Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

Thousands of Jews were massacred as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster.

Disease, war and famine began to corrode Europe’s social structure. In the towns, craftsmen rebelled against the restrictions imposed on them. In Flanders between 1323 and 1328, city workers and peasants rose up and challenged the authority of their masters. In France the depredations of disbanded mercenaries from the French army who roamed around trying to live off the land contributed to a rebellion in the Ile de France in 1357. In England, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the most serious challenge to the authority of the Crown and the ruling nobility throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. All these uprisings were crushed with rapid brutality. Europe in the fourteenth century did not succumb to revolution, but it did not escape from upheaval altogether. A catastrophe like the Black Death so reduced the total labour force that those who were left behind felt themselves to be in a stronger position than they had been before; a scarce labour force is always a valuable one.

Although manufacturing and trade were very important, land remained Europe’s principal source of wealth. Land belonged to the Crown, the Church and the nobility. In this organisation the nobility furnished the monarch with military support in return for being given valuable estates which the peasants farmed in return for the service they gave to their lords and masters. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the nature of the relationship between landowner and peasant had begun to change. The old system of labourers being tied to the manor by bonds of duty and obligation had developed into one that was more similar to a straightforward relationship between landlord and tenant. With labour scarce the tenants had more bargaining power and in some cases were able to move from one manor to another in search of work. Some estates broke up as their owners decided to lease the land to peasant farmers rather than own and manage it all themselves. A nation’s wealth, once the exclusive preserve of a small ennobled governing class, began to be shared more widely. This was a gradual but significant process. The Flemish, French and English peasants who marched in anger and desperation against those who ruled them won no immediate victories, but the underlying causes of their grievances began a slow transformation that would ultimately move Europe out of feudalism and into the modern world.

The plague remained a constant feature of European life after the Black Death of 1348–50 finally died out. It has been estimated that Europe suffered an outbreak somewhere every eleven years in the hundred years that followed. It continued after that: its last great manifestation was the Plague of London in 1665 which killed about twenty percent of the city’s population. In the middle of the seventeenth century people were rather more organised about coping with an outbreak of disease than they had been three hundred years earlier, but they still had no idea what caused it. The author Daniel Defoe wrote an imaginary diary of the London Plague more than fifty years after it happened. It was based on parish records and the recollections of citizens who had been there at the time: ‘So the Plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.’

Man cannot fight the things he does not understand. His greatest achievements can be destroyed by the unexpected. The Black Death terrified Europe, descending like a threatening cloud that brought it to a halt and left it groping for a new direction. Its effects were devastating. The population in many places declined by as much as thirty or forty percent – and stayed there, failing to recover even when the epidemic had long passed. The population of Toulouse, for instance, stood at 30,000 in the early fourteenth century: a hundred years later it was only 8,000. The Italian poet and author Boccaccio witnessed the effects of the disease in Florence and wrote about it in his book, The Decameron. He described the mass burials and claimed that some women developed loose morals because of the need to ‘expose’ their bodies as they investigated their illness. ‘The authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,’ he wrote. ‘Every man was able to do as he pleased.’ The Black Death fundamentally changed people’s attitudes towards wealth, and left behind a world very different from the one upon which it inflicted such horror.

CHAPTER 5

The Foundation of the Dutch East India Company 1602

For a hundred and fifty years, from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, world trade was dominated by the Dutch Republic. This achievement was largely due to the creation of a unique institution, the Dutch East India Company.

William the Silent is one of the great heroes of European history. His proper name was William of Orange, a Dutch nobleman who resented the injustice of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, rebelled against it and led the seven Dutch United Provinces to independence as a republic. He was called ‘the Silent’ because he was careful about what he said in public, sometimes avoiding saying what he thought. Under his leadership in 1581, the United Provinces signed the Oath of Abjuration in which they renounced Spanish rule. Although they were not formally granted independence until nearly seventy years later, in 1648, they operated from this moment on as a nation in their own right. The Spanish King, Philip II, proclaimed William an outlaw and he was assassinated three years after the Oath. ‘As long as he lived,’ wrote the American historian, J. L. Motley, ‘he was the guiding star of a whole great nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’

At the time of his death the republic he had helped to create seemed an insignificant country compared to the magnificence of the Habsburg Empire from which it had seceded. Only the northern part of the Netherlands had secured its independence. The south was still firmly under Spanish control: its Catholic nobility did not want to be part of William’s little republic and remained allied to King Philip and his able commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma. From these inauspicious beginnings the Dutch Republic grew with astonishing speed. At home, the work of its artists turned it one of the finest centres of painting Europe has ever seen, and the seventeenth century became known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art. Abroad it demonstrated rather more practical, and ruthless, skills as the commercial activities of the Dutch East India Company transformed it into a world power.

