regionalisms, managed to hold to- gether, partly because of the astute leadership of the young king Dom Pedro and partly because the slave population numbered in the millions, persuading white elites that they had better stick together.

In both Spanish America and Brazil, property-owning males of European descent occupied the pinnacle of the social hierarchy both before and after the wars of independence.

By 1821 this force seized the regions that are now Venezuela and Colombia and in the next four years defeated royalist armies in Ecuador and Peru.

Leaders of Spanish American independence move- ments had a variety of ideas about the precise form that new sovereign governments should take. Simón Bolívar was a republican, an advocate of governance by the propertied creole class, a relentless political in- fighter, and for nearly a decade the authoritar- ian president of the short-lived republic of Gran Colombia. José de San Martín, by contrast, was a constitutional monarchist, a liberal reformer, and a gifted general who had little stomach for politics.

Mexico achieved independence following a chain of events closely intertwined with political devel- opments in Europe, where a revolt in 1820 per- suaded Ferdinand VII to accept a constitution that would limit his authority and establish a legislature. This turn of events, which the Mex- ican viceroy supported, revived creole hopes and impelled both them and the peninsulares to try to achieve political change without violent revolution. Augustín de Iturbide, a creole and a royalist military commander, came to the fore to broker a compromise among all social groups, aiming to safeguard the interests of peninsulares, creoles, the Catholic Church, and the army, though he also prom- ised legal equality for all Mexicans except slaves. In effect, a conservative leadership maneuvered a sort of counter- revolution against the radical populist rebels that Hidalgo had represented. Indeed, Iturbide took power in 1821 as “constitutional emperor” of Mexico. Ten years of fighting, however, left the country in bad economic straits. Iturbide proved to be an inept decision maker, and in 1823 disgrun- tled army officers forced him out, replacing the short-lived monarchy with a republic.

Many Young States Some independence leaders, notably Bolívar, had visions of leading Spanish America quickly to prosperity and world influence as a single super-federation in imitation of the United States. Creole property-owners throughout the for- mer empire shared commercial interests, spoke Spanish, read the newspapers that sprang to life in the major cities, and, for the most part, thought of themselves as “America- nos” with a common history of discrimination at the hands of peninsulares. But union was not to be. Spanish Amer- ica extended about eight thousand miles from California to Cape Horn, and regional cultural identities and politi- cal interests had hardened over three centuries of imperial rule. Creole elites in different regions had little experience working together. In any case they aimed first to substitute themselves for royal officials in the existing administrative units. Even partial federation plans failed. Bolívar’s Gran Colombia quickly fragmented into Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and eventually Panama. The viceroyalty of Rio de

MAP 20.3 The Americas in 1830.

What geographical factors might help explain why Spain’s American empire broke initially into eleven sovereign states rather than remaining united as one?

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DFConclusion 603

As in the young United States, profound social and economic inequalities remained to be addressed. In the first decades of independence, all the new states except Brazil and the re- maining Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico abolished slavery. Even so, Indians and free blacks participated little in public life, and castas climbed social and political ladders at a discouraging pace. Women of all classes fought valiantly in the wars, and several gained fame as patriots. Juana Azur- duy, a Bolivian casta, led a cavalry charge against Spanish troops in 1816. Gertrudis Bocanegra served as a courier for Mexican rebels, as many women did, until the Spanish caught and executed her. Manuela Sáenz, the illegitimate daughter of an affluent peninsular and the mistress of Simón Bolívar, served the revolutionary movement as intelligence agent, fighter, nurse, and post-independence politician. The freedom movements, however, left male patriarchy largely intact. Nowhere in Latin America did women achieve voting rights or liberalization of restrictive marriage laws. Rather, their men folk expected them to observe the new age of inde- pendence from home.

