Plurk paste

PART FIVE
LANDS OF THE DEAD
11 American Slavery Sugar is made from blood.
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill THOMAS THISTLEWOOD (1721–1786) was an especially sadistic man. He took joy in flogging people until the leather wore out and then watched as salt, lime, and incendiary bird pepper were rubbed into their wounds that inflicted unimaginable pain and left thick scars that never faded away. For infractions such as losing a hoe, Thistlewood forced other slaves to urinate and defecate into the mouth of the offender, whom he then had gagged.1 Jamaica slave masters such as Thistlewood were famously brutal, although other whites on the island scarcely batted an eye at his cruelty, which included rape. Thistlewood was a well-educated successful modern man: he managed and owned profitable plantations, where his slaves produced the sugar to which North Americans and Western Europeans had become addicted. On Thistlewood’s Breadnut Island Pen and across the island, slaves were “ill fed, hard worked, and much flogged,” a recent arrival immediately noticed in 1776. Many suffered from branding, whipping, castration, rape, and amputation, in addition to punishments meted out in one of the island’s jails. “I have seen them worse whipt than even plowmen whipt his horses. And if any misdemeanor, they lay them down naked and whip them[,] . . . 30 lashes, sometimes 60, which cut them raw, and if [they] make any resistance double the quantity.”2 The horrific brutalities of slavery formed the crucible of our modern world, including our turn to fossil fuels, a connection rarely made in the now enormous literature on global warming. The relentless commitment “to continue to give all the perfection we can to our sugars” helped determine the course of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of our anthropogenic present.3 So ferocious was the drive to monoculture in Jamaica that it threatened food supplies on an island that generated fantastic wealth. The island’s inhabitants relied on imports, especially from the North American colonies: grains, meats, and salted fish in addition to a wide variety of materials from nails to wood to the whale oil that kept boiling houses lit through the night. The results were chronic food shortages and widespread malnutrition that occasionally collapsed into famine.4 For plantation owners, the death of enslaved workers—whether from lack of food, overwork, or wanton cruelty—was a cost of doing business, one of the assets expected to depreciate in slavery’s cold accounting.
It was easy for Thistlewood to be cruel: he had guns, and the humans he claimed as his property did not. Guns controlled not only the slave trade but also the entire institution of slavery, especially on an island such as Jamaica, where slaves outnumbered whites nine to one and where mountains rising more than seven thousand feet whispered freedom, especially when escaped slaves (maroons) managed to acquire a few weapons. In the eighteenth century, roughly 95 percent of official British gunpowder exports went to Africa and the Americas. Gun manufacturers considered the West Indies and the American South important markets for their wares; these were the most heavily armed whites in the Americas.
Jamaica plantations were well stocked with weapons to maintain discipline; elsewhere on the islands, militias set out pursuing maroons, squashing revolts, and stifling resistance. The islands were as much well-armed prison colonies or gulags as anything else, and the plantation master was little more than a racist warlord or deadly warden.5 Plantation slavery would have been impossible without the gun industry and the numerous weapons that landed squarely in the hands of this supposed “master” class.
Finance played its part here too, including in the spread of weapons.
Bankers and financial administrators might pretend to be at arm’s length from the violence, but they had blood on their hands. The flow of money, the extension of credit, mortgages, insurance, reckless speculation, and the busy work of clerks and lawyers who grew rich on the fortunes and misfortunes of others all operated at the epicenter of the entire system that bound the Caribbean islands to Africa and to Great Britain. Plantations might change hands two or three times in a decade, with prices rising thirtyfold. Some buyers felt that it was worth the gamble. Owners could go into considerable debt purchasing a plantation, paying, say, an interest rate of 6 percent for ten years. However, they could count on a return, after all expenses had been paid, of 10 percent, excepting the mortgage, leaving a profit of 4 percent. After ten years, an owner’s yearly profits soared higher, and his equity had improved dramatically. With low inflation in England, great wealth seemed certain. At least that was the hope, easily dashed by a summer hurricane, a sudden decline in the price of sugar, a financial crisis, or a revolt of the people whom men such as Thistlewood considered their property.
6 The crucial thing was to run the plantation efficiently, indeed scientifically, to be “an accurate planter.” Debt and the drive for profit exacerbated violence. “Running in debt” led to further exploitation of enslaved peoples. A plantation owner could “spare little from the pressing demands of his creditors.” In the face of debt, a key driver of the global Mortecene, the “necessity of forcing their slaves beyond their strength,” as an abolitionist wrote in 1785, seemed as inevitable as the demand for sugar and the deaths of so-called chattel.7 *
This was the barbarous world the military-commercial revolution made possible, created and sustained by warlords, many able to hide their bloody histories behind cloaks of decorum and artifice, a few rising to profound heights of power (and occasionally notoriety). Over a century or more, the great violence and killing that guns and finance unleashed generated capital that bankrolled the global exploitation of enslaved peoples. Predation became one of the foundations for the rise of new systems of economic production, especially slavery with direct connections to industries using fossil fuels. A substantial portion of the planter elite came from the earliest settlers whose livelihoods predatory violence had founded.
We are aghast at the conduct of sadists such as Thistlewood, although the world is filled with his ilk. More disturbing is Jamaican slavery’s modernity, its connections to a world with which most of us are familiar. At the exact same time that planters were beating, torturing, and working slaves to death, they were also keenly aware of and committed to scientific and technological developments that might help them improve sugar’s quantity and quality and maximize the exploitation of laborers, increasing their profits. Prominent plantation owner Edward Long (1734–1813), author of the influential History of Jamaica, was a defender of slavery, a racist, and an anti-Semite; he was also committed to science and the keeping of precise records and was interested in technological improvements, especially those that might make him wealthier.
8 Sugar attracted constant innovations, from improved ways of processing the cane to the use of modern bookkeeping and management methods and various financial instruments such as insurance. In 1768 a steam engine arrived in Jamaica, the second such engine imported in all the Americas and nearly two decades before the technology’s first use in cotton cloth production in English mills. Industrialists had long maintained connections to the slave trade and plantation slavery, including men such as the mighty arms manufacturer Samuel Galton and the industrial pioneers Matthew Boulton and James Watt. (The design of modern sugar plantations informed the creation of some of those earliest factories.) The birth of our fossil age may have begun in England, but it was global from the start. However one wants to date England’s industrial development, similar advances were occurring at virtually the exact same time in places such as Jamaica and especially in Cuba, where industrialization was rooted not in free wage labor but instead in the intensification of slavery.
The expiration of Watt’s patent for an improved steam engine accelerated the diffusion of this technology across the Caribbean, although from the beginning others had pirated his design. One of these imitations ended up on a Jamaica sugar estate owned by Lord Penrhyn (Richard Pennant) in the 1790s. Penrhyn was one of the most important plantation owners on the island, and his considerable fortune supported the construction of the massive Penrhyn Castle in Wales, in full faux Norman style. (Members of the Pennant family were also politicians and prominent industrialists, albeit often in debt, with a portfolio that included railways.) In the early years of the next century, a steam engine on Lord Penrhyn’s Denbigh plantation processed enough cane to produce over 1,500 gallons of sugar weekly.
British manufacturers were keen to export their technology, and plantation owners were equally keen to do whatever they could to improve production and raise profitability. By 1825, at least 267 steam engines had made their way to the Caribbean. (England had about seven times as many engines.) For the most important manufacturer, Boulton & Watt, the islands comprised its largest export market except for Ireland; only fifteen machines went to North America. Fawcett & Littledale, a manufacturer of steam engines based in Liverpool—the city most firmly attached to the Atlantic slave trade—depended on the Caribbean market for business. Only the burgeoning English cotton industry represented a more important early consumer of steam engines.9 FIGURE 11.1. Denbigh Plantation. The plantation had more than three hundred enslaved people.
Reproduced with permission of Richard Douglas Pennant.
The use of steam engines to crush cane formed part of a broader process of improved mechanization; steam engine technology and vacuum pans would also be introduced in the processing of the syrup. Jamaica innovated especially in its boiling processes, the so-called Jamaica train, a series of linked cauldrons that utilized fuel more effectively than traditional methods.
These and other developments would spread elsewhere in the Caribbean, most importantly to Cuba, which would further refine industrial developments, including the use of steam-powered trains. Cuba acquired its first steam-powered mill in 1797 and a railroad in 1837, just over a decade after the first train to operate in England. Cuban sugar production skyrocketed from the end of the eighteenth century; by 1848, the island produced nearly one-quarter of the world’s refined sugar. Brutality followed on the heels of new technological sophistication and rising production. As for weapons, the island regularly imported upwards of one hundred thousand pounds or more of gunpowder yearly, more than enough to shoot every single person in the Caribbean. Upwards of 400,000 slaves were imported to Cuba in seven decades from the early 1760s. In 1827 the slave population stood at nearly 287,000, and by 1840 the slave population exceeded 436,000.
All this production required massive amounts of energy and resulted in enormous destruction, human, animal, and plant. The plantation economy faced challenges in supplying the energy required to produce sugar crystals.
That process placed huge demands on labor and energy, especially over the concentrated harvest period of nearly five months. Since the sucrose content of cut cane degrades quickly, workers had to run it through the mill as soon as possible and then transfer the juice to cauldrons for boiling. Local forests provided fuel for the cauldrons, as did bagasse, the fibrous remains of the cane. Deforestation followed, becoming widespread across the Caribbean.
Soil erosion occurred as well, as treeless land torn loose by storms bled into the sea.
Once-large forests of towering mahogany were cut down, the trunks turned into lumber that became ships and furniture. As a result, dozens of species went extinct, especially the birds, monkeys, and small mammals that kept their home among the mahogany, ackee, and other tree forests.10 Soon the land would become almost unrecognizable.
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The wealth generated by slavery traveled in various directions. Sometimes it went to conspicuous consumption, such as the fantastical Penrhyn Castle.
Often it greased the path to political power. But the profits of slavery were also funneled directly into industries that had begun using coal, such as factories and railways. Slavery became inextricably bound to a new industrial capitalism based on fossil fuels: the profits of violence and exploitation—not just the profits of trade, as generations of scholars have argued—enabled the rise of modern industry. Our age of human-induced global warming began, in other words, in lockstep with the rapid expansion and intensification of slavery.
There is no getting around this point: the exploitation of slaves played a fundamental role in creating the Mortecene and our modern anthropogenic world dependent on fossil fuels. And the ecological devastation that accompanied slavery, together with the incalculable human suffering it created, must be seen as inseparably connected to the factories belching out CO2 , then and today.
11 This shift from predation to production—from the violence of killing to the violence of slavery—was breathtakingly rapid, one of the most significant revolutions in human history. It reaches from sugar slavery in Jamaica and Cuba to palm oil in Africa and the Cotton Kingdoms in the American South, Egypt, and India. This shift was always uneven and rarely a matter of one activity (predation) substituting for the other (production).
Frontiers of violence, like all frontiers, are mobile and unstable.
But these examples had four things in common. First, they were agricultural regimes founded by warlords, many with their own private armies or militias, all jealously insisting on their right to bear arms and to take life. Men who had first used guns to turn people and nature into tradable goods to generate capital or who had first created looting economies now settled down. Second, guns held the plantation complex together; plantations invariably had the greatest concentration of weapons.
At every instance, captive people resisted, ranging from escape and rebellion—and in the case of Saint-Domingue successful revolution—to more hidden ways of subverting the plantation machine. But the control and power achieved by plantation slavery would have been impossible without guns. Third, these brutal agricultural regimes made the Industrial Revolution possible. It is little wonder that plantations often resembled factories and vice versa, one reason why many referred to the West Indies as “manufacturing colonies.” Finally, these regimes wrought profound human suffering and a chain reaction of environmental destruction and change that continues today with our global climate crisis.
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From the start, the colonial Caribbean revolved around violence, a state of war and commerce and a near-perfect environment for warlordism. The situation went back to the beginning of Western overseas exploration with the 1559 declaration by French king Henry II that international law did not extend beyond the prime meridian and the Tropic of Cancer as Europeans began marking up the globe. (The prime meridian is a longitude that runs through Greenwich, England. The Tropic of Cancer is a latitude separating the tropics in the Northern Hemisphere.) The Caribbean could be legally defined as a place beyond the law, or “beyond the line,” as it became known. During much of the seventeenth century, the region became a Hobbesian world of violence in pursuit of profit. English, French, and others did their best to conquer Spanish ports or trade with the Spanish, capture and traffic in human beings, plunder natural resources, or loot Spanish ships of their stores of American silver. The English were especially aggressive, “swarming” the islands with settlers looking for easy money. And the Spanish often did the same, killing as many English and French as they could and selling guns to escaped slaves in a kind of proxy war.
12 Later in the seventeenth century, this dynamic began changing. Warlords began pioneering early sugar production, although Caribbean privateering continued well into the 1720s. Before they became full-fledged plantation economies, British and French outposts in the Caribbean were strategic locales that combined predation and trade, providing various goods and slaves to New Spain even as they preyed on ships plying the Caribbean with stores of precious metals. Treaties governed some of this commerce, including, for example, the 1713–1714 Peace of Utrecht (ending the war of Spanish Succession), an accord that began solidifying English power in the Caribbean and slowly bringing an end to over 150 years of legalized lawlessness. Smuggling and spoliation remained widespread in the newer plantation economy but with differences. The Caribbean became a “Sea of Contraband,”13 a space of sanctioned illegality whenever it served imperial interests. In the 1760s, the contraband trade between Jamaica and the Spanish Empire amounted to about six million pesos, or several billion dollars today. Places such as Jamaica continued being a launching pad for violence, including selling weapons, but now they were also emporiums, nodes in “imperial England’s overseas engines of growth, exporting sugar and tobacco, importing merchandise and African slave laborers.” These were then reexported “to Spain’s possessions in the Caribbean in exchange for silver pesos.”14 The Spanish Empire was remarkably porous, including its tendency to lose the all-important and coveted American silver. Between 1747 and 1761, the total annual output of the Spanish American colonies averaged 35.7 million pesos annually, but only 19.4 million pesos ended up in Spain.
By a vast margin, precious metals, especially silver, represented the bulk of Spanish American wealth, but only 58.8 percent of those metals made it to the mother country. The rest went in several directions, with large quantities “leaking” out and ending up in various places unintended by the Crown: northern European countries, England, the Caribbean, and North American colonies and hijacked on the way to the Philippines (and from there to China, where one could find Mexican pesos in Beijing).
Smuggling, looting, and New World silver thus helped bankroll the earliest years of the Caribbean sugar industry. As early as the 1660s, just a few years after Oliver Cromwell’s fleet, in cahoots with English pirates, headed into the Caribbean as part of the Western Design to wrest the region from Spain, Jamaica had begun the transition toward a colony based on private landownership and agricultural production using enslaved people. In these formative years, however, the issue was not between those who sought profit using violence and those who saw wealth in planting crops.
Rather, the two were intertwined from the beginning. Cromwell’s invasion incentivized and increased the plundering as warlords began seeing the potential for supplying the mother country with slave-produced products. Those who had killed and plundered and traded now also began acquiring slaves for labor.
They put their captives to work planting, sometimes first pursuing cocoa and cotton before settling on sugar.
15 British Jamaica would become England’s largest producer of sugar and the jewel in its West Indian crown. Jamaica was founded on extraordinary violence and human wastage in the mid-seventeenth century, cruelties initially meted out against Spanish and African communities on the island following a disastrous 1655 British attempt to take nearby Hispaniola. A central English intention had been to use the island as a hub from which to loot and sell goods in return for American silver. From Jamaican warehouses, merchandise began flowing into the wider Caribbean, everything from leather gloves and stockings to gunpowder, shot, and lead.
“Profits are large,” wrote a French cleric in 1690.
The port city Kingston emerged as the Caribbean’s most important legal and illegal commercial center with Spanish America. There merchants engaged in violence and contraband trade one day and sold legal goods the next. Merchandise and slaves also moved out of Kingston, over 18,000 captive peoples to the mainland in the early decade of the 1700s and approximately 150,000 in the second half of the century. Precious metals flowed the other way. By 1706, one observer noted, the island “abounded more in Spanish gold & silver than it ever did before.”16 The roles of merchant, planter, and privateer were thus far messier than we might assume and frequently overlapped; only later did the planter elite begin cleansing its less savory past in a wash of staid gentility, finery, and fabricated lineages. In 1680 the largest slaveholder was also a merchant, using his profits to invest in plantations in the island’s interior. Plantation slavery was expensive, even if land was cheap at first. Violence offered the easiest way to amass capital if one didn’t die in the process.
One of the island’s most important planter families, the Prices of Worthy Park, began with service in Cromwell’s army, using the profits of that violence to settle down and start planting. “Landowners and other free men . . . joined assaults, drawn by the prospect of quick gain.”17 One of Kingston’s wealthiest merchant families, the Hibberts, made money by “privateering,” a polite word for violence and plunder. They later owned plantations that exploited many hundreds of slaves. And to complete the networks connecting England, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, this exceedingly rich and politically powerful family owned cotton mills in Manchester, including one of the city’s largest and most advanced factories.18 Caribbean warlordism nurtured English manufacturing.
By the early years of the eighteenth century as absentee ownership began taking off, the Jamaican economy had turned decisively toward sugar, using African slave labor. With slaves came weapons. Sugar would rule the island, although it was not the only slave-based agricultural export. Jamaica was renowned for its cotton; Liverpool’s first major shipment of the white fiber, in 1759, came from the island. In twenty-five years, the value of cotton shipped to Great Britain rose by a factor of over thirty, £140,079 by 1790, although sugar exports were over ten times greater. The rapid expansion of sugar took place in the period roughly after 1750, with the greatest increase between 1791 and 1815, the height of the Industrial Revolution.19 The considerable violence of the Seven Years’ War in the Caribbean became a boon for the British, with commerce increasing “to an ‘amazing and unnatural height . . . [and] being literally erected on the ruins of half our neighbours!’”20 These decades saw the most explosive growth in the slave trade to the Caribbean; human imports nearly doubled between 1751 and 1800 compared to the previous half century, totaling more than 2.27 million people. In Jamaica, the slave population rose from 86,535 in 1734 to over 300,000 on the eve of abolition. In just under three decades from 1748, Jamaican plantations doubled their production of muscovado sugar, to over 1 million hundredweight, about 112 million pounds. Both production and prices shot up: around midcentury, sugar slavery was producing gross profits of over £1.5 million. The total amount of bullion moving from Jamaica to the Bank of England between 1748 and 1765 exceeded £2.3 million, roughly four times the combined amount from Cuba and other islands.21 Jamaica was one of the wealthiest places on the planet at least for the whites, who imported large numbers of books while many of their slaves were worked to an early grave. Per capita wealth of whites on the island during the 1770s was more than seventeen times that of whites in what would soon become the United States. The American Revolutionary War severely disrupted this burgeoning West Indian economy but only briefly.
By the 1790s Jamaica was fully, relentlessly back in business; half of all British ships sailing to the British West Indies were headed to the island.
Investments from London merchants flowed into port, many combining multiple business activities during their stay, ranging from providing slaves and finished goods to procuring sugar exports and outright purchasing plantations. “Parents” might go “out poor,” the plantation owner Edward Long, Jamaica’s first historian, would write of those who established sugar estates, but their “children came home rich.”22 Influence followed wealth, so much so that plantation interests came to have a large say in shaping British policy.
The island was also armed to the teeth. Over the course of the eighteenth century, nearly 30 percent of total gunpowder heading to the Caribbean landed in Jamaica. Lead imports were enough for over 145 million musket shots. Imports, which closely tracked the growth of slavery, continued right up to abolition. In 1800, 52,640 pounds of powder arrived at an island that had a population around 320,000. Just this amount of powder was enough to shoot every single slave across the entire Caribbean. In 1816 gunpowder imports rose still further, to over 60,000 pounds. Jamaica had become the most militarized island anywhere in the British Caribbean, in possession of perhaps the greatest density of weapons across Britain’s far-flung empire.23 There were good reasons why every plantation had its store of weapons, along with the occasional cannon. During the eighteenth century, whites faced constant resistance by slaves; revolts were frequent, and rumors of impending rebellion were as regular as the sunrise off Morant Bay. The latter would be the site of a massive rebellion in 1865 when former slaves took up arms and ended the island’s plantocracy. In the late 1720s, a decade of war broke out with the island’s maroons and again in the mid-1790s when over 2 million pounds of gunpowder and 8.6 million pounds of lead and shot came to slavery’s defense. Slave and maroon resistance became such an entrenched part of island life that it formed the basis of “a radical pedagogy of the enslaved,” as the historian Vincent Brown put it.24 And violence dominated the entire enterprise, from the guns manufactured in Birmingham to the capture of peoples in Africa and from the exploitation of slaves in Jamaica to New Bedford’s whale oil industry, which brought light to the boiling house. If the plantation was little more than a simmering gulag that occasionally boiled over into insurrection, just beyond the sugarcane field, a state of war awaited. It is difficult to imagine such a world ever existed, where human life was so expendable amid such opulence. It is even harder to imagine the connections between this violence, the wealth it generated, and the birth of our modern world.
These ties are diverse and sometimes unexpected. We know that the plantation complex played a central role in the Atlantic economy and British economic development. Trade was important and profitable. The West Indies provided a (literally) captive market for British goods. And as scholars have demonstrated, sugar became an important supplier of cheap carbohydrates that kept England’s industrial working classes at their jobs.25 At the same time, English looms depended on imports of raw cotton produced by slaves.
People recognized these connections at the time; it was only later that Great Britain developed its peculiar historical amnesia and scholars insisted that purely endogenous developments explained Western ascendancy. Sugar slavery—and of course cotton slavery as well—had become central to the “very ground works of our manufacturers,” Long wrote, with urban industrial and other areas consuming “such immense quantities of” the island’s production.26 But as I have suggested, more profound and direct connections existed between plantation slavery, the raw goods it produced and the profits it generated, and England’s emergent factory system, with its steam engines, locomotives, and CO2 emissions. Slavery and industry went hand-in-glove. The factory and the sugar plantation were two sides of the same coin of intensified exploitation, deeply interdependent and both fundamentally concerned with the marshaling and disciplining of labor to maximize profit.
Slaveholders—while maintaining an extraordinarily brutal system—were also pioneering industrialists, the ones turning to coal-powered steam engines and exploiting tens of thousands of workers.27 We have mentioned Lord Penrhyn and the Hibbert family and their Manchester mills. Another of the city’s factories and one of the first to use coal-powered steam energy was owned by an industrialist whose family exploited more than one hundred slaves on their Caribbean plantation producing cotton. Samuel Greg & Co. would be “known as the largest cotton empire in all of Britain.”28 The family’s Quarry Bank Mill, begun in 1784 using water and by the early nineteenth century shifting to steam and industrial leather belting, was considered, according to the historian Andreas Malm, “the largest establishment in Europe.”29 FIGURE 11.2. Quarry Bank Mill in the 1870s. CMS_1461042. Reproduced with permission of the National Trust.
Caribbean slavery, with all its attendant sufferings and human and environmental wastage, was inextricably connected to the foundations of our fossil fuel world. In the polite words of economists, “access to slavery investments has sizeable aggregate economic effects and a substantial impact on the geography of the industrial revolution.”30 “Slavery wealth contributed causally to Britain’s Industrial Revolution, accelerating growth and facilitating the escape from Malthusian constraints.”31 The profits—not just the products—of slavery helped create the first Industrial Revolution, England’s economic miracle, and the beginnings of global warming.
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The modern turn within sugar slavery—the intimacies of plantation and factory and the omnipresence of guns—reached its apogee on the nearby island of Cuba. Near the end of the Seven Years’ War, the 1762 British invasion and occupation of the Caribbean’s largest island shook the very foundations of the Spanish Empire. The twelve thousand soldiers and two hundred ships sent by the British not only destroyed an earlier pattern of Spanish mercantilism but also opened the island to the radical world of free trade and the Industrial Revolution, including greater access to weapons.
The Treaty of Paris signed the next year returned Cuba to Spain in exchange for losing Florida to Great Britain, but things were never the same again on the island. Almost immediately, thousands of slaves were moved to the island, along with English loans to the Cuban elite and a flood of North American products.
Until this time the island had been something of an agricultural backwater, economically undeveloped when compared to Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint-Domingue, and its interior was mostly dominated by cattle ranching and small tobacco farms. Cuba’s enormous mahogany forests fell to lumber for shipbuilding. From these forests, slaves and others constructed the ships that comprised the Spanish Armada, known for transporting American silver and other products to Spain, a fleet coveted by the British and others.
Cuba was both central to the Spanish Empire and a place of considerable lawlessness dating back to the early 1500s and continuing well into the eighteenth century. The island served as a hub in a wider world of trade and predation, with port towns dominated by warlords, who often found their ambitions frustrated by Spanish policy. Havana had long been a den of state-defined illegality (despite frequent official complicity). A good bit of its economy revolved around contraband trade, such as hunting turtles, salvaging wrecks, ransoming, interisland slave trading, arms dealing, and attacking British ships and settlements.32 Havana itself was both a port and a fortress, the “center of Spanish military power in the Americas” and a launching pad for privateering. The city’s growth “was fueled . .
. by slave trading, smuggling, and war making,” a historian has written recently, largely against the British, with whom they also traded.33 Ransoming ships, for example, brought considerable wealth to Havana. Spanish privateers captured “well over three hundred ships heading to or sailing from British American ports” in just two years in the late 1730s and early 1740s. The contraband trade during these years seemed “as bottomless as the ocean,” stretching northward to the Bahamas and the thirteen colonies and south as far as Curacao.34 In the aftermath of the devastating British invasion, Spain committed significant resources to the island, which meant that even larger quantities of silver and weapons flowed into Havana. Cuba “began to abound in money.”35 The number of ships calling at Havana rose dramatically, the port city now an emporium serving the wider area. By the 1770s, Cuba boasted such large stores of guns, shot, and powder that it didn’t know what to do with them. Many of these goods were reexported, including to Indians in the American South who traveled to the island to purchase weapons.
The island’s elite emerged directly out of military service, trade, and privatized violence. A worldly and opportunistic bunch, these warlords traded in various commodities, acquiring land whenever it seemed fruitful, directly or indirectly engaging in warfare, and maintaining “extensive connections throughout the western Atlantic,” including staying abreast of the latest economic opportunities. Ricardo (Richard) O’Farrill, who in the second half of the eighteenth century would come to own Cuba’s largest plantation, began as a merchant with the British South Sea Company, the largely fraudulent company whose collapse rocked the British economy; his family was deeply involved with the Havana militia. O’Farrill married into a local elite landholding family and used his considerable connections to import slaves and sugar technology to the island. Despite the Irish roots, which stood out among a largely Hispanic population, O’Farrill and his kind weren’t unique. Two other former South Sea merchants sold timber and slaves and owned considerable land, producing both sugar and tobacco.36 In the decades following the British invasion, the Havana elite, mostly creole families of Spanish descent, steadily gained wealth and influence.
Virtually all members of the exclusive Havana Economic Society, formed in 1791, came from the port. This society helped spearhead changes in land tenure and the expansion of sugar in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, which had severely disrupted the world supply. Three years later, the emergent planter elite formed the Real Consulado to further their interests and consolidate ownership over the most important sugar mills. By the early part of the nineteenth century, these elites had successfully changed the land tenure system, opening land to plantation agriculture and speeding the destruction of Cuba’s remaining hardwood forests. Many of the changes introduced by the wealthiest were political and economic in nature: the move to end the Spanish Crown’s control over the timber trade, for example, as well as other reforms that opened Cuba to free trade, especially the trafficking in slaves. The year 1816 marked the official triumph of private property in Cuba, a legislative endpoint known as demólicion, the demolition of the older patterns of landholding rooted in Cuba’s semifeudal past.37 The men who oversaw these changes were commercially savvy, internationally connected, and learned, eager to apply the latest technologies to agriculture.
They were also utterly committed to violence. Cuba’s elites had considerable stores of weapons at their disposal and saw the enslaved as “the most useful machines for agriculture.”38 Violence that had once been projected outward across the Caribbean now turned inward as the elite consolidated landownership in the interior and invested in large-scale sugar production. They set their sights on Güines, an area of extraordinarily rich soils thirty miles from Havana and, back then, mostly dotted with small tobacco farms. Their interest in this acreage proved to be intensely destructive. On horseback and heavily armed, Havana warlords “put” farms “to flame and ruined the small Güines tobacco planters.”39 “The powerful men of Havana,” wrote one colonial official, “take whatever they want and have the tobacco plantations destroyed[;] . . . they help bring about this desolation and make good business out of it.”40 Violence became, in Fraginals’s words, a form of “fabulous capital accumulation.”41 What purpose did such razing accomplish? In a remarkably short time beginning in the 1780s, Güines became the epicenter of both enormous violence and Cuba’s sugar revolution, with the most advanced mills and the greatest concentration of slaves.42 Large sugar plantations and land consolidation (along with rampant land speculation) began immediately and accelerated markedly around the turn of the century.
Land prices here might increase twentyfold in under fifteen years. In two decades from 1784, the number of mills on the island rose from four to twenty-six. This growth was marked by a tremendous increase in the number of slaves entering the island. In 1775, only a quarter of the population was from Africa; forty years later, 62 percent of the population was enslaved.43 By this time, Cuba also needed to import food to support its slave population. To accomplish this task, the elites used their existing connections with food merchants in the United States.44 In the thirty years following the 1789 reform that radically opened the Spanish slave trade, some 325,000 slaves were imported into Cuba from Africa—what some called “slaving fever”—and this was just the legal trade.45 Various forms of what had been deemed by Spanish authorities as illegal trade also opened. The result was a massive increase in commerce and cruelty.
Both the production and the efficiency of sugar plantations increased dramatically during this same period. In the past, Cuban plantations had remained small, with an average of sixteen to eighteen slaves per farm during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the second half of 1700s and amid rising violence, that average soared to fifty slaves per plantation and would continue increasing well into the nineteenth century when, with breathtaking speed, Cuba overtook the islands to become the world’s largest supplier of sugar.
46 As in Jamaica, Cuban slaves suffered a high mortality rate that went with expanded production. Unceasing resistance also came into play: one scholar has estimated that there were at least sixty-six instances of organized resistance by captive peoples—from conspiracy to revolt—between 1798 and 1844, on average more than one yearly. The 1820s on were especially tumultuous, the same period when sugar took off and the entire production process was becoming progressively more mechanized.47 The transition from predation to production was thus shockingly quick, and all of it depended on weapons: slavery was always maintained from the barrel of a gun. Spain had begun the process of militarization; Great Britain and the United States soon followed. Across the entire eighteenth century, a measly amount of British powder and of lead and shot had made it to the entire Spanish West Indies, including Cuba. Nearly half arrived in a single year, 1792, just as sugar was beginning to take off and amid ongoing slave resistance. The situation changed significantly after the Napoleonic Wars: in one five-year period, over 200,000 pounds of powder and over 30 tons of lead and shot arrived on the island. Over the course of the nineteenth century up to the ending of slavery in 1886, Cuba imported over 100,000 pounds of powder and 160,000 pounds of lead and shot every single year.
48 The first steam engine used in Cuban sugar production arrived in the late 1790s, although like Jamaica, in Cuba this early instance did not meet with resounding success.
British industrialists nonetheless eagerly sought Cuba as a market for their machines. By 1818 and just as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in England, at least twenty-five steam-powered mills were operating in Cuba, most in the same areas that a few decades earlier had witnessed the razing of smaller farms. Unremitting innovation and modernization continued. The issue was not just a matter of technological borrowing but also the creative adaptation of technology to plantation agriculture: horizontal rollers, steam-powered iron mills, the widespread deployment of the Jamaica train for boiling sugar juices, vacuum pans to accelerate evaporation, bone char filters, modern accounting methods, complex global financial instruments, battery-powered telegraphs, road construction, steam-powered plows, portable steampowered sawmills, and finally the use of steam-powered trains to transport sugar and molasses from plantation to port. The sugar industry consumed large amounts of fuel, supplied by bagasse (leftover cane stalks) but also by the rapidly destroyed Cuban forests, followed by imported coal once the trees ran out. “Sugar,” Fraginals wrote, “exterminated the forests.”49 FIGURE 11.3. Ingenio Acana. Ingenio Acana propiedad del Sõr. Dn. J. Eusebio Alfonso.
Eduardo Laplante, artist, ca. 1857. Library of Congress.
The Cuban slave machine—and it was a machine—had roots in the earliest days of warlordism, pioneered by Spaniards such as Juan Ponce de León on the island of Hispaniola and elsewhere across the Caribbean, men who pillaged and enslaved and turned their gains to agriculture in what became the earliest plantations. But late eighteenth-century and especially nineteenth-century innovations made Cuba thoroughly modern; these were no holdovers from a feudal past. By the 1820s, Cuba had become the most efficient producer of sugar in the Caribbean, with Havana soon one of America’s largest cities.
Technological developments beginning in the 1830s and 1840s accelerated sugar production and improved efficiencies.
Productivity per mill quadrupled in the roughly four decades from the late 1820s, a remarkable change. The Derosne system, which replaced the earlier Jamaica train, moved steam at high velocities to power the evaporation process. This expensive and fully industrial system dramatically quickened and improved the transformation of sugar juice into crystals but consumed vast amounts of water, as many as two hundred thousand gallons daily.
50 By the 1850s, steam engines were widespread in Cuba’s sugar industry and with them the beginnings of a demand for coal, although bagasse continued to serve as an important source of fuel. Railroad construction began at roughly the same time, the earliest in 1837, helping complete the transformation of Güines into an epicenter of the industrialized sugar revolution. In just two decades the sugar estates were stitched together by wood and steel.51 Coal imported from the United States kept the trains running. By the late 1830s Pennsylvania coal was being used in Cuban mills, crucial since the island’s timber reserves were being rapidly depleted.52 From a distance, the Cuban sugar plantation looked like the factories of northern England and New Bedford, Massachusetts: chimneys belching smoke; a massification of iron and brick; the massive consumption of fuel, water, cane, and bone char (some filtering systems might use ten thousand pounds of bone each season); and by midcentury a unique combination of slave labor, indentured Chinese workers, and free—largely white— managers, in addition to engineers, chemists, and accountants. The great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt visited Cuba twice in the early nineteenth century.
He would later write that the “magical influence of the improved mechanical appliances of our day” accounted for the effectiveness of Cuba’s sugar plantations.53 This entire edifice, which began with planting cane and ended with fine sugars, rested on the massive importation and exploitation of slave labor. As everyone knew, “sugar is made from blood.”54 Between 1801 and 1875, over seven hundred thousand slaves arrived on the sugar island, nearly five hundred thousand between the mid-1820s and the 1870s, precisely at the same time as industrialization.55 If we step back from these numbers, a larger portrait can be seen emerging. Historians of Europe have long debated when, exactly, the Industrial Revolution began. Was it simply with the effective refinement of steam power by Boulton & Watt in the 1770s and its rapid expansion from about 1800? Or was it with the consolidation of industrial manufacturing later in the nineteenth century? The conventional wisdom holds that modern industrialization began in England, expanded within the country, and only then spread globally to other parts of Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately across much of the world.
Cuba’s historical development calls this conventional telling into question.
It brings our attention to both the compatibility of slavery and industry and the fact that nearly simultaneous industrial developments took place across broad geographical expanses.
British manufacturers such as Boulton & Watt and Fawcett, Preston and Company looked as much across the Atlantic as to Europe for purchasers of their inventions. The issue, then, is less one of diffusion than of developments unfolding simultaneously, each invention and distribution entangled with others even if they eventually produced divergent historical outcomes. Put another way, steam power was being applied to cotton manufacturing in Lancashire at the same time that it was being introduced in the Caribbean. (And in India, a Watt steam engine arrived in the late 1780s.) The first trains appeared in England in 1830; within a year, Cuban elites were working hard to bring the massive machines to their island.
By the end of the decade, over fifty miles (eighty kilometers) of railway line had been laid on the island. These were not isolated backwoods.
*
Slavery in the United States would yield the greatest wealth in all the Americas. America’s nineteenth-century cotton revolution depended on Black slavery, but it arose squarely on the swindling, subjugation, and dispossession of native peoples. The space separating trade and plundering from production and slavery could be remarkably narrow, unfolding in a single generation or just a few years: plantation slavery arose out of the ashes of genocide and ecological devastation.
