a concise history of modern world

A Concise History ofthe Modern World

1500 to the PresentA Guide to World Affairs

Fourth edition, revised and updated

William Woodruff

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD

Also by William Woodruff

IMPACT OF WESTERN MAN

AMERICAS IMPACT ON THE WORLD

THE STRUGGLE FOR WORLD POWER

EMERGENCE OF AN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY

THE RISE OF THE BRITISH RUBBER INDUSTRY

VESSEL OF SADNESS: a Wartime Autobiographical Novel

PARADISE GALORE: an Allegory

THE ROAD TO NAB END: a Memoir of a Lancashire Childhood

A Concise History ofthe Modern World

1500 to the Present

A Guide to World Affairs

Fourth edition, revised and updated

William WoodruffGraduate Research Professor (Emeritus)

University of Florida in Gainesville

Helga Woodruff 1991, 1993, 1998, 2002

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author William Woodruff has asserted his right to be identified as theauthor of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and PatentsAct 1988.

First edition 1991Second edition 1993Third edition 1998Fourth edition 2002

Published byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the PalgraveMacmillan division of St. Martins Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdomand other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the EuropeanUnion and other countries.

ISBN 0333971639

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataWoodruff, William.

A concise history of the modern world : 1500 to the present : a guideto world affairs / William Woodruff. 4th ed., rev. and updated.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 03339716391. History, Modern. I. Title.

D208 .W67 2002909.08dc21

2002022090

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 111 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory ofHedwig and Richard

andAnne and William

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Contents

List of Maps ix

Preface to the Fourth Edition xi

1 Introduction 12 Origin of our Times: an Asian-dominated World 83 Europe: 15001914 234 Africa: 15001914 445 The Rise of the West 546 The Impact of Western Man 637 White Peril in the East 818 The Expansion of the Russian Empire 999 The Expansion of the American Empires 113

10 The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions 13611 The Great War: 191418 15312 1917: Communism A New World Religion 17213 Asia in the Interwar Years 18314 The Second World War: 193945 20315 The Balance of Terror 21916 The Decolonization of Africa 22817 Communism and its Collapse in the USSR and

Eastern Europe 24118 Latin America and the United States in the

Twentieth Century 25819 Western Europe and North America 27620 The Resurgence of Asia 29721 The Threat of World Anarchy 334

Notes 352

Bibliography 384

Index 396

vii

List of Maps

I The World before 1500 6II The Ottoman, Safavid and Mogul Empires 11

III Europe in the Sixteenth Century 26IV Asian and African Empires before 1763 45V Battles of the Seven Years War, 175663 65

VI European Empires after 1763 66VII Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, 1815 68

VIII European Colonies in Africa in 1914 70IX European Empires in Asia and Australasia in 1914 71X Expansion of the Russian Empire 102

XI Colonization of East Asia 109XII North American Expansion 126

XIII European Alliances in the First World War 155XIV Europe after the First World War 166XV Eastern Europe after the Second World War 217

XVI Decolonization of Africa 229XVII The Break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 245

XVIII Eastern Europe in 2000 250XIX The Balkans in 2000 256XX Latin America in 2000 259

XXI The European Union and NATO in 2000 278XXII Decolonization of Asia 298

XXIII The Middle East in 2000 322XXIV World Religions in the 1990s 340XXV United Nations Peacekeeping Missions, April 2001 343

ix

Preface to the FourthEdition

This overview of world history since AD 1500, with its underly-ing theme of shifting global power, tells in short compass howthe modern world has come to be what it is.

In emphasizing the study of humanity as a whole, this vol-ume continues the work I began in Impact of Western Man in 1966.It was then that the words of the English poet John Donne, Noman is an island entire of itself, every man is part of the main,came to have special significance for me. In seeking to under-stand the totality, complexity and diversity of the past, my focusshifted from the parts to the whole, from the trees to the forest.My concern became the relation between states rather than withinstates. While not denying the uniqueness of national or regionalhistory, or the sub-specialisms that have proliferated these pastfifty years, I felt that the growing communality and interdepend-ence of nations justified my taking the wider, more pluralisticview. To sharpen the focus of this ecumenical study, I have alsoadopted a topical as well as a chronological approach.

To provide insights into five hundred years of world historyand put them into compact form has not been easy. No matterhow much one tries to avoid it, some items will invariably begiven more, some less, attention than they deserve; the tendencywill be to present history as much more unidirectional and con-tinuous than events in the real world confirm. In sifting the wheatfrom the chaff, I have followed the maxim of Voltaire: Les dtailsqui ne mnent rien sont dans lhistoire ce que sont les bagagesdans une arme, impedimenta; il faut voir les choses en grand.(Meaningless details in history are like the baggage of an army:impedimenta; one must take the wider view.) Details are not endsin themselves.

The greatest hazard confronting a writer engaged in a task ofthis kind lies not in the breadth of the subject, or in its complex-ity, but in the point of view from which he tells his tale. I knowof no historical writing of lasting value that does not reveal the

xi

man behind the pen. Of necessity, my views are personal, tem-poral and locational.

Whatever the approach, it is only in historical terms that wecan ever hope to understand the metamorphosis of the modernworld. Only by using the past to cast light on the present canwe hope to know how the world has come to be what it is andwhere it might be headed. We are the only species who can learnfrom the past; we are threatened with extinction if we fail to do so.

In placing history in a global setting, I have been helped byscholars in many parts of the world. My debt to others in knowl-edge and inspiration (as the acknowledgements in the first edi-tion of this work and the footnotes and bibliography of this bookmake abundantly clear) is considerable.

My debt to Helga, as always, is immeasurable.

William WoodruffUniversity of Florida at Gainesville

xii Preface to the Fourth Edition

Introduction 1

1Introduction

In investigating the course of world affairs since roughly 1500,special emphasis is placed here upon the struggle for power by which is meant the use of organized force by sovereign statesto impose their will upon each other, or upon their own citi-zens. The perpetual aggressiveness of both individuals and statesunderlies all history. It is the underlying theme of Thucydides(471c.400 BC) who wrote about the Peloponnesian Wars, as it isof Herodotus (48425 BC) who dealt with the GreekPersian Wars.The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke(17951886) in his Weltgeschichte1 viewed world history as the historyof power. Power is essentially what Charles Darwin (180982)and Karl Marx (181883) are talking about one in biology, theother in economics. Darwin spoke of the struggle for survival,Marx of class conflict. The German philologist and philosopherFriedrich W. Nietzsche (18441900) expressed the will to powerin his Der Wille zur Macht.

It is not love, or morality, or international law that determinesthe outcome of world affairs, but the changing distribution oforganized force. While love and trust make our personal worldsgo round, we delude ourselves in thinking that the same is trueof the relations between states. A cynical doctrine, but one thathas all too often directed the conduct of nations. Justice is theadvantage of the stronger, says Thrasymachus in Platos Repub-lic. Weak states invite aggression. Despite the efforts of the Dutchjurist Hugo Grotius (15831645), who drew upon the work ofAlberico Gentili (15521608), and who insisted that morality mustalways direct human action, power and expediency (one is temptedto add hypocrisy and state terrorism) have remained the languageof international relations. Power dictates the course taken by anypolitical institution. It is what politics is all about.

Anyone who undertakes to investigate the role of power poli-tics in history must run the risk of being linked with the Florentine

1

2 A Concise History of the Modern World

political theorist and statesman Niccol Machiavelli (14691527)whose principal work, Il Principe (The Prince), was published in1513. Yet Machiavelli did not originate power politics. The lustfor power, wrote the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 55c.118), isthe most flagrant of all the passions. It is the only appetite thatcannot be appeased. Every age has known the dangers accom-panying its use. Power, said the nineteenth-century Englishhistorian, Lord Acton (18341902), tends to corrupt and absolutepower corrupts absolutely. The American historian and philos-opher Henry Adams (18381918) said that power was poison.

However condemned, power remains as valid a concept ininternational political life as it ever was. Power is to politics whatenergy is to the physical world. Far from being the malevolentforce it is made out to be, power is an inherent feature of therelations between sovereign states. No society, national or inter-national, is possible in which power and compulsion are absent.Without authority, anarchy reigns. Covenants without swordsare but words, wrote Thomas Hobbes (15881678).

The struggle for power is not the only key to the course ofworld affairs the past is also a story of the struggle for justice;it also is a story of sacrifice, love, interdependence and mutualaid but power remains the master key. In the international sphere,material might continues to triumph over moral right. While theUnited Nations and the Hague Court proclaim what is right andproper as they are doing about the ethnic cleansing that tookplace in the 1990s in the Balkans and central Africa the nationscontinue to enforce their will.

The greatest difficulty in stressing the role of power in helpingto shape the modern world is the illusive nature of power itself.There is no clear-cut line which enables us to separate the powerof the sword from the power of the purse, or those powers fromthe more intangible power of the word. On the evidence of thepast, it is chiefly military force which has prevailed. War, saidHeraclitus 500 years before Christ, is the father of all. Certainly,war has been the midwife of the modern age.