• • •

Conclusion

The violent and sometimes chaotic revolutions that took place in Europe and the Western Hemisphere between 1775 to 1830 firmly planted in the human imagination the novel idea that a community of people welded together by shared rights and responsibilities could form a sovereign state. This idea clashed head on with the principle—conceived thou- sands of years earlier—that the state existed of, by, and for its ruling elite of kings, queens, aristocrats, generals, and priests. We should not conclude, however, that the modern revolutions spelled the triumph of democracy around the Atlantic rim or anywhere else. When Britain lost its thirteen North American colonies, it did not then proceed to prevent trouble in colonized Ireland, South Asia, or the Caribbean by granting popular rights and freedoms. Rather, the crown did its utmost to shore up its authoritarian power. At home, the British government gave the vote to more adult males in 1832 but continued to respond to popular political pro- tests with police repression and restrictions on speech and

assembly. In France, radical democratic revolution shifted to Napoleonic despotism, then in 1815 to the restoration of yet another King Louis and a constitution that rigidly limited voting rights. The Congress of Vienna either restored royal autocrats to their thrones or endorsed conservative consti- tutional monarchies. Haiti went quickly from a democracy of liberated slaves to a politically isolated dictatorship. In the new Latin American republics, propertied elites or rural war- lords took full charge of affairs, leaving Indians, blacks, and castas nearly as politically marginalized as they had been under Spanish or Portuguese rule. The young United States not only kept 10 percent of its population in slavery but also launched its own imperial adventure to conquer and subju- gate Native Americans. As of 1830, a large majority of the world’s population continued to live as subjects of monarchs who suffered no formal limits on their power.

Nevertheless, 1830 represented a transitional moment in the modern era. In the following decades, the complexities

revolutionary leader manuela sáenz (1797–1856). A military strategist, soldier, politician, and activist, Sáenz played an important role in Latin American independence. As with many other politically engaged women, post-independence histories downplayed her participation. Historians have only recently begun to investigate her political and cultural significance, instead of focusing on the relationship she had with Simón Bolívar. How would you account for the changing perceptions of women’s contributions to Latin American independence movements?

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DF 604 Chapter 20 | Waves of Revolution

and uncertainties of the rapidly changing world economy impelled more communities to demand rights, liberties, and national self-determination. More urban workers and country peasants mobilized themselves to take part in pub- lic life, more males gained voting and offi ceholding rights

in particular countries, opponents of slavery and the slave trade gained strength, and the ideas that fueled the Atlantic revolutions began to arouse literate men and women in cities across Asia and Africa.

• • •

Key Terms

American Revolution 599 British East India Company 579 constitutional monarchy 591 coup d’état 592 French Revolution 587 Haitian Revolution 595 insurgency 595

junta 599 Mysore state 582 nation-state 594 nationalism 594 patriotism 587 popular sovereignty 587 Pugachev’s Rebellion 585

real wages 580 republic 584 Seven Years’ War 583 three estates 589 trans-Atlantic slave trade 579 U.S. Constitution 587 White Lotus Rebellion 585

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Please see end of book reference section for additional reading suggestions related to this chapter.

Change over Time

1722 The Safavid empire in Persia collapses after allowing its gunpowder army to deteriorate.

1756–1763 England, France, and their allies clash in Europe and abroad during the Seven Years’ War.

1757 The British East India Company begins to seize territory in India.

1761–1799 South Asia’s Mughal empire breaks apart; the Mysore state is established in southern India.

1768–1774 The Ottoman empire loses signifi cant territory in war with Russia.

1773–1774 The Pugachev peasant rebellion erupts in Russia during the reign of Catherine II.

1775–1781 British colonists fi ght for independence in the American Revolution.

1780s The trans-Atlantic slave trade reaches its numerical peak.

1787 The U.S. Constitution is signed by state delegates meeting in Philadelphia.

1789–1799 French government and society is transformed by the French Revolution and a series of revolutionary councils.

1789–1804 The plantation colony of Saint Domingue wins independence from France and an end to the slave regime in the Haitian Revolution.

1796–1814 The White Lotus peasant rebellion weakens Qing China.

1798 French forces led by Napoleon capture the Ottoman province of Egypt.

1799–1814 France embarks on empire building under Napoleon Bonaparte.

1810–1828 Wars of independence erupt across Latin America.

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