And like Jamaica and Cuba, wherever slavery persisted, weapons abounded. The United States has always been a heavily armed nation; from its earliest beginnings, weapons had flowed into the thirteen colonies. The British ending of the arms trade to punish settler protest helped push the colonies to revolution, and the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 guaranteed citizens the right to bear arms. In the early republic, most weapons headed to the south and west across the Mississippi. The South still has the largest per capita number of guns today. 56 Across the 1700s and into the early nineteenth century, the United States received nearly three times more British gunpowder than the rest of the Americas combined and twice the lead and shot, upwards of two hundred million pounds and enough for over three billion musket balls. Imports surged in the second half of the eighteenth century. These numbers point to a larger—and deeply grim—story: the deep histories of violence across the South as furred animals were exterminated and native peoples were enslaved, ensnared in debt, and dispossessed. Settler capital accumulation and dispossession came at the barrel of a gun.57 Increasingly, settlers had the guns, and Indigenous peoples did not, And increasingly, these weapons were manufactured along the Eastern Seaboard.
Across the South, state legislatures passed laws prohibiting Indians from owning guns, with the result that many Indians lived in absolute terror of settlers.58 Treaties meant little to colonists except when they served their own interests. The federal government sometimes intervened to dampen settler violence, then just as quickly receded: wars cost precious money for a government that had little of it. In the meantime, settlers, with or without government support, formed armed groups and attacked and massacred Indian communities. Local and state militias composed of citizens played a central role in this violence, in the South both pillaging and killing Indigenous peoples, pursuing escaped slaves, and confiscating land.
Here was warlordism run wild, men who used violence to generate the wealth upon which settler agriculture rested. Everywhere, Indigenous Americans mounted protracted resistance to white encroachment, from Ohio to Mississippi. But local warlords would not be stopped, leading a wave of violent dispossession across the South in the early part of the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 was an important moment in this progression, with both violence and white settlement increasing markedly during and following the conflict. Some of the settlers brought slaves with them into new territory; others squatted on Indian land. In the war’s aftermath, state militias came to play an important role across the South, with settlers convincing themselves that the Indians were untrustworthy and collaborating with the British.
This prejudice galvanized yet another spasm of violence across frontier areas, much of it prosecuted by formal and informal settler militias who coveted Indian land.59 The years leading up to the 1838 Trail of Tears, which forced Native Americans to reservations in Oklahoma and killed thousands along the way, were sordid even by the standards of the time. Corruption and violence held sway across the region. Under the 1832 Treaty of Cusseta, Creeks were supposed to retain ownership of more than 2 million acres divided into 320- acre allotments. Almost immediately, local white warlords and upstarts created companies to buy up the allotments. In return for loans to Indians, they required land titles as collateral. Even contemporaries described the conduct of some as “a system of the most atrocious frauds that ever disgraced human nature.”60 Fraud and violence in diverse combinations were widespread across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, involving millions of acres and often ultimately tied to the big banks in the Northeast and abroad. Violence and intimidation became endemic, at times nearly breaking into local wars, particularly when Indians fought to protect their property. Other tactics involved harassment that was little short of terrorism, not quite looting but not very far from it. Officials who tried to stem the fraud or enforce prior treaties found themselves threatened. Warlords involved in dispossession contacted their congressmen, officials in Washington, and even the president. But then, President Andrew Jackson was one of them. He had traded in weapons and furs, headed a militia, massacred Creeks in the early 1810s, and grown rich on his one-thousand-acre Tennessee cotton plantation, acquired at the turn of the century. This land had been the site of bloody conflict just a few years earlier, in the 1790s, when violence engulfed much of the greater Tennessee area (then the Southwest Territory), drawing in Indians, settlers, and federal forces. Early in his presidency, Jackson assiduously pursued treaties dispossessing Indians of their lands, writing to his friend and later president, James Polk, that in the wake of the treaty with the Chickasaws, which had “destroyed the serpent,” the Choctaws would soon follow.
61 The infamous Indian Removal Act, signed into law by Jackson in 1830, and the Trail of Tears eight years later marked the culmination of decades of settler violence. Individual settlers and especially state militias played a critical role in aiding the US Army in forcing people west, across the Mississippi. Militia leaders especially bought up land and owned plantations. America’s planter elite thus had its roots in warlordism, with the South’s cotton empire arising directly out of widespread violence and displacement. And like slaveocracies everywhere, these elites invented pedigrees, built palaces, sent their kids to prestigious universities, and entered politics. America’s well-armed planter elite cloaked themselves in a gentility that belied their ferocious origins and brutal present. Very soon the southern oligarchy, with their ostentatious mansions exploiting the labor of hundreds of slaves and at times more than a thousand invented a narrative that the settlers had simply purchased Indian land fair and square as well as the idea that the Indians had long desired to migrate west anyway. Many of these oligarchs were local leaders, so it was an easy progression from organizing militias to attaining political power and plantation wealth; a few rose to great power as governors, congressmen, and senators and, in Jackson’s case, president of the United States. These men honed a conception of the South that privileged white (male) power as personal property and fiercely reaffirmed states’ rights, including a claim to a monopoly on violence in the name of independence and the Second Amendment.62 Behind this remarkable violence lay demand for a single crop. The shift from plundering to production was born of the skyrocketing industrial demand for raw cotton and the invention of the cotton gin, which greatly eased the separation of seeds from the white fiber. In its earliest years as a new republic and fledgling empire, the United States accounted for less than 1 percent of global cotton production. This straggler status began changing in the nineteenth century. In 1821 the United States produced 180 million bales of cotton, virtually all of it by slave labor. By the beginning of the next decade that number had doubled and then nearly doubled again by the early 1840s, at precisely the same time Indians were being dispossessed of their lands at gunpoint. By 1860 the country produced 1,390 million bales of cotton, a whopping 66 percent of global production. Industrial Britain depended on the United States for 88 percent of its raw cotton. In seven decades, cotton production had grown by a factor of nearly seven hundred and had spread from North Carolina well into Texas.
Louisiana’s population also increased dramatically from around 1810, as did the populations of Alabama and Mississippi. As land that had previously been America’s Old Southwest became the Deep South, slave owners along the Mississippi River turned to cotton. Soon, much of the South and large areas across the Mississippi transformed into a vast slave-based monocrop economy. In 1790 the South’s slave population stood at just over 650,000; the state of Georgia had less than 30,000 enslaved people. By 1860 the country’s slave population had increased fivefold, to over 3.9 million. Much of this population now dwelled in the Deep South; Georgia’s slave population increased by a factor of nearly sixteen to more than 460,000 people held in bondage. By 1820, one in three Alabamans were slaves. In Louisiana, where New Orleans became North America’s premiere port into which vast numbers of weapons arrived yearly, the ratio was closer to one in two. Although Mississippi Indians still controlled considerable territory in the 1820s, their situation would change radically over the next decade.
Mississippi politicians conveniently passed legislation removing Indian rights, including restricting their access to guns, and various treaties whereby Choctaws and Chickasaws lost their land. What state legislatures and private militias didn’t accomplish, President Andrew Jackson did. As a result, almost half of Mississippi became private property in two years during the 1830s. Back in 1800, Mississippi produced virtually no cotton; by the eve of the American Civil War, the state produced over half a billion pounds of the stuff, a veritable “mania,” in the words of one contemporary, a sea of cotton.63 Here was an America—or the American South—based on guns, violence and slavery, credit, speculation and commerce, and greed and corruption, certainly one of the most rapid, indeed explosive, economic transformations anywhere in the nineteenth century and also one of the most extraordinary and extraordinarily cruel agricultural revolutions in human history. Since the importation of slaves had been formally outlawed in 1808, the rapid increase of enslaved peoples into the Deep South represented one of the largest and most sudden migrations in North American history. Much of the Cotton South’s wealth lay in human beings. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, slaves represented almost 20 percent of all US wealth, roughly between $3.1 billion and $3.6 billion in total.64 This was also an American South based on profound ecological destruction. The deer population had been severely depleted, along with many other mammals. Cotton is notoriously hard on soils unless carefully managed. Within a decade, southern soils were growing depleted; one consequence was to drive cotton slavery westward. The South had once been home to sprawling hardwood forests with deeply resinous and strong longleaf pines that towered one hundred feet or more. Today’s dense forests of especially soft white pine are the result of an earlier period of rapid deforestation, as woodlands were turned to cotton fields and old yellow pine went for lumber and turpentine. “So great is the eagerness to plant cotton that forests containing immense quantities of useful wood are yearly cut down,” one observer commented.65 Vast amounts of sawed woodland were left to rot.66 *
America’s cotton revolution was every bit as dramatic as what unfolded in Jamaica and Cuba, in many respects even more so. In the dispossession of native peoples by heavily armed settlers and in the extraordinarily rapid conversion of millions of acres into cotton fields lay the sticky web of the Industrial Revolution. The threads of this web were ever-present. The rise of Lancashire’s factories and the industrial transformation of the United States, both dependent on fossil fuels, could not be separated from the exploitation of millions of slaves in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.
“Without slavery you have no cotton,” Karl Marx wrote in the 1840s, acutely aware of the metabolism of capitalism, and “without cotton you have no modern industry.” “It is slavery that gave the colonies their value, it is the colonies that created world trade.”67 Sugar produced by enslaved peoples under the tyranny of men such as Thistlewood may have helped keep workers toiling for hours and hours as industrial belts made mass production possible, but these factories owed their very existence to cotton.
If you tapped one corner of the web with your finger, the whole thing shuddered.
And behind modern slavery were guns. Weapons and the militarycommercial revolution made the radical growth of the enslavement of Africans possible. On the other side of the Atlantic, men with guns dispossessed native peoples, stifled slave resistance, and intensified exploitation. Whites across the American South, from South Carolina to eastern Texas, owned large numbers of guns, many of them manufactured in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and more guns per capita than settlers elsewhere. White southerners also controlled local and state governments in the region; in other words, they had a monopoly on violence. Weapons were the key ingredient that created the entire system and kept it going.
Southern cotton also fueled the rise of New England’s cloth industry, factories such as the Wamsutta Mill. Industrialization was never very far away from slavery. Both were the fraternal twins of capitalist development. And this means that modern human bondage and modern global warming were born together, indeed were inextricably part of a single process transforming the world and now imperiling our present and our future. The revolutionary transformation of boat traffic on the Mississippi and its major tributaries went together with the expansion of cotton slavery.
Shipbuilding helped spur industry in places such as Pittsburgh, which became an important center for steamship construction supplying the South.
(Pittsburgh’s population doubled between 1810 and 1830.) These ships in turn played a crucial part in the rise and spread of fossil fuels. Western Pennsylvania coal moved from Pittsburgh to the American South and West, where it was put to a variety of uses, from warming homes to powering ships to driving the locomotives that rapidly spread through the South in the 1850s. Those locomotives ultimately moved raw cotton to the industrializing North, a shift that began to undermine New Orleans as a dominant port city. In two decades beginning in the early 1820s, the consumption of Pennsylvania anthracite increased by a factor of nearly ninety.
68 It doubled again between 1850 and 1860 to nine million tons annually, releasing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Like the transformation of the slave sugar plantation in places such as Jamaica and Cuba, cotton was thoroughly modern, including the exploitation of its enslaved labor force. The fundamentally capitalist economics of cotton insinuated itself into the micropolitics of slavery: the selling of human beings, beatings, rape, the ever-present threat of violence that a monopoly of guns made possible, the pressure to plant and harvest more quickly, the policing of work and life, and the nearly infinite indignities of slavery itself. Thomas Affleck’s Plantation Record and Account Books brought modern accounting to slavery, showcasing efforts to maximize the control and utilization of enslaved laborers as part of a more general “relentless drive to quantification.” And the key to all this quantification was the “analysis of labor output” or, in this case, a precise valuation (appreciation or depreciation) of human life itself.69 The southern nabobs whose plantations owned the largest numbers of slaves accounted for the bulk of cotton production in the United States.
Their estates served as a kind of “agricultural manufactory.”70 Their libraries were as filled with books as other rooms were chockfull of muskets, rifles, shotguns, and pistols made in England and the industrial Northeast. These were learned if also very well-armed men, keeping abreast of scientific literature and keen to maximize their profits. They went to America’s finest schools: Harvard, Yale, and especially Princeton. * From the beginning, the South’s development was enmeshed with England and America’s Northeast. The horrors of the Cotton South cannot be pegged solely on the violence that unfolded within this one geographic region, nor can the entire system be explained away as mired in some atavistic, preindustrial mindset. A wider web was at play here. Credit poured into the South, supporting everything from land speculation to the purchase of slaves to the selection of cottonseeds. There was a bond market in human bodies, and it shaped the ways masters ruled over their human possessions.
Debt generated innovation and, like slavery everywhere, spurred brutality.
71 But the servicers of this debt were not just southerners. Capital came from well outside the South, fueled by a rapid expansion of local, national, and international banking. British banks sought new investments. Their vaults had grown from the weapons revolution, plantations, and the Atlantic slave trade. One, Barings Bank, played a critical role in the Louisiana Purchase and then helped finance the cotton revolution throughout the early nineteenth century. (Barings later played a key part in financing the boom in railroads across the West as well as in the bust that followed.) Other British banks with ties to guns and slavery set their sights on the American South. The Second Bank of the United States (1816–1841), John Jacob Astor’s brainchild, also decisively bankrolled cotton slavery. That bank owed much of its founding to Astor’s involvement in the weapons trade and the extraordinary slaughter of tens of millions of animals across North America. Now it played a vital role in westward expansion and the modernization of the southern economy, from steamboats and land purchases to seeds and slaves. Particularly in the early years of the 1830s as white militias and others attacked Indian communities, the Second Bank of the United States inundated the region with easy money, helping create the enormous land bubble that broke in the second half of the decade.
“Nearly half its business,” according to one scholar, went “into the Southwest, flooding the region with loans to facilitate and take advantage of the profits produced in the cotton plantation economy.”72 Thomas Biddle, the bank’s head and “America’s Napoleon of finance,” simultaneously funneled loans to the South and attempted to corner the market on cotton exports to England.
The Panic of 1837 cost Biddle his reputation and served as the final nail in the coffin of the bank he headed. A classic crisis stemming from land speculation fueled by reckless credit and overproduction, the panic ended with the Second Bank of the United States owning farms up and down the Mississippi as bankrupt plantation owners fled west to Texas with their slaves, hoping for better luck establishing their cotton kingdom in the thenindependent republic and avoiding their creditors. The banks had been too speculative. Borrowers had assumed that cotton prices would remain stable or increase, believing that the future was bright enough to cover their debts.
Once credit dried up (both internationally and because of President Jackson’s attack on the Second Bank of the United States) and cotton prices dramatically fell, liquidation and crisis followed.73 The Panic of 1837 helped drive cotton slavery westward across the border to Texas and into Arkansas and Missouri, places already saturated with American and British weapons and with violence. The port of Galveston was not unlike other areas of the world where warlordism predominated, the Texas equivalent of Havana and Kingston, with a vigorous contraband trade and trafficking in people, weapons, and hides. Bloodshed had become entrenched throughout the 1810s and 1820s, with warlords attempting to expropriate large tracts of land and begin planting cotton, efforts that began taking off toward the end of the 1820s. With the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches against Mexico, Anglo-Americans effectively consolidated their control over the area. Warlords or their descendants became plantation owners, one owning over thirty-six thousand acres of what would become Texas land. Land speculators and Anglo settlers from as far away as Virginia soon followed. “Cotton,” according to one of Texas’s American founders, Stephen F. Austin, was “the primary product that will elevate us from poverty.”74 And this meant that Texas would come squarely to depend on slavery. President John Tyler agreed: the large territory was central to ensuring that the country would have “the virtual monopoly on the cotton plant.”75 The number of Texas slaveholders increased by a factor of four in just ten years after 1837. Earlier US settlers, now remembered as “somewhat crude,” were making way for a higher class of people: “very honorable and highly cultured families.”76 The slave population grew from under 4,000 in 1837 to more than 24,000 less than a decade later, a sixfold increase, by which time cotton had turned the Southwest into “an economic juggernaut.”77 The slave population again doubled between incorporation in late 1845 and 1850 and then by another factor of three by 1860, by which time there were more than 180,000 slaves toiling in the state.78 In twenty-three years, slavery had grown in Texas by forty-five times, the vast majority concentrated in the eastern half of the state near the Louisiana border, where raw cotton exports would exceed 190 million pounds.
Although this increase amounted to just under 5 percent of the total slave population (not including enslaved Indigenous peoples, of whom there were tens of thousands in North America at the time), it was remarkable, representing nearly 30 percent of the state’s total population.79 West of the Mississippi, cotton slavery surged amid the displacement of native peoples and the rapid destruction of bison herds (and, in the case of Texas, amid complicated politics involving Mexico, the US government, and the Comanches). The Republic of Texas’s first president, slaveowner Samuel Houston, wanted to pursue war with the Comanches and other Indian polities, if only as a way of inviting US intervention. In 1823, he began according to one historian “an all-out war of extermination” against the Karankawas,80 although he later sought a more conciliatory approach.
The republic’s second president, Mirabeau Lamar, was far more aggressive, in the late 1830s launching, according to a definitive recent work by the historian Pekka Hämäläinen, nothing less than “a genocidal war against the Comanches.”81 The bison died out just as people began planting cotton. Missouri (statehood 1821), Arkansas (1836), Texas (1845), and Kansas (1861) all had substantial bison herds, in a few places persisting into the 1850s and 1860s.
These disappeared, decades earlier in some areas. The Arkansas Gazette had written in late 1820 that “the salubrious plains,” once home to bison and Indigenous populations, had become “large fields of corn, cotton, and tobacco.”82 Planters and their slaves were soon establishing cotton farms up and down the Arkansas River, with bales making their way down to the Mississippi along with bison robes, deerskins, and beaver pelts. By 1840 Missouri was producing over 121,000 pounds of ginned cotton and by 1860 roughly 16.5 million pounds, still a relatively small amount compared to the Deep South and even Arkansas, which produced nearly 147 million pounds of the fiber.
83 By the cusp of the American Civil War cotton had spread into Kansas, where the racist “border ruffians” of the 1850s had muscled their way into the area, spewing hatred of Indians and promoting their explicitly violent objective of spreading slavery westward. (Some of these ruffians had been involved in the fur trade.) By the outbreak of war in 1861, it was an open question if slavery would extend through the Nebraska Territory, Utah, the Kansas Territory, and New Mexico. If the Confederacy had had its way, most of the American West would have joined its empire of slavery, forming an ever-expanding web from there into the Caribbean and down through Central America, where American warlords such as William Walker (1824–1860) took great delight in killing people and fantasizing about reopening the Atlantic slave trade nearly a half century after its end.84 These dreams would not come true, but they wouldn’t die either.
12 Castes of Another Name THE FIRST BRITISH PROCONSUL of Egypt was none other than Evelyn Baring (1841–1917), later the first Earl of Cromer. Baring belonged to the famous banking family that had played an important role in the militarycommercial revolution and helped spread cotton slavery and financial speculation across the United States in the early nineteenth century.
(Barings Bank collapsed in 1992 when a rogue futures trader burned through $1.3 billion. A Dutch company bought the once storied bank for £1.) Banking and finance were closely tied to modern British imperialism, including cotton production in Egypt and India. Egypt would collapse into bankruptcy in 1876, followed by British military intervention and, in 1882, the creation of a protectorate. India was different, although as in Egypt banking and cotton (in addition to opium) led to the continued drain of wealth from the subcontinent and the immiseration of its people.
Nicknamed “Over-Baring” (he served a nearly unbroken term from 1878 to 1907), the proconsul had a difficult if not impossible charge: get Egypt’s finances in order, which meant protecting British creditors and draining the country of wealth while millions of Egyptians starved to death.1 Baring knew what was happening just down the block from his lush Cairo residence: the extraordinary indebtedness of most Egyptians, an ever more precarious food supply, the spread of diseases, and soils that no longer nourished crops in one of the fabled birthplaces of agriculture. He also knew that the climate was changing: the Nile was not as dependable a water source as it once had been. None of this stopped Over-Baring from turning the fiscal screw.
At the center of these developments hummed Egypt’s cotton revolution, a boom (and bust) every bit as spectacular as the one in United States. Cotton has an ancient history in Egypt, along with other cloth-producing crops such as flax. The country also has a rich history of cloth production; Egyptians spinners and weavers once often found themselves importing the fiber instead of sending it abroad. Like many other places globally, Egyptian farmers had long planted cotton along with other crops, especially food such as wheat, although cotton required dramatically more labor to farm and harvest. This traditional agricultural pattern underwent profound change in the nineteenth century. Long staple cotton, often referred to as Jumel cotton, was introduced as a cash crop around 1820 and was found to thrive in the irrigated regions of the Nile Delta, beginning with Sharqiya Province. (American Sea Island cotton was also introduced, and over the course of the century, producers also experimented with other varieties.) With breathtaking speed, Egypt all but became a monocrop economy.
On the ground, this shift took different forms. Unused areas were turned to productive use.
The delta remained the center of cotton production, although the crop also took off in Upper Egypt. Farmlands across the region were pressed into producing a single crop. The nineteenth century saw a one hundred–fold increase in the export of Egyptian cotton. The increased demand for cotton marked in part a response to the American Civil War and the Cotton Famine (both 1861–1865) that had spread economic crisis, mass unemployment, and political turmoil across England. By 1880, Egypt was exporting over 300 million pounds of cotton annually and then upwards of 700 million pounds in 1897–1898, most moving to Europe, especially England, France, and Austria. British purchases of Egyptian cotton rose from £1.5 million in 1860 to £15 million just four years later, a remarkable tenfold increase.2 International finance made this startling growth possible, although depending on foreign loans led to crushing debt for the Egyptians and healthy profits for the Western banks until some began losing their shirts.
Financiers started demanding a response, which meant political and military intervention. By the 1870s, servicing its debt consumed much of the Egyptian state’s revenues. Crisis was inevitable; the only question was how and when the trouble would take hold, including the precise wording of the aptly named “Law of Liquidation” that Over-Baring would enforce in his role.3 Finance played its part, but so too did violence and slavery, both made possible by the spread of guns. In the nineteenth century, the weapons revolution turned the Sudan into a vast Egyptian hunting ground for slaves with profound implications for the region’s future, the majority ending up in northern Egypt if they managed to survive the infamously torturous “Forty Days Road” across the Sahara. The captives who lived through that crossing might wind up planting and picking cotton. Their labors were enforced, of course, at gunpoint.
Years earlier, guns had come from the Ottoman Empire and, for a short time, from within Egypt itself. But by midcentury, most of the new weapons now came from Europe and especially England, although a few guns manufactured in the United States also made their way to Egypt, traveling in the hands of the men responsible for the annual slave hunts.4 By the crisis of the 1870s, Egypt had long become a warlord state.
Muhammad ‘Ali (Mehmed Ali, 1769–1849, ruling from 1805 to 1848) had initiated a remarkable process of modernization by taking advantage of the military-commercial revolution. His successors continued what ‘Ali had begun, especially Isma’il, who ruled as Ottoman viceroy of Egypt from 1863 through the end of the 1870s. In a later feat of remarkable mythmaking and historical cleansing, ‘Ali would be made into modern Egypt’s nationalist founder. He was in fact a ferocious oppressor who brought Egypt more fully into the capitalist world economy while creating an empire that expanded south into the Sudan as well as into parts of the Middle East. The state and empire ‘Ali and his administration created— basically dominated by a Turco-Egyptian elite and local collaborationist sheikhs—“despised the Egyptians and looked upon them as an inferior race of dirty peasants” to be exploited as need be (a fact long since forgotten).
The elite’s appraisal of Sudanese people was far more racist.5 Like all empires, the Egyptian powers evinced more than their fair share of scorn for the many peoples they conquered, killed, and exploited.
*
Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century. The French briefly occupied the country in the closing years of the eighteenth century, but ‘Ali, originally from Greece and an Ottoman military official in Albania, helped lead a military force that would expel the French in 1801. Four years later, ‘Ali effectively attained independence from the Ottomans with his appointment as pasha by the Ottoman ruler Sultan Selim III. ‘Ali and his descendants went on to rule Egypt through the early 1880s, including appointing provincial governors, until the British takeover and Baring’s heavy-handed administration.
During his tenure, ‘Ali initiated a series of land reforms that included a system of taxation that enlarged state resources. He vastly expanded canal and irrigation systems throughout the delta, innovations that would become central to the cotton revolution. These upgrades consumed the labor of at least one hundred thousand people in what became the most extraordinary marshaling of human labor Egypt had seen since the building of the pyramids three thousand years earlier. These and other agricultural developments progressed as a state-military project and an expansion of Egypt’s patrimonial system. Between 1820 and 1844, the amount of land controlled by the elite nearly doubled, a process that would continue long afterward.6 ‘Ali and his family and descendants would emerge as the country’s largest landowners. In the 1850s, approximately 40 percent of the entire Egyptian cotton crop came from the combined estates of two families, one of which was the ‘Ali’s. Both proudly produced some of the best cotton for the international market and engaged in activities supporting imperial expansion. A decade later, ‘Ali’s son Isma’il owned half a million acres of land, on which he deployed an army of forced laborers, as did other wealthy cotton producers. The consolidation of landownership by Egypt’s elites would continue into the next century, indeed right up to Egypt’s 1952 revolution.7 In the process, the country became, in the words of one scholar, a “command economy,”8 a deeply authoritarian order that bore similarities to the Cotton South in the United States, as slave owners captured the Egyptian state and created a densely carceral political economy.
Modernization in Egypt, as in so many other places, came from the barrel of a gun: without weapons, Egypt’s transformation would not have been possible. Warlords became producers, or, more accurately, the two processes of predation and production were conjoined. ‘Ali, his successors, and their families, along with senior members of the military, became major landowners and cotton producers. “An elaborate system was created whereby decisions about what crops to plant and where to plant them were passed down through the provisional bureaucracy to village officials.”9 Ultimately, this system involved direct military intervention in agricultural production.10 The arrival of the tax man and his armed “procession struck terror into the heart of every village,” according to one contemporary account, particularly given that most peasants technically had only usufruct rights in land that remained the possession of the Crown.11 Taxes supported the elite as well as military expansion in Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Sudan and Ethiopia, including the spread of enslavement. Unused land, or land for which peasants had fallen into debt from being unable to pay their taxes (an increasingly common phenomenon as the century wore on), found its way into the hands of the same elite who were prosecuting violence in places such as the Sudan, where slaves and ivory tusks were moving northward in increasing numbers.
Changes in land rights generally helped the rich and hurt the poor, weakening the ability of peasants to gain or maintain access to land. These so-called reforms accelerated proletarianization and poverty. Egyptian peasants became workers, many forced into building the country’s infrastructure or laboring on the cotton estates. The state also dictated to peasants the cultivation of cotton; many did their best to avoid the crop, since growing it exposed them to debt and eroded their ability to protect their production of food. “Cotton is not willingly cultivated by the fellah,” wrote the political economist, diplomat, and later governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring (1792–1872), “and would be scarcely produced at all but through the despotic interference of the pacha.”12 Violence increased as “rural society was pushed to the limit of its ability to produce and pay taxes.”13 Where peasants tried escaping their debts, many lost their lands to “new proprietors” who had access to capital.14 Increasingly, the military, armed with Western guns, oversaw agricultural labor.
People worked at gunpoint, and when they didn’t, they were liable to be shot dead.
By the early 1830s, Egypt’s larger cotton estates owned by “warlike farmers” relied on forced labor, including slaves from the Sudan.15 “The huge farms of Muhammed ‘Ali and his descendants were to a large extent worked by slaves.”16 It was precisely the acquisition of these captive peoples that led to ‘Ali’s invasion of the Sudan in the 1820s, along with his need for soldiers prior to the ruler’s decision to rely on conscription. This pattern continued in later decades and accelerated in the 1860s, when a vast area that included the Sudan, parts of Ethiopia, and farther south to the edge of Uganda had become a reservoir for slave labor in Egypt.
Forced labor had a longer, indeed ancient, history in Egypt, but it now dramatically expanded in the nineteenth century in an age when many Western thinkers were celebrating the economic and moral benefits of free wage labor. In addition to tasking captives with crop cultivation, the state and the landed elite “dragooned” people “to work far from their homes” constructing irrigation networks; this marked an important change from earlier practices, as did the very intensification of exploitation. The sweat of such work was “enjoyed exclusively by large landholders,” the very people most committed to expanding cotton production and walked around with guns. The military, one account reported, “are sent out to surround the villages; the unfortunate peasants are taken prisoners and linked to one another, and marched, sometimes hundreds of miles from their homes and families, to the place of employment. . . . [T]he task masters are seen armed with their whips, parading amongst the labourers, lashing right and left the lazy and the weak.”17 The military brought many thousands to the Mahmudiyya Canal with ropes tied around their necks, slaves in every way but name. Over three years into the early 1820s, some twelve thousand to one hundred thousand died.18 This human toll only increased with time. Throughout the nineteenth century, slave markets emerged to provide agricultural workers, for example at Tanta, located in the heart of the cotton-growing region. This famous Cairo market trafficked in Black slaves and, along with other markets, connected Upper Egypt to slave routes reaching southward to Darfur, Kordofan, al-Ubayyid (El Obeid), Sennar, and areas around Lake Chad to the southwest. As the numbers of trafficked people rose, conditions worsened. In the cotton boom years these numbers swelled, reaching twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand slaves annually, or upwards of one hundred thousand in four years.19 The enslavement and transport of people northward wasn’t the only direction that slavery traveled. It also grew rapidly within the Sudan itself.
Visitors to the Sudan in the mid-nineteenth century would have found the country awash in enslavement and slavery. (A thriving slave market emerged in Omdurman, the capital of the Mahdiyya, and was still in existence in 1903.)20 The Sudanese Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad) might have successfully overthrown Egyptian imperialism in the early 1880s, but he was far from being an abolitionist. This revolution, which we will discuss in more detail in chapter 15, was as much about fractious competitive politics within the Sudan—in effect a civil war—as it was about Egyptian imperialism and ultimately European imperial machinations. Across the greater region, violence became “the only means of subsistence,” as men on horseback with guns embarked on pursuits we have seen elsewhere, preying on agricultural and pastoral communities.21 “Slavery was pivotal in the Mahdist state’s affairs and the livelihood of its nationals, and it was entrenched in the weft and warp of society,”22 including the military.
Indeed, a central duty of the Mahdiyya was controlling the slave trade in the greater Sudan area. Jihad became a cover for all matter of brutality and exploitation.23 *
Cotton and slavery had devastating consequences for Egypt and the Sudan.
Malaria and bilharzia are ancient scourges, the first carried by mosquitoes and the second by snails; both animals thrive in still or sluggish water.
These tiny creatures spread rapidly in deltaic areas, where the Egyptian state had so assiduously built many hundreds of miles of canals and massively expanded irrigation.24 Hookworm also became endemic. And in some areas, over a third of the population would be afflicted with bilharzia.
Repeated parasitical infections left the sufferers weakened and susceptible to other diseases, their bodies grotesquely swollen.
Slavery and cotton yielded other unintended consequences that did not take too long to be noticed. For one, the canal system helped spread various plant diseases. Second and more seriously, the system increased the salinity of the soils upon which Egyptian agriculture had depended for more than seven thousand years. As a result soil fertility plummeted, although this deterioration would later be mitigated by the widespread use of commercial chemical fertilizers (which come with their own consequences). These developments intersected with broader climate shifts. This part of the world is no stranger to drought and famine, and changes especially in the Indian monsoon system can affect the flow of the Nile River. A massive drought in the 1780s, caused by volcanic eruptions in faraway Iceland that altered weather systems across the Northern Hemisphere, led to widespread famine across much of Egypt, followed by various plagues and epizootics.
Human suffering and environmental distress across the Egyptian countryside provided nearly ideal conditions for the intimidation and land consolidation by the elites and a weakening of Ottoman control that would pave the way for warlordism and such men as Muhammad ‘Ali.25 More climatic and ecological crises befell Egypt and the Sudan during much of the nineteenth century. These disasters can only be understood in the context of the military-commercial revolution under way in these regions and the beginning of human-made global warming. Already by the late 1830s in Egypt, cotton had begun directly affecting the production of food crops. Indebtedness had skyrocketed. The consolidation of a warlord state led directly to widespread famine in 1829. “Nearly all the rice . . .
belongs to one man, the Pasha himself,” wrote the traveler J. A. St. John in 1845. “This merchant-viceroy monopolises the whole.”26 Fearsome scenes of starvation soon followed across the country.
Drought hit the region in the 1870s and again in the 1880s, both tied directly to changes in the Indian Ocean monsoon system and indirectly to the onset of human-induced global warming after a century of industrial burning of fossil fuels. These calamities were widely reported by residents in Egypt and in the international press. Millions died in the first wave of crisis, especially the “extremely poor and overtaxed.”27 The starving traveled from village to village searching for food, many “driven to satisfy their cravings with the refuse and garbage of the streets.”28 The 1888–1892 famine came on the heels of the intense immiseration of those who had been forced to grow cotton: “the cultivation of cotton is insisted on, and you see here and there a wretched peasant, with a look of defiance on his face, ploughing up the contracted bed of an old drain or canal in the midst of a vast salt plain.”29 The drought was especially apocalyptic in the Sudan and into Ethiopia, where in some places two-thirds of the population starved to death in a “widespread famine of an appalling character[;] . . . survivors have been driven to cannibalism.”30 “Whole tribes have been completely blotted out,” another observer grimly noted, “and in their places roam the wild beasts, spreading and increasing in fierceness and in numbers, until they bid fair to finish the destruction of the human race.”31 Winston Churchill, who fought in the Sudan in the 1890s, would later write that one should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Egypt’s rulers had long perfected this axiom. Crisis had helped smooth the ascent of people such as ‘Ali and, in the Sudan, the Mahdist Revolution (1881–1899).
But crisis would also lead to their undoing. Popular revolts would become a nearly constant feature of the political landscape, each seemingly more foreboding than the next, until the British intervened and put an end to dissent, at least for a while. (We will explore these issues more in Part Six.) For the British, their main concern revolved around ensuring the continuous supply of cotton and protecting their financial investments, climate disasters notwithstanding.
In the 1860s, Khedive Isma’il (also known as Isma’il the Magnificent and Isma’il Pasha) owed around £10 million to Europe; the country’s most important cotton producer also owed the largest amount to Western bankers, mostly the Rothschilds but also Baring. Isma’il’s debt was not necessarily a problem if Egyptian politics and the price of cotton remained stable and the exploited masses remained quiescent. But neither proved to be the case. The earlier Panic of 1837 had deeply shaken Egypt’s political economy. Cotton had turned profitable again, tremendously so during the American Civil War. Tumbling prices in the 1870s, however, would wreak havoc. In 1865, the value of cotton exports stood at more than £15 million; two years later, that figure had declined to less than half.32 By 1876, Isma’il and the Egyptian state had gone bankrupt in what might have been, according to one expert, the “world’s first modern debt crisis.”33 Four years later came the Law of Liquidation and Evelyn Baring’s arrival in Egypt, his presence backed by the full weight of the British military. In 1882, the British fleet would bomb Alexandria and conquer the country.
The ensuing arrangement called for the management of the newly consolidated £98.3 million of debt (about $13 billion today). Baring got to work, believing that he was part of a noble imperial tradition dating back to the ancients. “The modern Imperialist will not accept the decrees of Nature,”34 he later wrote. No wonder Baring was mostly indifferent to the widespread starvation that convulsed Egypt, arguing that the “many natives who are in debt to banks and merchants” should hurry up and pay their creditors and their taxes.35 Baring’s charge was to put Egypt’s financial house in order, a task that also required mobilizing the military and quashing nationalist dissent. He was suited for these tasks: as a military man in his twenties, he had helped put down the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in the dying breath of two centuries of planter dominance. But he needed money, and Egypt was bone dry. Baring’s attention soon headed south to the Sudan, where aggression and bloodshed had become ways of life and crisis loomed. Baring convinced himself that taxing the Sudan might be one way of solving the Egyptian debt crisis even if it required substantial and costly military commitments. The great diplomat and administrator thus continued what the khedives had pioneered, namely dealing with strongmen and bleeding an already impoverished Sudan dry. The only difference now was that the resulting money ended up in Europe, not in Cairo. And Baring’s successes wouldn’t last. Within years, all these efforts came to an embarrassing end when the Mahdi overthrew Egyptian imperialism. In 1885, British general Charles George Gordon lost his head (and other body parts) in one of the British Empire’s great disasters.