However indefinite, the realities of power have, in fact, seepedinto and controlled every institution devised to regulate interna-tional life. The declaration of principle has invariably been ofsecondary importance. This was true of the Holy League, foundedin 1495 by Pope Alexander VI (c.14311503), of the Holy Alliance,

Introduction 3

founded by the tsar of Russia in 1815, of the League of Nationsestablished after the First World War, and of the United Nationsestablished after the Second. International forums organized forpeacekeeping purposes and for rational discussion have invari-ably given way to a struggle for power. Too often the League ofNations and the United Nations have become forums of nationalrivalry rather than organizations of international cooperation. Untila code of international law evolves, and is enforced, power poli-tics will continue to determine our lot. It was not a universalmoral imperative but the awesome power of nuclear deterrence(force) that has ensured our security since 1945.

While arbitrary power and coercion continue to govern therelations between sovereign states, there are times when economicpower is all important. Money to get power, says the emblemof the sixteenth-century Florentine financiers, the Medicis, powerto guard money. Crucial to the prolonged European wars of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the creditworthinessof the combatants; the ability to raise funds is one of the reasonswhy the British and the Dutch were able to fight as long as theydid. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 disrupted the world economy.More limited in effect were the economic sanctions imposed bythe United Nations against Vietnam, Rhodesia, South Africa, Libya,Cuba, North Korea and Iraq.

At other times, intangible power intellectual, philosophical,spiritual and religious has swayed world events. Christ,Mohammed, Luther and Marx led no armies, yet the power oftheir word proved mightier than the sword. In the beginningwas the Word . . . says the Gospel of St John. Rome conqueredEurope first with the sword, but more thoroughly with the Chris-tian Word. The soul force of non-violence practised by MohandasKaramchand Gandhi2 (18691948) against British rule in SouthAfrica, and later in India, and the role played by Pope John PaulII against Soviet power in Poland, are classic examples of thepower of the spirit defeating the power of the sword.

One cannot commence an inquiry into the role of power in worldaffairs without taking a world view. There is hardly an import-ant problem that we face today that is not of world dimension.3

The problems of nuclear arms, outer space, population, migration,pollution, AIDS, human rights, commerce, economic fluctuations,ecology and climate changes cannot be confined to the nation-


state. Think of the world-wide activities of the internationalcorporation or the manner in which finance has become globalized.The effect of the destruction of the rain forests reach far beyondBrazil or the countries of southeast Asia. Indeed, in the globalage in which we live, some nations can no longer control theirown physical or economic destinies. Governments all over theworld are being subverted by the international drug trade andother forms of international crime.4 Thinking globally has becomea necessity. Nur das Ganze spricht (Only the whole has mean-ing) said the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt (181897). Yet wecontinue to think in tribal or national terms. We are global citi-zens with tribal souls, said the Danish poet Piet Hein (b. 1905 ).

Equally important is the need to take an historical view. Lifedemands a sense of continuity. We cannot see the present exceptthrough the past. Without some knowledge of the past the presentis unintelligible, and much more hazardous than it need be. It isnot only language that divides the human race, it is also history.The past is never dead, wrote William Faulkner (18971963), itsnot even past. People not only have a history, they are history.The alternative to experience and accumulated knowledge whichwe call history is a sickness called amnesia. We can no moreshed the past than we can shed our shadows (except by blunder-ing about in the dark). To wander out of history is to wanderout of reality. Truly, those who ignore history will be forced torelive it. Yet history remains the ignored dimension in world affairs.

Not that history is the source of ready answers. Nor is it ascience. It is too subjective a discipline to make such a claim.There is no objective reality independent of the writer; histo-rians often find what they are looking for. An isolated fact explainsnothing; it does not even exist until it is selected and interpreted.The role of chance, the way in which history is overtaken byevents, and the difficulty of predicting human action, also invalidateany scientific claim. Unlike an experiment in science, which canbe repeated, in human affairs nothing is constant; all is flux. Thepast cannot be explained with sequence of cause and effect, exactand clear. There are no ascertainable, inflexible laws that deter-mine our destiny. As the collapse of communist power in EasternEurope and the reunification of Germany in 1990 confirm, historyis both evolutionary and cataclysmic. There is no way that wecan anticipate the outcome of human behaviour, especially in

Introduction 5

times of war. The French astronomer and mathematician, PierreSimon Laplace (17491827), the father of present-day futurists,thought otherwise: Give me full knowledge and I will predictthe future precisely, he said. To see the past wie es eigentlichwar (as it actually was), as Leopold von Ranke advocated, willnever be completely possible. We never know the past; we knowonly someones story of the past. Meaning is always shaped bywriter and context.

History is oblique. It does not reveal itself in a linear fashion,but dialectically, by comparison. God writes straight, with crookedlines, says a Portuguese proverb. Crooked or straight, in provid-ing us with an imaginative understanding of the origins andconsequences of what we are doing, history provides us withperspective, with balance, with wisdom not for the moment,or the day, but for the totality of our lives and the society inwhich we live.

Having stressed the role of power politics in world affairs, andthe need to take both a world and an historical view, it remainsto explain why I chose to begin this inquiry at 1500. I did sobecause it is about then that the West proceeded to effect changeson a world scale greater than those made by any previous civil-ization. It is about then that the European Middle Ages endedand the increasingly secular modern age began. An interrelated-ness of continents existed before 1500, but it was a different inter-relatedness in scope, significance and speed of change fromthat which followed.

I also chose the 1500s because it was then that the Reconquistaof the Iberian peninsula from the Arabs by the Portuguese andthe Spaniards had become a Christian crusade which carried theminto the world, giving a tremendous impetus to discovery andcolonization. Two years after Christopher Columbus (14511506)set out in search of Asia, Pope Alexander VI (under the Treaty ofTordesillas, 1494) divided the world between Spain and Portu-gal5 (Map I). In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama(c.14601524) reached the Malabar coast of India. The capture bythe Portuguese of Goa (1510) and the Strait of Ormuz (1515) madetheir control of the Indian Ocean possible. In 151922 the Span-iard Juan Sebastin del Cano, who had taken command afterFerdinand Magellans (c.14801521) death in the Philippines, madethe first circumnavigation of the globe. By the early 1600s English,Dutch, French and Danish trading companies had all reached

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Ming voyages

Introduction 7

India, eager to exploit the riches of the East. Impelled by thedesire to profit, to explore and to Christianize, the scales of fortunebegan to tip in Europes favour. They would continue to do sofor the next 500 years.

The period beginning at 1500 is also important because thesixteenth century witnessed the rise and spread of nationalism.National consciousness had scarcely existed in Europes MiddleAges, which knew feudal particularism and Christian universalism.Under feudalism which in time would be undermined not onlyby nationalism, but by war and a growing money economy mens loyalties were concentrated on their immediate lord. Beyondthat they were conscious of membership in the universal ChristianChurch. The power to form a nation is difficult to define. Athenslacked it; Rome and Castile possessed it. It has been described asa gift, like a talent for art or religion. It has more to do withculture, language, customs and territory than crude force.

The newly emerging nations of Britain, France and Spain putan end to both feudalism and Christian universalism. The Congressof Mantua in Italy (145960) was the last international gatheringpresided over by the pope. By the time Henry VIII (150947)declared himself supreme head of the Church of England in1534, the prestige of papal authority had been shattered by theProtestant Reformation. By 1700 the European secular states hadcome to overshadow Christendom.6 What mattered henceforthwas not the Church but the nation. It was the foundation of themodern state system that gave Europeans the vigour and theresources to go out and conquer the world.

Finally, this study begins at 1500 because the sixteenth century wasan age of great scientific and technological achievement in the West.Although the idea of scientific progress is taken for granted in theWest today, against the backcloth of time, it was an innovation offirst importance. Before the sixteenth century, the West haddepended upon the East for many developments in science andtechnology. Now the East became reliant upon the more dynamicWest. Science and technology came to be used, not as they hadalways been to ensure stability in society but to stimulate change.

Of course, in 1500 no one foresaw these things. No one predic-ted that Europe would eventually control most of the world. In1500 Asia, not Europe, was pre-eminent. In the sixteenth centuryall the major empires in Eurasia were Asian. Whatever aspect ofpower we consider, it is to Asia that we must first turn.


2Origin of our Times: anAsian-dominated World

In the 1500s western Europeans took increasingly to the seas.With an expansionist Islam astride the land routes to the East,they had little other choice. Against eastern Europe, the MuslimOttoman Turks presented the greatest threat.1 Descended fromcentral Asian nomadic, pastoral peoples, who as allies of theMongols had been swept southward into Persia and westwardinto Arabic-speaking lands, under the tribal leader Osman (b. 1259,emir 12991326) they had reached the northwest corner of Anatolia.After the death of Osman they founded the Ottoman Empire inwhich Turkish became the dominant language. In 1345 they crossedfrom Asia into Europe. From Gallipoli they infiltrated the Balkans,conquering Bulgaria as they went. A century later in 1453, underSultan Mehmet II (145181), they captured Constantinople(Istanbul), the capital of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empirewhich had been founded as a second Rome by Constantine theGreat a thousand years before.