The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world.

The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world. It was created after a period when it seemed as though William the Silent’s dream of independence had died with him. Some of the Dutch provinces, disunited and unable to agree on a common ambition, were taken back into Spanish control by the Duke of Parma. But in 1590 he was despatched to France by Philip II to support Catholic opposition to the new French King, the Protestant Henry IV. With Parma out of the way, the Dutch rebels were at last able to consolidate their drive for independence and make the transition from a group of united provinces to a proper republic. But it was still a nation made up of separate entities. Although it was governed by a ‘States General’ that represented all the country’s different provinces, its constitution stated that this body ‘had no overlord but the deputies of the Provincial Estates themselves’.

The Dutch East India Company, the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, generally known then as the VOC, was the creation of rival merchants with one common interest – the pursuit of wealth. In 1598 all Spanish and Portuguese ports were closed to Dutch shipping, forcing the United Provinces to look beyond the Mediterranean for new trading opportunities. The obvious markets were South America, which was opening up steadily following the voyages of exploration of the sixteenth century, and Asia. South America was a difficult destination for the Dutch because the Spanish and Portuguese had established firm control there. Asia seemed a better bet, but here the problem was that so many Dutch ships were chasing after the same things that the spoils were in danger of becoming dissipated. By 1599, nine different Dutch companies were in the business of trying to get their hands on spices, tea, cotton and other goods from the East Indies. Many voyages ended in disaster. About a tenth of the ships that set sail never returned and many Dutch crews were lost without trace. The man who came up with a rescue plan was Johan van Oldenbarneveldt.

William the Silent

William the Silent (1533–84) was a curious product of Habsburg Europe: a sixteenth-century German prince, he inherited the French princedom of Orange, spoke French and liberated the Dutch, who have called him ever since the ‘Father of our Nation’.

William, whose full title was William I, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, was introduced as a boy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles grew to trust William, charging him with important negotiations and military engagements in the Netherlands. But William, an important member of the Dutch political elite (he held the title of ‘Stadtholder’), was far less enamoured with Charles’s son, Philip II, who became King of Spain in 1556. William disliked Philip’s religious intolerance towards Protestants and his encroachments on the Dutch nobility’s tradition of autonomy.

William’s upbringing as a Lutheran and then a Catholic (he would finally settle on Calvinism in 1573) taught him the importance of freedom of religion. ‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people,’ he once said, ‘and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’ William’s nickname ‘Silent’ is thought to have developed in this context. According to one story, while out hunting, the French king, Henry III, revealed a secret agreement to eradicate Protestant heretics, believing William, who was present but kept silent, to be a party to it.

William’s combination of political reality and idealism prompted him to rebel against the Habsburgs in 1567. He led the Dutch to several military successes culminating in the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and a formal declaration of independence by the renegade Dutch provinces in 1581. But he declined the crown, hoping instead that the French Duke of Anjou would become the monarch. His support of the Frenchman, who left the Netherlands after a short and unhappy stay, made William unpopular with many of his fellow countrymen although he remained the Stadtholder of the two important provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Meanwhile Philip II offered 25,000 crowns for William’s assassination. A French Catholic, Balthasar Gérard, took up the offer and, in a private audience with the prince, shot him in the chest. ‘My God have pity on my soul,’ he is supposed to have cried as he died. ‘My God have pity on this poor people.’

Many Dutch crews were lost without trace.

Van Oldenbarneveldt was the raadpensionaris – the Secretary of State – of the province of Holland. By all accounts a rather imperious character with a stiff and difficult manner, he had a fine legal mind, great vision and indomitable determination. In his view, war brought ‘little glory and great expense’. The provinces needed to be sure they could make money. The way to do that was to form their own company so that they could spread the cost of investment in ships and capital equipment. By pooling resources and sharing profits they would be able to build up the reserves necessary to fund the dangerous business of exploiting the East. They had not only the Spanish and Portuguese to contend with, but the English too. An English East India Company had been founded in 1600. Oldenbarneveldt set about trying to persuade the leaders of the different Dutch provinces to adopt his idea.