*
The uneasy marriage of guns, finance, and cotton that propelled Egypt’s modern turn had corollaries throughout the British Empire, including in India. Without the flood of weapons across the subcontinent, neither British imperialism nor India’s nineteenth-century economic transformation would have been possible.36 India was fantastically violent. Gun aggression spread across the subcontinent as the British East India Company (BEIC) grew in power and rulers sought to defend themselves or preyed on their own or others to pay their debts to foreigners. Empire and the conversion of large geographical areas into primary production sites for export commodities— especially cotton, tea, and opium—all rested on violence. The combined results were devastating. Slavery and enslavement dramatically expanded, as did debt peonage. Exploitation worsened, and when droughts or floods arrived, tens of millions perished.37 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the BEIC had chipped away at the Mughal Empire and other polities, turning BEIC officers into territorial warlords. One native ruler after another soon fell into punishing indebtedness, thanks to everything from punitive loans and treaties to outright extortion and looting. Conflict pummeled the subcontinent from the middle of the eighteenth century onward. Plundering Bengal, including the nabob’s treasury, became a nearly annual ritual, a key part of the broader creation of a colonial military state in which BEIC officials became “Asiatic princes,” ruling over huge “fertile and populous territories.”38 This transformation of “merchant” into “sovereign” owed everything to the military-commercial revolution.39 Events such as the 1757 Battle of Plassey in Bengal and the 1764 Battle of Buxar in Bihar punctuated the everyday violence already occurring. The Battle of Plassey helped extricate the French from the area; more importantly, the battle solidified British control over Asian trade, especially with China. The “hero” of Plassey was Englishman Robert Clive, one of the most successful and notorious warlords of the eighteenth century. Clive used the profits of violence to purchase grand estates back in England (acquiring political offices proved more difficult in England than in India); as his great critic Edmund Burke put it, Clive deployed “all the vices . . . by which sudden fortune is acquired.”40 From his origins as a lowly servant, Clive had evolved into one of England’s most wealthy and ostentatious individuals and among its most thoroughly corrupt. In addition to other activities, he helped inflate stock prices, which rose 300 percent from 1765 to 1766.41 In the end, Clive was unable to bleach the stains of his own predation: amid rising criticism, the Lord of India slit his throat in a final act of spectacular violence.
Following Plassey, the BEIC extricated diwani rights from the Mughal emperor, or the ability to collect revenue. In the early years, the implementation of this right looked an awful lot like extortion, even looting.
Clive had boasted about the riches that would follow possession, claiming that they would yield “an income [for the BEIC] yearly of upwards of two million sterling, with the possession of three provinces.”42 Tax farming, the system of subcontracting the collection of revenue, became ubiquitous across large areas of the subcontinent, impoverishing peasant farmers.
Profits were considerable.43 By the early 1830s, the BEIC was extorting more than £22 million in taxes yearly, the equivalent of more than £2 billion today (or more than $2.5 billion), most carted home to purchase property, titles, or invest in businesses.44 Extortion and looting became capital, some of it bankrolling industrial manufacturing.
Diwani rights in British hands also spread violence. Deeply indebted Indian rulers turned to brutality to generate the resources to service their obligations. Princes became warlords, attacking others as well as extorting their own subjects and, in the process, eroding the social contract that had once bound ruler and dependent. Instead of protecting subjects, especially in times of duress such as crop failure, many of these rulers now became parasites, sucking wealth from their own people.
Company men such as Clive never called themselves warlords, of course.
They preferred more decorous language to describe their exploits and their supposed spread of civilization. But the horrific violence and utter venality of the BEIC made even British officials blush at the telling. Slowly, the British government intervened in its own creation, beginning with the 1773 Regulating Act, an early and largely feeble step to control what had become a thoroughly corrupt commercial enterprise of organized warlords, men who had turned their monopoly on trade east of the Cape of Good Hope into a regime of nouveau riche tyrants, killing thousands, grabbing territories and states, extorting money, and occasionally hunting people.
India’s commodity revolution emerged out of this world of thuggery. Tea, opium, and cotton exports would be associated with a surge in forced labor, including slavery. (Britain also began importing Indian rice, some produced by slaves.) The BEIC led the effort to bring tea from China. The crop took off especially in Assam in northern India, an area that had already seen vigorous trafficking in slaves and nearly half a century of intense violence.
Into the 1830s, “slavery [in Assam] still continues to a very considerable extent[,] . . . and these poor creatures are bought and sold every day for a mere trifle.”45 In some areas, 7 percent of the population was enslaved.46 Punishingly exploitative indentured servitude would come to characterize the Assam tea industry and would include human trafficking.
This servitude scarcely differed from slavery, however much the British used language to obscure the true nature of these practices.47 Opium production expanded dramatically in Bengal, historically where the BEIC had its strongest foothold, and in Malwa, part of the Maratha Empire, located in the center of the subcontinent. Opium had been cultivated for many centuries, rarely intensively. Like cotton, opium typically formed one of a basket of crops that people might cultivate. Rising global demand for opium would change this situation, although as a cash crop opium is labor-intensive relative to many food crops.
Opium farming requires extensive watering, manuring, weeding, and then scarring of the poppy seed pod to summon the narcotic juice. The latter, in turn, had to be gathered, cured, and packaged. Although small farmers continued planting poppies, some even expanding their cultivation of the plant in response to rising prices and the demands of taxation, over time opium became a crop dominated by larger planters: in places such as Malwa—lauded by the British for its “free economy”—opium farming rarely turned a profit unless it was “undertaken . . . by substantial cultivators,” as governor of Bombay Sir John Malcolm noted.48 The BEIC established a monopoly over Bengal opium production and distribution through its Opium Department, created in 1797, that grew to a staff of over 2,500 clerks backed by the world’s largest military.
49 Many smaller opium farmers ended up indebted to the department for advances.
Across northern India, opium would involve as many as ten million cultivators. The vast majority of these small-scale farmers were beholden to landlords or to “eighteenth-century revenue speculators and military adventurers” whose ability to coerce cultivators had been strengthened by the BEIC.50 Given this environment, it should come as no surprise that debt bondage pervaded these relationships, especially as rents increased with poppy cultivation.51 Farmers, one commentator soberly noted, “live and die in debt.”52 FIGURE 12.1. Opium storage in India, 1882. Reproduced with permission of the British Library. Although the British hoped to exert control over opium production in Malwa, this goal proved too difficult to achieve. Opium production would be dominated by local warlords, like Egypt little more than a command economy. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Malwa society had become thoroughly weaponized, with well-armed members of the aristocracy and the elite, increasingly with Western guns in their hands, taking advantage of the fallout from European imperialism to expand their opium production and distribution.
Many of these armed strongmen were large revenue farmers closely connected with bankers and the military within the princely state. Men such as Appa Gangadhar, whose “authority in north-western Malwa was virtually absolute,”53 helped pioneer intensive opium production by forcing people to plant poppies and organizing the trade of the narcotic. Across Malwa, slavery, especially of women, grew with the poppies. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, Gangadhar and others like him had transformed themselves into emergent capitalists and Malwa into a militarized narcostate.54 *
The other main export crop was cotton, although unlike opium the vast majority of cotton headed to English textile factories. The story of cotton in India in the nineteenth century is often told but is still poorly understood.
The subcontinent has an extremely rich history of cotton cultivation and cloth production going back many thousands of years, with India operating at or near the forefront of global cotton cultivation and cloth production. In the eighteenth century, India exported huge amounts of cotton cloth, as opposed to cotton yarn and raw cotton itself. This cloth material might have been the most widely dispersed commodity in the world throughout much of the century, including in the Atlantic, where the cloth alongside guns helped sustain the slave trade.55 In 1750, calico represented 28 percent of all imports into London from India. Cotton yarn represented just 0.00027 the value of calico, and there was no import of raw cotton at all.56 These ratios began changing starting in the late 1780s, the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution, when the BEIC began a concerted effort to export raw cotton. For a while, the company even used convicts headed to Australia to help load cotton in Bombay. In some areas, BEIC officials had begun collecting revenue paid in cotton, continuing a broader historic practice on the subcontinent by which rulers extracted taxes in kind. Around 1809, the company was managing the shipment of 30 million pounds of Indian cotton, much of it carted by hundreds of thousands of cattle. The company would also export cotton to China and Singapore, in the mid1840s over 150,000 bales yearly, or about 7.43 million pounds.57 The BEIC’s growing embrace of raw cotton took place amid the ongoing looting of the subcontinent. The company had perfected extortion and, like all extortionists, owed its existence to violence, real or threatened. In Berar, located in central India, that “great cotton garden of Hindostan,”58 the nizam, or sovereign, had long fallen deeply into debt, including the funding of his military. One consequence was an increase in lawlessness and violence to generate funds. Famine exploded in 1803; the British meanwhile were busily “coveting these Berars for their cotton.” Englishmen began pressuring the nizam to pay “every item of arrears.”59 Pillaging and the taxation of rural peoples were on the upswing, and “spoilation,” a euphemism for looting, became a regular occurrence.60 It was “all violence throughout,” one contemporary wrote, perpetrated by a massive military presence.61 As the Times of India noted in 1882, the conquest of Berar (completed in 1853) had taken place “solely in order to realize our own extortionate claim.”62 By the time India formally came under British rule in 1858 (a reign that would last until 1947), the idea that the subcontinent comprised a source for raw cotton—and should serve as a recipient of industrially produced British goods—was widely held in England. In India, spinners and weavers were pushed out of business, resulting in an entire industry being largely destroyed; many turned to cultivation and especially to agricultural labor.
Imported cloth swamped the subcontinent as Britain forced India into the ostensibly free market of the world economy. Indian railroads were soon carting away bales of cotton as they snaked their way from the interior to Bombay, returning with Manchester cloth (occasionally referring to corduroy), a new arrival that drove local manufacturers into bankruptcy.
*
India’s cotton revolution, like that in Egypt and the United States, was inextricably connected to global events and world ecology. England’s Cotton Famine immediately encouraged a dramatic expansion of the crop in India. Bombay fell into “all the throes of the share mania. .
. . Every one, save those at Government House, seemed to have gone mad, the speculation craze being hot upon them.” People associated with the BEIC, some of whom had fallen into debt, now made a killing, heading back to England newly rich. The end of the American Civil War likewise sent shudders across India, “a curious example of the interdependence of distant countries.”63 British colonial officials and others forced Indian cultivators to turn to cotton instead of wheat, not the most palatable work, to borrow the words of one. “Abnormal profits” in the boom years led to crisis in bust years.64 By the 1870s, approximately one-third of all Berar’s cultivated land, rich with black soils, was devoted to cotton, a response to both the Cotton Famine and the energetic efforts of the colonial state.65 For some, cotton seemed to have “pitchforked the province into a state of truly ‘unprecedented prosperity.’”66 The Eton-educated Sir Alfred Lyall, in charge of Berar, waxed poetic at the ways the Cotton Famine had “positively electrified” Berar, with cotton now, happily, “the prevailing, absorbing, predominating product.” A summary colonial report in the 1920s declared that the “history” of the region “from 1861 till 1892 was an almost unbroken record of progressive prosperity” except for the “occasional famine,”67 as if mass starvation was an unremarkable fact of Indian life.
Revenues increased “by leaps and bounds” during the cotton boom, making Berar, along with its people, one of the “most flourishing [regions] in India.”68 For his part, Lyall saw prosperity, but by the time he had penned his rosyeyed words, precarity had long since settled in. Famines were a regular occurrence in this heavily militarized zone. By the 1870s Berar was importing food, not necessarily a problem if one had money to pay for grain, the cost of which “has been rising year after year” and since the early 1860s had “risen between twenty-five and forty per cent.” The cotton boom had created “a great and urgent demand for rural labour.” But the result was not improved labor conditions but rather intensified exploitation and increasing landlessness as the well-armed upper caste local elites consolidating their control of the land and ruling their neighbors with an iron fist.69 The cotton boom led to soaring indebtedness disguised as credit, with increasing amounts originating in England, a new financial reality now devouring the Indian countryside. As in the Nile Delta, the expansion and intensification of cotton farming in Berar saw large numbers of people moving into the area, many in abject conditions.70 Moneylending followed.
As early as 1825, merchants based in Bombay were advancing credit to Berar farmers; in 1841 they also became tax farmers as a result of loans to the ruler.
71 Complex financial entanglements reached into Berar throughout the first half of the nineteenth century as local moneylenders began controlling the production and marketing of cotton.
The American Civil War, which created England’s Cotton Famine, “occasioned a vast inflation [increase] of credit” in India, “fed by a corresponding influx of capital seeking investment,” as the Famine Commission would report. “Landholders, under cover of the proprietary rights [read: private property rights] they had acquired, were tempted to improvident borrowing. . . . As indebtedness became more hopeless and inextricable,” the commission continued, “the money-lender resorted more freely to the aid of legal process, and the debtors, exasperated at the invasion of their cherished rights in their holdings, were driven to despair, and finally on several occasions to rioting and violence.”72 By the 1870s, then, most farmers were deeply indebted, paying exorbitant rates of interest to moneylenders. Lines of credit snaked their way from London to Bombay and Hyderabad and elsewhere into the interior.
73 By the time credit reached the poor cultivator, it came with interest rates of 24 percent or more, at times as much as 50 percent, four to ten times the rate of interest that the local moneylender paid for his money.
74 This meant that moneylenders ultimately controlled land even if they did not farm it and that most cultivators were both deeply enmeshed in the new cotton economy and utterly unstable as a result. Farm suicides became a fixture of rural Indian life, persisting well into the twentieth century, although legislation beginning with the 1934 Berar Moneylenders Act began the process of trying to regulate usurious lending practices.75 These developments created for many a death spiral, in which people could not extricate themselves from dependence on cotton even as soils became depleted, food supplies dwindled, and debt bondage deepened, scarcely differing from outright slavery.
76 When the monsoons failed, disaster followed. “The more the area of food stocks is diminished in favor of fibres,” one official bluntly stated, “the greater the danger from any failure of the monsoon becomes.”77 And this is exactly what happened. In famines between 1833 and 1900, many tens of millions of Indian people died from starvation, perhaps a total of over 30 million dead. In the mid-1850s during the transition from BEIC to formal British rule, famine broke out with particular severity, causing dreadful suffering especially in the region just south of Berar. One observer noted “starving wretches . . . so emaciated, and so shriveled and weak[,] . . .
[and] dead bodies lying by the roadside, creatures who had sunk down to die.” In the 1860s, millions died during the boom in cotton production in Berar, at least 1.5 million starving to death and countless others experiencing “incalculable suffering, short of death.” In 1880 the famine was even worse, with “parents devouring their children . . . [and] children killing their parents.”78 In Egypt and in India, colonial officials liked to blame tragedy on the weather, as if famine was as timeless and unchanging as the hills. When this appeal did not suffice, they blamed things gone wrong on the intrinsic character of the people over whom they ruled and not infrequently terrorized. But even the most dogmatic imperialist knew that these jejune excuses were inadequate. Officials were well aware of the ecological transformations that cotton wrought. Cotton and empire remade the Indian landscape, remapping land, changing land tenure, instituting taxation, modifying how cotton was planted, and destroying forests, all born of the peculiar marriage of money and muskets. Early in the boom, BEIC officials began noticing the soil depletion. In Berar, one noted, “the deterioration has been excessive, and the richest and most easily cultivated soil in the world has been nearly depopulated, chiefly by the oppressions of Government.”79 Lyall wrote of the “great alteration of climate [that] is apparently owing to the spread of cultivation. With the clearing of land the influences (shade and the roots of the trees) which helped to conserve moisture have been removed.
Not only is it that the rain-fall drains off more rapidly,” he continued, “but the face of the soil is exposed to evaporative influences to a far greater extent than formerly.”80 The problem went beyond the soil demands of cotton and changes to the monsoon system. The latter, we now know, was already being shaped by industrial CO2 emissions that were beginning to warm the Indian Ocean as early as the 1820s. The weather systems upon which vast populations depended were changing, even if it would take a century for humans to grasp the dynamics of climate and global warming. But they had enough data to understand that problems were appearing. They had outstanding information culled from their many weather stations. They watched the land becoming more vulnerable to torrential downpours and extended periods of drought. The problem was indifference. Reports of diminished soils, chronic and punishing indebtedness, and terrible suffering and mass starvation did little to stop the relentless quest to ensure the plentiful and cheap supply of cotton, tea, and opium. Lyall knew the realities better than most. He barely lifted a finger as millions starved.
13 Farming War IT IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT that railroads changed the face of the planet. It is less well known that Africa played an important part in this revolutionary development. Within just a few decades, surging iron production and the refinement of steam engines effectively stitched the world together with steel tracks and wooden sleepers. With their percussive thumping, hissing, and screeching grind of metal on metal, trains transformed everything from how goods were delivered to the world’s auditory landscapes. Even animals adapted to the sounds and movements of the strange contraptions running through their worlds. Like the factories of Lancashire and New Bedford, railroads were the very face of the Industrial Revolution. Without them, our modern world of global warming would not exist, if only because of their central role in transporting coal. Nearly two centuries have passed since the first modern train appeared in England. It was mid-September 1830, the end of an unusually wet English summer, when that first train grumbled its way from Liverpool to Manchester. It was traveling from Britain’s most important port tied to the Atlantic slave trade to the city that became synonymous with the Industrial Revolution. Throngs came to watch the fabulous machine steam past. A few dignitaries arrived, hoping to ride in one of the carriages, until an accident left one person dead and they thought it better to remain as spectators. An even smaller group planned on destroying the tracks upon which the noisy and smoky marvel traveled and began our new age of transportation.
Within years that train—and countless others like it—would be carting fantastic loads of goods, as much as five hundred tons of slave-produced cotton in a single trip, destined for factories where workers labored beneath the yellow glow of whale oil lights. Just a few years earlier, this would have required more than four hundred horses and nearly one hundred of the largest carts. That was all in the past now. By the 1870s railroads could be found nearly everywhere, from Argentina to South Africa. In England between 1830 and 1860, total rail miles increased by a factor of 106, from 98 miles to more than 10,400. In the United States it was more than 30,000 miles. Train engines used massive amounts of coal, anywhere from ten to twenty-five tons daily, a major contributor to the global increase in greenhouse gases.
Coal production in the United Kingdom grew fivefold between 1830 and 1870. In the United States, the figure was by a factor of over forty-five. Pig iron and steel increased by similar degrees of magnitude.1 Railroads comprised one part of a broader global transportation revolution. Steamships also dramatically decreased shipping costs and vastly increased the speed of moving goods and people. The bison bones that ended up in Detroit and the raw cotton from India, Egypt, and the United States that found its way to Manchester depended on these technological innovations that brought the world together in fundamentally new ways.
All these new machines produced enormous amounts of friction and heat.
Ever since the invention of the wheel and axle and the birth of wheeled transport some six thousand years ago, humans have battled the inviolate laws of physics, including the force that arises when one object rubs against another. Humans have needed lubricants, usually fats from animals, either tallow or soap and water. Steam engines and especially trains presented a vastly more complex challenge: their enormous weight (a modern coal freight train might weigh thirty million pounds), the use of metal wheels, gears, axles, and bearings, and the speeds at which the machines moved all posed new challenges. In the best of circumstances, early axles required “greasing every 100 miles or less”;2 just the British railroads required thirteen thousand tons of lubricant yearly in the 1860s. (This would require slaughtering and rendering more than three hundred thousand nicely fattened Yorkshire cows.) FIGURE 13.1. Liverpool-to-Manchester train. Bury Ackermann, Travelling on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1831. Science Museum Group, 1945–48.
But as industrialists soon discovered, a lubricant that might work in the winter was apt to fail in the summer. The results were costly and occasionally catastrophic. Inadequately greased axles led to fires and derailments. (The horrific 2023 Ohio train disaster was caused by an overheated axle.) Nineteenth-century chemists and engineers immediately began trying to solve the problem; some had cut their teeth working in the whale oil industry. One challenge centered on design: how to come up with contraptions that would hold and distribute the lubricant effectively. A second challenge was identifying the best lubricant. Tallow was not ideal, especially in steam engines, reacting in ways that produced corrosion. There were also not enough animals to make enough fat. Whale oil remained an excellent lubricant, but supplies of the expensive oil were inadequate.
Engineers explored combining whale oil with latex and later experimented with mineral oil, a by-product of refining crude petroleum. (Another byproduct was petroleum jelly, which parents still use on their babies’ bottoms; the manufacturing process used bone char). But until the rise in the 1860s of petroleum-based lubricants derived from crude oil—from bearing grease to crankcase oil and, decades later, automatic transmission fluid—some of the world’s smartest minds were absorbed with how to keep the Industrial Revolution going round and round. The entire carbon-based economy depended on it.
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Another possible solution involved vegetable oils. But neither England nor the United States had any to speak of. (Peanuts took off in the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century.) Olive oil presented multiple challenges, including the fractious politics that regularly swept across France, Italy, and Greece. Industrialists finally found an answer to their problems in tropical fats, especially from Africa, and particularly the gooey orangish fat from West African palm oil that people used in cooking. (The oil solidifies at cooler temperatures and was usually referred to as “palm grease.”) British West Africa palm oil imports rose from just over 290,000 pounds in 1790 to almost 82 million pounds in 1854, an increase by a factor of over 282. In 1859 nearly 8 million pounds of palm oil left for England just from Lagos, the amount of fat one hundred thousand healthy full-grown cows would have rendered. West Africa continued exporting palm oil through the end of the century, in 1895 more than 135.5 million pounds.
Five years earlier, total British and French exports of African palm oil reached a high of over 200 million pounds, an increase by a factor of 700 in a century.
Vegetable fats became the link between an earlier epoch of tallow and the new world of carbon-based lubricants. In the last quarter of the 1800s, petroleum began supplanting tropical oils, although palm oil and its derivatives remained important as chemists invented a wide range of lubricants that would end up in everything from weapons to airplanes to sexual aids. These oils were used especially in heavy industry, including weapons and the manufacture of explosives. The 380,000 tons of napalm that wreaked enormous human suffering and environmental damage across Vietnam contained palmitic acid first derived from palm oil.
Along with peanut oil and other tropical fats such as shea butter, palm oil was also used in soaps, perhaps most famously the Palmolive and Ivory soap brands that can still be found on grocery store shelves around the world today. It was also used in candles. Only much later, beginning in the 1910s, did it become the principal ingredient in margarine. Recently palm oil has seen a remarkably destructive resurgence in Indonesia, where the destruction of forests has been a major contributor to global CO2 emissions.
It is the dominant, nearly inescapable, vegetable oil in the world today, found in nearly every processed food we eat and deployed in the production of biodiesel.3 (The oil derived from palm is widely regarded as unhealthy, containing high levels of saturated fats.) For a time, casks of palm oil joined people chained together in the bowels of ships traversing the Atlantic Ocean. With the ending of the slave trade, these ships were repurposed to carry oil; along with whale oil ships, these were our earliest tankers. Abolitionists hailed the arrival of ships laden with oil into ports such as Liverpool that had played such an outsize role in human trafficking and now served as a central hub in the new industrial economy. Trade in the lubricant, they believed, marked the successful transition away from the evils of slavery and toward “legitimate commerce.” “Palm oil is now the great article of commerce supplied by the Coast of Africa,” came the adorations from Liverpool.4 Political economists also lauded the development, which in their imagination marked a commercial revolution by African farmers, another example of the genius of entrepreneurialism and trade or the fantasy that vast amounts of underutilized land and labor could be turned to productive use once the free market was allowed to work its economic magic.
But the transition away from the Atlantic slave trade belied a more complicated and paradoxical history. The export of palm oil and other primary products took place alongside the enslavement and shipment of Africans to the Americas and the continued arming of the continent. The period from roughly 1815 through the 1850s would see a high volume of human trafficking, more than 3.3 million enslaved Africans, almost a quarter of the total number transported over nearly three centuries; anywhere between 6 million and 9 million died to produce this number of people cast into the Atlantic. While 1.6 million came from West-Central Africa, nearly a million came from the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, some of the same areas that were beginning to export palm oil and where the British would soon lob bombs in their conquest of Nigeria beginning in the 1850s. (Nearly another half million enslaved people, if not more, were exported from East Africa.) The enslavement of Africans did not suddenly dwindle with the rise of British abolitionism or with the rise of agricultural exports, although increased naval patrolling of Africa’s shores produced multiple crises across the politically fragmented continent, where the livelihoods of warlords rested on violence and enslavement.5 “Legitimate commerce” was anything but. Palm oil took off in the same locations where guns flowed and warlordism reigned. Weapons imports had collapsed with the British ending of the slave trade, only to rebound just a few years later.
“Guns, gunpowder, and cloth are the staple articles” in the palm oil trade, one contemporary report noted.6 By midcentury, Liverpool was exporting on average 2.2 million pounds of gunpowder annually just to West Africa, at a time when palm oil was one of the city’s most important imports; this was as much gunpowder (or more) as at any time since the end of the seventeenth century.
7 West Africa represented nearly half of global exports of gunpowder from the port city.
Other countries including the United States were also exporting large quantities of weapons to West Africa, most of it shipped from Eastern Seaboard ports, the powder manufactured by what would become one of the world’s most powerful companies, DuPont, which had begun manufacturing gunpowder at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many of DuPont’s products made their way into weapons, most infamously the napalm that incinerated large areas of Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.8 More gunpowder was heading to Africa, by a considerable degree, along with guns and shot, most of it in the hands of warlords.9 Never slow to miss an opportunity, warlords swiftly turned their attention to export farming, by either organizing the production of crops or controlling the flow of palm oil and other vegetable fats to the coast, the only way they could maintain access to weapons. Such was the case in areas along the Gold Coast, Dahomey, and into parts of Yorubaland, areas that had played key roles in the Atlantic slave trade. Dahomey, the brutal state utterly dependent on imported weapons and the capture and sale of people, had definitively asserted its independence from Oyo by 1823, only to collapse into protracted civil war shortly thereafter.
A region infamous for violence now became a major exporter of palm oil. Exports from this area took off in the 1830s, a time when large numbers of slave ships filled with human cargo were headed especially for Cuba. Enslavers became oil barons.10 King Gezo, warlord par excellence and like many deeply in debt, helped pave the way for this transition, making the palm tree a “fetish” and establishing plantations near the capital of Abomey before his death in 1858.11 Others followed his lead, including Brazilian emigres and an assortment of smaller producers.
Nigeria’s Yorubaland was somewhat different. The various city-states that had comprised the Oyo Empire, for example Ibadan and Abeokuta, successfully resisted and subverted royal power based in the capital OyoIle. The slave trade and the large influx of weapons into this region had long favored political fragmentation and the privatization of violence. The ending of the external slave trade and the temporary decline in weapons imports sent shudders among the elite, whose power had rested on human trafficking and the gun trade. Out of the apocalyptic violence of the 1820s and 1830s, culminating in the Oyo Empire’s collapse in 1836, emerged “a new era of war-lord-ism,” and this new era would be saturated in palm oil.12 Abeokuta almost immediately turned to the product, exporting fifteen thousand tons by midcentury, almost all of it passing through Lagos, which was swiftly becoming as much a weapons depot as a thriving oil terminus.
Other areas followed.13 Within a few years, Abeokuta and Ibadan had emerged as important producers of some of the finest palm oil, effectively competing with Krobo farmers in the area heading toward Ghana and farmers across the Niger Delta. By the late 1800s Yorubaland had fifteen million oil palms, many planted by farmers. Among the largest producers were the new strongmen, who were often the old warlords in new guise. Other strongmen controlled the oil of smaller producers by demanding tribute, typically at the point of a gun: in other words, through extortion. An entire class of “warboys” emerged here by which warlords squeezed oil from smaller producers.14 Invariably, this oil was sold to Europeans in exchange for weapons, along with other goods.
These developments were profoundly contradictory. The most important agricultural revolution since the beginning of farming was now inextricably tied to the Industrial Revolution and to the weapons flooding into the continent. Endemic violence was a central instrument of modern economic development, including pervasive militarism and proliferating private armies. One powerful warlord’s praise poem described the situation as follows: Ibikunle! the Lord of his Quarters, The Warrior! as regular as the Muslim prayers.
The affluent with enough to spend and to spare at the brewery.
Owner of farm land at Ogbere, Ibikunle also has a farm at Odo-Ona, A wide expanse of farm land, Extensive as far as the city wall at Adesegun, (Ibikunle) A stockist of bullet[s] and gunpowder.
15 One of the most powerful men in Ibadan and a well-armed war chief constantly prosecuting violence, Ibikunle grew wealthy trading, extorting, and selling palm oil from his extensive farms. To the east and farther into the interior, Aro warlords also became extortionists. Just years earlier, they had played an important role in the slave trade and in spreading credit, debt, and violence across southern Nigeria from their ritual capital at Arochukwu. Now they entered the palm oil trade, not as producers but instead by trying to extend control over what amounted to thousands of small farmers. Oil now moved along the exact same paths that slaves had traveled on their way to the Atlantic; in fact, slaves carried the produce on their forced marches. Much of the oil headed south to places such as Bonny and Old Calabar, important centers in the palm oil trade in the Bight of Biafra. Ekpe warlords, who had played such an important part in the Atlantic slave trade, also became powerful brokers in the palm oil business. William Dappa Pepple, the ruler of Bonny and almost certainly a member of Ekpe or another ritual association, became “an immensely successful oil trader,” according to one historian.16 Other armed operators directly involved in the slave trade also trafficked in oil. These were men such as Duke Ephraim (Efiom Edem), one of Anterra Duke’s partners, the warlord we encountered earlier, the “King of Warr” who ruled from Nigeria’s Cross River during the overseas slave trade. By 1841, abolitionists convinced themselves that Ephraim had seen the wisdom “to exchange the products of labour rather than the labourer itself.” They noted with approval that Duke’s Town exported four thousand to five thousand tons of palm oil annually, enough to keep many of Britain’s trains running on time.17 But they scarcely commented on the slavery and violence at the center of the palm oil revolution.
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Why couldn’t abolitionists acknowledge this contradiction? British abolitionists had a hard time understanding slavery outside the milieu of the Jamaican sugar plantation, where the connections to England were blazingly and brutally clear. They convinced themselves that products such as palm oil had to be better—much better—than trafficking in human bodies.
They rarely commented on the weapons flooding the African continent or on the connections between guns and the products that greased industry and later cleaned their skin.
“Legitimate commerce” was the way forward, they argued, for ending slavery and spreading Christianity and civilization.
The reality was far more complex and disturbing. As long as weapons continued spreading around the world and people could get away with it, the powerful enslaved the weak. It had happened in Egypt and in India, and it was happening across parts of the Americas well into the nineteenth century. In sub-Saharan Africa slavery had been steadily increasing, both the numbers of slaves and the intensity of exploitation, much of it directly tied to the sharp rise in agricultural exports and weapons imports. Nigeria’s Sokoto Caliphate, founded in 1804 by Usman dan Fodio, for example, rested squarely on violence and slavery. This West African empire engaged in both plunder and production, raiding various peoples and putting them to work on extensive estates growing cotton, indigo, and other agricultural crops. Enslaved peoples likely comprised more than 25 percent of the caliphate’s population by the 1820s, a figure that would increase to perhaps as high as 50 percent by 1900, or anywhere from 1.25 million to 2.5 million people.18 By the middle of the nineteenth century much of Africa was awash in slavery, with vast areas now slave societies. There were more slaves laboring inside Africa than anywhere else on the planet, in both absolute numbers and in many areas as a percentage of the total population. In regions tied to the export economy and into which slaves were shunted, upwards of 50 percent or more of the population might be enslaved, percentages similar to Mississippi just before the outbreak of the American Civil War.
These were unpleasant truths in an industrializing world that could not run without steady supplies of lubricants and other raw goods, a world that turned on guns, finance, and slavery. Europeans would insist that slavery in Africa was different, by which they meant less onerous, certainly nothing like in Jamaica and the American South. It was but a small step to imagine that slavery in Africa was in fact so mild that the word “slave” scarcely applied. Plus, human bondage was such an ancient institution and an intrinsic feature of African culture that slavery didn’t really have a history.
It was as much an unremarkable part of daily life as sleeping, eating, and crop cultivation.
Not surprisingly, slave masters embraced this sentiment.
Slaves held different opinions. There was nothing mild about servitude.
They escaped when they could, and as the century wore on, they did so in greater and greater numbers. And when they could access decent enough weapons, they rebelled.19 West Africa’s commercial revolution was thus accompanied by a dramatic expansion of slavery and the ongoing militarization of a continent. Households wanting to sell oil on the external market invariably encountered extortionist warlords. Indebtedness, long an African problem, continued in this new age of palm oil, including among warlord merchants.
They depended on guns to extort and to reduce others to servitude, and they depended on European credit to obtain trade goods. Most owed someone something, and many were massively in debt, in Old Calabar more than £400,000 in 1857 (nearly £57 million today).
European traders in turn were in debt to lenders back home and were keenly aware of market conditions.20 Debt was (and in much of Africa still is) an old story. It had long been enmeshed in the very fabric of social life, ultimately connecting families in the interior with people and institutions many thousands of miles away.
These relationships had deepened since the middle of the eighteenth century, with the rapid escalation of the slave trade and the millions of weapons and thousands of tons of gunpowder flooding Africa. Now with the surge in demand for lubricants to run the Industrial Revolution’s new machines, the import of weapons and the export of tropical fats became two sides of the same commercial coin.
But the world was changing—and fast. Raising crops and manufacturing goods requires a modicum of stability at crucial nodes along the supply, production, and distribution chains, much different from economies based on hunting, whether humans or other animals. The world that modern guns had helped create was increasingly in conflict with the requirements of modern capitalism.
There were also changes on the ground. The number of Europeans on the West African coast and the immediate hinterland accelerated from the 1820s: these were missionaries, growing numbers of government representatives, and traders seeking to secure shipments of a commodity central to industry and more than willing to use violence to enforce their debt obligations. Everyone had guns, even occasionally men of the cloth.
Competition among European and Western merchants was also rising. In West Africa, the number of British traders per British port rose from 21 in 1830 to 150 in 1870, more than a sevenfold increase. The British weren’t the only ones in the region: Americans, Germans, and others also tried to cash in on the palm oil revolution. Most of these men were utterly rapacious, wrote a British officer, “palm oil ruffians” for whom “no infamy or enormity” was too great.21 Well armed, they were more than willing to subvert social conventions, breaking the “trust” that had governed AfricanEuropean trade for centuries.
That “trust” had been vital to the way warlords maintained their control and power. Men such as Pepple, the king of Bonny, on Nigeria’s coast, and the most powerful member of the broader system of canoe houses that organized trade, vigilantly asserted control over who could have contact with traders. These men threatened and enacted violence against those who trod on their turf. People found violating their oligopoly were killed. Fierce measures notwithstanding, the control enjoyed by these strongmen would weaken in the second half of the century as the European presence increased. Pepple’s power, for instance, declined rapidly from the late 1840s. He was deposed by treaty in 1854 and died a broken and indebted man a dozen years later.
22 Europeans chafed at the African oligopolies, which they believed cut into their profits even if at the very same time they were plying warlords with weapons. Ruffians rallied to the cry of free trade while doing everything possible to reduce competition. The creation of courts of equity as early as the 1850s offered an ostensibly legal instrument to assert their control over trade and to enforce debt, particularly to the detriment of smaller African traders.
These courts might not have been particularly successful at establishing a rule of law, but they were effective in raising tensions. European traders pleaded for government intervention (consuls were established from the 1850s) when it served them, including warships, and criticized intervention when it didn’t.
Steamships had begun carrying oil in the 1850s; by 1885, virtually all oil was carried by them, over ninety thousand tons. With the advent of steam came a steep decline in oil prices. By the 1870s there were significant transformations in the oil business, especially rising competition and the increasing availability of petroleum-based lubricants. West Africa was no longer “the Eldorado it once was,” bemoaned the commercial publication the Africa Times in 1862. According to the Church Missionary Society a decade later, competition had become “insane.”23 And violence was also being directed against Europeans, with attacks rising substantially from the 1860s. Bloodshed, of course, went both ways, although violence against Europeans increased steadily over the years. Such was “the rule of the revolver.”24 Violence had long been central to the political economy of West Africa. Even as oil exports continued apace and with it a deepening of slavery, conflict rose steadily throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
Slaves played an important role in these unfolding dramas. The spread and intensification of slavery was met by resistance, most often in the form of desertion. From the 1850s and in some areas continuing into the twentieth century, West African slaves fled their masters in ways not too dissimilar to what would unfold in the United States after 1861, when people up and left.