Islams2 invasion of Europe long pre-dates the appearance of theOttomans. As early as the eighth century the Arabs had built anempire that stretched from Mecca and Medina in Arabia west-ward to the Atlantic, and eastward to the China Sea. By the ninthcentury the Arabs controlled the trade from Europe to Persia,India and China. Long before the European age they had boundthe Eurasian world together. Laying down the groundwork of aworld economy which Europe would later restructure, they knewfar more about China and Africa than Europeans did at that time.

Helped by the power of prophesy, by the fire of faith, by thecall to brotherhood, as well as by the prowess in arms, no faithspread as quickly as Islam. In AD 711 the Muslim general Tarikibn Ziyad, having crossed from Ceuta in Morocco to Gibraltar,

8

An Asian-dominated World 9

began a Muslim occupation of Spain that was to last almost 800years.

Wherever they spread, the Arabs stamped the unity and cultureof Islamic life upon the areas they conquered. Almost all thelanguages of the Muslim world have borrowed heavily from Arabic,which (as Greek had done earlier and Latin would do later)provided a bridge between East and West. Muslim cities, such asBaghdad in Iraq (immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights)or Crdoba in Spain, experienced an extraordinary burst ofcreative activity and became centres of scientific, artistic and philo-sophical learning. The Arab philosophers Ibn Hazm (9941064)and Ibn Rushd (known as Averros, 112698), and the leadingJewish scholar of the Middle Ages, Maimonides (11351204), whowrote in Arabic, were all sons of Crdoba. Under Abd al-Rahman(who in AD 732 crossed the Pyrenees and captured Bordeaux)and his successors, Crdoba, boasting 500 mosques, 300 publicbaths, 70 libraries and lamp-lit streets, became one of the greatcultural centres of Europe. While the Arabs and other Muslimsin Spain were creating buildings of breathtaking beauty and estab-lishing libraries that far surpassed anything the Europeanspossessed, the leaders of Christian Europe were only just learn-ing to write their names.

The Arab world was the conduit through which passed theideas of East and West. It was through an Arab window that theWest first saw the East. In translating and diffusing the learningof the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Persians and the Hindus,Islam made available to the West the heritage of antiquity. Arabiccontributions to the sciences and the arts (including business andfinance) were crucial to later western developments. Before 1500many of the classical Greek and Arab scientific works had beentranslated into Latin, increasingly the language of Christendom.Not least, the Islamic empire helped to transfer superior Chinesetechnology to the West. Muslim Spain, as well as Italy, was thecradle of Europes Renaissance during the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies.

The Christian victory over the Marinids (Muslim Berbers fromFez in Morocco) at Salado in Spain in 1340 brought to an endthe long history of the Arab-Berber invasion of the Spanish penin-sula. It was not until 1492 that the last Muslim outpost was crushedin Granada by the armies of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella ofCastile (united in 1469). Henceforth, the Arab light dimmed.


The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had encouraged the militarilyinclined Ottoman Turks to expand in Europe. In the 1520s, underSuleiman the Magnificent (b. 1495, reigned 152066), parts of theBalkans and Hungary (the Battle of Mohcs, 1526) were overrun;Vienna was threatened in 1529 (Map II). Western resistance onland, and Islamic defeat at sea by a Spanish fleet at Lepanto in1571, stemmed the Muslim advance. Having helped to destroyIslams hold on the eastern Mediterranean, Venice became themost powerful state south of the Alps.

In 1687, at the second Battle of Mohcs, the Turks were defeatedbefore Vienna. Although Ottoman power had probably reachedits zenith before then, it was not until the continuous and exhaust-ing defensive wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesagainst Venice, Austria, Poland, Russia and Persia had reducedthe Ottomans possessions in Europe by half, that the Islamictide in Europe was turned. Within a century the Ottomans passedfrom the offensive to the defensive. A humiliating peace withthe Holy League (Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia) followedin 1699 (the Treaty of Karlowitz), whereby the Turks surrenderedmost of Hungary. This was the turning point in Ottoman fortunes.So great were the Ottoman Turks military reverses in the lasthalf of the eighteenth century that Turkey became known as thesick man of Europe.

By then the military prowess, the pragmatic creativity, the vitalityand the remarkable leadership of earlier times all of which hadenabled them to match the material and intellectual accomplish-ments of the West had declined. The rigidity of Muslim thought,its refusal to accept new ways and new ideas, coupled with anincompetent, despotic, centralized rule, had also stifled the earlierinterest in the human and physical world. Incessant wars, palaceintrigues, widespread corruption and loss of will did the rest. Thefact that Suleiman I, the Magnificent, under whose rule theOttoman Empire reached its height, should have been followedby Selim II, the Sot (b. 1524, reigned 156674) and Selim wasonly one of the 13 incompetent leaders who followed Suleiman demonstrates the decline of Ottoman leadership. The wonderis that the conglomeration of people that the Ottomans ruledshould have been held together for as long as they were. By provid-ing a constant military challenge to the West, as well as by barringthe land routes to the East, the Turks (like the Arabs before them)had played a pivotal role in the unfolding of western history.

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Matching the glory of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s was thatof Persia (Iran), where the Safavid dynasty, the first nationaldynasty in many centuries, was founded in 1501 by Shah Ismail I(14871524). Descended from a long line of militant Shiite Muslims,Ismail declared himself the legitimate leader of Islam; the Shiafaith became the religion of the state.3 (Persia had been underSunni Muslim control since the Arab invasions of the seventhcentury.) Shiism was attractive to the Turkmen and other tribes-men who had joined Ismail in seizing Azerbaijan from the Otto-mans in the northwest. They then defeated the Uzbeks in thenortheast. The charge of heresy so intensified the discord betweenPersia and its Sunni neighbours that warfare between them wascommon throughout the sixteenth century. In 1514 Ismail wasdefeated by the Ottomans at Chaldiran, but kept control of thegreater part of Persia, as did his successor Shah Tahmasp I(b. 1513, reigned 152476) (Map II).

Persias fortunes improved under the strong leadership of ShahAbbas I (b. 1571, reigned 15871629). Between 1603 and 1612 herecovered Tabriz from the Ottomans, recaptured all of northwestPersia, took Erivan and won a decisive victory against the Turksnear Lake Urmia. Fostering trade and industry, he encouragedthe English and Dutch East India trading companies to establishbranches in Persia. In 1622 the English assisted Abbas to seizethe island of Ormuz from the Portuguese, thus gaining tradingprivileges there. Abbas conquest of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan wasfollowed in 1623 by the seizure of Baghdad. With great splen-dour a new capital was established at Isfahan.

Alas, the reign of Abbas the Great was followed by that of ShahSafi, the Weak (reigned 162942), who having been raised in theharem, lacked political and military experience. Helped by Safisineptitude, the Ottoman Turks reconquered large parts of Persianterritory. Azerbaijan fell to them in 1635. The final blow to theSafavids, however, came from the Ghilzai Afghans in the East.In 1722 the Afghan ruler Mir Mahmud overcame the Persian armyand took Isfahan. The Safavid empire collapsed in 1723; the lastof the Safavids was deposed in 1736.

The Afghan victory was the signal for Russia and Turkey toseize whatever Persian territory they could. They were preventedfrom dismembering Persia entirely only by the appearance of thepowerful leader Nadir Shah (b. 1688, reigned 173647). Nadir, aSunni Turk, succeeded in holding Persias predators at bay. In a


series of battles he routed the Afghans, Turks and Russians. In1739 he carried his wars of conquest across Afghanistan into MogulIndia, where he sacked and looted Delhi. His brutal efforts toreinstate Sunnism in Persia ended with his assassination in 1747.His death was followed by political divisions and civil war. Onlyin 1750, with the establishment of the Zand dynasty, was anelement of stability restored. In 1794 Persia was again throwninto disruption by an internal struggle for power. For much ofthe nineteenth century, Persia became a pawn of RussianBritishrivalry in central and eastern Asia.

Another great Muslim empire the Mogul4 Empire of India was founded in 1526 by Babar (14831530), who had invaded Indiafrom Afghanistan. Babars victory over the much more powerfulSultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526 was for the eastern wing ofMuslim power what the victory at Mohcs on the Danube (alsoin 1526) was for the Ottomans. With these victories Islam extendedfrom Morocco in the west and Austria in the north, through theSafavids of Persia, to the centre of India.