The desperate situation in which they found themselves speeded up their willingness to bury their differences and Oldenbarneveldt was able to devise a common plan for their commercial salvation. He then drew up the new company’s statutes and charter, and the Dutch East India Company came into being in Amsterdam in January 1602. It had six chambers, one each in the main ports of the United Provinces. Each of these chambers elected delegates who sat as the company’s directors. There were seventeen of them, the ‘Heeren XVII’ or Seventeen Gentlemen, who had the responsibility of guiding the fortunes of this semi-political, totally commercial and all-powerful corporation. Although the directors reported to the States General of the Dutch Republic, they were given enormous powers. In order to support their monopoly on trade in the Far East they were given the authority to raise armies, start wars, capture territory, build garrisons, negotiate with local chiefs and build their own ships. In the first instance their charter was to run for twenty-one years.

Nothing explains the success of the Dutch East India Company better than the exploits of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. An adventurer in the mould of Francis Drake or Robert Clive, Coen was harsh, clever and brave. Carefully controlled by the diligent burghers of the company for which he worked, he laid the foundations of the Dutch Empire in the East Indies and established its lucrative trading monopoly in Indonesia. He trained as a bookkeeper and sailed on his first voyage to Asia in 1607 where he experienced the rough and dangerous conditions in which the Dutch East India Company’s employees worked. The merchants had nothing but contempt for the sailors who risked their lives to make them rich. They called them ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’ and forced them to sign contracts in which they agreed to reimburse their employers for their food and equipment, amounts that could take as much as a year’s service to pay back. On his first journey, Coen’s commander was killed on the Banda Islands in the Indian Ocean. Coen came to realise that nothing less than conquest would give the Dutch ownership of the valuable territory they wanted and in 1614 sent the Seventeen Gentlemen of the Dutch East India Company a paper setting out his views about how this could be achieved. What was required, he told them, was ‘a grand resolution in our fatherland’ to send ships and men to subdue the area and bring it into the ownership of the company. It is extraordinary to think that a group of merchants sitting in the coastal towns of the Netherlands could simply set about conquering a large part of the world. But that is what they did, and Jan Pieterszoon Coen was their agent in this task.

He captured Jakarta from the British, which the Seventeen renamed ‘Batavia’. He subdued the Islands of Banda with great savagery – although he proposed the use of ‘justice backed up by force’, force tended to be the main method of achieving his aims – and established a thriving capitalist economy. This was to be the pattern of European colonial expansion for many years to come. Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters. Coen called for higher quality settlers to emigrate to the East Indies rather than the ‘scum’ who normally travelled in Dutch ships. He encouraged Chinese workers to come and help the work of empire-building, and used slaves to swell their numbers. For all this he was rewarded with 23,000 guilders (a considerable amount, given that the daily wage for a skilled worker was about 1 guilder); each of his achievements was carefully itemised, valued and rewarded by the meticulous merchants for whom he worked. He died of dysentery in Batavia during his second tour of duty in 1629.

Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters.

The Dutch East India Company provided much of the wealth of the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth century. At its height it had a presence in Persia, Bengal, Taiwan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. It also expanded beyond Asia into South Africa when, in 1652, it sent a detachment of men to establish a base on the Cape. Its intention was to protect the passage of ships on their way east, rather than to colonise the area, but full settlement inevitably followed from this first expedition. By this time there were 1,700 Dutch ships involved in international trade, more than England and France combined. The accession of William of Orange to the English throne in 1688 began the long process of decline as, bit by bit, power and influence transferred from the Netherlands to Britain, and the Dutch became the junior partners in the alliance. The British East India Company became a serious competitor to the Dutch Company, as did the French Compagnie des Indes founded in 1664. The French were late entrants into the scramble for the riches of the Orient, but highly successful once they recognised the opportunity. Between 1780–84, the Anglo-Dutch alliance was over and the two countries went to war. The result was a disaster for the Netherlands which finally lost its monopoly over East Indies trade.

There is one other sad footnote to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The man who had been its chief architect, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, became a victim of his country’s religious struggles. The majority of the Dutch people were Calvinist, believing in John Calvin’s stern form of Protestantism. This taught that God elected those he wanted to serve with him in heaven: man’s fate was predestined. By following God’s law he might hope to be elected, but there was no guarantee of this. We know from our own time how this sense of being entirely in God’s hands adds strength to a political cause: in seventeenth-century Europe it helped fuel the Dutch revolt against their Spanish masters. Oldenbarneveldt and his followers came to believe in a more moderate approach than that which Calvin decreed, arguing for a greater degree of religious liberty. This brought them into conflict with powerful elements in Dutch society, and when Oldenbarneveldt decided to raise a militia to help protect the peace in his home province of Holland, his enemies pounced. He was already unpopular for supporting a truce with Spain and the Dutch Stadtholder, William the Silent’s son, Prince Maurits, ordered his arrest. In a trial that was a mockery of justice he was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed at the age of seventy-one in 1619. ‘Is this the wages,’ he asked, ‘of the thirty-three years’ service I have given to the country?’