And in both cases new regimes would emerge to put the newly free back in their so-called places.
A series of wars broke out in the eastern delta between the 1860s and 1880s, while Yorubaland experienced a second wave of conflict following the epochally violent civil wars of the 1820s and 1830s. But while violence had been ever-present since the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, these were new days. Entering the fray—indeed central actors in its creation—were European warlords, men committed to violence and extortion whether by warship, revolver, or, increasingly, the Gatling gun. African warlords could resist or accommodate to the new circumstances. One thing was unmistakable. The age of European empire had arrived.
PART SIX EMPIRE TWILIGHT OF THE WARLORDS
14 Conquering Africa, Part One “THOUGH WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF WAR OURSELVES,” the New York Times matter-of-factly reported on October 20, 1861, “we must not lose sight of what other nations may be doing.”1 The American Civil War had begun six months earlier; many thousands had died. Three-quarters of a million people would perish by the conflict’s end four years later, about 2 percent of the total population and 5 percent of the whites who joined the Confederacy, still the deadliest war if not the longest in American history.
For over a decade the newspaper had been reporting on conflicts embroiling vast areas of the globe: Algeria beginning in the 1830s, India and China in the 1840s and 1850s, and, closer to home, the US invasion of Mexico in 1846. War seemed to be everywhere, the first conflicts in our age of global warming. The 1861 article covered the British bombardment of the West African town of Porto Novo, where Dahomey’s warlords controlled the production and flow of large quantities of palm oil on its way to the world’s industrial centers, much of it exchanged for the weapons that kept these strongmen in power. A decade earlier, the New York Times had similarly written of the British bombing of nearby Lagos, another vital hub in the palm oil and arms trade and, like Dahomey, entangled in the politics of empire and a mad scramble for industrial resources that led to warships appearing on the African coast.
The same year that the Royal Navy lobbed bombs on Porto Novo, the warlord ruler of Lagos who had grown rich from the trade in guns, palm oil, and slaves signed the Treaty of Cession. Lagos became a colony.
The New York Times also reported on developments that it rarely connected to its coverage of war and empire: the droughts, famines, and ecological catastrophes that marked the beginning of a new age for the planet. Between 1856 and 1865, drought had its grip on large parts of the United States, including the South. Confederates struggled to find food; a number starved while the planter elite, facing the ecological limits of their agricultural revolution, hung on to fantasies of an ever-expanding frontier of cotton and slavery that might extend right across the seas. Drought and food shortage shaped the Civil War, including making it easier for slaves to take their freedom; these crises may well have helped bring the conflict to a close.2 Much of North America would suffer punishing droughts during the remainder of the nineteenth century, especially in the 1870s and 1890s, the same decades when the country spread westward at breakneck speed and animals and people were brought to the edge of extinction. In the Gilded Age (1870s–1900) of the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers, large areas of North America turned brown, dried up, and died.
The United States was not unique. Droughts and what climate scientists call “weather perturbations” afflicted much of the planet in the second half of the nineteenth century. In several areas, drought and political conflict conspired to create widespread food shortages resulting in extensive starvation. In the famines caused by the 1875–1878 Great Drought, which gripped large swaths of the globe, more than fifty million people died.3 Vast swaths of humanity knew that something was happening, although only a few made the connection between climate and the new industrial economy. Western scientists working in the 1820s and 1830s had explained the mechanisms of heat absorption in the atmosphere. In 1857, Eugène Huzar wrote that “the world will emit billions of cubic metres of carbonic acid [carbon dioxide] and carbon oxide, and, since the forests will have been destroyed, these hundreds of billions of carbonic acid and carbon oxide may indeed disturb the harmony of the world.”4 Much of this early research was widely circulated, including to the reading public. No prophet or a soothsayer, Huzar was a humble man of science who was following the evidence. Just a few years later the head of the Royal Institute in London, John Tyndall, said much the same: “Carbonic acid diffused through the air,” he warned, would warm the planet and create “all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.”5 These climatic events and the crises tied to them marked the earliest observable instances of a warming planet.
For five hundred years, Earth had seen the cool and, in some areas, generally wetter conditions of the Little Ice Age. Now that age was coming to an end, part of the planet’s eternal natural warming and cooling cycles. And a new epoch was beginning, one increasingly shaped not simply by natural rhythms but also by the emission of industrial greenhouse gases. Events such as the massive 1815 Tambora volcano eruption near Bali helped postpone global warming by depositing massive amounts of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anywhere between sixty and eighty megatons (or sixty million to eighty million tons, the weight of about two hundred Empire State Buildings crushed into dust and thrown up into the air). The eruption, which temporarily cooled temperatures, left Europe without a summer and with many starving.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, signs of a warming planet were becoming unmistakable particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, where peoples across Africa, Asia, and the Americas warned that the world was changing before their eyes. A century of industrial emissions tied to globalized violence and slavery was beginning to alter planetary systems in subtle but unmistakable ways. The Northern Hemisphere’s oceans especially had begun warming in the 1820s and 1830s, and the continents began warming about two decades later. Even very small increases in sea surface temperatures impacted climatic systems. Repeated volcanic eruptions helped postpone what today seems inevitable and, potentially, catastrophically irreversible: human-created global warming.6 Warlords had thrived in the worlds created by the Little Ice Age and the military-commercial revolution.
International trade had skyrocketed, and with it came the demand for a vast range of goods, from beaver pelts to sugar to human beings. The unholy marriage of finance and weapons that propelled greed and violence drove these changes, especially the global spread of unfree labor as warlords settled down and shifted from plunder to production. They did so nearly everywhere, from the southern United States to Egypt, across large areas of sub-Saharan Africa, and throughout Asia and much of the Americas.
More than a century of violence had proven cruelly vital to the Industrial Revolution that could never have existed without the constant infusion of raw materials: the palm oil that greased machinery, the cotton grown by slaves, the sugar that kept workers at their jobs, the whale oil that lit factories, and the bison leather belts that, for a time, kept machines spinning. This was the world that warlords created, one dominated by nonstate actors on a playing field marked by political fragmentation. Guns were the pivot upon which all activity turned, the instruments of modern barbarism that made our world. Without guns, there would have been no global spread of slavery. Without guns, there would have been no Mortecene.
But the world of these bruisers grew more and more unsteady and untenable. Predation produced chaos, violence begot violence, and events had a way of spiraling. Even when warlords successfully extended political control, these triumphs were as unstable as they were short-lived. And they remained, at their core, fundamentally violent, utterly dependent on guns as modes of power.
Slavery and other forms of unfree labor had their own contradictions, including the explosion of indebtedness among slave owners and, of course, the unremitting resistance of the unfree and the exploited. During the American Civil War, enslaved people fled and refused to work, less an outright rebellion than a slow unraveling of slavery; they didn’t wait for Union troops to arrive to declare their freedom from bondage. In Jamaica, the attempt to reassert control over former slaves led to outright rebellion in 1865, an experience that decades later shaped Evelyn Baring’s iron fist administration of Egypt. In French West Africa beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the early part of the twentieth century, amid intensifying exploitation and drought, slaves—in the end, upwards of one million— began deserting their masters.
Beyond slavery itself, core areas of industry also saw widespread protest and state violence.
England saw the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of workingclass protestors in Manchester and in the late 1830s and 1840s the millionsstrong Chartist protests that demanded wage laborers’ rights and political democracy. On the other side of the Atlantic, workers’ protests racked the United States as early as the 1830s but especially during the Gilded Age, often led by miners and steel and railroad workers. Hundreds died at the hands of the police and private militias in these struggles.7 Production required the imposition of order. The future of capitalism, the very future of industries burning fossil fuels, depended on enough stability to secure resources and protect private property. But what kind of order and at what cost? This became the nineteenth century’s most pressing political question. Potential answers were fiercely contested as the modern globalized world began to emerge, with humans increasingly interconnected and beginning to alter planetary systems by burning ever larger amounts of fossil fuels. The crises and conundrums of warlordism that the West had largely created ultimately led to formal political interventions particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century, although in some areas a few decades earlier. Warlords were disarmed or at least pacified. This process was itself intensely bloody and stood among the most dramatic moments in world history, whether the creation and consolidation of states, the making of territorial empires in the Americas, or the spread of European imperialism across Africa and Asia. In crucial ways, they were all of a piece.
*
Between 1871 and 1901, the British Empire expanded massively by at least 4.5 million square miles. The most punctuated formal seizure of land came in two breathless decades of conquest starting in the mid-1880s. More broadly, between the 1840s and the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, Europe turned some 9 million square miles into colonial possessions, an area more than twice the size of China. In the same decades that saw British and other European powers scrambling into Africa, the United States teetered on collapse but still managed to double in size in a period of extraordinary violence that ranged from the battlefields of Gettysburg to the killing fields of the Dakotas. On the other side of the Northern Hemisphere Russia did much the same, pressing into Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska. In one form or another, states eventually triumphed wherever violence had been privatized.
We are accustomed to drawing a bright line separating empire from the nation-state. We describe the former as large, heterogeneous, and often global and, to many minds, archaic.
The very word “empire” seems antiquated if not atavistic and reactionary. Nation-states, by contrast, we regard as smaller and more homogenous and, most of all, modern. Surely, we think, there exists some basic or “inner incompatibility of empire and nation,”8 as the political scientist Benedict Anderson once wrote, with the latter naturally taking shape out of the ashes of the former. After all, the world we inhabit today is one of nation-states that arose out of fallen empires.
But the reality isn’t quite that simple. Empire and nation-state are, in fact, variations on a single theme; rather than one superseding the other, they developed concurrently. Both “represent . . . different or alternative strategies for pursuing or consolidating power,”9 and both aim or aimed to end the barbarous age of warlords. Both are also inextricably tied to the Mortecene and unfolded with the beginning of global warming; indeed, they were central to its emergence. Both also entailed processes of colonization, of extending control and sovereignty (however complex or layered) over territories: establishing borders and administrations and seeking uniformity. And both grappled with difference and incorporation as state power extended over the spaces occupied by diverse political societies that had been marked by rampant warlordism. Nation-states embarked on what amounted to “internal colonization,” such as the centuries-long processes by which France’s “hexagon” became “French” or at least more “French” by insisting that everyone speak the way Parisians did.
Similar processes developed elsewhere, including Great Britain and also the United States, although it has remained a somewhat jumbled (if not structurally confused) polity, both a nation-state and a territorial (and overseas) empire.10 Both empire and the nation-state brought an end to the era of warlordism that had thrived for 150 years as guns manufactured in the West spread across the globe. Neutralizing the warlords and establishing order was a difficult and protracted process. The West became more militarized as it went about disarming rogue threats, pursuits that amounted to a “military revolution.”11 Sometimes these men were defeated on the battlefield; frequently, this process entailed attacking the same strongmen one had earlier plied with weapons. Sometimes they were bought off.
Often, warlords were pacified and folded into a new political order. After all, they knew which way the winds were blowing.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the world that had been created by warlords had come to an end; many hundreds of millions of people had died in the process. Empire and the triumph of the state brought stability to many areas and a decline in violence, for a time peace and progress even if citizens and subjects were regularly reminded who now had all the guns.
These developments were intensely paradoxical if not hypocritical. The West had armed the world, unleashing violence it could not control and that now threatened its dominance. Partly in response, Westerners created stereotypes of non-Western peoples that conveniently forgot their own role in creating modernity’s muscle men and now justified their conquering the world to make it safe. The West’s nineteenth-century military revolution emerged less from intrastate competition within Europe than as a response to the very barbarism it had created. And a greater irony would soon follow: a deeply armed West would turn its weapons right back on itself in the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century.
*
The ships that laid anchor outside the Nigerian city of Lagos in 1851 were a mishmash, combining the age of sail with the new technologies of iron, steam, paddles, and propellers.
They were also intimidating. One had fortysix guns and the capacity to hurl projectiles weighing eighteen or thirty-two pounds a half a mile or more at velocities approaching 1,500 feet (450 meters) per second.
Lagos’s heavyweights were very well armed. Weapons had been flooding the area for more than a century; the island was as much arsenal as oil terminal. In 1841 lightning had struck the gunpowder stores of Oba Oluwole, blowing the warlord and his palace to bits and throwing Lagos into widening political turmoil. But faced with the Royal Navy on that day in 1851, Lagos didn’t stand a chance. It fell after five days of bombardment, although it would take another decade before Lagos became a formal colonial possession. In the meantime, the weapons shipments continued: the British would keep arming the very people they were bombing.12 The tensions that triggered the 1851 bombardment had been in the mix for several decades and wouldn’t end with the bombing. British warships had expanded their patrolling to bring the Atlantic slave trade to an end; the last ship to make its way to the Americas with human cargo departed Dahomey in 1867 amid its oil boom. Abolition was an affront to African strongmen, many of whom had combined slavery with palm oil and other export crops.
In 1859, nearly four thousand tons of the lubricant departed for England from Lagos alone.
Warlords needed their weapons to both obtain slaves and keep them at work and also to control the oil spigot heading into the Atlantic. Subtler but no less important sources of tension went alongside these events, particularly changes in monetary and property systems and an intensification of debt. Despite considerable fluctuations, the decades-long commodity revolution (roughly 1835–1885) and generally favorable terms of trade created a continent that remained drenched in debt and bound to a monetary world that was becoming far more uniform. It is one thing to barter; it is quite another to conduct one’s business using a single currency under the watchful eye of a warship. This witches’ brew, or what the British conveniently described as so many “internal disturbances,” became more toxic amid deepening competition and conflict between and among African and European warlords, all of them avaricious, and many with private armies, accustomed to using violence to obtain what they wanted. Europeans convinced themselves that Africa held “unlimited resources.”13 This was a common delusion; El Dorados, veritable cities of gold, could be found from Borneo to the Amazon if only one tried hard enough, which usually meant killing people and pressing others into labor, including slavery.
Beginning roughly in the 1820s, European companies and business interests had poured into Africa’s coastal areas and in some places advanced considerably inland. Globally, the world was being covered over in paper agreements underwritten by dreams of untold riches and imperial glory.
14 By midcentury, Africa’s political geography included many hundreds of informal and formal agreements, compacts in which companies—and sometimes individual entrepreneurs—tried to create exclusive zones where they could trade manufactured goods, especially weapons for raw products, and occasionally pursue their political fantasies of becoming rulers. At times these were trade agreements, but as time passed they veered toward political control mechanisms whereby Europeans ostensibly obtained rights of ownership and rule. This was not quite the assumption of formal sovereignty that would begin unfolding later in the century, but it was not too far off either.
Africa, and indeed large areas of the world, was becoming overpopulated with warlords who simultaneously pursued violence and a modicum of stability, at least within the domains they controlled. This was a contradiction in search of a military and political solution. Warlord territories were constantly shifting and interminably contested, and the “rule of the revolver” appeared increasingly combustible. Back in the metropole the situation was equally cantankerous and unclear, with disagreements erupting among financiers, industrialists, humanitarians, and pennypinching bureaucrats and politicians. Everyone knew that violence was on the upswing, alongside what neoclassical economists would describe as a prolonged period of economic growth vital to the Industrial Revolution and the decisive turn to relying on fossil fuels. But things were falling apart, sometimes quite rapidly. The question was how to put everything back together again on a new footing as well as how to secure resources at the lowest costs possible, although what that meant was as yet unclear. In the case of Lagos—and repeated around the world—the British government hoped that it might bomb its way to some sort of clarity.
*
Lagos’s ruler, the warlord King Docemo, signed the 1861 Treaty of Cession while aboard the 878-ton HMS Prometheus. Then nearing the end of its useful life, the more than 150-foot-long ship, with its sails and considerable array of cannons, was also one of the first naval vessels to be equipped with a steam engine and paddles.15 Since the early years of the nineteenth century, a vast area of West Africa, five times the size of the United Kingdom, had seethed with the violence of triumphant warlordism. Massive amounts of gunpowder and weapons had long flooded the region, reaching a thousand miles or more into the interior.
The enslavement of people had continued even as the Atlantic slave trade began declining.
The centrifugal politics of warlords—the privatization of violence and the perversion of power at the expense of centralized authority and the older social contract that had bound ruler and subject—spelled the end of Nigeria’s Oyo Empire and its fabled cavalry. From its wreckage emerged city-states such as Ibadan and Abeokuta where warlords reigned supreme and grew rich and powerful by force, production, and trade in oil, weapons, and other goods. The apocalyptic violence of the 1820s and 1830s that saw the centuries-old Oyo Empire’s collapse in 1836 did not come to a stop, however. Internecine violence continued right up to 1880 and the British annexation. MAP 14.1. West Africa in the age of empire Dahomey had definitively asserted its independence by 1823, with its warlords soon turning their attention from exporting slaves to large-scale palm oil production, roughly following a plantation model. Some five hundred miles inland from the coast, a new predatory empire began emerging in the early years of the nineteenth century: the Sokoto Caliphate, founded by Usman dan Fodio. At its height, the caliphate stretched across much of Central Sudan and ultimately across the Niger River to Ilorin in the south, which just years earlier had declared its independence from Oyo, only to succumb to these new rulers from the north.
Sokoto’s leaders may have preached jihad, but they perfected enslavement, at one point prosecuting slave raids both nearby and as far away as what is now the Central African Republic. Weapons helped: more and more guns moved northward during the nineteenth century, ending up in the hands of local emirs and supporters who ruled largely free of central control. Slavery within the caliphate proliferated. Slaves labored on extensive estates, growing cotton, indigo, and various agricultural crops.
Raw cotton turned to regionally produced cloth, although a small quantity of cotton began making its way to European merchants on the coast. By the 1820s, less than two decades after the Sokoto Caliphate’s 1804 founding, likely more than 25 percent of the entire population of the empire lived as slaves, a figure that would swell to perhaps 50 percent by 1900, or anywhere from 1.25 million to 2.5 million people. Slavery would continue in one form or another into the 1930s, although the British prohibition on raiding and other laws resulted in its slow erosion. Other enslaved people in this general region moved in various directions, including south toward the coast into areas producing export crops such as cocoa and palm oil or west into groundnut-producing zones. In this way, this internal slave trade was directly linked to industrial Europe. (When coastal areas could not source their chattel from the north, they got them locally.)16 Along with towns such as Badagry, Lagos arose out of this miasma of complexity and vast human misery. Earlier with the collapse of Oyo, warlords had bought and sold thousands of slaves, most shipped to Brazil and Cuba. Palm oil now entered the picture as did cotton grown to the north, along with a tsunami of imported weapons and immense quantities of gunpowder. Some of the very same African men who had sold people into the Atlantic slave trade now moved oil. At any one moment, these warlords might own fifty guns, a few small cannons, numerous swords and cutlasses, and a ton of gunpowder.
17 As if things weren’t complicated enough, people from the broader West Africa region as well as from Europe and Brazil also moved into Lagos and its immediate environs. Most of these newcomers arrived heavily armed, creating a place that was cosmopolitan, ruthlessly competitive, prone to killing, litigious, and perpetually fraught. With this new population came new money and new relationships of credit and debt. Maria Theresa thalers from Europe streamed into Lagos, along with British currency; soon the island’s inhabitants owned considerable amounts of silver. It should come as no surprise that the first modern bank appeared here in 1872, just one decade after annexation, and a first chamber of commerce appeared in the late 1880s. By that time British specie was the only legal currency, and officials spent much of their time in court prosecuting locals for failing to pay their debts.18 The presence of galivanting Europeans—some arriving as early as the 1810s—marked a radical departure in African history. For centuries Westerners had been confined to their ships or trading ports, but not anymore. In Lagos, their presence invariably was followed by government officials, or the so-called consul system, reformed in 1825 and brought under the British Foreign Office but still a largely patrimonial edifice defending British economic and strategic interests. Especially from the 1840s, various companies had arrived in West Africa intent on pursuing commercial aspirations, especially palm oil. (Earlier, the 1832 Niger Expedition had set out to pursue commerce, convinced that steamships could effectively transport commodities up and down the river and open Africa’s interior to untold resources.
That expedition was an epochal failure but did little to stem Western appetites for glory and profit. Attempts in the early 1840s also failed.) Outside of Lagos, Europeans entered a riverine world of canoe houses, small villages and towns, and fragmented authority, an area of warlordism par excellence.19 The European traders who showed up in places such as Bonny and Calabar with their money and weapons and fantasies of wealth and empire invariably created conflict, just as they did in Lagos, Badagry, and elsewhere. Africans deeply resented and resisted attempts by European “ruffian” traders to set up their own petty fiefdoms, a reversal of a centuries-old pattern of cross-cultural trade. African leaders imprisoned a number of these wannabe warlords; a few ended up dead. The consul system, intended to manage trade and the beginning of direct political intervention (including forcing Africans to pay their creditors) sprang into gear. The Royal Navy would show up, often at the instruction of consuls.
Treaties would follow, forcing Africans to recognize European suzerainty, followed by other pacts that formally ceded native territory, many if not most made under the cloak of humanitarianism that scarcely hid the weapons they were more than happy to use. The bombing of Lagos in 1851 was followed three years later by the Treaty of Epe between the consul for the Bight of Benin and Lagos’s leading heavyweights and finally by the 1861 Treaty of Cession.20 Events moved from gunpoint to quill and ink and then back again in a remarkably short time period.
“Ruffians” was a polite word for these arrivistes, “who cared little how he obtained his oil,” one critic and military man noted, “so long as he was able to enrich himself. The black man asked for spirits and weapons, and they were accordingly bartered,” even if “his method of trade was producing internecine warfare.”21 These Westerners differed little from African warlords and in most cases were far worse. They refused to be held accountable by locals and did whatever they could get away with; indeed, these Westerners considered killing others and exploiting their birthright.
Many were employed by international corporations and armed with advanced weapons.
Crucially, they also had the ultimate backing of the British government and military.
These Western strongmen were a central part of an economic and political landscape that began changing irrevocably from the 1850s. Steam freighters regularly appeared on the horizon, with their captains on tight schedules well knowing that the grease they were transporting helped keep the trains running on schedule. Companies and their employees frantically—often violently—tried to make money and quash competition in every direction.
Countless treaties and agreements were forged between European companies, colonial officials, and Africans. Functionaries forced debtors to meet their obligations and more generally enforced private property rights.
And increasingly, government functionaries committed to the successes of “free trade” even if they remained wary of getting caught up in local conflicts. All the while, the flood of weapons continued. And most everyone knew that behind all these developments lay the British military, although in London politicians were often reluctant to expend resources dealing with conflicts they scarcely understood.
Here, then, was a world overrun with warlords, a pattern reproduced across much of the continent and indeed across large areas of the planet. In Lagos and much of West Africa, commerce proceeded amid rising competition and violence as trade routes snaked their way over a large oilproducing region that rested on slavery. High prices helped sustain this tense cordiality, or at least it dampened the temptation to escalate skirmishes into open and protracted war. In Lagos itself from midcentury onward, the more established warlords struggled to control the trade in palm oil and, more generally, control an increasingly diverse population, which brought new institutional practices and new pressures into the region.
In the mid-1850s following the bombardment, these men began signing various agreements with the British, but the agreements did little to soften tensions.
Between its creation in 1861 and the 1870s, the Lagos Colony grew to include the immediate area in the interior, becoming the Lagos Colony and Protectorate. Various changes in colonial administration involved Sierra Leone and, closer by, the Gold Coast, in other words, most of the coastal areas where the British had established a presence. To the south in the delta area and what was becoming known as the Oil Rivers, ruffians were busily trying to make as much money as they could as quickly as possible and, if it served them, to make an empire while they were at it.
A new wave of violence convulsed the region between the mid-1870s and the early 1890s.
West African oil prices fell considerably, by some 36 percent in the 1880s, tied to what is often referred to as the Long Depression, which began roughly with the Panic of 1873 and persisted nearly to the end of the century. In the interior, conflict among strongmen involved maintaining access to the flow of weapons from the coast, controlling palm oil production, and continuing to enslave human beings.
Much of the conflict centered on Ibadan, whose slaves helped produce some of the area’s best oil. The violence of the 1870s has been described as the “Trade Wars,” but it would be more accurate to call it a conflict among panicky warlords. Plunging oil prices added fuel to the fire, and the influx of more advanced guns such as Winchesters and Snider rifles helped make the war even more destructive.22 Into this fraught world entered men such as the fanatical, violent, and increasingly paranoid Sir George Taubman Goldie (1846–1925), who came to the Niger region convinced of the importance of growing the British Empire. For over a decade, London officials balked at his persistent requests to form companies.
Undeterred, Goldie gathered various treaties and proclaimed control over much of the lower Niger, convinced he was making the region safe for empire and economic development. His shenanigans would become an important part of the broader politics of the 1884–1885 Berlin West African Conference. By that time he had successfully formed his company, what would become the Royal Niger Company and, much later, Unilever. (Today, Unilever employs 150,000 people and has annual revenues of more than $50 billion. For a century and a half, it has been involved in the palm oil business and the exploitation of vast areas of the tropical world, most recently the rapid, destructive rise of palm oil in Indonesia.) From early on, the Royal Niger Company dominated British West Africa.
By the 1880s, the company had produced a standard form to gather signatures from African chiefs agreeing to cede their territory while pledging to “not interfere with any native laws or customs.”23 The company ended up controlling large swaths of land until its revocation by the British government in 1900, when the company’s wanton violence and fantastic mismanagement had produced such instability that it now threatened British strategic interests. Goldie would serve as the company’s governor for four years before heading off to China. Disaster followed him on a new continent.
None of these developments were clear to the people at the time. Throughout the 1860s and into the 1870s, British policy vacillated, at one moment leaning toward aggressiveness and at the next appearing conciliatory if not simply passive. These shifts would be followed by far more consistent interventions and bloodshed in the next decade. Conflicts among warlords continued during the same period, as did the flood of weapons, the best ones—that is, the most lethal—always finding their way into the hands of company men and the British military.
One thing was clear: the weapons that Europeans now used were frighteningly destructive.
HMS Prometheus, with its cannons and steam engine, was a harbinger of things to come, most famously the Gatling gun and later the Maxim gun. Both saw early uses in Africa.
Whereas the best musketeer might be able to get three shots off in a minute, early Gatling guns could shoot two hundred rounds. Maxim guns were even more destructive, with upwards of five hundred shots per minute or more. A single Maxim gun was equivalent to more than 150 ace musketeers.
These guns found their uses. Companies played hardball, whether with Africans or the home government. Their goal was profit, real or imagined, the clearest demonstration of masculine prowess. They sought agreements enforced by the barrel of the gun, preferably a Maxim, although generally pointed at Africans, not Europeans. Most companies had their own militias, including gunboats. From its base in Asaba in the delta, for example, the Royal Niger Company prosecuted monthly campaigns in the interior, in 1895 attacking warlords in Brass, followed by an assault on the Nupe kingdom. This pattern had been under way in the general region for decades. And when company rule seemed particularly threatened, British naval bombardment kept Africans largely in their place.
In one way or another, then, and in the span of just a few decades, the British had extended varying degrees of formal political control over much of southern Nigeria: the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1884 (renamed the Niger Coast Protectorate a few years later) aimed to secure their economic interests, particularly given the German presence in the Cameroons.
Conquest moved north as the export of raw goods continued, even though the terms of trade were steadily declining. Prices for export crops had all but collapsed by the 1890s as the Long Depression coursed through the region; from about 1905 onward, this decline seemed inexorable. Two years earlier, the British had conquered northern areas belonging to the Sokoto Caliphate. Defeat invariably meant disarming people who held Western guns in their hands and then somehow preventing them from accessing any more. The era of warlords was coming to an end.24 But British conquest produced its own problems, beginning with what “conquest” even meant. The political map resembled a mosaic, with various parties arguing about which pieces were missing. European colonialism had begun with the formation of what amounted to so many private possessions; in many areas this pattern now continued, especially and most notoriously in Central Africa. For some African rulers, conceding sovereignty, an act that could amount to little more than affixing a mark on a piece of paper, might offer an effective strategy for maintaining real control, particularly given the deep ambivalence and contradictions easily observed by locals as Europe blundered into the continent. What “effective occupation” meant was hugely ambiguous. The idea of protectorates offered a convenient fudge, creating more an illusion of control than a real practice.
Most rulers and warlords—African and European alike—saw the writing on the wall, not only adjusting to the official Western presence but also actively cooperating with it. Some African toughies refused rapprochement; they ended up dead, exiled, or otherwise pushed to the margins. Others failed to take advantage of the new opportunities. Many vacillated, at one moment resisting and at another collaborating, trying to bend European power to their advantage, a “political judo” that recognized that many Europeans scarcely had a clue what they were doing. The West’s general modus operandi was to shoot first and figure things out later. 25 Always, amassing power meant giving some of it away. The issue was how exactly this power should be reorganized and redistributed. And here is an uncomfortable truth: many African warlords successfully made the transition to colonial collaboration. Indeed, many of their descendants continue to occupy privileged positions in West Africa and across the continent. In other words, a largely unbroken line exists connecting those African elites who profited from the Atlantic slave trade to those who organized export products using slave labor and then to that decorous colonial Indigenous elite who effectively hid its rather unsavory past. As for the European warlords and the world they created, they too were nimble; they could return home, many to write books regaling their adventures in the “dark continent.” Unilever became one of the most revered and profitable companies in the history of capitalism, and in 1887 Queen Victoria made Goldie a knight.26 The human costs of conquest in West Africa were horrific. We will never know just how many died; Europeans rarely spent much time counting the enemy dead. The situation was particularly dire in the northern areas, which had been struck by recurrent famines following decades of generally drier conditions across large areas of the Sahel, culminating in the disastrous droughts and famines of 1905 and 1913. French forces had been moving through the Niger areas. They “left massive devastation in its wake; whole villages were sacked and burned. Their inhabitants, including women and children, were taken prisoner or summarily executed.” In the north, widespread starvation followed conquest, particularly among slaves who were deserting their masters. One report noted that children especially “generally arrive in a starved condition and die before they can be restored to health.”27 *
The British in West Africa faced considerable European competition from the Germans in the Cameroons to the south and from the French all around.
Both of these countries, along with Belgium, were undergoing their own industrial revolutions using fossil fuels and would play central roles in the broader politics of empire, including the earliest international agreements aimed at disarming Africa and bringing warlordism to an end.
Throughout the nineteenth century, everyone was looking for supplies of industrial raw goods in Africa, not just Europeans but also the Americans.
Forested areas near the coast, stretching from Guinea south to the Congo, held strategically important crops such as palm oil and rubber. Areas especially from the Gold Coast to Cameroon also yielded cocoa originally brought from the Americas, the demand for which soared especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as rich supplies of tropical woods. North of the forests were products such as gum arabic, used in everything from sweets to textiles to industrial food manufacturing and industrial chemicals. More important were peanuts (groundnuts). Like cocoa, peanuts were also originally an American crop, but they took to African soils handily. Soon they were cultivated over a vast area stretching from western Senegal well into what is Burkina Faso, a major reason why ports such as Dakar suddenly became strategically more important. They were used extensively in the French soap industry, serving along with palm oil as a cheap substitute for olive oil. A few manufacturers experimented with using peanut oil as an industrial lubricant and as a fuel for diesel engines until vegetable oils were supplanted by petrochemicals.
All this supply and demand meant that most everyone involved in the commodities trade also trafficked in weapons, ranging from blades to guns.
In some parts of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, shipments of weapons equaled one gun per one hundred people yearly. Large quantities of weapons were imported into certain areas of Africa well into the 1890s, arriving at the exact same time that the West was violently stripping Africans of their guns.
These new imports were generally inferior to the weapons wielded by Europeans (the French had Maxim guns by the late 1880s, the Germans a few years earlier), but they were nonetheless transformative. Combined with the demand for raw products, weapons dramatically expanded enslavement. With few exceptions, well into the early twentieth century wherever there was intensive agriculture there was also slavery, creating an archipelago of unfree labor across the savanna and Sahelian areas of the Western Sudan.
In the latter nineteenth century, slaves might represent anywhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population.
Like the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate, this internal slave trade had ties to political transformations and a new, if brief, era of warlords who often used Islam to legitimate their predation. The flow of weapons into the continent was crucial to their rise. Now, according to the leading historian of this region, “military units with no social bases could dominate large areas, and those with a social base could build empires.” In the groundnut basin, where agriculture was most intensive, exchanging crops for weapons was fairly easy. Elsewhere, weapons were exchanged for slaves.28 Groundnut farming in Futa Toro, a region inland along the Senegal River, expanded alongside an increasing French presence. The earliest government posts appeared in the 1850s, swiftly leading to the formation of various protectorates, which at first meant little to most people. Groundnut production rose to more than eighty thousand tons by the early 1880s, by which time the French were completing their 250-plus kilometer-long railway between Saint-Louis and Dakar, for a time using palm grease to keep the trains moving. Slavery by Africans was pervasive throughout this entire period. The warlord Abdul Bokar Kan (d. 1891), who ruled over much of Futa Toro until his defeat by the French, put it very clearly in 1889: “It is impossible for us to live without slaves.”29 To the south, the mountainous area of Futa Jallon saw the emergence of warlord-owned plantations and extensive violence associated with conquering Fulbe Muslims from the north and with broader political transformations that had begun in the eighteenth century. Earlier, Futa Jallon slaves had been shuttled to the coast by African merchants, where they were exchanged for weapons and other goods. From about the 1820s on slavery proliferated in these mountains, and exploitation intensified.
Captive peoples produced a variety of crops, including rice and groundnuts.
Well into the twentieth century, a very large percentage of the population was enslaved.
Many lived on estates called runde that had begun appearing in the 1700s. The larger plantations, comparable in size to those in the Americas and just as brutal, might have more than 150 slaves. “The presence of the master intimidates them,” wrote the great French explorer René Caillié, who made it as far as Timbuktu, “and the fear of punishment expedites the work.”30 Warlordism in what would become French West Africa thus took multiple forms, from small warlord states that were little more than personal fiefdoms to expansive empires that rose and fell with breathtaking speed.
The so-called Islamic and juula revolutions of the nineteenth century were the Western Sudanic version of the new era of warlordism that had taken hold in the tropical forests of West Africa.
The paths leading to political control varied, although in the end all of them depended on the musket. At times control emerged directly from merchant communities; at other times it emanated from religious leaders or from combinations of the two. The eighteenth century had seen an extraordinary religious transformation of much of the Senegambia region and, in many areas, the rise of theocratic states. Islam continued to powerfully shape rule, if at times only rhetorically. It was not uncommon for leaders to simultaneously engage in slave raiding, trading, and slavebased agriculture, all while professing their religious purity.
Religion has always offered manipulators an easy way to legitimate violence. Across the broader region, “Islam started,” the historian Martin Klein has written, “as a liberating force and ended up rationalizing slaving military activity.”31 Years before the French invaded from their coastal redoubts, the phenomenal increase in violence quite literally left areas depopulated.
One of the most famous of the new warlord polities to take shape was that of Samori Ture (ca. 1830–1900) in what would become the colony of Guinea, located in the southern savanna areas of the Western Sudan. A trader, soldier, and devout Muslim, Samori burst on the scene in the 1860s just as the region was in the throes of a “climatic tipping point” marked by increasing aridity (which continues to this day). Over the next decade, using horses equipped with Western guns, Samori extended control over large areas of the southern savanna stretching from the Niger to the upper Volta.
His capital at Bissandugu “was surrounded by a belt of slave plantations.”32 Unlike areas such as Futa Toro, Samori’s state struggled to produce export crops for the European market; he was too far from the coast. Slave production was instead oriented to support the elite and for local and regional markets. For Samori slaves were his export crop, and he raided for people across a large area that stretched nearly one thousand miles east to west.
His slaves were mostly moved to the north and to places such as Futa Jallon—a mountainous area filled with warlord-owned plantations and extensive violence—and were traded for European weapons or sent to plantations near the capital. At its height, Samori’s empire reached into parts of Ghana, enslaving people who ended up in coastal areas producing palm oil and, particularly from the 1870s onward, the cocoa that ended up in European and American chocolate.33 This situation greatly irked the French. Across Futa Toro and into the interior, internecine conflict was worsening as warlords reigned triumphant.