Babar laid the foundations of a dynasty that lasted over threecenturies. Within four years he had conquered the greater partof Hindustan. His followers extended their power and their reli-gion across most of the subcontinent. The reign of his grandsonAkbar the Great (b. 1542, reigned 15561605), who renewed andconsolidated Mogul rule, is considered a golden age in Indiaspast. There had never been so it was said an Indian empireof its like for two thousand years. A benevolent despot, Akbaris remembered for the synthesis and the unity he achievedthroughout the Indian subcontinent between Hindu and Islamiccultures. His religious tolerance was matched by his fairness inassessing taxes and his astuteness in establishing a centralizedgovernment. Following the death of Akbars successor Jahangir(b. 1569, reigned 160527), who had neglected his duties for aself-indulgent life at court, further extensions of Mogul rule weremade by Shah Jahan (reigned 162758). Like his Muslim prede-cessors, he encouraged the arts and the building of palaces andmosques; the Taj Mahal at Agra was built as a mausoleum forhis wife.

The turning point in Islams fortunes in India came with theaccession to power of Aurangzeb (b. 1618, reigned 16581707),whose attempts to consolidate power a very difficult thing to


do at all times in India were undone by rebellions, politicalinfighting and wars. His efforts forcibly to convert Hindus to Islamaroused widespread hostility. Following his death, the MogulEmpire began to disintegrate. Henceforth, harried by Marathas,Sikhs and Persians, as well as by Europeans (Portuguese, Dutch,Danes, British and French), there was a steady decline in Mogulpower a decline accelerated by internal weaknesses and therigid and unchanging outlook of the Mogul elite.

With the collapse of the Mogul Empire in the eighteenth century,the purely commercial attitude of European traders in India ceasedto be tenable. Increasingly, and often unwillingly, they were drawninto the countrys political conflicts and intrigues. The British,who had established their first trade factory near Bombay in 1612,are said to have conquered India in a fit of absence of mind.With the British victory over the Nawab of Bengal and the Frenchat Plassey in 1757, over the Dutch at Chinsura in 1759, and overthe titular Mogul emperor at Buxar in 1764, Britains supremacyin Bengal and later the whole of India was ensured (Maps V andVI). In 1786 the first British Governor-General of India wasappointed.

The most populous and powerful empire in Asia in the 1500swas the Ming Empire (13681644) of China,5 which in 1368 hadoverthrown the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty (12601368).6 Coming fromcentral Asia in the early years of the thirteenth century, the Mongolarmies (under the leadership of Temujin [Genghis Khan, c.11621227] and the khans who followed him), had swept like a pesti-lence southward into northern China and India, westward intonorthern Persia and eastern Europe, and eastward to Japan. Until1368 China was under Mongol rule.

If Mongol rule sat ill with the Chinese, it was not only becausethe Mongols had laid waste to so much of China, but also becausethe Chinese considered themselves a superior people. The world,seen from the Chinese bell tower, was always subservient; mankindwas one family, of whom they were the head. The emperor, theSon of Heaven, was the father of the worlds family.

Chinas basic strength in the 1500s lay not in its age (the Chineseempire had been founded in 221 BC), its power, its widespreadempire (under the Mings China extended its rule into Mongoliaand central Asia; they also reconquered Vietnam), its numbersor the richness of its land, but in its ancient culture and civiliza-


tion. Europeans visiting China at this time never doubted Chinasclaims to cultural pre-eminence. China was a non-acquisitive, non-hereditary, secular, centralized society, in which men of humbleorigin could rise to the summit of power.

Whereas in Europe and Asia the tie that bound men togetherand often gave them their strength was religion, in China the tiewas civilization. The Chinese were concerned not so much withtheir relations with God as with their relations with their fellowmen. The reigning religions in China in 1500 Confucianism7

(not a religion so much as a system of order), Taoism (the Way)and Buddhism were seen as intermediaries in the manifoldrelations between men, and between emperor and subjects. Confu-cianism stands at the opposite pole to Christianity in its view ofthe human being. It required no supernaturalism for its moral-ity, no doctrine of original sin, no idea of creation as the singleact of one god and no threat of eternal damnation. An individualneed not feel inner guilt but outer shame; the greatest shamewas any act that brought shame to ones family and ancestors.

Confucianism (proclaimed Chinas state doctrine in 136 BC) wasparticularly successful among the early Chinese because it providedthem with a viable perception of order in the individual, in thefamily, in society and in the world. With Taoism, Confucianismprovided the foundations from which Chinese culture is spiri-tually derived. The cornerstone of Confucian teaching was thesanctity of the family. Respect for family and for the past is whatrespect for the person came to mean in the West. Harmony, stabilityand continuity were what mattered. What was just or unjust waswhat was socially harmonious or disharmonious.

Since the visit of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo to Chinain the thirteenth century, Chinas wealth had impressed foreignobservers as much as its culture. Yet China has never been acommercial civilization. The Chinese mandarinate system and theagrarian self-sufficiency of the Chinese people inhibited the riseof a merchant class, which, for most of Chinese history, wasregarded as parasitical. Although the merchants lot improvedduring the Song dynasty (AD 9601279), and there was probablymuch more internal and foreign trade and commercialism thanwestern scholars have allowed, the market has not played thepivotal role in Chinese history that it came to play in the Westor the Islamic Middle East. Except during the Yuan dynasty,founded by Kublai Khan (12571294), trade foreign and domestic


was not allowed to change the empires economic, cultural andintellectual institutions. Agriculture was the right and proper sourceof wealth. The goal of Confucian harmony, based as it was onthe land, the family and the scholar-gentry, was preferred.

Chinas official attitude towards the merchant class did nothinder its technological development. In the first 14 centuries ofChristian Europe, many Chinese inventions were adopted by theEuropeans without knowing where they came from. These inven-tions included gunpowder, the maritime compass, silk, paper andporcelain. It is doubtful if the West had much to teach China inagrarian or industrial techniques before the eighteenth century.Until the nineteenth century Chinas agrarian standards wereunmatched.

In particular, the Chinese excelled in shipbuilding technology.In the fifteenth century they possessed the worlds greatest sea-going fleet large enough, had they willed it, to have blockedEuropean expansion into Asian waters. The Chinese passed tothe Arabs (who subsequently brought the ideas to Europe) thetechniques of watertight bulkheads, stern-post rudders and navi-gational aids such as the compass. Unlike the European single-masted vessels, which could sail only downwind, their multiple-masted vessels which influenced changes in the West couldsail into the wind. Long voyages were now feasible.

Between 1403 and 1433, in order to show their flag and impressdistant lands with Chinese supremacy, seven great naval expe-ditions were sent by the Mings from China into the Indian Oceanas far as Arabia and Africa (Map I). The first voyage began in1405 with more than 60 large vessels (up to 440 feet long and186 feet across), 255 smaller vessels and a crew of about 28,000men.8 Contrast this with Columbus three ships and crew of 90.Columbus flagship, the Santa Maria, measured 117 feet long. In1433, roughly 70 years before da Gama rounded the Cape of SouthAfrica, the Chinese (having done some trade, and collected giraffesand other exotica) returned home to continue their traditionalpolicy of isolation.

In sharp contrast to the Europeans who would follow them,the Chinese expeditions sought neither conquest nor trade. Nooverseas territories were acquired; no colonies established. TheMings show of force in 1407 in the Malacca Strait and againstAnnam were two of the few attempts at naval conquest. In 1433,having shown their flag and satisfied their curiosity, the Chinese


returned to China and shut their door. The expeditions were neverresumed. Henceforth the Chinese were concerned with enemiesin the interior of Asia and political rivalries at court. Chinaremained closed until it was forced open by the West in the nine-teenth century. By then China had lost its ascendancy. The domi-nation of the mandarin class, and the Confucian world view thatassumed the superiority of the East, had kept China largely ignor-ant of the changes going on in western industrial and scientificthought. The Chinese elite were so convinced of their superior-ity that they felt no need to know what inferior people weredoing.

The decision of the Ming dynasty to revert to a defensive strategydid not save it from attacks. In the sixteenth century Japanesepirates invaded the Chinese coast with impunity. In 1592 whenthe Japanese invaded Korea, the Chinese crossed the Yalu Riverand successfully intervened. In the seventeenth century, by whichtime the Mings were in decline, they were beset by the Manchusfrom Manchuria. Because of weak rulers, growing famine, sick-ness and want, rebellions swept much of China from the 1620sonwards. The fall of Peking to a rebel force in 1644 provided theManchus with the ideal conditions for invasion.

Having seized Peking and crushed all resistance to their newChing dynasty (16441912), the Manchus extended their rule tothe entire region (Map IV). The country was pacified; the worstills redressed. Sharing power with those they had conquered,Manchu rule proved strong and judicious. The Manchus alsofollowed a policy of expansion in inner Asia, including the AmurValley, Mongolia and Tibet. Their invasions of Burma in the 1760s,like their later eighteenth-century invasions of Nepal and Viet-nam, proved abortive. Meanwhile, a new threat had appearedfrom the West.

In 1514 a party of Portuguese traders and buccaneers reachedthe southern China coast. Arab, Persian and Indian sea-tradershad long preceded them. In 1565 the Spaniards arrived from thePhilippines, bringing with them not only a new religion andsuperior arms, but also the products from their recently discov-ered New World (among them maize, sweet potatoes, tobaccoand silver). With the arrival of the Spaniards, the colonization ofChina by the West (which would continue until the Second WorldWar) began.