Today we can still look at him in the portrait by Michiel van Miereveld who, like his great contemporaries Rembrandt and Frans Hals, painted the men and women who led the Netherlands in its golden age. He looks towards us, serious, intelligent and sombrely dressed, a white ruff the only splash of brightness in a picture of unbending resolution. He showed his countrymen how the wealth of the world could be theirs for the taking. It was a lesson they learned with enthusiasm.

CHAPTER 6

The Invention of the Flying Shuttle 1733

In 1733 John Kay patented an invention called the Flying Shuttle. It transformed the cloth-weaving industry, the first of a train of events that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution.

In the early 1840s a young German called Friedrich Engels was despatched to Manchester to work in a family business. His father hoped that the experience would relieve him of his radical tendencies, but it had the opposite effect. In 1845, Engels published a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which has survived ever since as one of the great classic texts of socialist theory. In it he argued that the Industrial Revolution had transformed the lives of the English working classes. The workers’ pre-industrial condition, he wrote, was ‘not worthy of human beings’: labourers could barely read or write and existed in a state of docile obedience to the so-called superior classes. ‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest; for their looms and gardens; and knew nothing of the mighty movement, which beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.’ They were woken from their submissive torpor, Engels argued, by the invention by James Hargreaves of the Spinning Jenny in 1764; this was the year that Engels took as the moment the Industrial Revolution began. Though it is true that large-scale industrialisation in Britain did not begin until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the process really started much earlier – in 1733, when John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle.

Britain led the way in the Industrial Revolution and its history is essentially the history of Britain from the last years of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It was a revolution because it transformed everything. It changed people’s lives – where they lived, how they worked and how they were organised. It changed the status of the nation, catapulting Britain into a great power that dominated world trade. Most importantly, it changed attitudes, ultimately creating a working class that demanded proper involvement in the affairs of the state in return for its role as an essential engine of prosperity. Britain today is a country that, aside from London, is built around its great industrial cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast and Glasgow. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this structure was very different. The main provincial centres were York, Exeter, Bristol (because of its importance as a port), Norwich and Newcastle. When the Industrial Revolution got under way, most of these places, all ancient cathedral cities and big market towns with a long history of being at the centre of their communities, began to lose their influence as factories and the jobs that went with them grew up elsewhere. Many new towns grew tenfold during the course of the eighteenth century. Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1701 which grew to 84,000 by 1801; Liverpool increased from 6,000 to 78,000 in the same period; and Birmingham from 7,000 to 74,000. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population growth had accelerated even more: Liverpool’s stood at 443,000, Manchester at 338,000 and Birmingham at 296,000. York had only 40,000 people, Exeter and Norwich less than that. Between 1750 and 1850 the axis of regional life in Britain swung and settled in a completely new position.

This great cycle of change was unique in Europe. In other countries, particularly France, the German states and Belgium, industrialisation followed the British lead and there was expansion and rapid growth. But it did not have the same effect of disrupting the influence of those countries’ traditional urban centres. In Britain this experience was intensified by the realisation that steam power could be used for transport as well as manufacturing and the age of the railways began. From the 1840s new railway companies sprouted up all over the place. Like the emergence of the internet in our own time, the railway network became the epitome of achievement, a vital ingredient in a modern, aspiring society. The big difference was that railways, like the pulsating new towns they connected, required civil engineering on an enormous scale. Bridges, embankments, sidings and warehouses littered the countryside, while in the towns splendid new stations were built alongside other gothic monuments of civic self-confidence – town halls, libraries, museums and churches. The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom. But like all booms it eventually went into decline, leaving behind the people it had lured into its success and the buildings that accompanied its astonishing growth. It took barely two generations for a vision of the future to be seen, built, celebrated and lost. Today Britain’s ‘industrial heritage’ is a central part of what the nation is. The memorials of the Industrial Revolution are a formidable reminder of lost wealth, almost as precious as the thing itself.