French control over the strategic Senegal River was precarious at best. The French had been moving into the interior from their historic base on Goree Island from the late 1810s and more aggressively from midcentury, reaching the interior of the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s. French commercial interests wanted gum arabic and groundnuts at the lowest prices possible. They also wanted to ensure that the deeply indebted African traders on the littoral, who themselves were committed to slavery and helped extend credit and debt relations deeper into the interior, often at soaring levels of interest, kept their obligations to European creditors.34 Navigating these interests successfully required a modicum of stability as well as new institutions: the first modern bank in what became French West Africa opened in 1853 in Saint-Louis. The problem was that many agreements weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Earlier treaties had created as much conflict as they solved, if only because they left unresolved the confused and confusing politics of sovereignty and legitimacy.
Treaties were a long way away from “effective control,” the difference between claiming a territory and administering it. Like the British, the French weren’t exactly clear what effective rule entailed or even what they wanted. Samori’s success at covering so large an area with violence and refuting French pretensions was especially frustrating. So too was the constant flow of weapons to Samori’s army, particularly when these guns were nearly as good as those the French forces used. French officials were none too happy to discover that trade routes winding their way from the coast were depositing British arms into African hands, guns that were then pointed at the French directly.
How to solve a self-made problem? As the European presence on the continent grew, the arms trade was becoming a source of diplomatic tension. Growing violence threatened access to and control over resources (real and imagined) that helped keep the fossil fuel economy going. For centuries, the West had supplied Africa with weapons. Now Europe had to figure out a way to turn off the spigot or at least effectively control it.35 This was easier said than done.
A new wave of conflict erupted in the 1880s and 1890s, but now the bloodshed took place against a broader canvas of growing Western powers determined to tackle the arms trade problem and to decide which piece of the African “cake” belonged to which Western country and on what terms.
How could they conquer the continent without creating a war among themselves? Answering this question meant bringing some form of order to the chaos and a willingness to assume the challenges of a deeply fragmented and violent continent.
The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, which culminated in the February 1885 General Act, ostensibly sought to address trade in the Congo, navigation along the Niger River, and the slave trade. Aiming “to give a new guarantee of security to trade and industry,” the act set out spheres of influence in the name of free trade, humanitarianism, and “rules for future occupation.” All signatories, which included the United States, had participated in the arms trade.36 In Berlin, diplomatic etiquette helped cover over the obvious issue: the entire continent was chockablock with guns the West had provided and was still providing, weapons that had allowed for the rise of warlordism and slavery and now posed a direct challenge to imperial interests. Selling guns was one thing, but discovering that those same weapons were now being used against you was quite another. As late as 1890, large quantities of weapons were still moving into African hands.
In that year, tiny Togo and larger Cameroon alone imported over 1.4 million pounds of gunpowder.
37 What stayed largely implicit in the formal documents surrounding the 1884–1885 conference became explicit five years later when signatories met in Brussels. Like the General Act of 1885, the Brussels Conference Act of 1890 came couched in the language of humanitarianism. Indeed, the agreement still represents one of the most important actions to end slavery in international law. It was also the first modern global arms treaty.
38 At the center of the Brussels Conference Act was the “regulation” (read: ban) of the weapons trade. Article VIII recognized “the experience of all nations who have intercourse with Africa” as demonstrating “the pernicious and preponderating part played by fire-arms in Slave Trade operations as well as in internal war between the native tribes.” Given this reality, “the Powers decide, in so far as the present state of their frontiers permits, that the importation of fire-arms, and especially of rifles and improved weapons, as well as of powder, balls, and cartridges, is . . . Prohibited.”39 The Brussels Conference Act served the interests of its authors and signatories. It was explicitly designed for those areas of Africa coming under colonial rule, specifically between twenty degrees north and south, in other words the tropics. Territories passed immediate legislation implementing the 1890 act for their regions. These policies bore exquisite detail, precisely regulating the sale of weapons and powder, including noting how much could be stored and where. Controlling the movement of weapons was now paramount. In Lagos, for example, an ordinance stated, “It shall not be lawful to introduce into the Colony by land any firearms, ammunition, or gunpowder from neighbouring countries.”40 Similar legislation was enacted across the continent, a dramatic change from just a few years earlier.
Disarming Africans obviously eased European intrusion and secured their control over vital resources, although nothing in the Brussels Conference Act overtly made these connections; imperial aggression remained cloaked in humanitarian dress. Exports of firearms to West Africa promptly declined by 55 percent between 1894 and 1901, followed by another decline of 10 percent three years later. Notably, what was pioneered in Africa would soon be applied elsewhere: globally, British gunpowder exports dropped by nearly a third between 1890 and 1900, a decline equivalent to over fiftythree million musket shots.
What had been a geyser of weapons exports thus turned into a trickle.41 For nearly 150 years, the military-commercial revolution had spread weapons around the world. These implements were turned on people and on animals. They had been central to the world economy, including industries burning fossil fuels. Now weapons would go to national armies, not to warlords, and to devastating effect. They would be used to violently subdue the tyrannies they had created or helped foment. And in 1914, they would be turned against one another.
What unfolded in Berlin and Brussels ultimately spelled Samori’s demise.
Into the early 1890s Samori still managed to access arms, including an exchange of weapons in return for a concession to the Sierra Leone Coaling Company financed by British capital. The flow of weapons disappeared after 1895, however. The French defeated Samori in 1898; he died in exile two years later.
To Europeans at least, one unexpected consequence of colonial intrusion and the curtailment of weapons used by African warlords was a loosening of the control masters had over their slaves. Those who experienced pillaging, whether the enslaved or those who managed to escape, hated warlords. Some fled to French protectorates and attained their freedom.
Others joined French forces in their march into the interior. The less fortunate found themselves reenslaved, a fate that refugees fleeing violence also were subjected to.42 The French, like the British, soon became concerned that the erosion of slavery might produce a new kind of chaos: African freedom. Their overriding ambition was stability, preferably at the lowest cost possible.
They wanted to weaken warlords, through either outright military defeat or by agreement in which warlords relinquished most of their weapons and recognized colonial oversight. The latter path was far preferable and would help keep slaves at their work. The problem, of course, was that slavery was illegal if also necessary for the export market. Various contortions and ethical compromises followed. The easiest route for many was to rename a slave a serf or a servant. (One doubts that this solution satisfied the renamed person.) Enslaved individuals, especially those on plantations and on peanut estates, had their own ideas. They didn’t need international agreements to pursue freedom. Many had only been recently enslaved; they knew how to return home. Slaves had begun deserting their masters within the immediate context of French conquest in one of the greatest stories of emancipation in world history. Desertions continued with the weakening of warlordism and the end of the gun trade as well as with the outbreak of famines in the interior that accompanied colonial violence in a period of increasing aridity.
Closer to the coast, the collapse in groundnut prices in the mid-1890s helped incite outright rebellion. What started off as a slow collapse of slavery quickened in the early years of the new century when a terrible drought hit large areas of the Sahel, the worst in a century and a harbinger of the horrific famines that would begin afflicting the region in the 1960s.
Between 1905 and 1913, across West Africa an estimated nine hundred thousand slaves deserted their masters.43 And across other areas of the continent more were poised to join them. 15 Conquering Africa, Part Two EUROPEANS CALLED HIM “Africa’s Napoleon.” The epithet was not affectionate, although it begrudgingly acknowledged Samori Ture’s ability to craft an empire nearly, it seemed, out of thin air. Once the weapons stopped flowing inland, his creation evaporated nearly as quickly. Over half a century later, African nationalists and propagandists would resurrect the notorious warlord as an anticolonial hero, erecting statues and issuing postage stamps in his honor. Locals remember Samori differently: as a killer and enslaver so brutal that streams still run red with blood more than a century after the warlord’s death.1 Samori’s defeat in 1898 came the same year the French and British nearly launched a war in what became known as the Fashoda Incident, occurring deep in Africa’s interior in today’s South Sudan, an international event (or nonevent, as it turned out) that we will explore later in this chapter.
Until that time, various agreements had largely managed international tensions along the coast. One way or another, warlords in this region were being disarmed, their places taken by European administrators and the latter’s African collaborators. These were important accomplishments with world historical implications. The growth of Western militaries, so essential to making Africa safe for continued exploitation, could easily have turned into a fight among Europeans for their share of the African cake. Instead, the great powers had recognized that it was no longer in their interests to spread weapons hither and yonder. The good intentions of the world’s first international arms agreement—disarmament, ending slavery, and reducing violence—hid baser desires even if it brought peace and a modicum of prosperity to the continent: imperial expansion and the imperative to secure the resources that modern industry burning fossil fuels needed for its relentless expansion. Paradoxically, perhaps the better word is “hypocritically,” as the 1890 Brussels Conference Act concerned just about everyone except its authors. The West went on pretty much as usual, amassing ever larger and more lethal military stockpiles.
The situation in the interior was altogether a different matter. Whereas the coast had seen disarmament of the warlords, weapons in inland areas continued flowing mostly unimpeded.
Borders were unclear or nonexistent.
To many Europeans, the interior was a “blank space” to fill in or, as Joseph Conrad put it, a continent “to dream gloriously over” if also to mold into “a place of darkness.”2 Long before it became an international cause célèbre, Fashoda (seven hundred miles from Uganda, five hundred miles from Khartoum, and nearly five hundred miles to the nearest coast) was a patrol station established by the Egyptian Empire, ostensibly to aid that nation’s efforts to end the slave trade and acquiesce to the demands of British abolitionists. Nothing of the sort happened. The deeply indebted Khedive Isma’il (r. 1863–1879) might have attempted to patrol the slave trade and assuage European pressure, but during his reign plundering in places such as Equatoria and elsewhere in the Sudan likely reached its zenith.
For many decades, the Sudan had been the site of extraordinary predation and suffering.
The Egyptian government had emboldened warlordism, beginning with providing strongmen with weapons. The structures of Ottoman and later Egyptian imperial rule encouraged local political autonomy as long as tax revenues and resources continued flowing, creating a fertile ground for the warlords and a political landscape of highly fragmented authority.
3 Perhaps more than any other place in Africa in the nineteenth century and more than anywhere globally, the region saw a world of warlords run amok: Zubayr Pasha Rahma Mansur with his large private army, officials or accessories of the Egyptian Empire, the eccentric German Emin Pasha and his Equatoria, the Khartoumers, the Shilluks, and farther to the south the Azande Kingdom, which had become a predatory warlord state. Strongmen little more than thugs established petty fiefdoms of varying sizes, plundering and trading and extorting communities for ivory and slaves. Zubayr’s regime in the Bahr al-Ghazal and Emin Pasha’s Equatoria with his base at Lado on the White Nile represented the largest and most colorful of these fiefdoms, enjoying the most direct connections to Cairo and ultimately to Istanbul and Western capitals. Most warlords were scarcely accountable to anyone except perhaps their creditors and the men who provided them with weapons. Attempted political reforms by the khedive in the 1850s accomplished little. In fact, predation and commerce accelerated as the ivory trade took off in the 1840s and then again in the 1860s with the rapid increase in slavery during the cotton boom years and at the height of the Industrial Revolution. (Slavery would be abolished in Egypt in 1877, although as we have seen it continued for many decades in the Sudan.) This was a world of epochal destruction, a triumphantly immoral economy in the center of Africa. And it was a world that would soon involve European powers, especially the British. To the south, an expanding Azande empire and the Sudanese Arab Zubayr’s regime came into direct conflict in the Bahr al-Ghazal, in the 1870s the site of extraordinary violence.4 Zubayr continued attempting to extend Egyptian suzerainty, efforts that made him a pasha, attacking Dar Fur in 1873, but attempts to expand and modernize Egypt’s empire failed to bring a semblance of order, quite the opposite in fact. Disorder reigned supreme. The Shilluk kingdom, under nominal Egyptian control, revolted. Beginning in the early 1860s and then dramatically in the 1880s, stateless peoples between the Blue and White Niles, particularly the Dinkas who for decades had suffered at the hands of men with guns, rose in retribution against the warlords.
*
Like West Africa, Egypt and the Sudan comprised an external rim of export production connected to an interior of violence and, later in Sudan’s case, political revolution. Egypt’s cotton revolution was financed by European capital, French and increasingly British. These connections were vitally important to Egyptian modernization, including guaranteeing the large flow of weapons into the region, many into the hands of the army but many thousands also moving into the Sudan. Over the course of the nineteenth century weapons imports steadily rose, with many weapons manufactured within the Ottoman Empire but also increasingly in the West. The more Egypt became important to manufacturing cotton, at the time the single largest emitter of CO2 , the more weapons streamed into Cairo until crisis engulfed the region. By the 1870s the army had modern rifles and cannons, soon joined by machine guns; the older weapons were reexported south.5 Much more than West Africa, Egypt saw a substantial European presence, which had begun in 1798 with Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest. The European population rose in the 1820s alongside Egyptian modernization and then boomed in the 1860s with the rapid rise of cotton production and the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. The 120-mile canal quickly became key to the world economy, including to the petroleum revolution beginning in the early part of the twentieth century and soon surpassing coal in global CO2 emissions. In the next decade the population reached approximately one hundred thousand, vastly more Europeans than in all of West Africa, although in both places they pursued riches on the quick.
Unlike Egyptians, most of whom suffered from a punishing regime of taxation, these ex-pats did not have to pay taxes, and many lived high on the hog.
In addition to British cotton brokers, French engineers, arms dealers, and a vast array of less savory individuals, a sizable financial community came to organize and manage Egypt’s foreign debts. Institutions such as the Rothschild banks and the Barings Bank—both with deep connections to slavery and the weapons trade—had loaned huge sums of money, some of it for weapons purchases. Representatives based in Cairo looked out—with growing if often boozy trepidation—over an Egypt populated with warlords they had helped create.
Khedive Isma’il, owner of perhaps one-fifth of all Egyptian agricultural land and exploiter of thousands of forced laborers and slaves, ended up mired in debt to the Rothschild banks. As such financial entanglements increased, Europeans (especially the British) began taking up positions within the Egyptian government. These were men such as Charles Rivers Wilson of Eton and Balliol who had served the chancellor of the exchequer and ended up as the khedive’s minister of finance, narrowly escaping death in the 1879 Cairo riots, which protested British and French imperialism, economic crises, and the corrupt Egyptian government. MAP 15.1. Northern and East Africa in the age of empire The collapse of commodity prices in the global downturn beginning in the 1870s ushered in a period of sustained crisis. Cotton prices were sinking, the price of food and other goods had been going up for decades, peasant indebtedness had skyrocketed, and instability in the Sudan and into the Horn was beginning to shake the foundations of the Egyptian Empire.
War with Abyssinia in early 1876 proved disastrous. Months later, Egypt declared bankruptcy. European imperial intervention began with the deposing of Isma’il and the installation of Mohamed Tewfik Pasha, the latter little more than a puppet. Figuring out how to service the debt was first on the imperial agenda along with how to thin out the bloated (not to mention corrupt and authoritarian) Egyptian state. This was less an issue of defeating warlords than of reforming them; Egypt was too important and too complex—and European interests too entwined—to simply eradicate the opposition.6 Two convulsive events occurring nearly simultaneously spoke to the unraveling world the warlords had created: the start of the ‘Urabi Revolution in Egypt in January 1881 and the beginning of the Mahdist Revolution in the Sudan just six months later. Colonel Ahmed ‘Urabi, an educated Egyptian military officer who had risen from the downtrodden peasantry, sought to overthrow the warlords and their European enablers. In ‘Urabi’s judgment and one widely shared by others, both had debased the country and left Egypt bankrupt and Lord Cromer (Baring) administering the Law of Liquidation. Debt “was incurred, not for Egypt’s benefit, but in the private interests of a dishonest and irresponsible ruler,” the khedive and his “despotic reign of injustice.” In a kind of early nativist nationalism, ‘Urabi wanted to create a religiously pious country, an “Egypt entirely in Egyptian hands.”7 Folded into this looming Egyptian crisis were changes caused by the end of the Little Ice Age and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (in which warming and cooling and Pacific waters affects global climate) and industrial-era climate change. Warming oceans were beginning to alter the climate systems that brought the highland rains that fed the Nile.8 In Egypt the Nile had failed to flood in 1877, which caused large areas to go dry. The next year there was too much water, destroying crops.
Farmers were “forced to beg, steal, or starve.” “The worst feature of” of a farmer’s “life,” according to an official report, “is his chronic state of indebtedness, either of the Government for arrears of taxation, or to the merchant who supplies him on credit with seed corn and corn for his household, to be repaid with exorbitant interest when his crops are ripe. The merchants for the most part are Europeans, and are always ready to make advances to the needy peasant provided the interest is high enough.”9 The result was widespread starvation and the spread of diseases as people fled to cities, where they picked through garbage hoping to find something to eat.
Against the backdrop of this difficult climactic and political moment, ‘Urabi’s supporters were many and diverse. They included intellectuals, indebted farmers, middling agriculturalists who were unable to take full advantage of the cotton boom and/or were deeply in debt, urban guilds, and officers within the army. (These categories frequently overlapped. Many intellectuals came from within the military, for example.) The revolution embodied many grievances, all directed at the khedive and Europeans, and in the end positioning protestors against a warlordism that had done them no good. They correctly saw the warlord Egyptian state as profoundly corrupt, unable to reform itself and incapable of managing what dwindling finances remained outside of the crushing debt. Their grievances spoke precisely to the warlordism that the military-commercial revolution had made possible, in this case the Turco-Egyptian state created by Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors with the help of foreign credit and modern weapons.
The appearance of British and French warships off Alexandria made these imperial connections newly visible, a reminder that the khedive, indeed the entire edifice that warlords had created throughout the nineteenth century, in the end remained beholden to others.
In some areas, indebted farmers began refusing to pay their creditors and threatened violence. “The arrival of the fleet at Alexandria caused an immense amount of ill-feeling,” one report from the time carefully noted.10 For their part, the Europeans went around telling the Egyptians they were about to get what they deserved. Many Egyptians believed—correctly, as it turned out—that they were about to be invaded. In June 1882 a riot broke out in Cairo, followed the next month by British bombardment and troops entering Alexandria at the khedive’s invitation. By mid-September the British had conquered Cairo, and a few thousand Egyptians had died.
‘Urabi’s government and the popular uprising that had birthed it had come to an end.
In the aftermath, the British created what came to be known as the “Veiled Protectorate,” but there was nothing veiled about it; this was a colonial occupation, pure and simple, administered by Over-Baring and others who drained Egypt and quashed dissent. British officials soon embarked on reforms that largely brought an end to warlordism in Egypt, instituting greater control over the army and the Ministry of War and bringing an end to forced labor. The British would remain in Egypt until 1956, when a new wave of militant nationalism, again led by a military officer, would finally kick them out for good.11 * ‘Urabi’s revolution had taken place in a context of distress caused by multiple political, economic, and climactic changes. It wasn’t just the corrupt state people were protesting; some were also blaming warlords and their European abettors for a changing environment that left their crops failing, soils polluted, peasants sick with diseases, and people starving.
They weren’t exactly right, but they weren’t entirely wrong either.
Six months after the formal start of ‘Urabi’s movement to cleanse the state and country and restore Egypt to the Egyptians, in the Sudan Muhammad Ahmad announced the “End of Days” and the creation of the Mahdiyya.
The Mahdi (Guided One) chosen by the prophets, the thirty-seven-year-old Sufi promised to restore peace and Islamic justice to the Sudan in a messianic jihad against the impure, especially Egyptians and Europeans.
FIGURE 15.1. Ruins on One Side of Grand Square Alexandria, 1882. By Lieutenant Francis Henry Boyer. National Royal Navy Museum, NMRN 2023/22/13.
The Mahdist Revolution began in earnest in the southernmost part of Kordofan. The Egyptian government soon became “very anxious.” It had “no funds to meet an emergency, and they have already dispatched almost every man to the Soudan.”12 In 1883 just two years after the beginning of the movement, the Mahdi defeated the Egyptians at El Obeid.
By this point, the Mahdiyya had also expanded into the Bahr al-Ghazal and Equatoria, where Emin Pasha had to be rescued. Khartoum would fall (and General Charles George Gordon would lose his head) in January 1885. Egypt’s empire in the Sudan had come crashing down, and the British had suffered a great embarrassment.
Muhammad Ahmad died of typhus six months after his victory at Khartoum. (There is some evidence that the spread of typhus is related to climate change.)13 At its height the Mahdiyya controlled much of the Sudan, including areas where warlords associated with the Egyptian Empire had recently operated unchecked. Many of these strongmen fled or were vanquished or were incorporated into the Mahdiyya. One of the Mahdi’s most important emirs, for example, had earlier served Zubayr; he proved, according to an early writer, to be “of great value to the Mahdi in his military engagements.”14 Warlords assisting the Mahdi played definitive roles in conquering parts of the Bahr al-Ghazal, for example, where violence endured and may well have accelerated into the 1890s.
The Mahdiyya under Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad produced a modicum of consolidation in 1891, but for much of its existence this regime was less a state than a highly organized form of warfare, indeed a perfection of warlordism now overlaid with jihadist ideology.
Religion could only do so much, papering over what was in fact a situation marked by constant fragmentation and internecine conflict. The Mahdist state was in essence a reconquest of the Sudan in the guise of religious revolution, buoyed by profound and widespread anti-Egyptian sentiment.
Under the reign of the Mahdist state, pillaging continued especially against non-Muslim peoples in the south. Near-constant violence unfolded between the Mahdi’s forces and peoples such as the Shilluks and, occasionally farther south, the Nuers, Dinkas, and Bongos, particularly during the horrific famines between 1888 and 1892 and a rapid spread of sleeping sickness.15 From the perspective of these neighboring peoples, very little had changed. Unsurprisingly, the trade in ivory and slaves continued.
Like Samori’s posthumous venerations, later propagandists would praise the Mahdist Revolution. In this case the accolades came not from nationalists but from Islamic terrorist organizations such as ISIS that dream of creating caliphates and most of all punishing the West. Both Samori and the Mahdist Revolution are cases where theocracies and pronouncements of religious purity arising out of ecological change went hand in hand with violence and enslavement, not to mention considerable infighting, which their supporters conveniently forget. What differed was the Mahdi’s successful overthrow of an Egyptian Empire that had been milking Sudan for decades and that most everyone despised. The khedive knew that “with the exception of a few well-disposed individuals, all were fanatical and strongly prejudiced against the Egyptians,” so wrote one official.16 “The fact of their general incompetence to rule,” as another official bluntly put his view of the Egyptian government, “is so generally acknowledged that it is unnecessary to discuss the question.” To this Baring added, with the usual racism of the day, that “even judged by an Oriental standard, the [Egyptian] government of the Soudan has been exceedingly bad.”17 But the Mahdi was fighting a corpse. By the time he declared jihad, the Egyptian Empire had largely expired from a sclerosis of violence, corruption, and financial ruin. Egypt effectively became part of the British Empire from 1882, the same year Muhammad Ahmad began his crusade.
The Mahdist Revolution that coursed through the Sudan took hold within a broader sea of spiritual innovation that reached well north into Egypt.
People had always looked to their prophets to help make sense of the world, to explain why some used magic for selfish or evil reasons, why so many people suffered, and why the gods held back the rains and left the land dry and people and animals starving. Across the Sudan were shrines tended by ritual specialists. What did the gods have to say of the violence, enslavement, famine, and ecological distress that had become so pronounced since the 1860s? In the next decade amid terrible famine and ongoing violence, the gods of rain and fertility began possessing certain people who prophesized the importance of sacrifice and defiance. The result was widespread resistance led by prophets against warlords who had ruined the land and taken their people, including one combined Dinka and Nuer attack in 1883 on Rumbek (northwest of Juba), a zareba with a long history of raiding and extortion.
The British mostly didn’t care about what the Dinkas and Nuers did, much less what Africans thought. It was the Mahdiyya that consumed their attentions, and behind that controlling the Suez through which thousands of ships were passing yearly and was now vital to the capitalist world economy, including the movement of fossil fuels. In 1896, General Herbert Kitchener received his orders to invade the Sudan, ostensibly to avenge Gordon’s murder but mostly for strategic reasons. The Mahdiyya was expanding toward the Red Sea coast, and the British desperately wanted to avoid any conflict with Abyssinia, which had humiliated the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in March 1896 and the Egyptians twenty years earlier.
Simultaneously, the French and the Belgians were blundering their way into the heart of Africa, at risk of being pulled into the situation. The Mahdist Revolution was becoming a major diplomatic headache.
Kitchener defeated the Mahdiyya in early September 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman. Two weeks later and after a feverish march southward of some four hundred miles, he was in Fashoda meeting with the maniacal French general Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who earlier had fought in West Africa.
Now after a two-year trudge from the Atlantic coast, heavily armed but also bearing cases of Bordeaux, Marchand “steadfastly refused to haul down his flag without orders from his Government,” meaning, as The Times of London reported, that “at the present time the British, Egyptian, and French flags are flying at Fashoda.”18 This was intolerable if also quite common during the tumultuous nineteenth century. A confrontation was close at hand.
For decades, the French had convinced themselves that enormous riches lay somewhere in the interior of Africa, if only they could find and lay claim to them. The British had slightly different and less fanciful interests.
In the end Fashoda was a nonevent, although for the French it was something of an embarrassment. Discussions were held, and tempers cooled; everyone went on their way.
Marchand returned to France a hero, only to end up in China, where in 1900 he fought the Boxers. For his part, Kitchener headed off to the South African War (1899–1902), the British Empire’s most costly conflagration.
The resolution of Franco-British tensions arising from Fashoda did help clarify the continued European division of Africa. The Sudan (and, more critically, the Nile) would be British, or formally a hybrid rule involving Egypt (which technically also meant Ottoman) in what would come to be known, until its independence in 1956, as the Condominium. British conquest radically reduced violence, effectively extending control over but never quite ending the domination of warlords. Outwardly at least, British occupation brought an end to the extraordinary bloodshed and the external slave trade that had been going on for nearly a century. South of Khartoum, many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people had perished or been enslaved. In some areas human populations had all but collapsed, with declines of two-thirds or more. Notably, the destruction of the region’s elephant herds would continue into the early decades of the twentieth century.
Warlordism was less eradicated than contained, less conquered than domesticated or conveniently forgotten. In 1900, none other than Zubayr Pasha Rahma Mansur, that “former Prince of Slave-raiders” whose career was “marked by perfidy and crime,” received permission to return to Sudan.19 He died peacefully in 1912 even though was in considerable debt to the Bank of Egypt. Meanwhile, the provisions of the 1890 General Act went into effect, ending or at least radically slowing the weapons that had been entering the Sudan since the early nineteenth century. Slavery was abolished as well, although in practice it persisted for many decades including the export of people out of the region. There were other important continuities between Egyptian and British imperialism: the British, for example, maintained the Egyptian provincial map, with each province receiving an appointed governor. Mostly, the Sudan became a neglected part of the empire, particularly the south, where the official British presence was especially thin on the ground.
Beneath this temporary decline in violence and veneer of calm lay an entrenchment of slavery. Forced labor was ubiquitous in the region, sometimes leading to revolt and almost always to evasion. Powerful strongmen in agricultural areas made the transition to cash crop production, especially cotton in the Gezira region; and they did so with the support of the colonial state and Britain’s cotton industry. Elsewhere particularly in the south, warlordism in its more traditional forms endured, with occasional violent episodes requiring British and Egyptian intervention, although these colonial intrusions were often ineffectual. But the general historical patterns continued: between a wealthier north and an impoverished south, between Muslim and nonbeliever (whether Christian or not), and between those who had access to horses and guns and those who lived in sedentary villages.
The south remained a “problem” throughout the twentieth century and was the site of a new era of violence off and (mostly) on from the mid-1950s to the present.
*
Tippu Tip was to Zanzibar what Zubayr was to Cairo: powerful, profoundly violent, heavily armed, and a mostly independent slave-raiding and elephant-destroying warlord tied to an imperial center that was itself weakening in the face of European aggression. Both men sought the creation of their own personal empires in the heart of Africa. Both in the end failed, although they would effectively be rehabilitated in the new age of European imperialism, finishing their last years in peace and comfort.20 Massive amounts of weapons had been flooding East Africa throughout much of the nineteenth century, the best invariably into the hands of AfroOmani warlords such as Tip. These guns were inextricably tied to the rapidly expanding trade in ivory and slaves. Zanzibar was a huge weapons bazaar. The island comprised the principal source of the guns that could be found from Uganda south to Malawi, a distance of over one thousand miles.
Many were being used to hunt people. Some were being aimed at Christian zealots, including missionaries deep in the interior who wanted to save African souls and rescue the continent from the Arabs.21 It is small wonder, then, that East Africa and Zanzibar in particular dominated the conversation during the meeting that culminated in the 1890 Brussels Conference Act. Guns drove slavery: this fact everyone acknowledged. Guns were also being deployed to intimidate missionaries.
Coordinated action was necessary. Almost immediately efforts got under way to turn off the flow of weapons, including an international office in Zanzibar to implement the General Act.
Invariably, the new weapons prohibitions were tagged to the evils of slavery and, especially for the British, to the problems of “Mohammadism,” a shorthand for anti-Arab racism.
Like the Egyptian Empire in the Sudan, the sultan of Zanzibar had little control over the interior, indeed even over his officials on the coast. Outside of towns with their garrisons filled with weapons, these governors themselves had only thin control over the African communities they ostensibly ruled.22 The sultan, who had his own concerns with Indian creditors, now also had Europeans breathing down his neck. The British had established a consul on Zanzibar in the early 1840s at much the same time as they did in West Africa. In the early 1870s, this position had grown so powerful that the sultan was reduced to little more than a British client. The British forced Sultan Barghash bin Said (r. 1870–1888) to agree to ending the slave trade. The slave market on the island closed, and the sultan agreed to end the movement of slaves from coastal ports to the Arabian Peninsula.
The enslavement of peoples continued across much of East Africa, but British pressure nonetheless shook coastal society, reverberating far into the interior and even across the ocean to India, where creditors worried about their commercial investments.
By the late 1870s, the Omani Empire that had stretched down the East African coast had seen its best days. In the 1880s and in advance of the General Act, an international naval blockade stopped or at least profoundly slowed the export of people and the import of weapons. Within a decade and a half, the empire had succumbed to the European onslaught. In 1890 Zanzibar became a British protectorate, not more than fifty years after the sultan had moved from Muscat to Africa’s coast.23 Zanzibar’s warlords, most of whom were deeply in debt, bitterly resented any attempts to conclude the slave trade and any intrusions led by Sultan Barghash and the British consul, including the energetic pursuit of debt repayment. Some rebelled, such as Mbarak near Msambeni on the Kenya coast, where high levels of violence continued for a decade or more from 1874, just one year after the first antislavery treaty was concluded between the British and the sultan. From Kenya to Kilwa in the mid-1880s, endemic brigandage led to a new surge in enslavement. Coastal areas around Pangani exploded into revolt in the late 1880s against both the pretensions of the Zanzibari state and the Germans. The latter had established a presence in the region earlier in the decade and were quickly earning a reputation for brutality in an already brutal age.
FIGURE 15.2. Imperial British East African Company treaty form used by Frederick Lugard (later Lord Lugard) in Uganda. RGS arLMSI1. Reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society.
On the coast, the German East Africa Company and the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) filled the vacuum created by the collapse of the Omani Empire. Their employees began venturing into the interior and gathering treaties as quickly as they could, trying to beat the other guy to territories they were convinced held valuable resources. They made a bad situation far worse, eventually requiring metropolitan intervention and the imposition of formal European rule. These company men were warlords of a different order, beholden to no one except their employer, largely ignorant of the worlds into which they blundered, and returning home as selfproclaimed experts and regaling others of their exploits. Racist, avaricious, and heavily armed, they engaged in their own forms of pillage, looting African property as they “hammered” communities, a euphemism for killing people.
The IBEAC would extend its rule all the way to Buganda; the company ceded control to the British government in 1893. The Germans meanwhile created “a new ‘empire of the rugaruga’” out of warlord Mirambo’s former warriors. The Germans might have been small in number, but their destructiveness was far-reaching. Around the same time that the British stood on the shores of Lake Victoria, the German East Africa Company had reached far into the interior, where Mwami Rwabugiri, the exceptionally brutal king of Rwanda, signed a treaty with the Germans in exchange for weapons.
*
The Europeans had blundered into a deeply fragmented and extraordinarily violent world.
East Africa’s age of warlordism took multiple forms: small fiefdoms created by batemi (chiefs) focused on controlling trade and access to weapons; warlords within stateless societies such as the munda munene, or big men among the Kamba; larger territories ruled by such men as Nyamwezi warlord Mirambo in what would become German East Africa; the general militarization of kingdoms such as Buganda; and Tip’s predatory empire, ultimately tied to the Omanis. All these forms had in common the use of guns to extend and solidify control and to intensify predation against people and elephants. Most involved the accumulation of dependents and the exacting of tribute, a weakening of reciprocal bonds between ruler and ruled and, where trade routes existed, an attempt to regulate the flow of commerce.
A few areas remained minimally affected by the changes coursing through the region. In some instances, people managed to create relatively prosperous islands of stability within a wider sea of insecurity. Many moved to less vulnerable areas and sought a reaffirmation of social mores in the face of what seemed like an ever-expanding immoral economy. These individuals reminded rulers of their traditional obligations to ensure safety and summon the nourishing rains upon which society, indeed life itself, rested. Often, they took up violence against corrupt chiefs and slave traders.
But the flight of people to defensible areas and the abandoned villages left behind, the ubiquitous stockaded settlement, and the invention of what amounted to early warning systems all spoke to the wider insecurity of life —the struggle to survive—that had taken hold in the early 1800s and would continue into the first decade of the new century.
More subtle but no less powerful were environmental changes that coincided with and were exacerbated by violent European colonial conquest. The rinderpest epidemic that took off from 1887 was especially deadly. In some places, the virus killed off 95 percent of their livestock.
Bush and scrubs kept at bay by careful grazing practices as well as by wild animals such as elephants now expanded in many areas, and with it so did the tsetse fly vector that spread deadly sleeping sickness.
East and southern Africa were no exceptions to the climatic instability and frequent drought across much of the continent, indeed much of the planet.
Two periods of drought—in 1812–1839 and particularly 1879–1902—were especially punishing. The latter, directly tied to El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability and indirectly to industrial emissions and a warming Indian Ocean, coincided with the onset of European imperialism and the spread of epizootic diseases. Starvation followed in the wake of rinderpest, and sleeping sickness was beginning to spread, along with cholera, smallpox, and influenza. Disease, crop failure, and famine struck parts of Kenya from the early to mid-1880s; as many as half the Kikuyu people would perish. “I cannot over-estimate the dire effect of the present famine,” wrote one official in Kenya, “a tale of extreme suffering and death.”24 Starting at the end of the 1850s, the Shambaa kingdom, located in Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains, experienced more than a decade-long internecine conflict that some called the pato, or “rapacity.” Here as elsewhere, good leaders were seen as helping heal the land, bring the rains, and provide protection to dependents. But bad leaders—and there now seemed no end to them—brought drought and misfortune and treated people as expendable trade items. A once-large capital soon withered along with the kingdom as murderous groups with guns and access to caravan routes through the lowlands effectively destroyed the Shambaa state. In the mid-1890s the Germans entered and contributed to this tumult, conquering the area and executing the Shambaa king. Coffee farms began appearing in highland areas and sisal (brought from Mexico) plantations in the valleys; the latter crop would be turned to rope for international shipping. Where the caravans had once passed, a train soon trundled its way into the interior. Meanwhile, shocking numbers of people died from starvation and disease.25 But the age of warlords was reaching its final days. In the midst of all these changes the gun trade declined, the slave trade came to a close, and, in an extraordinary three decades at the century’s end, formal colonial conquest marched into the interior, with high levels of violence especially from the late 1880s during the Great Drought. In many areas of East Africa between half and two-thirds of the population perished, in a few cases even more. Amid these horrors, some of the greatest amounts of ivory made their way across the oceans to places such as Ivoryton and to workshops across Western Europe. There they would be turned into piano keys, umbrella handles, and false teeth for those who could afford them.