Convinced of their superior civilization, the Chinese kept theforeign barbarians at bay. Except for gold and silver specie, eye-glasses, astrological and musical instruments, clocks and enter-taining items such as mechanical toys, the West had little thatthe Chinese wanted. Since Chinas self-imposed seclusion, begin-ning in 1433, they had kept trade relations by sea and land (alongthe Silk Road) to a minimum. In doing so, China deliberatelyabandoned the opportunity to become a dominant world trad-ing power.

It was not until 1601 that several Jesuit priests,9 led by MatteoRicci (15521610), who had spent seven years proselytizing onthe coast, were allowed to visit Peking. Prompting the Chinesedecision to allow the Jesuits to stay in Peking was the scientificknowledge which they had brought with them. In due course,Ricci and his companions translated several important westernscientific works such as those of Euclid and Copernicus intoChinese. In helping to reform the Chinese dynastic calendar(primarily the work of Johann Schall von Bell [15911666]), whichwas crucial in regulating every aspect of the emperors life, theyaltered the whole outlook of Chinese astronomy.

So impressed were the Jesuits by the civilized conduct andbearing of the mandarin class that they extolled the Chinese assuperior among Orientals. In particular they noted the contrastbetween Chinas tolerance towards other beliefs and seventeenth-century European religious strife. The different world outlook ofChina was noted by Ricci in his diary:

To begin with, it seems to be quite remarkable . . . that in akingdom of almost limitless expanse and innumerable popula-tion, and abounding in copious supplies of every description,though they have a well-equipped army and navy that couldeasily conquer the neighboring nations, neither the King norhis people ever think of waging a war of aggression. They arequite content with what they have and are not ambitious ofconquest. In this respect they are much different from the peopleof Europe, who are frequently discontent with their own govern-ments and covetous of what others enjoy . . .

Another remarkable difference . . . is that the entire kingdomis administered by the Order of the Learned, commonly knownas the Philosophers . . . The army, both officers and soldiers,hold them in high respect . . . Policies of war are formulated


and military questions are decided by the Philosophers only . . .From the beginning and foundation of this empire the studyof letters was always more acceptable to the people than theprofession of arms, as being more suitable to a people whohad little or no interests in the extension of the empire.10

In Riccis view the Chinese were justified in calling their coun-try the Middle Kingdom the centre of the earth. Europeanleaders of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire (Franois MarieArouet [16941778]), Franois Quesnay (16941774) and GottfriedWilhelm Leibniz (16461716), looked upon China as a model thatEurope should imitate. The fact that the Confucian social codestressed conformity, and hence was less stimulating to the devel-opment of scientific thought, was glossed over. A passion for thingsChinese swept through the elite of eighteenth-century Europe.With the help of the Jesuits, the Chinese examination system wasadopted first by France and then by the other European powers.

It took time before the Jesuits began to notice aspects of Chineselife such as ancestor worship which they were less willing topraise. Some Jesuits thought ancestor worship idolatrous. Theyalso wondered aloud about the emperors spiritual authority inrelation to that of the pope. Priests in the emperors employ-ment faced the problem of serving two masters. In 1715 the popeappeared to insult the emperor by telling him how the wordGod should be translated into Chinese. Worse, the rival Chris-tian orders began to squabble among themselves about the compro-mises being made by the Jesuits to Confucianism. By the time ofhis death, the Emperor Kang-hsi (16621722) had wearied of thewestern presence. His successor, Yung Cheng (17231735), endedthe dispute with Christianity by suppressing it.

The propagation of Christianity in China by the Jesuits therewere by now hundreds of court officials and thousands of ordi-nary Chinese who had converted to Christianity was dealt asevere blow. As the Europeans were in no position, militarily orpsychologically, to impose their will on the Chinese, the quarrelover rites a theological dispute among the Christians ratherthan a political threat to the Chinese throne eventually put anend to more than a hundred years of almost unbroken Euro-pean presence at the Chinese court.11

Thenceforth, for more than a century, China remained largelyclosed to western influence. The Chinese themselves were forbidden


to travel abroad. Foreign trade was proscribed or severely restric-ted. Chinese shipping was confined to coastal waters. When in1793 the British King George III sent Lord Macartney, hisAmbassador Extraordinary, to negotiate improved foreign trad-ing conditions in China (by then the British had replaced thePortuguese as the most important traders in the East), the emperor,seeing no reason why Britain or any other European nation shouldbe granted rights other than those of a tributary state, politelyturned him away. In 1816 another British mission suffered thesame fate. The Manchu dynasty was probably at the peak of itspower and had nothing to fear from the British. At least that iswhat it thought. If westerners brought war to eastern lands andeastern waters, it was because they were covetous of Chinesewealth. There was simply nothing that China needed of them;the peaceful exchange of commodities was inconceivable. It wasa situation which the West found intolerable.

Instead of fostering its links with the West, China directed itsenergies to extending and maintaining its relations with surround-ing areas, including the Amur Valley, Nepal, Tibet, Siam, Burma,Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia. The frontier between Russia andMongolia (then part of China) was drawn in 1727. Under theTreaty of Kiakhta (1727), Russia alone was given the right to traderegularly with China, but that only annually and overland. Inreturn, Chinese rule was confirmed by Russia over all of Mongo-lia. The only link with the West and that a tenuous one wasthat maintained by a handful of European traders at Canton(Guangzhou), where ever-growing quantities of tea, silk, finecottons, highly valued porcelain and lacquerware were tradedfor western wool, tin, copper, honey, salt and specie. Much ofthe silver came via the Philippines from the Spanish silver minesin America. Even this limited trade with foreigners was consid-ered a privilege, which was grudgingly granted. Not until theBritish forced China to accept western commerce in the OpiumWar (183942) was Chinas policy of isolation ended.

European intrusion into Japan began in 1543 when a group ofPortuguese merchants, bound from Indonesia to China, were blownoff course and shipwrecked at Tanegashima, an island off Kyushu,the southern island of Japan. By the mid-sixteenth century, theChinese government having forbidden its subjects to trade directlywith Japan, the Portuguese at Macao on the Chinese coast (after


1557) controlled the carrying trade between China and Japan.The most important item was silk from China, which wasexchanged for Japanese silver.

The port of Nagasaki, opened to western commerce in 1570,became the meeting place of an ever-growing throng of Portuguese,Spanish, Dutch and British merchants. Firearms from Europe werebrought to Japan in exchange for Japanese silver and copper. Inthe sixteenth century the Japanese quickly adopted and put thePortuguese musket to use.

The Japanese greeted the first Portuguese ships with similarfear as the Chinese had done, but also with wonder and awe.They were fascinated by the newcomers dress and the thingsthey brought with them. They showed the same eagerness tolearn from the Europeans as they had shown earlier in learningfrom the Chinese.

Helping to shape their reactions to western intrusion was theShinto religion, which appealed to Japans emerging sense ofnational identity and uniqueness as a divinely begotten race. Shintodemanded reverence for ancestors, for the emperor and for thepast. Although overshadowed by Buddhism in earlier centuries,it has always managed to coexist with it. Shinto was a nationalreligion long before it was proclaimed as such in 1871.

Equally important was bushido, the Japanese warrior code ofmoral principles, which stressed filial piety, benevolence, loyaltyto ones lord unto death, personal courage, conscious choice ofwhere ones duty lay, self-discipline, endurance, kindness andhonesty. Its martial spirit emphasized duties not rights. Familyrelations came after those of lord and vassal. Bushido placed thewarrior ruler first, followed by the peasant, the artisan and thenthe merchant. Perhaps the stress on military prowess explainswhy in the nineteenth-century Japan was able to make a muchmore realistic appraisal of the western military threat than China.

The Japanese displayed the same interest in western religionas in other aspects of western intrusion. Christianity (first intro-duced into Japan by the Jesuit missionary St Francis Xavier[150652] in 1549) received the protection and the seemingencouragement of two of Japans military leaders: Oda Nobunaga(153482) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (153798). The role of boththese men in unifying the country and in deciding Japans relationswith the West was paramount. With their tolerance, and some-times their help, in less than 50 years, the Christian missionaries


had made 300,000 conversions. Japan came to be regarded as themost promising field of Christian evangelism.12

Yet the very success of the Europeans in Japan proved to betheir undoing. The growing Christian presence began to alarmJapanese leaders (especially Hideyoshi), who came to suspect theChurch as an agent of western imperialism. The Jesuits in Japancame to be looked upon as the secret agents of Spain. Loyaltyand authority were at stake. Increasingly fearful that the Euro-peans might try to seize power in Japan, as they had done inthe Philippines (156571) and Formosa (1624), the Japaneseproceeded to reverse their attitude towards western commerceand Christianity. In 1587 Christianity was denounced by Hideyoshias a threat to the state. In 1612 Tokugawa Ieyasu (15431616)decreed that all missionaries must leave; converts were orderedto renounce their faith. In 1636 a seclusion edict was proclaimed.13

In 1637 the Japanese stamped out a Christian insurrection atShimabara (close to Nagasaki) in which 37,000 Christians died.Everything was done to exterminate Christians and Christianity.At issue was the extent to which the growing western presencehad become a threat to the state. By the mid-seventeenth centuryEuropean merchants had also been banished from the mainland.