The ending of the slave trade and, finally if slowly, the abolition of slavery itself in 1909 profoundly disrupted the Arab commercial networks that had branched out from Zanzibar clear into what is today Zambia. These networks had already been disrupted by the mid-1890s, when the partition of East Africa between the Germans and the British began taking shape.
Many Arabs, however, accommodated themselves to European colonialism, including the most notorious warlord in all of East Africa, Tippu Tip.
In 1883, Tip had formed a company with the Sultan Barghash’s backing.
Tip named it the H.M. Company (after his own name, Hamid bin Muhammad), and the venture marked his attempt to turn the sow’s ear of enslavement into the silk purse of modern commerce in the new age of formal European empire. The enterprise formalized what was already in existence: Tip’s commercial empire, with its control of trade routes extending deep into the Congo basin that had become his territorial possession, not unlike European concessionary companies that were colonizing and exploiting large chunks of the continent. He adroitly adapted to the European intrusion. In 1887 he assisted Emin Pasha (and the British) in the latter’s “relief” from the Mahdist Revolution. Tip also helped provision the Germans and, crucially, assisted Belgian king Leopold’s International African Association, which was ruthlessly laying claim to Central Africa. As Tip carried out these activities, he saw the writing on the wall: his own days as a warlord were numbered. So, he changed tactics.
From Stanley (now Boyoma) Falls, Tip would rule as a governor of the Belgian Congo Free State, maintaining his control and perfecting his transformation into a formal colonial ruler while conducting business as usual, killing human beings and shipping ivory to the coast.
Tip died at his estate in Zanzibar in 1905 at age seventy; he had lived a long life. Mirambo (which means “corpses”) had died two decades earlier, just as the Berlin West Africa Conference was getting under way. The great Nyamwezi warlord king had risen to power out of East Africa’s militarycommercial revolution, taxing the caravans passing through his territory, acquiring firearms, and using his ruga-ruga army of young men to enslave people and extort communities. For a short time starting in the 1860s and operating from his palisaded capital, Mirambo had succeeded wildly, incorporating chiefdoms and consolidating his rule in the region between Tabora and Lake Victoria. With his passing, roughly at the same time that European powers were slowing the gun trade, the warlord polity Mirambo had created began falling apart. Life throughout the greater region had long been precarious, with some areas largely depopulated. The tsetse fly vector was already expanding by the time German troops and freebooters arrived in the 1890s and insinuated themselves into the conflicts that had erupted following Mirambo’s death.26 Another warlord with similar notoriety was Rindi, who had ruled the Moshi area near Mount Kilimanjaro (in present-day Tanzania) from the middle decades of the century and died in 1891 or 1892. Rindi had deftly understood the military-commercial revolution and especially the importance of accessing weapons. He had helped unleash protracted violence among the Chagga chiefdoms, spurring bloodshed so severe that in one area people dug a long trench more than fifteen feet deep to try to protect themselves. For a while, he successfully manipulated the Germans.
After his death, however, the Germans formally took over the area, hanging Rindi’s successor along with nineteen others.
Neither Mirambo nor Rindi would see the final decades of devastation coursing through Tanganyika that came with German colonialism, in which hundreds of thousands died. Both had played their part in the making of East Africa’s immoral economy. They owed their existence to commerce and the gun. Yet neither had destroyed the older ways of thinking, in which political legitimacy rested on ensuring fertility, on protecting the land and bringing the rains. Ideas and practices of good governance never disappeared even in the absence of viable embodiments of the ideal.
Alternative modes of authority endured too, especially in prophets and religious leaders.
Local people appealed to these figures to heal the land and criticize the powerful and the avaricious, critiques that would be turned against the Germans in the 1905–1907 Maji Maji Rebellion. That event would convulse much of the southern half of Tanzania, which had seen a brisk trade in rubber from the 1870s and, in the early colonial period, the forced cultivation of cotton.
The rebellion began in July 1905 with the destruction of an Asian trading station and the uprooting of cotton plants on a German plantation that people especially despised. Rebels distributed the maji medicine, which they believed would protect them from German weapons, turning bullets into water. The movement spread quickly over a large area, beginning with stateless peoples and spreading to the interior kingdoms. By 1906, large areas of what is today Tanzania seethed in a revolt that shook the very foundations of German imperialism.
The rebellion was ostensibly against German “hammering” and the rise of forced labor. But the Maji Maji was much more than an isolated instance of anticolonial resistance. German plantations were attacked, but so were African collaborators and Arab traders. The revolt confronted the larger immoral economy that had taken root over the course of the nineteenth century. The rebels possessed a powerful sense that the world was wrong, that climate change and human suffering lay at the hands of selfish people accountable to no one, men who sought gain from violence and exploitation. They hoped that their resistance would restore the moral order and return fertility to lands that had withered under an unrelenting sun.27 Those hopes were not realized. The Germans retaliated swiftly and brutally, using African auxiliaries and taking advantage of a deeply divided land. What began as an attempt to root out the rebel leaders quickly became a punishingly widespread war, including the pursuit of a “famine strategy.” A historic famine appeared. As far as the Germans were concerned, “The fellows can just starve.”28 They did. Between 1905 and 1908 a quarter of a million East Africans perished, in some areas half the population.
The situation throughout what was becoming German East Africa was appalling. Kenya wasn’t much better. Farther in the interior, Kabaka Mutesa of Buganda, born about the same time as Mirambo around 1840, died the same year as Mirambo. The two had battled in the mid-1870s as the region south of Lake Victoria became commercially important and the Arab presence from the coast grew across parts of the lake region. Slaves and ivory flowed to the coast; weapons and cloth, a prestige item found mostly in the capital, moved the other way.
In both Buganda and neighboring Bunyoro, “every trader” was expected “to present almost half of his goods, especially powder, lead, shot and guns, to the ruler” in return for ivory, wrote the scientist and explorer Georg Schweinfurth. “Both parties make a good thing out of the transaction.”29 The Buganda kingdom had become both increasingly militaristic and expansionist, in the 1870s attacking nearby Busoga for slaves and ivory in addition to the war with Mirambo over the control of the Unyanyembe-Karagwe trade routes.
Buganda had become a full-blown warlord state by the 1870s. Ganda politics frayed amid a proliferation of guns and foreigners: Omani Arabs; a motley crew of people from the Sudan and Egypt; European explorers (most famously Henry Morgan Stanley) and well-armed filibusters, some representing the IBEAC and warlords in their own right; and Catholic and Protestant missionaries fretting over the spread of Islam and squabbling among themselves.
The kabaka (the Buganda king) struggled to control these foreigners as well as the ekitongole chiefs who had been an extension of royal power. Earlier cultural practices that bound ruler and ruled had severely weakened. Mass executions, which became a common site in the capital from the 1870s, stood as a crude reminder of tyranny and royal paranoia.
Palace intrigues and violence deepened as people jockeyed for advancement within the state or sought their own paths to wealth and power. At the same time, ritual specialists invoking mytho-historical figures offered an alternative authority and a counterbalance to the systemic insecurities at play throughout the kingdom. No one exclusively owned the spiritual realm.30 Epidemics and famines struck Buganda and surrounding areas in the first half of the 1880s. Kabaka Mutesa succumbed to disease (likely gonorrhea) in 1884, ending a reign that had begun three decades earlier. His adolescent successor, Mwanga, seemed particularly attracted to plundering his own people, but the tide of weapons would soon start slowing. Buganda slipped into civil war: Mwanga’s reign lasted just four years. He would return, but by then the power of the kabaka would be much diminished. By this time the colonial presence had become unmistakable, soon with the force of the 1890 General Act behind it. The new warlords were Europeans and their African collaborators, men such as Frederick (later Lord) Lugard (1858– 1945). Initially a youthful and extraordinarily violent employee of the IBEAC, Lugard arrived in 1890, later ruled over northern Nigeria, authored The Dual Mandate in British Africa (1922) that set out the principles and practices of indirect rule, and would go on to play an important role in the League of Nations. With each career advancement and ceremonial embellishment, Lugard’s history of violence faded.
Lugard insinuated himself into the internecine struggles unfolding in the Ganda capital; in this he differed little from other European imperialists.
With a diverse force of Sudanese and Zanzibari troops, he forged a partnership with Christian Baganda warlords fighting in the civil war. These fighters knew that collaborating with the IBEAC was the only possible way to acquire guns. They had their own pretensions of power and regional dominance, which they later secured: thanks to the 1900 Agreement, these warlords—and Buganda writ large—would have a privileged position within the newly created Uganda Protectorate. Prior to that agreement, Lugard and these African collaborators attacked communities in a broad area around Lake Victoria, particularly the Bunyoro kingdom. At gunpoint, they forced local rulers to sign treaties. They used a one-page standardized company form by which these rulers agreed to “cede to the said Company all his sovereign rights.”31 Not surprisingly, Lugard also laid claim to native resources, particularly ivory, and otherwise looted and extorted communities.
In the space of about a quarter century, many hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as one million would die in the greater Interlacustrine region, either directly or indirectly from colonial intrusion, and this on top of the massive numbers of people who perished in what became Kenya and Tanzania. Approximately one-third of Buganda’s population died in the 1890s. The colonial violence meted out against Bunyoro between 1891 and 1899, much of it under Lugard’s leadership, nearly destroyed one of Africa’s most powerful and densely populated kingdoms. One military strategy articulated the aim explicitly: “depopulating” the area.32 *
Once respected across the West and today mostly reviled,33 King Leopold and Cecil Rhodes were near contemporaries. Leopold was born in 1835, Rhodes eighteen years later.
Both died within seven years of each other, Rhodes in 1902 and Leopold in 1909. At the Berlin West Africa Conference, Leopold began securing claims to the Congo basin, prerogatives that the United States was more than willing to recognize (the United States wanted the rubber) and that Leopold’s American agent, Henry Morton Stanley, was busy turning into reality: he would acquire a ream of treaties and kill many while he was at it.
(Africans would call Stanley “Bula Mutari,” the “crusher of rocks,” to depict his brutality; the title would also be extended to describe Leopold and his Congo Free State.) For his part, Rhodes arrived in South Africa in 1870, making his way to and his fortune in the diamond fields of Kimberly and later the gold deposits beneath Johannesburg.
In late 1889, Rhodes formed the British South African Company (BSAC).
Its emblem with the ribboned words “Justice, Freedom, Commerce” underlining an assortment of African animals belied a complicated and bloody history. The royal charter was explicitly designed for British expansion north of the Limpopo River, where Rhodes hoped he would discover a “Second Rand.” In the 1890s, the BSAC began colonizing what would become Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). At the exact same time, Leopold and his cronies expanded across the Congo Independent State, created in 1885. The interests of the two would converge in mineral-rich Katanga, located in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rhodes hoped to snatch that territory from the Belgium king.
Both men had at their command large supplies of the world’s most advanced weaponry, from rockets to Martini-Henry rifles to machine guns.
Great Britain remained the most important arms producer on the planet and a global superpower, but Belgium wasn’t far behind in manufacturing and selling guns. In 1890, Liège’s barrel proofings outnumbered Birmingham’s by a factor of 3.78 in terms of private makers; the city had long been one of the world’s most important arms manufacturing hubs.
By value, Belgium was exporting over twice the number of firearms as the British; most British arms were now going to its own military—the world’s largest—not out on the private market. The Belgium government was literally giving them away to the Congo Free State (the same as the Congo Independent State), 1,500 in 1890 and another 6,000 two years later.
34 The 1890 General Act did not apply to what would become South Africa, since it lay below the 20th parallel. Besides, a decade earlier the Cape Parliament had already passed laws disarming and prohibiting weapons among Africans in territories under its control. The interior was a different matter. Weapons made their way from the Angolan coast to the headwaters of the Zambezi River, a distance of nearly 1,500 miles. The trade in guns, slaves, and ivory continued into the early part of the twentieth century, albeit not at the levels seen during the height of the Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, Leopold and the BSAC were both capable and, when necessary, willing to provide weapons to Africans in return for concessions and other appeasements. The BSAC sold many thousands of Martini-Henry rifles to King Lewanika in Barotseland (later part of Zambia), partly using the specious argument that the sale would put an end to the illegal gun trade. Farther to the north and also well above the 20th parallel, the Congo Free State supplied various groups such as the Yekes in Katanga, whose leaders used the new arms to establish a warlord state. The result was a massive increase in violence and enslavement.35 Both Rhodes and Leopold were ultimately implicated in the deaths of millions. The exact numbers slaughtered are impossible to determine, as they are almost everywhere Europeans and Americans pursued imperial conquest. Those responsible tended to vastly underestimate the figures or devised tortuous explanations for what was happening. Conversely, critics of empire sometimes inflated the numbers, although they rarely needed to do so given what most everyone knew at the time: that massive numbers of people were dying. It is safe to say that between 1890 and the early part of the first decade of the twentieth century, anywhere between three million and ten million people died in southern and Central Africa and perhaps more.
The carnage began in the 1880s and accelerated in the next decade. The African International Association (AIA), Leopold’s front organization, pretended to have humanitarian aims and an interest in spreading the gospel. Under these guises, the AIA began moving into the upper reaches of the Congo River, areas dominated by Tippu Tip and other Arabs who were focused on Zanzibar and the slave and ivory trade. These were men who had been responsible for terrorizing numerous peoples and massacring elephant herds from the dense Ituri forests south to Kasongo and Tip’s Manyema empire. Early incursions by the AIA into these regions also brought Leopold into the broader orbit of the British in Sudan and East Africa and characters such as Emin Pasha as well as the French, who had been conquering the region from the Atlantic coast into what is today Chad and the Central African Republic.36 Making Tip a governor and seeking alliances with various Arab warlords roving the region should indicate to us just how weak Leopold’s presence was in these early years.
Indeed, the AIA appointment effectively recognized Tip as already in control. Conflict erupted in the early 1890s as emerging European-based warlords took on established strongmen, beginning with raids on slave and ivory caravans. As in so many other parts of the world during the nineteenth century, the violent fissiparous politics of warlords proved impossible to contain; killing had long been part of doing business. Now with Europeans and their African allies muscling their way into the area, a new round of conflict ensued, fueled by the price of ivory and the easy availability of deadly weapons and typically unfolding under the dubious cover of bringing peace to the region.
European toughies helped lead the attacks, trying to confiscate whatever ivory and slaves they could. The Congo Free State’s Force Publique included trained officers, and those allied with Leopold often had access to superior weapons. The force also depended on Zanzibaris and West Africans in addition to Congolese, some local and others from areas to the west. (It is worth noting that troops mutinied in 1895, 1897, and 1900.) Arab warlords and their African supporters retaliated; a two-year war proved to be immensely destructive. The clash was as much between the Belgians and the Arabs as among a diverse array of warlords in which those representing or collaborating with Belgian interests finally prevailed.
Tens of thousands were slain, although very few were Europeans. The German Emin Pasha was perhaps the most famous European to die. He was assassinated by slave traders. His body was thrown into a river, and his head was packed in a box. In the end, Congo Free State forces captured Tip’s capital at Kasonga and promptly looted it. Other Arab strongholds saw similar thefts of their property, much of which they had acquired by force as well in years prior.
By 1894 Belgian warlords had gained some modicum of control over a region that had previously been dominated by Arabs, although most everywhere Africans resisted Belgian rapacities. Expansion in the north entailed battles against Mahdist forces as well as competition with British interests. In this general area that today includes parts of South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Azande warlord state mounted vigorous resistance. In the far south, large areas of Kasai and Katanga remained unsubdued until well into the first decade of the twentieth century. Still other areas were conquered in name only. Despite these challenges, the Congo Free State ended up creating the largest military anywhere in Central Africa: by the early 1900s, its force numbered some seventeen thousand warriors.
But the rule of the Congo Free State scarcely differed from the Arabs that preceded it: raiding and looting, capturing people, and extorting communities. In fact, many Arabs soon became employees of the Congo Free State, including, as we have seen, Tip himself. What the Belgians did in effect was to destroy the commercial networks that had taken shape around the slave and ivory trades earlier in the century, substituting a European monopoly for an Arab one and crafting a single militarized predatory state or, in the words of Africans, “the destroyer of the country.”37 This was a state wholly obsessed with profit. Behind the flimsy veneers of “free trade” and ending slavery, the Belgians continued to go after ivory that, of course, was obtainable only by violence. Various trading stations also purchased palm oil in large enough quantities to compete with West African suppliers. But these efforts weren’t as successful as some had hoped. In its first decade, the Congo Free State failed to yield profits for its king. Leopold wound up relying on the Belgian state to finance an imperialism about which many politicians back home seemed ambivalent and some seemed outright hostile.
Then rubber entered the picture. In the 1890s, rubber seemed to offer a “miracle” for the Congo Free State’s finances. The global growth of bicycles helped drive demand, along with shoes, industrial belts, and then the automobile revolution. (Belgium would become a world center in bicycle use. Rubber was a dirty industry and heavily dependent on fossil fuels.) Exports rose sixtyfold in just over a decade, from one hundred to six thousand metric tons, while prices nearly doubled, producing massive profits, most of which went to Belgium’s coffers.
Rubber, however, was a new iteration of a now-familiar story: the looting or extortionist economy placed in the service of industrial capitalism and, like slaves and ivory, an easily exhaustible resource. As wild vines were depleted of their sap and often destroyed to maximize latex collection, the rubber economy relentlessly moved in search of fresh sources. The “regime domanial” established in 1891, in which the Congo Free State in effect proclaimed itself owner of all land, served to authorize extortion and violence and reflected an economy fundamentally based on military rule. Africans were forced to provide rubber to intermediaries: local rulers, who then provided the product to state administrators and received weapons in return, and concessionary and trading companies. Failure to provide enough rubber quickly or rubber of sufficiently high quality resulted in further violence.
Companies had their own militaries; African rulers had their guns.
And then there was the brutal Force Publique.38 In these ways, companies, including the Congo Free State writ large, were a new form of warlordism, with a few important differences. They shared with warlords a reliance on guns, a privatization of violence, and a willingness to extort communities of labor and resources. They also shared a predilection for looting and controlling the flow of world commodities, an eagerness to profit from destruction, and a resistance to accountability.
Finally and locally at least, they shared a nasty reputation: people utterly loathed the companies and considered them the epitome of evil. But companies and warlords differed in one key respect: companies represented the direct, unmediated extension of the military-commercial revolution, which among other things provided immediate access to weapons and financial institutions. Warlords did not enjoy this benefit. The BSAC, for example, was a publicly held company with an original capitalization of £1million. And, of course, both the Congo Free State and the BSAC, along with others such as the IBEAC and Goldie’s Royal Niger Company, were headed by men living in an age of profound and growing Western racism.
They were mostly able to cleanse their blood-soaked hands. Money helped.
Particularly in the 1890s, the Congo saw a wave of devastating violence and suffering: the burning of villages, the chopping off of hands, and shootings. Tens of thousands fled, for “life had become intolerable,” Casement reported. “Nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them.”39 Across vast areas, predation disrupted agriculture. Famine, malnutrition, and disease followed. Millions perished.
The Belgium government would soon blush at the atrocities and the disaster their king had wrought. Leopold died a year after Belgium took formal control of the Congo in 1908 (this rule lasted until the early 1960s).
Much is made of Roger Casement’s 1904 report on the barbarisms that Leopold’s reign had wrought. (Casement, in fact, had worked for the AIA; in 1890 he would meet Joseph Conrad, who published his Heart of Darkness in 1899.) But people had known what was unfolding in the Congo for some time, including Leopold himself. The profits from rubber had proven too seductive to initiate change. When those profits began tumbling from about 1907 for a host of reasons, including competition from Asian rubber, savagery in the Congo became less palatable.
Belgium now began to realize that the Congo’s future lay not with rubber or palm oil and certainly not in ivory but instead with something more precious: copper. The export of copper from what came to be known as the Copperbelt would take off after Europeans secured imperial control in the early twentieth century and after the construction of railroads that connected the interior to the coasts. By 1925 the Congo was producing more than ninety thousand tons of copper, the world’s third-largest supplier of a resource critically important to the West’s advanced economies.
Copper had been used in electrical wiring starting in the 1820s. Demand grew astronomically with the rise of the telegraph (developed in the 1830s and 1840s) and later with the spread of electrification. By 1900 more than 750,000 miles of telegraph cable extended over much of the planet, some of it not even an inch in diameter, relying on just a single strand of copper, although as the technology improved, cables grew in size and the amount of copper increased. In the 1880s, electricity generated by coal-fired plants was becoming available to city dwellers; steam engines turned to generating electrical power.
Demand was insatiable. All of these developments required copper, just as they also required fossil fuels. Power generation would become one of the leading sources of greenhouse gases and indeed remains so today.
40 Although Africans had been mining copper for centuries, Congo’s vast copper deposits were “discovered” by an employee of Rhodes’s BSAC.
Frederick Russell Burnham (1861–1947) helped lead the violent conquest of Southern and Northern Rhodesia, participated in the South African War of 1899–1902, and would later play a foundational role in the Boy Scouts of America. Prior to his arrival in South Africa, Burnham earned a deserved reputation as an effective Indian killer in the making of America’s empire across Arizona and California. (He would also become one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.) Burnham was an exceptional tracker, which meant that he was a good killer. He was, in short, an imperialist, a white supremacist, and a murderer, a maker of his age, although his name is mostly now forgotten. “A trained white man can out stand all other races,” he once wrote. “I had won out nigger after nigger Zulu, Basutos & others.”41 Like most other companies then conquering Africa, the BSAC had its own flag, stamps, forms to make treaties and acquire territory, and a militia composed of diverse people from various imperial frontiers. Stetsons ended up in the middle of Africa, along with pith helmets, not to mention Colt pistols and Remington rifles along with all the other weapons. In a feverish decade, the company rushed into what would become Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Neither place yielded the fabulous riches of South Africa’s Kimberly’s diamonds or to the north the Rand’s vast seams of gold. Very quickly the BSAC encouraged white settlement, in effect extending South Africa’s settler colonialism northward. African leaders confronted their less than ideal choices: sign treaties based on unfamiliar concepts of sovereignty, try to turn the imperial juggernaut to their advantage, or take up arms against the new invaders.
A businessman, politician, and imperialist, Rhodes enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the British government. He worked in tandem with government officials to conquer regions north of the Limpopo River. At times it was difficult to distinguish between the British government and the BSAC. Protectorates established by the British, for example, might entail administration organized by the company, and the enlargement of the company’s ventures beyond the Zambezi River in 1891 involved the consul general of Nyasaland, now described as a “political administrator,” whose salary would be paid by the company. This was classic colonialism on the cheap: the British wanted to extend their control over interior areas, but they weren’t sure it was worth the expense. Getting others to do the work of empire was a convenient way to achieve one’s ends at the lowest costs possible.
The early 1890s saw the company entering into various treaties with African leaders across the entire region, from Zimbabwe to Malawi and into Zambia, in some areas revising agreements that had been concluded just a few years earlier. In Southern Rhodesia, however, the BSAC found the Ndebele Kingdom—an unstable polity wracked by its own civil war less than a half century after its creation in the 1830s—insufficiently pliant. The company started a war with that kingdom in 1893; doing so, the BSAC hoped, might also help inflate share prices. Vast goldfields seemed forever on the horizon; surely wealth would follow once new areas were “opened up.” Disappointment followed: gold was discovered but never on the scale of a second Rand. Instead, the 1890s saw Southern Rhodesia becoming a settler colony amid rampant land speculation, dispossession, and the widespread looting of African communities. A settler warlord economy swiftly took hold, and well-armed militias—some organized by the company, others by settlers—attacked the Ndebele and neighboring Shona communities, killing people, burning homes, and confiscating property. In three years Africans lost around two hundred thousand cattle, many of them ending up in the slaughterhouses of the Rand.42 Taxes became little more than extortion, except now people were forced into the wage labor economy. Profits from looting proved formative in establishing settler farming and white supremacy in Southern Rhodesia.
This dismal pattern was reproduced elsewhere, although little white settlement took place in Northern Rhodesia, and only a bit more occurred in Nyasaland, where colonial agriculture based on tea arose. Both areas had seen an explosion of violence earlier in the century, and the bloodshed continued into the 1910s. The movements of people, especially the Ngonis, became tied to the rapid expansion of the ivory and slave trades. The acquisition of weapons, once again, helped propel the rise of warlords. Stockaded settlements could now be found from Lake Nyasa far into Zambia, clear evidence of just how insecure life had become. In many areas, farming had declined because people found it too dangerous to be in the fields. Ecological and epidemiological disasters coursed through the wider region at the very moment of European conquest: droughts, sand jiggers that ate away feet, plagues of locusts, and then in the late 1890s the nightmare of rinderpest.
Rhodes’s company took full advantage of the chaos and vulnerability on the ground. In Nyasaland, today’s Malawi, which the BSAC had assumed control over what had been the British Central Africa Protectorate, employees clashed with well-armed Yao warlords who had profited from the trade in ivory and slaves.43 Colonial violence worsened after 1893 when Rhodes committed more resources to his militia. By the end of the decade, most Yao warlords had been defeated. Pillaging continued, however, only now at the hands of white, not African, warlords. Stockaded villages were attacked. “Once inside they seized women, cattle, cloth, ivory, or whatever .
. . they could lay hands upon,”44 reported the Central African Times in late 1899. “I got some goats by looting,” one officer wrote to his mother in 1897, “so I get fresh milk and the natives bring me fresh fish every day.
One chief has to bring me 200 men to work for nothing. . . . The hatred on his face when I tell him he has to bring more still or I’ll make war on him is intense, but he’s got to do it, or I’ll burn all his villages and crops down.”45 When officials came to collect taxes, villagers would “take to the bush.”46 Taxation and forced labor (thangata), both hated by locals, would be deployed to support settler tea plantations along the Shire Highlands.
The company acquired Northern Rhodesia primarily as a way of making sure Leopold didn’t get to it first. Until the beginning of copper mining operations in the early decades of the twentieth century, the general region was somewhat neglected, with the northern areas mostly dominated by warlord polities tied to the ivory and slave trades. To the south lay the Lozi state. Everywhere, people were assiduously acquiring weapons. Violence had been pronounced since the late 1860s, with the penetration of Arab merchant warriors into the region and, from the west, the appearance of Angolan merchants. Into this complex political landscape now marched the BSAC, seeking alliances by treaty, insinuating itself into succession disputes to install cooperative leaders, and prosecuting violence as needed.
Company leaders wanted to reduce African access to weapons or at least access among those who might offer resistance; in the 1890s, colonists were authorized to shoot any African who had a gun.
In the northeast, the BSAC attacked caravans moving slave and ivory toward the coast; by around 1900, the company had successfully destroyed these commercial networks. In the west, along the Zambezi, the company reached an agreement with the Lozi Kingdom, which, like the Ndebele Kingdom, had endured a prolonged succession dispute. The Lozi conflict had ended in 1885 with the rise of King Lewanika, known as “the conqueror.”47 Ceding mineral rights to the BSAC, Lewanika received weapons and an annual salary in return and solidified his own expansionist claims. In doing so, he transformed the Lozi Kingdom into a predatory state operating under the protection of the British Crown. A now plentiful supply of guns meant that violence radiated outward. Slaves, ivory, and cattle flowed to Lewanika’s capital at Lealui; meanwhile, local people suspected that his violence and collaboration with the enemy had caused their own misfortune. Rinderpest, drought, and famine had taken over. The king had bewitched the land. * Such beliefs had become widespread across East, Central, and southern Africa, indeed across the continent. They were not altogether new ideas. Good leaders healed the land and brought nourishing rains, prosperity, and peace; bad leaders destroyed the land. Drought, even for extended deadly periods, was nothing new.
Nor was the avariciousness of those who sought power and wealth at the expense of others.
These events were as old as time.
But something was different now. The severity of suffering was multiplying exponentially.
East Africa saw drought, disease, and mass starvation in the 1890s in some of the earliest spasms of our new age of global warming. Central Africa saw deaths in the millions. The situation was dire in Southern Rhodesia, where the colonial looting economy and the extortion of communities had arrived with drought, locusts, and rinderpest.
Across the wider region, communities suffered from “a great drought . . .
and terrific swarms of locusts.”48 Never had people so suffered. Never had the land seemed to die so profoundly and permanently. Never had the evil of immoral economies so taken possession of the world. Human beings on the African continent were caught within a whirlwind that was impossible to escape, a tornado destroying the earth, sundering the expected rhythms of everyday life, and burrowing deeply into the collective imagination.
What could be done?
Wherever the military-commercial revolution took hold, local peoples submitted these immoral economies to withering condemnation. They reached deep into African history and culture for these critiques, into the human compulsion and capacity to speak truth to power, to those who pursued greed by violence and to create meaning out of catastrophe.
In 1896, first the Ndebeles and then the Shonas revolted against BSAC rule and the exactions of farmers and labor recruiters. “The white man would be driven from the land,” one observer reported. Religious specialists played a powerful role in organizing this resistance, which forced whites from their farms to the safety of Bulawayo. In June 1896, none other than the American Burnham allegedly shot the prophet Mlimo in the Matopo Hills, with the “aid of a 303 bullet.” But Mlimo (more properly Mwari) was less a person than a constellation of ideas about the fertility of the land and the ineluctable connections between the living and the ancestors and what humans owed the earth, ideas that lived on in the hills and in the breeze whispering that nourishing rains would return. Burnham was incapable of understanding this spirit. The racist and imperialist might have murdered many people, but he was no match for Mlimo.
FIGURE 15.3. Prophets Nehanda and Kagubi, 1897. Both prophets were executed and buried in unmarked graves. Alamy Image ID K9E156.
Among the Shonas, spirit mediums played an important role in the revolt, which came to be known as the chimurenga. They too formed part of a rich culture around land, authority, and legitimacy. The BSAC had entered a territory organized around chiefdoms but also one comprising spirit provinces, or the mhondoro, the lion spirits of royal ancestors going back nearly a millennium. These spirits helped ensure nourishing rains, cured the ill, and played an important role in chiefly succession and political legitimacy. Now they looked out over a world defiled and rendered barren; they gazed out upon a political order that, in some basic way, was profoundly illegitimate.49 The war would continue through 1897. Militias would exact such violence that even the Colonial Office grew worried and began intervening.
Eventually BSAC rule would be put on a shorter leash; the company would be dissolved in the 1920s. In the interim, the colonial looting economy continued. New colonial farms began popping up wherever there was land to hold them. Thousands of Africans were shot, many summarily; the Maxim gun did its work. Others were lynched. Many thousands starved to death. In the space of a decade, Southern Rhodesia’s African population declined by nearly half.
Meanwhile back at home, Rhodes would receive his venerations, despite criticisms by various members of Parliament. Entire colonies were named after him, not to mention buildings, schools, and scholarships. But across Southern Rhodesia’s Matopo Hills where the great man found his resting place, everyone knew the truth: “he’s death.”50
16 Savageries of the New Imperialism in India EUROPE CONQUERED LARGE PARTS of Africa in a breathless and bloody decade, the culmination of nearly half a century of exceptional violence across the continent, from Cape to Cairo, from Lagos to Zanzibar. Africa was made safe for continued exploitation. Many tens of millions had died, perhaps hundreds of millions. In some areas, especially parts of East, Central, and southern Africa, local populations had virtually collapsed.
Entire communities vanished.
By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, new patterns of colonial rule were becoming firmly established, and the reign of warlords—both African and European—had come to an end.
The world’s first global arms treaty had made colonial conquest easier and, by slowing the century’s long flow of weapons, had effectively demilitarized African political systems. There were exceptions, but Africa in 1914 appeared far more unified—and peaceful and in many areas more prosperous—than it had been in many decades and in some areas in centuries.
Critics of empire usually forget these facts; empire had its benefits that many Africans, especially those who had lived under the tyranny of warlords, recognized.
Unification and peace came at the cost of European imperial domination and exploitation, and violent repression would punctuate the ensuing decades of relative calm, especially with anticolonial politics after 1945.
But even empire ended more often with a whimper of political concession than with the bang of armed revolution. Remarkably, the borders so arbitrarily drawn by European powers have remained stable to the present day, even if internally ethnic conflict and regional politics have bedeviled the promises of progress and national integration. Especially from the 1970s, however, a new era of warlordism would begin, and once again, the West (and today China) would eye Africa for its abundant resources. Also once again, weapons would become cheaper, more plentiful, and shockingly destructive.
Asia was different, although guns also led to widespread enslavement.
Despite the extensive manufacturing of guns and powder in India, Great Britain shipped immense amounts of armaments to the east: in the eighteenth century alone, nearly 4 million pounds of gunpowder and over 150 million pounds of shot and lead, enough for more than 2 billion Brown Bess musket balls, twice as many musket balls as there were people in the world in 1800. Guns might promise democracy to some Americans and revolution to others, but they usually end up spreading authoritarianism.
Weapons enabled the British East India Company (BEIC) to loot India. In the nineteenth century, warlordism in Asia created multiple crises that inevitably led to colonial intrusion and economic transformation and to destruction, death, and impoverishment. In India and China, somewhere between 30 million and 60 million people died from famine in just the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the same years that saw such terrific loss of life during the Scramble for Africa. Earlier famines produced extraordinary devastations: think Bengal in 1770 and other parts of India in the 1780s and 1790s and China on and off from 1810 through the cataclysmic years of the Taiping Rebellion midcentury. All told, in just over a century upwards of 100 million or more people needlessly perished. This was the human cost of the Mortecene, where the savageries of the new imperialism across Asia arrived with an Indian Ocean warmed by fossil fuels and foretelling the climate emergency of our present age.1 *
Back in the seventeenth century, the BEIC’s ability to prosecute violence had remained weak. But this began to change in the early eighteenth century, at first slowly and then more rapidly around the 1750s, as the company combined trade with violence and warlordism took root. In the 1780s, the word “loot”—from the Hindustani term lūṭ meaning “plunder, pillage”—began entering English usage, one indication that the company had become the preserve of warlords par excellence.2 This linguistic import appeared just fifteen years after Robert Clive’s subjugation of Bengal and the extrication of diwani rights from the Mughal emperor in 1765, which allowed the company to expropriate—extort, in essence—the finances of India’s wealthiest region. The BEIC swiftly increased taxation, even in the face of the great 1770 famine. This move produced vast profits for Clive and stockholders, quite a few of whom served as members of Parliament, and also saved the company significant amounts of money, since it no longer had to import gold into the region.
The looting continued and indeed would become so important that the company would create the Prize Committee to distribute the lucre, although employees squabbled over what constituted outright plunder and what had to be funneled through the prize fund.
Looting would have been impossible without guns. By 1800, the BEIC’s army had swelled to over 250,000, twice the size of the British Army, the world’s second largest. (Increasingly, British troops would augment and in the end replace these forces.) Ostensibly, this army sought to fend off European competitors and protect its control over the vitally important saltpeter production in addition to other exports. In practice, however, the soldiers were mostly used for looting and conquest. In the final years of the eighteenth century during the conquest of Mysore, in southwestern India, the company confiscated quite literally everything of worth, to the tune of $250 million in today’s currency. The orgy of pillaging left over ten thousand people dead and many more without food, human beings left “to wander and starve,” as one company officer noted.3 Indian rulers purchased weapons from the BEIC, often providing the company with exclusive trading rights in return, as did other nations.4 This was a devil’s bargain.
The diffusion of weapons and rising violence created a far more fragmented political world dominated by warlords, of which the BEIC was becoming the most powerful. Effective governance by centralized rulers withered. By 1750, the Mughal Empire had definitively declined. The Marathas had defeated the Mughals in the early part of the eighteenth century and had begun consolidating control over territories around midcentury, emerging as a full-fledged, if also not particularly stable, empire. Succession disputes at the center and rebellions on the periphery helped produce three periods of civil war (1708–1718, 1772–1778, and 1795–1801). Maratha rule in many areas was at best weak, something the company had a hard time understanding in addition to Indian conceptions of sovereignty, which were foreign to British newcomers. Rulers (peshwa) struggled to exert control over many of the states that formed the empire. The leaders of these states maintained their own armies and, very often, pursued their own violent expansion. Smaller armed groups led by local leaders proliferated, many of whom gave lip service to central power and then forged ahead, acting as they pleased. The BEIC looted in one area, demanded tribute in another, and taxed everywhere it could.