Henceforth, the only Europeans allowed to stay in Japan werea few Protestant Dutch traders in virtual imprisonment on theislet of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour. To prove that they werenot true Christians, and therefore not agents of western imperi-alism, they were required annually to trample on the Christiancross or an image of Christ. A few Chinese ships, and two supplyvessels a year from Holland, became Japans only link with theoutside world. The Japanese themselves were forbidden to travelabroad. Any Japanese returning from abroad was put to death.For two centuries (relatively peaceful and progressive centuries)Japan was isolated from most of the world.

Europe: 15001914 23

3Europe: 15001914

In 1500 the unity of Christendom was still Europes ideal. Chris-tian unity lasted as long as it did because of the constant chal-lenge of the non-Christian world. In the seventh and eighthcenturies it had been attacked by Muslim invaders who struck atEurope through Spain and later through the Balkans. In the ninthand tenth centuries Asiatic nomad Magyar horsemen had raideddeep into Europe. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries Europehad been threatened by the pagan Vikings, whose dragon-prowedships had penetrated its waterways, and whose plundering andmurdering had spread terror throughout Christendom. In thethirteenth century Europe had been battered by the Mongols,who swept from the heartland of Asia through eastern Europeto the shores of the Adriatic. In the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies Christian Europe had turned back the Turks at the gatesof Vienna. Only with the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire inthe eighteenth century did the Turks cease to threaten Europeand its unifying faith. By then the papacy and the Holy RomanEmpire had long since passed the peak of their spiritual and tempo-ral power; the unity of the Church had given way to the unityof the nation.1

The deadliest threat to the unity of Christendom came not fromwithout but from within. The whole trend of Renaissance thought with its stress on the secular and its disregard of medieval certainties encouraged the questioning of the spiritual and temporal auth-ority of both pope and emperor. In a growing urban, capitalisticeconomy, merchants were eager to rid themselves of the Churchsmedieval moral restraint concerning usury, the just price andthe living wage. When Pope Boniface VIII (12941303) declaredin a papal bull (Unum Sanctam, 1302) that subjection to theRoman pontiff is absolutely necessary to salvation, the Frenchking, Philip IV (reigned 12851314), openly defied him. When aFrench archbishop followed Boniface as Pope Clement V (130516)

23


he moved his papal residence to Avignon in France. From 1305 to1377 the papacy remained under French influence. Two popes, oneat Avignon the other in Rome, indulged in a papal squabble whichended with each excommunicating the other. Even after 1409, whenboth pontiffs were deposed and a third was elected in their place,the schism in the Church remained. In fact the disintegration ofpapal power worsened, for there were now three popes to satisfy,all of whom claimed divine authority.

The decline of feudalism between 1300 and 1450 had also stimu-lated the rise of Europes dynastic states, whose interests wereoften contrary to that of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.The wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries betweenFrance and England, as well as the political unification of Portu-gal and Spain, had fostered the growth of a nationalist spirit. Asa result, the relations between European monarchs and the popedeteriorated.

In 1414, in an attempt to re-establish Christian unity, the HolyRoman Emperor Sigismund summoned the leaders of the Churchto a council at Constance in Switzerland. For the first time,members of the council voted not according to their position inthe Church but as members of a nation, each nation having onevote. This was the last occasion on which the hierarchy of LatinChristendom met as a single commonwealth.

While the Council of Constance helped to heal the schism inthe Church, it did not halt the decline of Church authority. Norwas it able to silence the growing criticism of Church abuse anddoctrine. John Wycliffe (c.132084), master of Balliol College,Oxford, Jan Huss (c.13691415), rector of Prague University, andGirolamo Savonarola (145298), a Dominican priest, were onlythree of the many voices raised at that time against the Churchsmoral and fiscal abuses. Wycliffe called for the establishment ofa national church, for salvation as an individual matter and forthe abandonment of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He refusedto believe that any priest could convert bread and wine into thebody and blood of the Saviour. He condemned the venerationof Church relics as idolatrous. In his protests against Church abuseand doctrine, Huss was greatly influenced by Wycliffe. UnlikeWycliffe, he accepted the Churchs doctrine on transubstantia-tion which did not save him from being condemned as a hereticand burned at the stake. Savonarolas aim was to reform theChurch of its inequities under the Borgia Pope Alexander VI.

Europe: 15001914 25

Condemned as a heretic, he suffered the same fate as Huss. In1511 in Encomium moriae (Praise of Folly), the leading Christianhumanist Desiderius Erasmus2 (c.14661536) added his voice tothose criticizing the Church, but never suggested the overthrowof its authority.

By the time the German Augustinian friar Martin Luther3 nailedhis 95 theses to the door of the ducal chapel at Wittenberg (31October 1517), it was too late for the Church to stem the tide ofdoubt and distrust. Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders (HereI stand, I can do no other). In emphasizing that each man washis own priest, in placing scripture-based faith above priestly andpapal authority, in rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation,in denouncing the sale of indulgences4 for the remission of sins,in rebuking the Church for its wealth, worldly power and corrup-tion, Luthers criticisms had much in common with those ofWycliffe and Huss. Like Wycliffe, Luther translated the NewTestament into the vernacular. In his tract An den christlichen Adeldeutscher Nation (Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the GermanNation [1520]) he called upon the German princes to establish anational German church. In northern Germany, no message couldhave been more politically appealing. In 1521 Luther was excom-municated; one year later he was tried and condemned as a here-tic. Without the protection of the Elector of Saxony who shelteredhim, Luther would have died at the stake. Others had weak-ened Christian unity; unwittingly, Luther destroyed it.

When the Christian monarchs of France, Francis I (b. 1494,reigned 151547) and England, Henry VIII (b. 1491, reigned150947) met in 1520 at Calais, the idea of a Europe unified in ares publica Christiana was as good as dead. By then the countriesof Christian Europe were all going their separate ways (Map III).Loyalty to the Christian ideal would remain; loyalty to the popeand the Holy Roman Empire would diminish. In 1534 Henry VIII,having failed to bend the Church to his will, denounced the papacyand declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England.He was not the only European monarch to use the conflict withthe Church as an excuse to further his own political and econ-omic ambitions. Under the Tudors, England became a truly nationalstate.

The fires of dissent were enlarged in 1541 when a new waveof Protestantism was launched from Geneva by the FrenchmanJohn Calvin5 (150964). Calvins doctrine of predestination made

26A

Concise H

istory of the Modern W

orld

HOLY

ROMAN

EMPIRE

England

SpanishNetherlands

Alsace

FrancheComt

Tyrol

Lombardy

Naples

Sardinia

SicilyTunis

Bona

BugiaAlgiers

Aragon

Castile(and lands

in the New World)Port

ugal

Lithuania-Poland

Silesia

Bohe

mia

Hung

aryAustria

Morav

ia

RussianEmpire

OttomanEmpire

Melilla

The Habsburg Empire of Charles V (1500-1558), Holy Roman Emperor 1519-1556

Lands inherited or acquired (Mexico added in 1519, Peru in 1543)

Boundary of the Holy Roman Empire

Map III

EU

RO

PE

IN T

HE

SIXT

EE

NT

H C

EN

TU

RY

Europe: 15001914 27

a strong appeal to middle-class interests. Following Luther, hebelieved that biblical authority took precedence over priestlymediation. His disciple John Knox (150572) launched the Refor-mation in Scotland, then ruled by Catholic Mary Stuart (b. 1542,reigned 15617, d. 1587) Queen of Scotland.6 In 1560 the Scottishparliament severed its relations with Rome in favour of KnoxsScottish Presbyterian Church.

Five years earlier, at the Peace of Augsburg, the Holy RomanEmperor Charles V, desperate to put an end to the wars betweenChristian factions, had allowed each member state to follow thereligion of its choice: Cuis regio eius religio (the rulers deter-mine the religion). With this decision, the popes authority overthe moral lives of nations, even within the Christian common-wealth, was irreparably harmed. Henceforth kings and nationswould be their own moral arbiter; raison dtat not moral princi-ples would direct the conduct of governments and nations. CharlesVs hope of reuniting Christendom now lost, he abdicated andsought seclusion in a monastery for the rest of his days.

Fortunate for the Roman Catholic Church, the response to thechallenge of the Reformation was a resurgence of morality.7 Severalreforming monastic orders sprang up in the first half of thesixteenth century. Unique among them was the Society of Jesusfounded in 1534 (recognized by a papal bull in 1540) by the Spanishnobleman Ignatius de Loyola (14911556). Loyolas Soldiers ofChrist, professing absolute obedience to the papacy, were soonto be found throughout Europe and in every corner of the globe.Their influence in theology, diplomacy, education, exploration,agriculture and in the sciences and the arts is legendary. Withina century they had become the most influential group of clerics.