The company operated, as a Scottish Ricardian economist put it in 1832, “with ‘a sword [that is, a gun] in one hand and a ledger in the other,’”5 a perfect description of warlordism, indeed of the military-commercial revolution writ large. Everywhere the company went, suffering followed. The company’s bleeding of Bengal radically increased economic insecurity. Very quickly, what had been a “fine country . . . is now verging towards ruin.”6 The great 1770 Bengal famine followed. In the space of six months, the London Magazine reported in April 1771, “upwards of three hundred thousand” people perished. “There was never so great a scarcity of cash in Bengal as at present,” the magazine callously lamented, noting that “the company, I am afraid [will] fall short of their revenues this year.”7 Meanwhile, “the very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead,”8 with the famine “depopulating a country with which we [the BEIC] are so immediately connected.”9 While BEIC officials fretted that profits might decline, upwards of 1.2 million people died, roughly 20 percent of the population, a mortality rate that ranks the famine as one of the deadliest in modern history. Clive was doing just fine amid these horrors: in less than a decade he pocketed the equivalent of $60 million in today’s dollars, spending a good bit of the money on massive estates across England.10 His son would become the governor of Madras.
Although the BEIC’s incursions into the subcontinent occasionally met with defeat, by 1803 and the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Maratha War, the company had laid its hands on a vast area. (The first war had concluded two decades earlier, following seven years of conflict.) The final major conquest came in 1849 with the Battle of Gujrat; the BEIC now controlled, in varying degrees, much of what would become India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Company militias and other employees handily carried off the subcontinent’s wealth while draining its resources by taxation. Extortion helped line the coffers of the powerful. Indian rulers found themselves in debt, paying such punishingly high levels of interest that they lost their territories. The company also came up with the sly policy by which it took over territory when a ruler died and left no clear successor.
The BEIC produced fabulous returns for its investors and conquerors, the most famous and wealthy of whom returned home with the moniker “nabob,” meaning “governor,” a term taken from the Mughal Empire. The conduct of its warlords—as notorious in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as King Leopold’s behavior was in the 1890s—produced a steady stream of scandals and political headaches for the British government, beginning with Clive and his sudden windfall of riches and continuing right through to the BEIC’s dissolution a century later. Parliament found itself passing legislation to reign in the company or save it from bankruptcy, as if it were too big to fail. Early efforts such as the 1773 Regulating Act were desultory at best. The most famous of the scandals was the 1788 trial of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, led by member of Parliament and liberal conservative Edmund Burke, whom we earlier met occupying the same intellectual world as Adam Smith. Appalled by what the company had done in India, Burke was troubled by what he viewed as the unseemliness of empire, as if colonialism (and capitalism) could somehow be prosecuted in a “proper” way. He was equally appalled by what he saw as the corrupt manner in which warlords had bought their way into the British elite. In his Articles of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Burke explicitly connected the 1765 concession of diwani with the “dreadful famine and mortality” that soon followed. The company government in Bengal had “violently kept up” the taxes amid terrible suffering, he observed. Even worse, when Hastings became governor in 1772, he increased taxes “at a higher rate than had ever been received before,” despite writing to the directors about the “unheard-of depopulation” the famine had wrought.11 Hastings knew exactly what he was doing, as did Leopold a century later.
The 1784 India Act that emerged out of the miasma of controversies increased government control over the BEIC, but very little happened to stem the tide of its immoral economy.
Violence, territorial acquisition, and looting continued across the region into the 1850s, but so also did trade, especially with China, as tea had become central to company profits and the British economy. Guns and gunpowder continued flowing into and out of the subcontinent; in 1842, for example, more than 3.2 million pounds of lead and shot headed to the subcontinent. Shareholders, shielded by an early form of limited liability protection, continued making money. Corruption and maladministration continued largely unchecked until the very end, even if the company did bequeath to history the high-minded phrase “civil service.”12 Major reforms to the BEIC came in the early 1830s, but these primarily focused on ending the company’s monopoly of trade, something Adam Smith had long criticized, including in his 1784 edition of the Wealth of Nations. Smith believed that monopolies such as those exercised by the BEIC interfered with the immutable laws of supply and demand and in so doing not only produced economic harm but also undermined the public good and political order. The BEIC’s malfeasance was thus directly related to its trade monopoly, not to any larger stance or issues. Revoke the charter, and progress would follow as naturally as the sun rose on the British Empire, or so Smith argued. His diagnosis would soon become gospel.
Only during and immediately after the Great Rebellion of 1857–1859, which cost the Treasury vast sums and cut into corporate profits, did the British state intervene and begin formally taking over the BEIC. Under the 1858 Government of India Act, all company territories would be “vested in Her Majesty.” Henceforth, India would be ruled from London, overseen by a secretary of state and a council of fifteen headed by a governor-general; the directors of the company would be allowed to appoint seven members.
This decision, with other changes, functioned to create continuities between the company and the British state.13 Even so, the company’s monopoly status ended. Other reforms came into play as well, some initiated earlier, perhaps most importantly a change to the collection of land revenue that had been so central to generating company profits. And with greater parliamentary oversight came important changes to local governments that effectively ended widespread looting, that most primitive mode of accumulating capital. At long last, a century of warlordism was coming to a close.
The revolt of native troops within the BEIC’s army began in May 1857 and within months had spread across large areas of India. There was much about which to complain. The most obvious reasons for dissent were the looting of wealth; wanton violence and cultural debasement; the revenue system, from rising taxes to its extension over new areas; interventions into political succession, including installing rulers seen by many as illegitimate; the transformation of rural relations, from landlord-tenant agreements to the subversion of communal rights to forest and grazing lands; and discontent within the army. “The English Government [the Company] is less popular than it has ever been in India. It is in fact very much disliked and looked at with fear and distrust,” wrote one critic from India. Such were the “galling distinctions of conquest.”14 Significantly, the 1857 revolt began with a gun or, more precisely, with rumors of bullets greased with pig fat, an affront to Hindus and Muslims, or as one official dismissively put it, “this cartridge business.” These bullets were for the newly introduced Enfield rifle, at the time one of the world’s most advanced guns. Over time, the Enfield would become the single most important weapon in creating and maintaining Britain’s vast empire. The Great Rebellion, as it became known, was ultimately not one revolt but many: at times cohesive and invoking historic grievances going back to the 1700s, at other times unstable and reproducing political fragmentation that had been in play for nearly a century. At still other times, the rebellion was informed by ideas that violence would restore some golden past or realize time’s end. BEIC militias pursued retribution and the restoration of company rule; indiscriminate violence followed. The conduct of British troops, forty thousand of them, was not much better. Tens of thousands of Indian people were killed, many summarily. A few areas were nearly depopulated. Those who had rebelled were punished, perhaps most famously the show trial in Delhi of the last Mughal leader, Emperor Bahadur Shah II, who narrowly escaped death and ended his days exiled in Burma. His two sons, however, were shot on the spot. Delhi was utterly devastated. In one of the most disgusting episodes of a shameful epoch, Brigadier General James Neill forced rebels to clean up the spilt “blood of Europeans with their tongues before hanging them.”15 Many of the wealthier rebels lost their estates or positions “to divers persons as rewards for faithful and loyal services.” Some of these recipients ended up as maharajas with massive landholdings, producing export crops and collecting taxes. In Oudh, local rulers controlled more than 67 percent of the land. The mass “disinherison [disinheriting/depriving] of a people” originally contemplated as a potential good now gave even some seasoned politicians in England reason to pause, however much jingoism had taken hold. Moreover, the new British rulers soon realized their dependence on Indian collaborators and, when it suited them, so-called customs. In this way, the landed aristocracy solidified its control, in many instances also taking on important positions within the colonial order.
16 In significant ways, then, many older patterns continued in this new age.
Indian hierarchy, real and imagined, suited British aristocratic sensibilities and pretensions. A world of landlords and peasants, of those who ruled and those who were subject, seemed as eternal in India as it did to British grandees who believed that the Norman Conquest still coursed through their veins, so also their belief in the natural law of free markets.
Laissez-faire yielded wholesome social and political orders and, of course, economic progress. These were, in the language of the day, “universal laws.” The absence of free markets helped explain the corruption of the BEIC, or so some argued, as well as the arbitrary tyrannies of warlords and other despots. From this new vantage point, in short, free markets would rid Asia and the world of these thugs and the violence and political fragmentation they had unleashed. But the tyrannies of warlords gave way to the horrors of free market ideology, which in India would come to justify colonial indifference in the face of mass starvation. And as we shall see with China in what was perhaps the age’s most profound contradiction in search of a justification, this free market ideology would be used to legitimate imperial aggression.17 Many of these convictions held firm so long as they suited those who espoused them. Formal imperialism would be erected on a cracked foundation of contradiction patched over with a plaster of equal parts haughty morality and historical amnesia. The politics around the consolidation of power and a new more progressive order of a British colonial state might be wedded to the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of the rule of law and the free market. But soon forgotten was the fact that economic liberalism had spread weapons and violence around the world.
One immediate challenge the British faced was the fact that India had millions of guns and an arms and explosives industry and was responsible for the broader circulation of weapons across Asia. The company had provided many hundreds of thousands of guns to its native troops, who vastly outnumbered the British and had turned weapons against them in a villainous act of treason and treachery. The British set to work countering this activity immediately. Laws enacted between 1857 and 1860 prohibited the import and manufacturing of weapons and empowered officials to disarm whomever they chose. These legislative actions formed part of a more general demilitarization of society, culminating in the 1878 Indian Arms Act, which dramatically restricted and controlled the possession, manufacture, and sale of weapons, including imports and exports, as well as who could carry guns in public. (A few years later, another act extended greater control over gunpowder.) Taken as a whole, these laws anticipated the 1890 General Act that helped bring an end to warlordism in Africa. (The 1878 act served as the foundation for the strict gun laws India enforces to this day.) The political reconfigurations that took place after 1858 brought a modicum of stability, a general decline in violence, and an end to the looting economy. The subcontinent was far more peaceful and, in some areas, more prosperous, but it was also far more unequal. Vast numbers of rural peoples lived deeply insecure lives, with the structural violence of institutions and markets replacing the physical violence of warlordism. The rise of export crops such as opium and cotton under the BEIC was often associated with unfree labor and indebtedness and in some areas a dramatic increase in slavery. We have explored how the post-1858 period saw a phenomenal increase in cotton exports and devastating environmental change, which India’s colonial masters knew very well. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 promised never-ending growth in Indian exports and the shipment of British finished goods within a glorious world of liberal capitalism, where the work of Indian peasants and Manchester factory workers would be conjoined by the magic of coal and steam. The end of BEIC warlordism augured progress and development.
A torrent of legislation covered everything from banking, the formation of limited liability companies, telegraphs, and universities to the creation of a uniform penal code. Modern India, it seemed, was being created by pen and ink. Modernity’s more unsavory aspects, especially slavery and the spread of weapons, were best forgotten or explained away as a premodern hangover, something that would disappear with the sobering tonic of civilization and commerce.18 Overall, the Indian economy grew from around 1 percent to 1.5 percent per year in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Many areas had seen significant losses of population in a hundred years of violence, but these began rebounding in the 1860s. Exports of raw goods steadily increased, especially during the cotton boom years. In 1870–1871 over half of Indian exports went to Britain, which accounted for over 80 percent of imports. Railroads snaked their way into the subcontinent’s interior. India began importing large quantities of British coal, with the fuel shipped down the Suez Canal decades before the invention of oil tankers. The economic capital born of looting was now a capital suckled on international trade, but the direction the profits of empire traveled remained largely unchanged. By a wide margin, India emerged as the most important colony in Britain’s vast empire, central to its continued industrial expansion. Free trade and a benevolent liberal colonialism—both forms of supposed improvement— appeared to be working their magic.
These political and economic changes seemed to work until they didn’t.
Economic crisis took hold almost as soon as ships began making their way up and down the Suez Canal, when cotton prices declined following the end of the American Civil War. The worldwide Long Depression during the 1870s spelled disaster. Well into the 1890s, international commodity prices remained mostly weak, even as exports of cotton and grains continued, and the price of food skyrocketed during periods of drought. For much of the colonial period, Indian agriculture was mostly static in output; not until the Green Revolution of the 1960s did yields significantly increase, although the changes wrought by that period of innovation (fertilizers and tube wells) had their own environmental and health costs.19 Overshadowing or at least affecting all these developments was a climatic shift: the monsoonal system upon which agriculture in the subcontinent, indeed all of Asia and much of Africa, depended had entered a period of pronounced instability. In many areas, both land and sea surface temperatures were rising. The Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean have been warming roughly since the late 1820s and early 1830s and more so from the latter part of the century, a change tied in part to the burning of fossil fuels and rising greenhouse gas emissions.
There is no single cause for these changes; climate attribution science is complex and controversial. A major area of contemporary research concerns the relationship between the global warming associated with industrial emissions and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the complex climate pattern tied to changing tropical ocean temperatures that has an impact on global rainfall patterns. An emerging consensus suggests that a warming planet has an impact on the frequency and intensity of El Niño–Southern Oscillation perturbations, bringing floods to some areas and droughts to others. Establishing when this association began is fraught with challenges, but one thing seems clear: the more we learn, the earlier the dates of human-caused or at least human-influenced climate change appear to become. In other words, liberal imperialism’s free trade and human-created global warming took off mostly simultaneously, each feeding on the other.
20 What is brutally clear is that famines soon arrived. The price of food might rise three or four times during these crises. People could not afford to purchase food, and practices of redistribution had long since frayed from a century of warlordism. Remarkably, the revenue system that the BEIC had deployed continued under British rule. In fact, taxation had increased. Even in nonfamine years, taxation, one observer wrote, “reduces them to a state of chronic poverty.” What did this mean in practical terms? “The fact is, the average cultivator is in debt,” with many owing as much as two years of crops to the British government, landlords, and moneylenders.21 Besotted by free market ideology and convinced that they had brought peace and progress to India, British colonial officials dragged their heels on offering any significant aid to the starving. Labor would save the day, or so argued people such as Sir Richard Temple, who in 1877 became the governor of Bombay and earlier had faced criticisms from his London superiors for violating free trade gospel by providing famine relief in 1874.
Ever mindful of career advancement, which meant stern rule of the natives, Temple devised a notorious “wage” that provided less food to the starving than what prisoners received in the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald.22 FIGURE 16.1. Indian Famine Victims. From the Illustrated London News, October 20, 1877. Alamy Image ID EBHM2C.
Famine hit parts of the subcontinent in the late 1860s; more than a million people died. In the second half of the 1870s, famine became widespread as “countless patches of ground” remained barren.23 In Bengal, the only things that seemed to grow were poppies and tobacco. Some officials worried about how to properly “authenticate” the starving as if they couldn’t tell if someone was famished by looking at them, and more fretted that relief programs might interfere with the free market. The official record is rife with bureaucratic sclerosis and dithering, punctuated by the occasional infighting. With such “uncertainty” about how to act in the face of such distress, perhaps the best thing, some basically argued, was to proceed slowly and deliberately; after all, it was impossible “to meet every case,” wrote one official.24 As a result, between six million and ten million died across much of India, even as grain shipments continued heading to Britain. Unimaginably, the famines that took place over much of the 1890s were likely considerably worse; anywhere between six million and nineteen million people perished.25 Some areas lost nearly half their populations to death and desertion.
Throughout these decades food exports to better-off nations continued, at times accounting for nearly 20 percent of the entire Indian economy. The 1880 Indian Famine Commission matter-of-factly reported that grain and pulse exports averaged over £7 million yearly between 1875 and 1880, the other two major exports being cotton and opium. Food exports reached their highest in 1876–1877, while the British Parliament and colonial officials argued over whether Indian policy properly conformed “to the laws of political economy and free trade” and many millions of Indians starved to death.26 The free market, at least for the privileged few, was working.
17 The Terrors of Free Trade in China THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY (BEIC) perfected the immoral economy on the Indian subcontinent and across much of Asia, practices that at home were sometimes called the “Old Corruption.” But like hunting and other forms of predation, looting could only get you so far, and there was only so much wealth one could extract through taxation, although both had done very well for the likes of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, who suffered the indignities of impeachment at the hands of conservative Edmund Burke.
These tactics had worked in India for nearly a century. China, however, would be an entirely different matter.
The BEIC was the quintessential cartel, thuggish pioneers of capitalism in a dog-eat-dog world. The company had its own military, guns, and codes of honor; relied on local and metropolitan collaborators and enablers; and combined violence, extortion, and trade in anything and everything that might make money, including weapons.1 Utterly corrupt in an age of venality and warlordism, the company played a central role in the militarycommercial revolution. The BEIC spread indebtedness and guns across Asia and into Oceania, from Pakistan to Papua New Guinea. The company ensured the steady supply of the crucial raw material that made Britain the world’s largest producer and distributor of gunpowder: the saltpeter produced by thousands of exploited laborers.
Particularly from the last quarter of the eighteenth century and in the context of a warlordism run amok that left tens of millions dead, the BEIC came to depend on the British state to bail it out of successive financial and political disasters. The violent looting of India cost the British government dearly. The company produced incredible fortunes for some—the nabobs— and for decades yielded excellent returns to its investors and speculators, some prominent politicians. But the BEIC also produced one ignominy after another as millions of Indians needlessly died. After unbridled warlordism forced the hand of government, Parliament came to the company’s rescue many times, each time ratcheting up formal oversight (1773, 1784, 1813, 1833, and 1858), with dwindling returns: the disorder would consume a subcontinent and spread to the rest of Asia.
Adam Smith had set out a withering assessment of the BEIC, part of his broader critique of mercantilism. Smith had intimate knowledge of the company; beginning in 1778 he had served as commissioner of customs, and he possessed an in-depth understanding of international trade. Yet the situation was even more complex and contradictory than the apostle of free market capitalism had described in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. In the early eighteenth century, the company had granted licenses to private traders and employees operating from Burma to China and deep across Indonesia, a kind of subcontracting of warlordism. These merchants were among many engaged in the broad spread of weapons and violence across Asia, some of whom settled down as tyrants ruling over people they barely knew and usually loathed.2 The distinction between monopoly and free trade might have existed more in Smith’s head than in the actual trade routes connecting India to China and from there across much of the world. Early on, company employees working in China were allowed, indeed often encouraged, to engage in private trade, particularly to access tea. The BEIC developed elaborate financing to support private traders who would help move goods between India and China and ultimately to the world’s commercial and financial capital in London.
These so-called private trade ventures expanded considerably from the late 1780s and then dramatically in the next century. The BEIC hoped that the Chinese would sell their tea for weapons and other goods at a time when company workers were ramping up the Indian production of arms and gunpowder, all easily shipped down the Hooghly River and into the Bay of Bengal, and soon joined by many tons of opium. The area around Calcutta had distinguished itself as an important regional arms manufacturing center.
By 1800 this area alone was producing million pounds of gunpowder annually, at the time enough to kill nearly half of India’s population. The company had amassed “an immense stock of ordnance” and massive amounts of gunpowder that occasionally exploded, killing workers and bystanders and destroying mills. These were not just for the company’s military.
And as new and more effective weapons were developed, the company found itself with substantial military surpluses of inferior models.
“An indefinite expansion might be expected.”3 Surpluses meant that those guns needed to be offloaded. Vast amounts of weapons began heading from India to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and China, with an untold amount escaping the official tax ledgers. These areas were being flooded with weapons. Some were shipped as part of the BEIC, but an increasing amount came from private traders. Many eyed China as a potentially lucrative market for guns, not the Qing military but warlords and others along the periphery. China might have had a long history of manufacturing weapons and gunpowder, but its products were often inferior to what was being produced in India, Great Britain, and the United States, and in any case the Qing government restricted access to domestically made arms.
Weapons, Western traders believed, offered another avenue for opening China to commerce and a pathway nearly as addictive as opium, given the increasing fragmentation and violence within the Qing Empire.
The line separating the BEIC from private traders was often ambiguous, at times a mere nomenclature distinction in search of a difference. Many private merchants had worked for the company in previous years. For nearly a century, the company and these traders enjoyed a profitable cohabitation, a “partnership formed of various individuals—one a retired civil servant of the Company—another a military man—a third a doctor and a fourth a London Merchant,” for example, men who secured their capital from the “accumulating fortunes of the East India Company’s servants,” fortunes dripping with blood.4 Similarly, the company’s Canton tea trade depended heavily on “British private traders in India.”5 Already by 1808 and decades before the First Opium War (1839–1842), over thirty-five million pounds of tea was making its way to Great Britain.6 The free trade lauded by Adam Smith became across Asia more of a freefor-all to engage in violence, partake in the looting economy, and spread guns from Borneo to Shanghai. Private traders were just as corrupt as anyone else, if on a much smaller scale than people such as Robert Clive, that eighteenth-century leader of the BEIC who, as we saw earlier, perfected the fleecing of a subcontinent. In Asia, it seemed, the “trader becomes first a smuggler and then a pirate,” wrote the diplomat Frederick Bruce in a private letter to the British foreign secretary, and “the idle and the destitute become thieves then banditti, then organized bands of plunderers numerically equal to armies.”7 The opening of free trade here led to a proliferation of men with their sights set especially on China, and a few of these men would become exceedingly wealthy from the opium, weapons, and tea trade beginning in the 1820s; they pursued with zeal and determination whatever goods made money. Some combined trading with what amounted to piracy, arriving in Canton (Guangzhou) with armed militias, their holds filled with inferior products along with weapons. The Chinese had little interest in these cheap goods; they had eyes only for weapons and gunpowder. Private traders regularly engaged in smuggling and bribery in these transactions; both practices pervaded the region. Well into the nineteenth century, trade might not be as free as many Westerners demanded, but it was free enough for some to do pretty much whatever they wanted.
Tensions did erupt between the dictates of the company and the practices of private traders plying their wares in Canton. Many of the latter were so unprincipled that even company directors, not known for their scruples, raised alarms. Back home in Britain, politicians began voicing concern over the reckless spread of weapons, some of which had landed in the hands of pirates attacking Western ships. But these were mostly crocodile tears. The so-called Canton free traders, or “private merchants,” cut their teeth in India, impoverishing a subcontinent and leaving many millions dead from starvation. And the generation of capital from violence in India helped bankroll early Western aggression against the Qing Empire, or the so-called opening up of China to Westerners in the nineteenth century. Many Chinese saw things differently; they observed the West’s rapacious imperialism and the beginning of their own “Century of Humiliation.” *
We have seen the gradual and uneven shift from wanton plundering to production around the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: how the wealth born of violence turned into capital that helped bankroll the rise of commercial agriculture and the industries that soon began warming the planet. We have also seen the surge in Indian cotton exports to England along with saltpeter for the British arms industry, the emergence of gun and gunpowder making, and the rise of opium and the creation of narco-states in Malwa and across Bengal. Opium was mostly destined for China, although the BEIC and private traders helped spread the drug across the world, where it found its way into everything from pipes to analgesics to quiet crying babies. Opium in the form of morphine was widely used in the American Civil War, and as early as 1808 Britain imported over 65,000 pounds of opium yearly, an amount equivalent to some 6,500 pounds of pure heroin today, enough to get every single person in 1808 Britain high a dozen times.
Here as well, key continuities and connections cropped up between the world of warlords and the later triumphal march of cash crop production and free trade.
Like all drugs (and weapons), opium was an ideal warlord product. It is highly addictive, profitable, and easily transportable. And like the drug trade today, the BEIC wielded nearly monopolistic power over the distribution of opium until the reforms of the 1830s ended the company’s control over places such as Canton. The Chinese began smoking pure Indian opium in the same years that saw the rise of Clive and his extrication of diwani rights from the Mughal emperor. (Qing prohibitions on opium imports meant that the BEIC technically did not trade the narcotic in China, although the company remained deeply implicated in the commerce.) Opium also had the potential to address two major issues: Britain’s addiction to tea and the drain of American silver to Asia. When combined with sugar, tea provided the stimulants and cheap energy that helped power the labor of the Industrial Revolution, although a result was ill health. By the early nineteenth century, Britons were consuming on average roughly two pounds for every single person yearly, enough to make between three billion and four billion cups. Lancashire workers seemed to drink as much Chinese tea sweetened with Caribbean sugar as their mills devoured coal and cotton. The British were not just addicted to tea and sugar for the fun of it: these products were crucial to keeping workers at their jobs and keeping wages low.
8 The transition to a fossil fuel economy fully depended on these two foreign commodities.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, China had functioned as the exclusive provider of tea, just as India provided the vast amount of finished cotton for an expanding Atlantic slave trade. In the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century, American silver flowed into India and China to help secure these commodities, much to the frustration of Westerners. Manila, for example, emerged in the 1600s as a central terminus for silver’s movements within the Spanish Empire.9 While the BEIC and private traders would begin shipping Indian cotton and weapons to China through Canton from the second half of the eighteenth century onward, Chinese demand for British products other than silver and (illicitly) weapons remained sluggish at best. All the Chinese really wanted was silver, and they couldn’t get enough of it. Into the nineteenth century one could find Mexican silver money in Beijing and Nanjing, while Chinese ceramics, silk, and tea moved in the other direction.10 As the 1700s ground their way into the 1800s and warlords rose to dominance in India, the BEIC—and the British state more generally— began bristling at having to pay for Asian goods with silver. The American Revolutionary War severely disrupted English access to silver, as did civil war in Mexico decades later; the gap between British imports and exports grew larger.
11 The rising price of American silver in the early decades of the nineteenth century and the explosion of British manufacturing amplified the voices demanding free trade and, in Asia at least, something that could substitute for the coveted white metal.
Opium would be the answer. In the 1830s with the erosion of the BEIC’s monopoly and the expansion of private trade, what thus began as a complaint over trade turned into a condemnation of the entire Qing Empire, indeed of Chinese culture and “Oriental despotism” in general. “Free trade” would now become a convenient way of beating China into reducing its imports of silver and, importantly, accepting inferior British goods and Indian opium and ending the Chinese state’s control over foreign trade.12 Remarkably, from the early 1800s on, silver would begin flowing out of China and into the British monetary system. Despite Qing prohibitions, what began as a trickle became a silver flood by midcentury, with enormous consequences for the Qing Empire, including rising taxes and economic immiseration. Silver traveled to London, where it was melted down and turned into British sterling, which was becoming the world’s most powerful currency and would remain so until the rise of the US dollar after 1945.13 (Silver was used in crowns, half crowns, shillings, and other coins until the metal was phased out after World War II. Gold was used in higherdenomination coins, while lowly copper and bronze ended up as pennies and halfpennies.) These fraught and significant developments took place in a condensed geographical space at the mouth of the Pearl River in Macau and Hong Kong and upriver in Canton. The latter formed the unstable, violent interface between the Qing Empire and the rapidly changing, diverse world of warlords and foreign merchants, some arriving in Canton as employees of the BEIC and others as supposedly private traders. Much of China’s relations with Europe, the United States, and Japan thus took place in an area at the far edge of its vast empire. MAP 17.1. Asia in the age of empire Over seven hundred miles from the emperor’s palace in Beijing (Peking), Qing officials struggled to use Canton to control Western influence and, importantly, to generate revenues from foreign trade. Canton was a place of extraordinary wealth and opulence and utter venality, perpetually on the verge of crisis. Chinese officials may have restricted foreigners regarding where they could live and work, to whom they could speak and in what language, and how long they could stay, but these strictures belied a looming chaos marked by rising international tensions and a burgeoning illicit economy. Smugglers made their way up and down the Pearl River between Canton and Hong Kong, Macau, and various islands. Villages along the river functioned as depots, filled with opium, tea, silver, cloth, and weapons. These stops might be plundered “of everything valuable” and set afire not more than twenty-five miles from the Canton warehouses.14 Trade and violence developed an incestuous relationship, with extortion, ransoming, and bribery part of the costs of doing business. By the early part of the nineteenth century, the Canton area boasted perhaps the world’s greatest concentration of warlords, many of them pirates; this was one reason why the ships arriving in Canton were not the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s modern container ships. They were mercenary vessels, often wielding control over shipping lanes, and were well armed with cannons and also filled with guns and gunpowder ready for sale. Some were ships built in Bengal, stocked by the BEIC with locally made weapons and gunpowder.
What to do in such a chaotic situation? The Qing government was called in “to exterminate” the pirates, “a thing much easier said than done.”15 In 1809, Qing admiral Qian Hu met with defeat and disgrace when mercenaries destroyed over two dozen of his ships. The area teemed with so many pirates that the Royal Navy was called in to protect its merchant ships, at times finding little success. Other navies soon began appearing on the river, also. But the lines separating licit from illicit trade were rarely clear. “Some of the wealthiest Chinese in Hong-Kong have been discovered to be in connection with the pirates,” an English officer who aided the Taiping rebels wrote, “and even Europeans have been implicated.”16 In this atmosphere, the hunger for profit reigned supreme. Everyone was trying to make a quick buck, ranging from men with little more than money and gems in their pockets, company ships with thirty or forty cannons ultimately backed by their national militaries, to pirates who confiscated ships and demanded ransoms in cash, opium, or weapons. Westerners, one contemporary noted, were “look[ing] to making their fortunes in the least possible time, and leaving the country for ever.”17 The area was awash in guns of foreign provenance, from BEIC-manufactured weapons to French, Swedish, German, and other European guns, along with gunpowder, saltpeter, sulfur, and, increasingly, guns and gunpowder from the United States. American traders, arriving heavily armed, swaggered into the China trade and earned repute for their aggression, soon playing a vital role in the movement of silver and weapons. For a short time, the War of 1812 played out in the waters off Canton. The opening of Chinese trade the following year, together with the “insane speculations” this change promised for British and other manufacturers,18 added to an already frenzied situation.19 Selling weapons had long provided traders of all stripes an easy entrée into the Asian markets, along with related products such as saltpeter: in 1806–1807, over four million pounds of the chemical headed to China, enough for over sixty-four million musket shots.20 Widely used in fireworks, foreign gunpowder was also finding its way down the barrel of Chinese guns and cannons. Western gunpowder had a much higher quality than that produced within China, which made it better suited for weapons. A vigorous, if totally illegal, trade in weapons flourished all along the coast, not just between Macao and Hong Kong and up the Pearl River to Canton but also all along the Xi River into Guangxi and, farther north, in Shanghai and along the Yangzi, with much of this trade conveyed in small flatbottomed boats that were difficult to police. Weapons also flowed from the south, especially the area Europeans called Tonkin; many of these were then smuggled north into China.21 Qing officials might have considered their military largely superior to the Western barbarians, even though their matchlocks fizzled in the rain, but many others had no qualms about using foreign-made weapons, which the government was simply unable to control.22 Flintlock muskets and gunpowder began moving into China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then came more advanced rifles, along with the occasional machine gun and cannon. Some of these made their way into the Qing army, but many if not most fell into the hands of nonstate actors as part of the broader surge in smuggling that persisted across the entire nineteenth century. This trade produced enormous profits for some, but for the Qing Empire, the spread of weapons augured disaster.
*
Like all empires, the Qing struggled to control its frontiers. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, one of those frontiers began filling up with heavily armed and mostly crooked Westerners, many smuggling weapons into areas where state control was weak at best. Since its founding in the early seventeenth century, when largely nomadic peoples in the northeast (later lumped together as the Manchus) overthrew the Ming dynasty, the Qing Empire had extended its dominance over large areas of Central Asia and expanded into the southeast in what would become Vietnam, “beyond the Nam River.” By the end of the eighteenth century, the empire had grown to twice the size of the Ming and nearly the size of the largest territorial empire at the time: Russia. Size had its benefits. In 1800, China’s economy was the largest in the world. But challenges soon arose, of which the Western barbarians on the coast were but one.23 Environmental strains were another. China had enjoyed nearly a century of population growth, which placed pressures on land development, agricultural methods, and strategies for redistributing grains in times of drought and famine.
Some areas began seeing significant declines in agricultural productivity as soils were depleted, and deforestation and excessive dike construction led to widespread ecological deterioration. No one could have anticipated the nineteenth century’s generally drier and climatically unstable conditions. Severe droughts afflicted large areas of China in the 1830s and especially between the 1870s and the beginning of the next century, although given Chinese beliefs, many blamed these misfortunes on the emperor. The famines that came in their wake left tens of millions dead.24 A third challenge was the increasingly sclerotic administrative state, which had proved itself incapable of effectively dealing with the “vicious Westerners.”25 The Qing Empire had its share of corrupt administrators, despite the legendary civil service examination system. Systemic underpayment of many of these administrators encouraged shady practices, including under-the-table agreements with Westerners. Often, corrupt officials became warlords with their own militias, some dependent on imported guns and engaged in extorting and stealing from villagers. Too often, Qing rulers seemed unable or unwilling to tackle this situation, even as warlordism had a direct impact on state functioning, everything from revenues to flood management operations.26 Perhaps the most famous corrupt official was Heshen (1750–1799), for both his enormous wealth and as a model of bureaucratic manipulation for personal gain, including making inroads with the emperor. At his most powerful, Heshen was worth approximately eight hundred million silver taels, the equivalent of about sixty-five million pounds of the metal, making him one of the richest men in the world. In the end, marriage and a private militia armed with some Western guns were not enough to protect him. By the time Heshen was given the silk rope to hang himself, an order of the new ruler following the death of Emperor Qialong, corruption had become endemic across much of the empire.27 This was true especially in Canton: corruption was more concentrated here than any other place in the empire. The granting of licenses, the collection of duties, and the management of credit and debt all provided ample opportunities for self-aggrandizement. The results were fiscally disastrous.
Westerners sold weapons and whatever else turned a profit, but they also lent large sums of money to Chinese merchants at interest rates as high as 20 percent yearly; indebtedness and bankruptcies skyrocketed. By the 1830s, some Cantonese merchants were paying traders interest rates of 5 percent per month, a compounded rate of nearly 80 percent a year. In numerous cases, the BEIC intervened to smooth ruffled feathers, keep Chinese merchants afloat, and save them from embarrassment and exile.28 Such corrupt practices extended far beyond Chinese officials, many of whom attempted to force foreign traders to operate through the customs officials (known as Hoppos). These efforts mostly amounted to an epic failure, although the restrictions did manage to wildly irritate Westerners.
Smuggling was rampant across nationalities, with everyone from Danes to Americans to the British doing their level best to skirt Chinese official control. Special boats sneaked merchandise past official eyes, thereby avoiding customs duties. Ships regularly used saltpeter as ballast, later selling it illegally for other products and the chemical finding its way into gunpowder mills that began popping up across eastern China, and they hoisted whatever national flag might serve their interests. Even responsible officials realized that this was a situation they couldn’t entirely control: they had to permit some level of illegality to maintain a modicum of social order.
An entire immoral economy had arisen around the foreign traders plying their way up the Pearl River and along much of China’s coastline. And everyone had weapons, from pirates and traders to local strongmen, although Westerners tended to have the best ones, with cannons that could easily destroy forts.29 The status of foreigners comprised a contentious subject within the Qing state and in international politics more broadly. A steady stream of Westerners was flowing into China in search of economic opportunism.
They heralded from every European country, along with the Americans.
Missionaries had arrived as well, hoping to convert Confucian (and other) souls; Christian teachers generally followed the tracks of weapons moving in from the coast and then spread in places such as Guangxi, which bordered Vietnam. Famously, in 1793 the British official George Macartney refused the ritual ketou (kowtow) before the emperor, an example of Western arrogance that would be interpreted by many Westerners as a symbol of British honor and rationalism in the face of Oriental obstinacy and an archaic, indeed irrational, social and political order. Some “proper force,” as it were, might be needed to catapult China into the bright light of modernity that free trade promised. Less reported at the time was the considerable arms and gunpowder cache that Macartney’s embassy carted along on its journey to Beijing.30 Western businessmen also hoped that the Chinese would become addicted to their products, the opposite of the trade situation in the present day.
31 Opium imports had been rising dramatically from the late eighteenth century; by the mid-1800s, one out of ten Chinese had an opium problem.32 Qing rulers mostly condemned the trade, especially since it encouraged the outward flow of silver. So too did many British; the BEIC preferred using private vessels to ship its drugs, the better to avoid public scrutiny.
But the opium trade produced tremendous profits at the expense of economic misery in India and rampant addiction in China.
“Free trade” as a European imperial weapon sharpened in the final years of the 1830s, even if some of its loudest proponents conveniently forgot its foundation in the predatory violence of warlordism. But the looming military presence that backed Western demands for unimpeded commerce was harder to forget or unsee. There was nothing “gentlemanly” about what had been unfolding in Canton for nearly a century:33 all manner of illicit trading, extortion, and gun dealing; the occasional murder and outbreak of mob violence; and armed vessels and, now, newly appearing warships that threatened to bomb those who didn’t comply with their demands.