In 1535 Pope Paul III (153449) also expressed the latent vital-ity within the Church by initiating an investigation into the needfor reform. Its report in 1537 led eventually to the establishmentof the Council of Trent. The council, which met intermittentlybetween 1545 and 1563, was the Churchs response to the attacksmade upon it during the Reformation. The council rejected compro-mise with the Protestants and upheld and strengthened the auth-ority of the pope (only in the mid-twentieth century would theidea of a reunified Christendom be reborn). The basic tenets ofCatholic faith were redefined: salvation required not only faithbut also good works; the source of doctrine was not only scrip-ture but also unwritten traditions, some of which had been


received by the apostles from Christ himself; the seven sacra-ments were reaffirmed with special emphasis on transubstantia-tion; the usefulness of indulgences, the veneration of relics andthe cult of the Virgin were approved.

By the mid-eighteenth century, feeling among the western elitehad turned against the Jesuits. Their defence of the native peoplesof Spains empire in the New World had made enemies for themin high places. The growing secularism, nationalism and politi-cal absolutism of the time all ran contrary to their ideal of auniversal Christendom. In 1773 Pope Clement XIV (176975)disbanded the Society. In Protestant Prussia and Silesia, however,the Jesuits continued their work undisturbed. Their presencewas also tolerated by Catherine II, the Great (b. 1729, reigned176296) of Russia, as well as by Catholic Poland. Half a centurylater in 1814, times having changed, the Order was re-establishedby Pope Pius VII (180023).

The breakdown of Christian unity plunged Europe into a longand bloody religious struggle in which Catholics and Protestantstried to subjugate each other. Between 1559 and 1715 east andcentral Europe was wasted by fanatically waged religious wars8

in which every kind of outrage was perpetrated. Germany divideditself into two hostile camps, most of the north becoming follow-ers of Luther, while the south remained Catholic. In the Germanprincipalities, such wars became endemic. Between 1562 and 1598religiously inspired civil wars also took place in France. Peacewas achieved in 1598 with the acknowledgment of Catholicismas the official religion of France, while guaranteeing FrenchProtestants (the Huguenots) religious, civil and political rights(the Edict of Nantes). Spain fought almost constant wars of reli-gion, first against the Moors and then against France, Hollandand Protestant England. Philip II (reigned 155698), Spains mostCatholic king, seemed blind to everything except the need todefend the holy Catholic faith. Charles V had hoped to link Spain,Holland and England in one grand Christian maritime union bymarrying his son, Philip II, to Catholic Mary Tudor of Englandin 1554. But Mary died, and (the English having taken care toensure that Philip would not succeed Mary) Protestant Elizabeth I(reigned 15581603) ascended the throne. England was lost tothe Spanish Catholic cause. The religious wars of 161848 werean almost continuous power struggle between the Spanish andAustrian Habsburgs and the French Bourbons. Only after the

Europe: 15001914 29

religious wars of the seventeenth century were the religious andpolitical frontiers in Europe given some permanency; only thendid European politics become free of religious passion.

The outcome of the schism within the universal Church was theappearance of a variety of national states, all of them concernedwith national power, prestige, wealth, security and independence;all of them at daggers point with each other; all of themprepared to switch sides for the slightest political gain; all of themunsettled, ambitious, creative and dynamic. For 300 years thestruggle of these states to prevail, both in Europe and in an ever-widening world, was incessant. Among them, moral and religiousscruples were lost sight of in the effort to survive. France on twooccasions actually allied itself with the Turkish infidel. In addi-tion to religious scruples, monarchical rivalry was also responsiblefor the European wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries, including the War of the Spanish Succession(170114), the Great Northern War (170021), the War of the AustrianSuccession (17408), and the Seven Years War (175663).

The first European monarch to demonstrate his nations mighton a world scene was Portugals Manoel I (reigned 14951521),Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of India, Ethio-pia, Arabia and Persia. Where Portugal led, Spain followed. Begin-ning with the voyage of Columbus, the Spaniards eventually madetheir way across the entire globe. The only limits to Iberianexpansion were those set by the other European powers Britain,France and the Netherlands. Of these, Britain became Spainsnemesis.

From hoping at one time to rule Protestant England, Spain cameto fear it. Elizabeth I of England gave it no peace. English piratespreyed on Spanish possessions and Spanish treasure intermi-nably. In 1577 Francis Drake (c.154096) sacked Spains Americancolonies and seized a Spanish treasure ship in the mid-Pacific.The booty brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind is said tohave been the fountain and origin of British foreign investment.In 1584 John Hawkins (153295) another pirate pillaged theSpanish Main. The last shred of pretence was cast aside in 1585when England sent an army of 6,000 men to fight against Spainin the Spanish Netherlands, where revolt had broken out in the1560s. Two years later, in 1587, Drake and other English seacaptains destroyed the Spanish fleet at Cadiz. Any hopes that


Philip II may have had to remove Elizabeth in favour of herCatholic cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, were dashed byher execution. In desperation, in 1588 he launched his Invin-cible Armada against England.

While Spains vast empire was probably at the height of itspower in 1600 (its navy was still the equal of the English andthe Dutch combined), the loss of the Armada undermined itsleading position at sea. Spains trade, agriculture and shippingwere all neglected. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries itwas the Dutch who carried Spains colonial products from theIberian peninsula to northern Europe. As for the profits of thecolonial trade, much of these in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies went to British North American merchants who spentthem in England. Not only other nations, but smugglers andbuccaneers waxed fat off Spains wealth.

After the peace of Utrecht in 1713 the last treaty to refer to aEuropean res publica Christiana Britain openly penetrated SpainsAmerican colonies from the West Indies. For more than a century,Spain had to defend its empire in the New World from thosewho would bring it down. Because of Spains constant wars inEurope and the New World, between 1492 and 1700 its popula-tion fell from nine to six million.

By 1659 at the time of the Peace of the Pyrenees, Spains hith-erto leading position in Europe had come to be challenged bythe French. In the war of the Spanish Succession (170114) theAustrians, the Dutch and the English had banded together toprevent France taking control of Spains empire. In 1747 the lastSpanish bullion convoy set sail from Vera Cruz. By the time ofthe War of Jenkins Ear (173940) Spain was unable to assert itswill. In 1744 Englands Admiral Hanson, ignoring Spanish protests,entered the Pacific.

In power politics, France proved a worthy successor to Spain.In the mid-fifteenth century it had driven the English from thecontinent of Europe. On and off, from the 1290s until the 1450s,for 150 years, England had fought France for parts of northernEurope, including Flanders, at that time Europes industrial centre.But for Joan of Arcs triumph over the English at the battle ofOrleans in 1429, France might have become a vassal of England.

In the 1490s the French under Charles VIII (b. 1470, reigned148398) had attacked Spanish forces in Italy. Encouraging Franceand Spain to use Italy as a battleground was Italys seeming

Europe: 15001914 31

inability to unite. Its political states, Naples, Sicily, Venice, Genoa,Lucca, Milan, Florence and Piedmont, had no common rule orgovernment. Despoiled by all, only Venice managed to keep itswould-be conquerors at bay.

Out of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries world-widecontest with France with the exception of the War of AmericanIndependence (177583) Britain emerged triumphant. Nothingserved it as well as the English Channel, which had deterredone French king after another. In contrast, France suffered fromits continental vulnerability. In the Seven Years War it failed tostop the British from controlling the Atlantic and isolating Frenchforces in North America (Map V). France, like Spain, was both aland and a sea power. The wars it fought between 1688 and 1815were always double wars a war in Europe and a war abroad.In the Seven Years War it had to fight the British overseas andthe Germans in Europe at the same time.

England not only had the advantage over France in terms oflocation and insularity, the compactness of England had encour-aged national unity, centralized government and the rule of law.By 1500 the first of the Tudors, Henry VII (b. 1457, reigned 14851509) had become firmly established on the English throne. InElizabeth I, Tudor England found the strongest queen it had everhad. Queen at 25, for 40 years she outwitted and outfought allEnglands enemies. It was during her reign that the foundationsof Britains future maritime predominance were laid. GraduallyBritain came to think in terms of sea power and to establish itscontrol over the sea lanes of the world. By the eighteenth centurysea power had become the basis of all British strategy. The song,Rule Britannia, Britain rules the waves . . . was first sung in 1740.

By then English parliamentarianism and constitutionalism hadtriumphed over monarchical absolutism. The fight against thedivine right of kings culminated in the English Civil War (164248)out of which the military dictator Oliver Cromwell (15991658)emerged as the victor and Charles I (b. 1600, executed 1649) asthe victim. Parliamentarianism was furthered by the GloriousRevolution against James II in 1688. In deposing Catholic James IIin favour of Protestant William of Orange ruler of the Dutch parliament determined the conditions under which an Englishsovereign could rule.

The French were eventually undone by the British on both seaand land. Frances dream of supremacy at sea died in May 1692


at the Battle of Cap de La Hogue. With this defeat Louis XIVs(b. 1638, reigned 16431715) intention of restoring Catholic James IIto the English throne was abandoned. Frances dream of supremacyon land likewise ended with its defeat at the Battle of Blenheimin 1704. It only remained for French arms to be defeated in India(1747) and North America (1759). With the defeat of the French,Britains concern was how best to maintain the balance of powerin Europe.

In 1763 at the time of the Peace of Paris France emergedfrom the century-long struggle with Britain with a ruined foreigntrade, a depleted treasury and a hurt pride. (Its pride would berestored when it helped to defeat Britain at Yorktown in 1781.)Its ruinous military and naval campaigns against England, coupledwith run-away inflation, had helped to sow the seeds of the socialdiscord that would result in the French Revolution of 1789.

Among the other European powers who were to exercise greatinfluence on European and world affairs in the years after 1500were the Spanish Netherlands (Map III). In the mid-sixteenthcentury this area was one of the richest in Europe. Its popula-tion of about 2 million was small compared with that of Spain(approximately 8 million), France (approximately 20 million) andBritain (6 million). Yet what the Dutch lacked in numbers wasmade up for by their financial acumen, their fighting qualities,their skill as shipbuilders, and their knowledge and command ofthe seas. Once the Dutch revolt against Spain had broken out inthe 1560s, they fought the Spanish oppressor with one hand andfounded a great colonial empire with the other. Even more totheir credit, the Dutch not only escaped subjugation by a muchgreater power, they also experienced a remarkable flowering inthe humanities. The Netherlands became a haven for some ofthe outstanding thinkers of the time. Seventeenth-century Hollandwas one of the few places in the western world where a mancould speculate freely. One of the dissenter sects to take refugethere the Pilgrims chose to leave their Dutch hosts for anunexplored wilderness across the seas, partly because of a fearthat their children were being corrupted by such a religiouslytolerant and materialistic society.

At the time of the truce with Spain in 1609, the Dutch feltsufficiently confident to found the Dutch Republic. In 1639 theyplaced the seal on their liberty by decisively defeating Spanishpower before Dover in the Battle of the Downs. Spain never again

Europe: 15001914 33

attempted to conquer the northern half of the old Spanish Nether-lands. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which largely determinedthe shape of Europe until the French Revolution, confirmed theexistence of the Dutch Republic.

Behind all Dutch triumphs was the sea the focus of theirenergies. In the sixteenth century they had wrested control ofthe lucrative trade of Seville from Genoa. In their golden seven-teenth century they had built up an enormously profitable carry-ing trade9 in Europe and abroad. While the religious wars of161848 engulfed Europe, the Dutch fought to establish their ruleon the major sea lanes of the world. It was the Dutch who firstchallenged the right of other powers to claim exclusive sover-eignty over the oceans. Hugo Grotius, who declared the doctrineof the freedom of the seas that every nation has equal rightson the high seas was a Dutchman. Dutch intrusions into theeastern seas as well as into the Gulf of Mexico, had put the olderdoctrine of mare clausum to the test.

The harsh experience with Spain had made supreme politicalrealists of the Dutch. They left England alone until they haddefeated Portugal. In appealing to England for help against Spainthey knew how to emphasize English interests. They realized thatwhen England attacked Spain as Elizabeth I did openly in 1587 it would not be striking a blow for its fellow Protestant rebels,but for England. Elizabeth came to their aid because she reasoned as English leaders have reasoned ever since that if there wereto be war, it should be fought on foreign soil.

The Dutch were as realistic about trade as they were aboutpolitics. The sole purpose of the Dutch East Indies Company(founded in 1602, and which soon became the largest tradingcompany in Europe) was not to explore the world, or save it forChristianity as Portugal and Spain had tried to do, but toincrease its share of the newly found eastern commerce. Strategicbases rather than territory were their aim. The only time theymixed Calvinism and commerce, as they did in their West IndiesCompany, they did poorly. Nor did they have any disinclinationtowards money-making as some of the Iberians had had. On thecontrary, like Florence and Venice before them, emphasizing thenecessary unity of business and politics, the voice of the merchantwas heard wherever policy was made. Because they were commer-cially oriented, they were quick to use the financial talentspossessed by the Portuguese Jews who had fled the Spanish


Inquisition. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century moneywas so plentiful in the Netherlands that the interest rate inAmsterdam was below that in London.

At the same time that the Dutch were excelling in navigation,commerce and politics, their scientists were making outstandingcontributions. Dutch artisans, shipbuilders, canal lock builders,merchants, architects and engineers were employed through-out Europe. They were the forerunners of the nineteenth- andtwentieth-century British and American highly skilled workersoverseas.

For the Dutch, as for the other Europeans, there was to be noprofit without war. In 1652 they began the first of three navalwars with their chief rival at sea and in world trade the English.The struggle arose directly out of the clash of interests in theEast and the introduction of trade restrictions by the English in1651. Henceforth, economic warfare would become an acceptableinstrument of power to be exploited by all states. In the secondAnglo-Dutch war (16657), the stakes were still the same and theoutcome equally indecisive, except that the Netherlands aban-doned claims to New Amsterdam (New York) in exchange forthe return of Surinam. In the third Anglo-Dutch war (16724), Francejoined Britain against the Dutch. Later France reversed its posi-tion and fought both England and the Netherlands. By the begin-ning of the eighteenth century England had come to fear theFrench more than the Dutch and had thrown in its lot with theNetherlands.

The drain on Dutch resources was not limited to the cost ofthe English and the French wars. In 1657, in an age that acceptedwar as a form of diplomacy, the Dutch intervened in the Swed-ishDanish war (165761) to prevent Sweden closing the Baltic.In the 1650s they fought Portugal over Brazil. In the East Indiesthey were forever putting down insurrections. Year after year,the Netherlands could never shake itself free of war. Eventually,the rapidly rising costs of making endless war outran Dutch abilityto make money. The end of the long expansion of the Baltic graintrade in 1651 resulted in a trade war being fought against theEnglish and the French.

The turning point in Dutch fortunes in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries is difficult to discern. Perhaps the War ofthe Spanish Succession marked the decline of Dutch power inIndia and the East; though for another 70 years after 1714 the

Europe: 15001914 35

volume of Dutch world trade remained about the same. Othermajor factors in the decline of the Dutch was the loss of theirlead at sea, the problem of shallow harbours, the growing inabil-ity to compete as shipbuilders and middlemen, the neglect oftheir manufactures and fisheries, stagnation in their numbers, andthe migration of Dutch capital and labour. Yet it was not so mucha matter of the Dutch falling behind their own past efforts astheir inability to match Englands superior performance.

By the mid-seventeenth century, Prussia had become one of themany separate provinces into which the Holy Roman Empire ofthe German Nation was divided. The Peace of Westphalia, whichin 1648 ended the Thirty Years War, ratified the existence of morethan 300 such sovereign German principalities. In doing so itretarded the evolution of a mature German nationalism. Franceand Britain were nations in the 1400s. The United States (US)was a nation in the 1700s. Germany did not become a unifiednation until the second half of the nineteenth century. Not untilthe reigns of Friedrich I (16571713), crowned Prussias firstmonarch in 1701, Friedrich Wilhelm I (b. 1688, reigned 171340)and Friedrich II, the Great (b. 1712, reigned 174086) did Prussiaspower grow. Indeed, until the beginning of the eighteenth century,Brandenburg-Prussia was outstripped in wealth and numbers byBavaria. By the time of the War of the Austrian Succession (17408),however, things had changed. Prussia had become not a statewith an army, but an army with a state. In the Silesian Wars(17402, 17445 and 175663) Friedrich II eventually forced theAustrian Habsburgs under Empress Maria Theresa (b. 1717, reigned174080) to surrender all claims to Silesia (Map V). AlthoughFriedrich II had written a book against the unprincipled Realpolitikof Machiavelli, he had no scruples in doing what was best forPrussia. The question of right, he said to his foreign secretarywhen Prussia was about to take Silesia, is for you to elaborate . . .the orders for the army have already been issued. By these means,Friedrich II increased the area of Prussia by more than one-third,and made the Hohenzollern kingdom strong enough to resistAustrian-Russian attempts to recover Silesia during the Seven YearsWar (not least because in Silesia Friedrich II had at his disposalGermanys first heavy industries).

Prussias rise might have ended with its crushing defeat bythe Russians at Kunersdorf in 1759, had not Russia withdrawn,


and had not Britain triumphed over France. The subsequent stale-mate peace of Hubertusburg in 1763 allowed Prussia to surviveas a great power; in doing so it set the stage for the subsequentstruggle between Austria and Prussia for the mastery first ofGermany and then of Europe.

Whereas in the eighteenth century the Europeans had foughteach other for strat

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