Canton was a den of avarice, teetering on anarchy; Shanghai wasn’t much different.
Gunpowder explosions were not uncommon; fires regularly erupted, a few massive enough to destroy thousands of houses and upwards of seven thousand shops and warehouses.
When these blazes raged, they cast an orange glow that could be seen for miles.34 The banks of the Pearl River were lined with floating warehouses filled with opium and other goods, all technically illegal; ships carried large quantities of weapons and gunpowder before filling up with tea. It is little wonder that one tea came be called after the explosive it resembled—gunpowder tea—a phrase that made its first appearance in the English lexicon around 1813.35 FIGURE 17.1. Canton, ca. 1760. Reproduced with permission of the British Library, Maps. K.Top 116.23.
In 1839 a Chinese official ordered all the opium in Canton seized, with most of it dumped into the river. The British official overseeing the trade at the time demanded compensation, which was refused, on the entirely reasonable grounds that opium was an illicit article. Soon the First Opium War broke out, in which the vastly more advanced Royal Navy destroyed Chinese vessels, captured trade forts, and seized Hong Kong. From Shanghai, the British marched inland to Nanjing before the Qing emperor made various concessions, although some British officials involved in the takeover were excoriated for not being imperialist enough. The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, in addition to demanding recompense for the lost opium and other expenses to the tune of $3 million ($110 million today), opened up “mercantile practices to whatever persons they please[d]” and ceded Hong Kong to the British.
The Chinese didn’t take these developments lying down. Chinese officials continued resisting, or at least attempting to control, Western intervention amid skyrocketing opium imports and the ongoing spread of guns. Weapons imports into China rose dramatically in the wake of the 1842 treaty and would continue through the end of the century as various companies and individual filibusters expanded their inland presence. Some of these weapons went “safely” to government hands, but most did not, to the growing alarm of both Chinese officials and some foreign diplomats. And despite racist caricatures of the Chinese as unlearned or unsophisticated, paralyzed by their adherence to Confucianism, the presence of Western arms would (admittedly rather tardily) lead to Chinese state attempts to modernize its military, from shipbuilding to rifles and howitzers.
Conflict broke out again in 1856 with the Second Opium War, in which the British effectively received support from the Americans, the French, and others. Tensions continued erupting past the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin (actually a series of agreements) to the 1860 sacking of Beijing, where looted royal objects wound up in museums and private collections in London, Paris, and other countries. Subsequent treaties, including with the Americans, French, and Germans, put an end to the canton system and opened China fully to foreign intervention.
Japan would soon join the Scramble for China, gaining a foothold in the 1870s, delivering a stinging defeat in 1894–1895, and then aggressively moving forward in the 1930s.
The contradictions and crises that had wracked Canton had mostly reached resolution by the early 1860s, marking the rise of the “treaty system,” a more formalized European imperialism in China that created a series of ports through which free trade took place under the threatening eyes of naval warships.36 Outside these enclaves of formal empire, however, the situation looked dramatically different. Just eight years after the signing of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing that technically ended the First Opium War, much of China waded into a civil war in the Taiping Rebellion. That conflict continued from 1850 to 1864, the same years as the Second Opium War and the advent of the punishingly exploitative treaty system. The Taiping Rebellion shook the empire to its core, but so did other significant revolts across these decades. Much of China from the coast to nearly one thousand miles inland and from Manchuria to Indochina seethed with violence and instability.
37 * A major problem throughout this period in Chinese history was the dissemination of weapons. Since the empire’s founding, Qing rulers had mostly managed to control the means of destruction, even within such a vast multiethnic and religiously diverse region. The Qing had deployed its military to subjugate frontier areas and especially to quell domestic rebellions. Maintaining such control became increasingly difficult from the late eighteenth century as power began slipping from the hands of officials into the greedy paws of local warlords. And in some of these areas although certainly not all, access to new sources of weapons accelerated this fragmentation.38 In the White Lotus Rebellion that had taken place in the closing years of the eighteenth century, for example, rebels still possessed few if any muskets; they hoped that their faith would protect them from bullets. This situation would change catastrophically around the mid-nineteenth century, when Taiping rebels gained access to Western weapons that, in many cases, were superior to those of the Qing military.
The West began pouring weapons into China. Between 1850 and 1865, for example, gunpowder exports to China increased by a factor of forty-six, to over six hundred thousand pounds, in a single year, enough for twenty-five million shots; and these official British export figures barely scratch the surface. Weapons moved inland especially from the Canton region, along with Shanghai, Xiamen (Amoy), Zhanjiang, and other small trading sites as well as from Vietnam. More and more guns could be found in rural areas such as Guangxi Province, where missionaries had been active and where instability was accelerating steadily, as well as in the hinterland around Shanghai.
Already in the early 1840s and continuing through much of the century, foreign muskets, gunpowder, and cannons were ending up in private hands, many resold to the highest bidder. Punishments ranged from beheading to enslavement and exile, but this did nothing to slow the movements of arms.
“Foreign strong weapons could be bought everywhere, so that foreign guns, cannons, and all kinds of bladed weapons were readily available,” reported the newspaper Shen Bao in 1886. As late as 1891, German Mauser rifles, at the time one of the world’s most advanced guns, were making their way from the coast to Mongolia nearly one thousand miles away.
39 China had always seen its share of rural revolts, one reason why rulers sought the redistribution of food in times of scarcity to keep peasants in their fields or, when necessary, brought in the military to quash resistance.
But the Taiping Rebellion was of an entirely different order, much of it made possible by the pervasive and lucrative illegal weapons trade. The rebellion marked the greatest uprising in Chinese history before Mao Zedong and the first of China’s internal paroxysms to stem directly from the military-commercial revolution. The rebellion arose out of a confluence of entangled developments: late eighteenth-century revolts against corrupt Qing rule; the hollowing out and weakening of the Chinese state; the penetration of Western businesses and the new forms of indebtedness they helped spread; the rise of local strongmen and warlords; the terrific spread of weapons that sustained widespread banditry and warlordism where looting became a mode of economic production and now made possible a fantastic revolt; rural immiseration; ideas going back nearly 1500 years about what brought balance and harmony to the world and where explanations of misfortune and suffering laid blame on the state, ideas now overlaid with Christian eschatology; and a series of ecological catastrophes so severe that the middle years of the century saw the Yellow River abruptly shift northward.
There seemed no end to the droughts, floods, famines, and epidemics battering the Chinese people. The state seemed incapable of effectively addressing these multiple crises; its fiscal health deteriorated with the outward flow of silver, and it struggled with the redistribution of grains to offset hunger. The Taiping revolt promised “a new system of property relations, a new mechanism of local control, and a new relationship between the individual and the state,” in short a radical overturning of an existing system the rebels and many millions considered fundamentally immoral. Violence, many fervently hoped, would bring apocalypse, rebirth, and the restoration of order. The new emperor of the Heavenly Kingdom, Hong Xiuquan, whose visions had emerged from time spent in the Canton area, wrote of this vision: When in the present time disturbance abound, And bands of robbers are like gathering vapors found, We know that heaven means to raise a valiant hand To rescue the oppressed and save our native land.40 The war began in the hinterland in Guangxi Province, west of Canton and Macao, the main conduit through which foreign weapons and Christianity had been entering China. Here state control was already weak, banditry was widespread, and both foreign and domestically manufactured guns were widely accessible. Rebels armed themselves with guns they had acquired from foreigners or had captured from the government, along with cannons and many older weapons such as matchlocks, spears, and bows and arrows.
The Taipings had no problem getting their hands on weapons, building on an illicit history of arms smuggling across China going back to the late eighteenth century. In the early years of the conflict, rebels secured supplies of gunpowder and Enfield rifles smuggled into the country as “Chinese snuff” and “umbrellas.”41 “I have recently heard,” one senior Qing official wrote with alarm, “that foreign merchants are willing to transport guns, gunpowder, and sell them to the Taiping rebels for a heavy profit.” The Taiping military offered much higher prices for Western arms, two or three times the usual rate, purchased with silver and other highly valued commodities. Most but not all of these arms came through the south. In the region around Shanghai, foreign merchants forged their way up the Yangtze River, where they found an eager rebel market for weapons. British officials knew that “the great difficulty will be to prevent the trade” on the river “from becoming a mere smuggling” operation.42 The Taiping Rebellion would have been impossible without Western weapons.
Without them, the rebellion would have remained a mostly regional crisis, serious but unlikely to threaten a great empire. With weapons, the rebellion soon engulfed much of southern and eastern China and shook the foundations of Qing rule. Well into the 1860s, nearly everyone was still selling arms to the Taiping rebels, from the French to the Swedes and especially the Americans, as well as to Chinese pirates and British merchants who preferred easy profit to patriotic duty. But then, piracy had long been “looked upon as a matter of business,” the engineer Dew wrote in 1865, “entered into frequently by respectable merchants and small mandarins.”43 Everyone knew that a steady supply of arms was heading to the rebels.44 In 1862, the British discovered the records of an American company that had been selling arms to the Taipings: nearly four thousand weapons, fifteen thousand pounds of gunpowder, and over three million percussion caps.45 They were displeased, but the illegal arms trade was an open secret, an easy way to squeeze more silver out of China as long as rebels were able to plunder state resources. (At one point, the rebels hoped to purchase steamships to modernize their navy.) It was also an easy way to dispose of inferior products.
Dressed in red and yellow with their hair grown long and with guns and other weapons in hand, the rebels marched north, their minds filled with a vision of a new world order that would restore fertility, bring order, and eradicate “foreign” Manchu rule. The rebellion spread remarkably fast, by 1853 reaching the former seat of the Ming dynasty, Nanjing, which became the capital of its Heavenly Kingdom, nearly taking Shanghai and threatening Beijing.46 The Taipings’ largely decentralized military swelled to a combined force of well over two hundred thousand, aided in equal parts by ideology, plunder, and cruelty. The purchase of Western weapons and the capture of Qing and foreign military supplies proved crucial, as did the confiscation of silver, in one instance over sixty thousand pounds, worth about $20 million today.
47 With breathtaking brutality, rebels destroyed villages and cities; beheaded opium addicts and other “devils” and “evildoers”; beheaded, crucified and immolated Qing officials and soldiers; massacred villagers; and branded people on the forehead as belonging to the Heavenly Kingdom. As the Taipings conquered different areas, they enslaved large numbers of people. Ningbo, located on the coast south of Shanghai and populated by a quarter million people, became a “City of the Dead.” The wealthy fled, some on Western boats. “The rich and beautiful furniture of the houses had become firewood. . . . The canals were filled with dead bodies and stagnant filth.” Buddhist temples crumbled, turning into “chaotic remains.”48 In another area, 1,600 soldiers who had surrendered were promptly beheaded; the nearby stream ran red “with blood for four hours.”49 For a while, the British and especially the French sought a rapprochement with the Taipings, although they bristled at the latter’s condemnation of the opium trade and seemed both perplexed and annoyed by rebel assertions that the British were “subordinate” to the Heavenly Kingdom.50 In early 1862, Lord Russell hoped “to be neutral in regard to the rebels.”51 After all, those rebels had been shockingly successful, and they had substantial supplies of silver that were finding their way to Western coffers. And the Taipings needed weapons, with ever-growing urgency.
“They don’t in any way encourage trade,” wrote one merchant, “excepting in fire-arms and gunpowder.”52 Selling precious silver for precious guns was a deal few Western merchants were willing to turn their backs on.
Taiping denunciation of the West as well as violence in the interior, however, soon began threatening Western economic interests, “ruining a flourishing commerce.”53 Earlier neutrality agreements were annulled.
Having weakened the Qing Empire with punitive treaties, the West now sought ways of bolstering the Chinese state just enough to provide a modicum of stability. Before long the Qing military was receiving modern arms, even though an agreement that belonged to the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin (also known as the Treaty of Tientsin) spelled out terms to the contrary: “Import and export trade is . . . prohibited in . . . [g]unpowder, shot, cannon, fowling-pieces, rifles, muskets, pistols, and all other munitions and implements of war.”54 The situation was rife with contradiction. Political expediency usually sufficed, along with the time-honored practice of turning a blind eye to reality and engaging in convenient bouts of historical amnesia. An early 1862 agreement formalized British and French military cooperation with the Qing government to defeat the Taiping rebels just four years after the treaty banning the weapons trade. Soon, the Qing state was modernizing its military to obliterate the Taipings and in the process also strengthening its ability to resist Western aggression. Simultaneously, muskets and other weapons still ended up in the possession of rebels and brigands; this fact everyone knew. China was experiencing catastrophic tumult, all of it made possible by modern weapons and all or almost all of it successfully disrupting “our trade,” at least according to some aggrieved Westerners.55 Having helped spread guns through the eastern half of China, the West now found them to be a headache. Although formal war with the Taipings still remained two years away, beginning around 1860 British, French, and American forces began fighting often pitched battles with the rebels, many of whom fired Western guns, along with cannons and other weapons; they also had an arms factory outside their capital in Nanjing. Westerners were thus being shot at with their own weapons. Although some arms were still making their way into the interior well into the early 1860s, over time the Taiping military began to run dry. It didn’t help that the Taipings’ ability to acquire silver was declining. One Taiping official went to Shanghai twice to purchase weapons “but returned empty-handed both times.”56 Western leaders loathed the Taipings and the Qings in nearly equal measures. In 1860 Lord Elgin (whose father stole the Parthenon marbles) sacked and looted Beijing, forcing Emperor Xianfeng from the imperial palace. Yet more punitive treaties followed. In August 1861, Xianfeng died after ruling for just eleven years, the weakest emperor since the founding of the Qing dynasty two centuries earlier. Almost the entirety of his reign had been taken up, mostly ineptly, by the rebellion and Western imperialism.
The tumult and palace intrigues that followed his death offered aspiring power holders an opportunity, particularly given the Taiping attack on Shanghai, a treaty port since the end of the First Opium War. “We need not be very particular about our neutrality,” Russell wrote.57 The British believed that they could kill two birds with one stone: defeat the Taipings to end their “desolating insurrection” and “impose our terms” on an already mostly broken empire,58 by which they meant their notions of free trade and their commitment to continuing to drain China of its wealth, including paying the claims (many of them entirely fictitious) of merchants who alleged that they had lost money.
By the early 1860s, an already large Western military presence in China had ballooned to at least forty thousand troops. Dozens of gunships patrolled the coast, churning up and down the major waterways.59 Westerners were soon supplying arms to the Qing military they had just defeated. Here was a “policy” that was “inexplicable,” one critic declared.
Again, political expediency prevailed, along with a large dose of forgetting.60 What finally prevailed? A slowing illegal gun trade, Western military engagement using more advanced weapons, a beefed-up Qing military, and various mercenary forces headed by foreigners would all help end the conflict. The total combined firepower expended would be one of the greatest in world history, although this was exceeded only half a century later in Europe during World War I. The casualties were horrific, with the “horrible ‘thud’ of the cannon shot crashing continuously among the living skeletons,” one witness recounted, “the perfect immobility with which they confronted the death hurled upon them.”61 Qing reprisals against the rebels were shockingly brutal. Insurgents had their eyes gouged out and their feet “cut off,” or the Qings “applied oil to their clothes and set them on fire. The crying was so loud that it shook the earth.”62 Many others, including pregnant women, children, and infants, were disemboweled.63 Heavenly Kingdom emperor Hong Xiuquan, who three decades earlier had his first visions of a new world that would end the droughts and other natural disasters afflicting China, was executed and cut up into bits and pieces. FIGURE 17.2.
Western warships and the Taiping Rebellion. The Rebels, or Taipings, at Nankin Opening Fire upon the “Lee” Gun-Boat. Illustrated London News, February 4, 1859. Alamy Image ID WR8EDX. The smoke had not even cleared from the battlegrounds when widespread looting took place, not just by the Qing military but also by everyone from American and European forces to mercenaries and the occasional pirate. In one well-known 1862 incident, a French general attacked a Qing official and then proceeded to confiscate £10,000 worth of silver from the local treasury, worth about US$2 million today.
64 Repeating what the company had perfected in India, the British created a “prize committee,” General Charles George Gordon wrote, “to realize and distribute the prize money.”65 An estimated one hundred thousand people died in the taking of Nanjing.
“Viewing it therefore upon sordid grounds,” one military man wrote of British engagements as he weighed commerce against killing, “a continued state of warfare with the Taepings must damage our commercial interests; but viewing it as a question of humanity, our conduct is really very shocking. By means of our long-range guns we kill the Taepings in hundreds, while we ourselves are out of the range of their puny artillery and defective fire-arms, and we read of one killed and two or three wounded in our attacks, while the Taepings are counted by hundreds. I wonder that our gallant soldiers and sailors don’t shrink from such unequal conflicts.”66 In fifteen years of war made possible by modern weapons, between twenty million and thirty million people died, more than those who perished in World War I. To this extraordinary figure, we might also add the additional thirty million Chinese who were lost to famines over the course of the nineteenth century.
67 Roughly between 1830 and 1901, then, China lost anywhere between fifty million and sixty million people, nearly 14 percent of its 1850 population, more than double Great Britain’s population, and nearly the number of people in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Taiping Rebellion stands as one of the world’s first and longest modern wars and one of history’s most brutal moments, unfolding at the same time as two other major conflicts: the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the American Civil War (1861–1865). These were the world’s first wars of the Industrial Age: they relied on new, more advanced weapons, new communication systems such as telegraphs, and ironclad steam-powered warships propelled by modern screws. Seldom noticed is that these were also the first wars fought in a warming planet, including rising temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels as hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 were released into the air yearly. And in a portent of things to come, in both Crimea and the American conflict a changing climate—especially drought —played an important if still poorly understood role.68 After 1868 the Qing order would be restored, but by that point the empire was little more than a hollow crown. By the 1890s, massive amounts of wealth had drained out of China, both informally through looting and formally through punitive treaties and the opium trade, which continued through World War I.
Famine and political crises recurred across the region, especially the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, which had its origins in the impoverished north, with its leaders holding the West responsible for drought and famine even as many clutched Western guns in their hands.
A certain kind of stability nonetheless arrived in China. The uncontrolled weapons trade into China slowed down but never fully expired. National and international laws and treaties mostly ended the global arms trade. The 1858 treaty marked the start of a long line of agreements that sought to control or prohibit the trade in weapons. Thirty-plus years later in 1890 (the same year as the Brussels Act prohibited weapons across Africa), the British Parliament passed the Exportation of Arms Act, partly to stop weapons from reaching Chinese shores.69 These efforts culminated in the 1901 Boxer Protocol in which China agreed “to forbid the importation of arms and ammunition as well as of all material exclusively employed for the manufacture of arms and ammunition.”70 The West was trying to accomplish what it was already doing on other continents: demilitarize a world it had armed for more than a century. If Westerners saw the irony in this effort, they didn’t say so openly.
The imperial powers would continue chomping away at what remained of the Qing Empire, which finally expired in 1912. Britain already had its pound of Chinese flesh. France had Indochina, parts of which China had considered a colony. Russia and Germany extracted various concessions from the Chinese in the 1890s. The United States had its piece as well, along with other Western powers. In June 1900 some eighteen thousand soldiers—Americans, British, and troops from various European nations, in addition to eight thousand Japanese soldiers—began a 130-kilometer march from Tianjin to Beijing. Most of the soldiers soon left, although not before they again extorted the Qing state for money it did not have. Drained of upwards of ninety million pounds of silver over the nineteenth century, more than the combined weight of silver specie circulating in Great Britain and the United States in 1900, China now entered a period of profound fragmentation in which provincial leaders ruled largely unaccountable to central power, its unique “warlord era” that came to a tentative end in 1928 when Chiang Kai-shek unified the country for a time.
A few decades later the Japanese empire would conquer Manchuria, which it reinvented into a make-believe country called Manchukuo, soon followed by a full-scale invasion of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanjing. There in the same place where the capital of the Heavenly Kingdom had fallen seventythree years earlier, some two hundred thousand people were murdered.
18 New World Empires AT THE DAWN OF OUR AGE of global warming in the second half of the nineteenth century, the warlord world created and sustained by the militarycommercial revolution surrendered to Western imperialism and formal colonial conquest across Africa and Asia.
This spelled the end of one of the greatest contradictions in modern world history: arming peoples and nations only to eviscerate them once they threatened Western powers and their economies based on burning fossil fuels.
For over a century, the West had spread weapons near and far across multiple continents.
Privatizing violence had served Western interests well and spurred the rise of fossil-fuel burning industries that were beginning to change planetary systems. But in the nineteenth century, those newly armed continents began threatening Western dominance. Imperialism helped make the world safe for continued industrial expansion, and this means that any historical explanation of our contemporary climate crisis has to address colonialism and its legacies. One recalls what Mary Shelley wrote in her great 1818 work Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, conceived as Europe shivered in the cold gloom from the Tambora eruptions. “The monster who I had created,” her narrator laments, “the miserable daemon whom I had set abroad into the world,” a demon whom everyone, including its maker, now wanted to kill.
In fifty years, the British alone acquired millions of square miles of territory populated by many hundreds of millions of people. Much of this conquest took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Other European powers also confiscated large swaths of territory.
Vast numbers of people died as the West disarmed the rest. Across Africa and Asia, populations only began rebounding in the early twentieth century, just as Europe began entering its barbarous epoch of massive bloodletting. In the Americas, something both similar and very different developed. The 1800s saw terrible paroxysms against the liberal promise of national citizenship and the rule of law, from Argentina to the United States of America and Canada. Many of these contests unfolded within and were shaped by the changing climate, particularly widespread and recurrent droughts in the second half of the century, especially in the United States, Mexico (New Spain), and Brazil. Political fragmentation and warlordism had thrived during the failures of early independence, followed—slowly, unevenly, and uncertainly—by a politics of political consolidation. The latter continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. Here was an internal colonization, then, a scramble of a different kind altogether, an empire and an imperialism of the nation-state that brought their own unique American experiences of warlordism to an end.
This internal colonization also brought uniquely American forms of resistance in the lives—and deaths—of people such as Brazil’s Antônio Conselheiro (1830–1897), the diminutive lay priest who spoke of how the government had brought drought and suffering.
Conselheiro, as we will meet shortly, led one of Brazil’s most important social movements, and his visions were intolerable to the country’s rulers. And across the Yucatán, internal colonization led to thousands of Mayans laboring and dying from exploitation and state violence. We will meet them as well and their hopes for a better world free of drought and free of modernity’s relentless storms of avarice that swept across their lands.
*
In the early 1800s, a wave of independence swept across Latin America just a few decades after the creation of the United States and the massive slave revolution in Haiti. As in the United States, people of European descent who had been born in the country mostly led the independence struggles and later dominated the early independent states. Indebtedness was pervasive, particularly to banks in Great Britain and the United States, with the usual rise and fall of speculative bubbles and other financial disasters that went with informal empire. The two industrial giants effectively reduced countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru to financial penury. Civil wars broke out nearly everywhere, along with attempts to restore empire. Ultimately Latin American independence movements prevailed, in part by spreading violence beyond the borders of the various viceroyalties that comprised the empire.
Across Latin America, each new polity—like the United States, all were republics—had its own frontier and border problems. The central state generally remained weak, battered by intense political fragmentation. Each country contained significant Indigenous populations that were excluded from the rights of citizenship until the late twentieth century. And each embarked on a colonization of its own internal, now ostensibly national, space into which weapons had spread. This process, uneven and prolonged, persisted well into the 1900s and in some areas is still unfolding today.
Latin American leaders discovered that states, like empires, required constant reassertion of control even over those domains supposedly safely contained.
Much of the 1800s was taken up by struggles around the precise character of government in the broader context of European and especially American imperialism. At the same time, the flood of weapons into private hands sustained caudillismo, Latin America’s distinctive form of warlordism, as well as civil war, banditry, and rebellions, and violence against Indigenous peoples. Internecine conflict engulfed Mexico throughout the 1810s, part of a deeper crisis and fragmentation of empire unleashed by Napoleon’s conquest of Spain. Independent since 1821, Mexico found itself dominated by militarized politics and privatized violence for much of the century. Warlords mobilized local control using their access to weapons and deploying a politics of clientage. The result was systemic instability: in three decades, Mexico would go through fifty or more governments. For a brief time in the early 1820s, Mexico declared itself an empire and attempted to extend its borders to the south before it became a federal republic in 1824. By then, creole warlords had largely monopolized control over local and regional governments. And tumult continued even after the 1824 designation. Spain planned to retake Mexico in the late 1820s. The French invaded Mexico briefly in 1839 and again in 1861, only to be expelled six years later. Civil war erupted following the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War and then a final time in the early part of the twentieth century. It was only after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 that the state effectively controlled the means of destruction and governed its own territory a century after independence, and even that dominance remained questionable in several areas. Today, Mexican drug cartels such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, with their guns, grenade launchers, drones, and armored vehicles, are nearly as well armed as the police and the military.
1 Between 1800 and the early 1820s, Mexico lost upwards of 10 percent of its population, or over six hundred thousand people. (As a percentage of population, this is about the same as the Soviet Union’s losses in World War II.) Silver production plummeted, and mines filled with water. Mexico had accounted for a large proportion of all the white metal produced in the Americas and was crucial to global commerce and to Great Britain’s financial innovations. Now, what had been one of the wealthiest areas in all the Americas began a steady decline. Thousands of miles away, speculation abounded in places such as London and New York and across Asia, where the declining supplies of American silver shaped European imperialism and helped lead to the draining of wealth from India and China.2 Liberal ideals of equality, the individual, and the rule of law, along with important reforms such as the ending of tribute and the abolition of slavery, jostled uneasily alongside warlordism, conservatism, monarchism, antiIndian prejudice, ethnoracial rule, and a new era of exploitation and violence against Indigenous communities. In Mexico on the eve of independence, Indians comprised perhaps as much as 60 percent of the population and whites just 18 percent, although whites had the guns.3 Indian communities beyond the central plateau dominated by Mexico City were especially vulnerable to a new legal regime intent on undoing colonial laws that had offered them some modicum of protection.4 Slavery might have been outlawed in Mexico three decades before the United States did so, but in certain areas slavery continued through much of the century or at least some version of it did, as with debt peonage.
While some liberals offered visions of reform, the realities of federalization and a structurally weak central state meant that these ideas remained mostly fanciful, the wishful thinking of urban intellectuals.
Strongmen quickened their land expropriation as they sought local and regional control in the context of persistent droughts between the 1820s and 1890s, the most punishing falling in the last quarter of the century. This process was exceedingly violent and marked by near-constant rebellions. In Mexico, Jalisco state along the Pacific coast had seen high levels of violence especially from the late eighteenth century and particularly as more weapons poured into the region from the ports of Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo. Rebellions broke out in the early 1800s in the broader context of Mexican independence; this violence continued for decades until the central state was finally able to intervene in the early 1870s.5 In the arid and sparsely populated northwest, “almost continuous Yaqui revolts” erupted amid settler violence and enslavement.6 The ability to access weapons from the north in what would become Arizona considerably strengthened Yaqui resistance and assertions of independence. Like Jalisco, Mexican control in the north—that is, the imperialism of the nation-state—only began to solidify in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Outside the central plateau, nineteenth-century Mexican warlords ruled largely unencumbered by the central state, much as they do today. Their biggest headache was what they called the “Indian problem,” which they addressed by expropriating lands, especially where lands might be turned to raising export crops, or simply by pillaging and outright murder. Earlier forms of debt peonage hardened, and landlessness expanded.
Recalcitrant Indians were enslaved, sold to silver mine owners trying to resurrect that industry and to henequen plantations or transported to Cuba. The enslavement of Yaquis continued into the early 1900s, nearly a century after Mexico formally abolished slavery.
7 MAP 18.1. Latin America in the nineteenth century Violence was especially pronounced in the Yucatán, which saw perhaps the most protracted Indian rebellion in all Latin America. In the early part of the nineteenth century, merchants and the landed elite made the transition from livestock and maize to sugar and then henequen. Many engaged in both mercantile and agricultural pursuits. Some henequen warlords came from the established landed oligarchy, strongmen such as the Peóns, who combined their henequen production with trade and other economic activities. Others were relative newcomers such as Olegario Molina, who ran a henequen export house but also owned plantations and a twine factory, engaged in financial speculation, worked closely with American businesses, and later jumped into politics. In the early 1900s, Molina served as Yucatán’s governor before fleeing the revolution to Cuba; other members of his family controlled local politics. Cultivation of henequen, the so-called Mayan green gold, expanded dramatically from midcentury. Henequen fiber made good rope for shipping and excellent twine for baling hay and other crops during the explosion of capitalist agriculture across the American Midwest. American capital would fund the henequen plantation complex, providing needed loans at competitive rates in return for securing henequen supplies. The results were high levels of indebtedness for many Mexicans and considerable wealth for some. The Molina cartel used money, most of it from the United States, to loan out to farmers at higher rates in return for their henequen crops, which the cartel purchased for a pittance.8 American companies were deeply implicated in the henequen regime nearly from the beginning. Most infamous was International Harvester, one of the largest corporations in the United States, formed out of a 1902 merger. International Harvester was joined at the hip with the ruling Mexican oligarchy, who styled themselves the “divine caste.” This marriage helped make the Yucatán the wealthiest state in Mexico by the end of the 1800s and the most heavily armed. Weapons had long been moving directly into the Yucatán Peninsula and, farther south, illegally from British Honduras (Belize). The latter was a classic eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury frontier marked by slavery and lawlessness and, in the end, was largely controlled by an elite few who grew rich from the destruction of mahogany and rosewood forests and trees used as industrial dyes. Most of the weapons in this region were British guns, including Enfield rifles, although from about the mid-nineteenth century onward American makes became increasingly common. Henequen warlords were more than happy to have the guns; their power and self-righteous divinity depended on these weapons.
The warlords were less happy when these weapons landed in the hands of Mayan Indians.9 The henequen elite needed guns because the boom unleashed widespread land expropriations and a surging demand for labor that was impossible to meet without extraordinarily high levels of violence. Guns were also needed because much of the region was in a state of civil conflict. Between 1829 and 1837, Yucatán was ruled by Mexico’s national military in a largely inept, fiercely resented attempt to extend federal control. The state declared its independence no less than three times in the 1840s before reaching a tenuous rapprochement, but political instability continued for decades. During this period, “governors came to be counted, not in months, but for days, and we can already add, for hours.”10 Civil war and systemic political instability drove the formation of private militias against the backdrop of a broader militarization of Mexican society.
All too often, the privatization of property and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of communally held land came at the point of a gun.11 Various laws made it easier to consolidate land parcels and force Indians into debt peonage. (Cultivating henequen requires nearly year-round labor.) Native land was transformed into henequen haciendas, although in some areas warlords established sugar plantations, and in later years forests were turned over to the tapping of trees to produce chicle for chewing gum.
Whereas in 1840 most people had access to land, by 1910, “96.4 percent of all family heads” were landless.12 Rebellion, what came to be known as the Caste War of Yucatán, erupted in the late 1840s. The rebellion would continue on and off until the beginning of the twentieth century, the most devastating of Mexico’s long history of rebellions. The problem, at least from the perspective of henequen strongmen, not to mention the government, was that Indians had guns, which they obtained through the illegal arms trade out of Belize or by raiding farms and military encampments. From the early 1850s onward, the entire region was saturated with weapons. Guns continued flowing to the rebels in spite of repeated Mexican government complaints. Only in the 1890s, half a century after the beginning of the rebellion, did the gun trade begin drawing to a close with the establishment of a formal border between British Belize and Mexico.13 Already by 1862, Yucatán’s population had declined by 40 percent and perhaps more, with the Indigenous population reaching its lowest point in the closing years of the century.
14 At least 250,000 died in an area that was home to just 600,000. Warlords terrorized Indian communities, as did the Yucatán government’s military. Looting, the wanton destruction of villages, and summary executions all occurred as violence and land expropriation became inseparable. Captured people ended up as debt peons on henequen estates, many worked to death. Others were sold and shipped off the peninsula, with many traveling to Cuba, a move that helped the Yucatán government settle a debt for war expenses.15 For a while, this slave trade became an important part of the Yucatán economy.
Ultimately the Mexican Army was called in to restore order, deploying machine guns, cannons, and modern rifles against rebels mostly armed with muskets and simple machetes.
Rebel leaders and many of their followers in Yucatán’s great Caste War considered the henequen industry and the social order that supported it not just exploitative but also profoundly evil, responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the world. Their views had obvious merit. Here was a profoundly immoral economy, one where the “bosses do not always take the trouble to bury” people they had worked to death. “They throw them in the swamps where the alligators eat them,”16 wrote the American socialist muckraker John Kenneth Turner. “By the sixth or seventh month they begin to die off like flies at the first winter frost, and after that they’re not worth keeping. The cheapest thing to do is to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from.”17 FIGURE 18.1. Una escena de la Guerra de Castas (A Scene from the Caste War). Unknown artist, ca.
1850.
Rebels combined Mayan ideas of an enchanted world, where souls traveled in and through all things and time was cyclical, with Christian concepts of eschatology, original sin, and the promise of redemption. The result was a blistering critique of the Yucatán’s immoral economy, an indictment of its greed and devastation and of its wanton destruction of life, indeed of history itself. For rebels, the Christian cross did not represent God. It was God, most profoundly so at the ritual center of the rebellion at Chan Santa Cruz in central Yucatán. In the dead of night, the cross spoke “in a fine thin whistle.”18 Tens of thousands flocked to these speaking crosses to hear God, to know that he loved them and to receive instructions.
Violence and the eradication of the warlords would restore the land and turn the world upside down. There would be no more droughts. Clouds of locusts would no longer appear on the horizon to devour everything in their path, much like the henequen lords had done.
The corn would once again be plentiful, the cacao rich and flavorful.19 These beliefs were, tragically, at least half right. The land was dying.
Henequen estates devastated Yucatán’s diverse environment, destroying forests, degrading soils, and leaving already dry areas even more parched.
Persistent crop failures had plagued the region since the middle of the eighteenth century, sometimes resulting in widespread famine. The frequency of droughts per year in the Yucatán between 1800 and 1900 was four times higher than the previous 250 years.20 They have grown more punishing in the recent past.
Warlordism in Mexico only came to a definitive end in the 1920s and 1930s following the Mexican Revolution, a cataclysmic event that caused between one million and three million deaths and brought the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to an end. That conflict and the carnage it sowed were made possible, in part, by a flood of weapons from the United States that ended up in the hands of revolutionaries such as Pancho Villa.
Reforms and a weakening, or at least a taming, of the landed oligarchy finally began a century after independence from Spain.21 The movement of guns to nonstate actors dramatically slowed if only for a few decades. The 1917 Mexican Constitution and the 1934 Federal Law of Firearms and Explosives dramatically restricted access to weapons to the general public.
The situation began changing once again, however, in the 1970s, less than half a century after relative calm had descended. Today, the leaders of the drug cartels are the warlords of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Massive numbers of American guns have moved south of the US-Mexican border, to devastating effect. Well over three hundred thousand people have died in Mexico’s drug wars over the past two decades, and increasingly, narco-warlord violence and rapid climate change have conspired to create the most profound demographic upheavals that Mexico and Latin America have seen for over a century, perhaps ever.
22 This story of warlordism, extreme weather, food and water insecurity, and insufferable heat is still unfolding.
*
Indigenous populations across Mexico continued declining into the closing years of the nineteenth century, a demographic catastrophe second only to the great devastations of the 1600s. Mexico was not unique in this respect.
Increasingly well-armed settlers from the southern tip of Latin America to the United States convinced themselves that the Indian would disappear— indeed should disappear, along with the natural world—before the relentless forward march of commerce and civilization.
Argentina gained its independence from Spain in the 1810s, only to plunge almost immediately into civil conflict and warlordism as British guns flooded the region. Settlers soon embarked on their genocidal campaign across La Pampa and Patagonia.23 Brazil had more guns than any other Latin American country. During the nineteenth century, Brazil imported vast quantities of gunpowder—over 1.3 million pounds and nearly twenty thousand guns in just 1865—as well as producing some locally.
Many weapons went to Angola to fuel its slave trade, but many also remained in the hands of crioulo. Brazilian independence came in 1822, although unlike the rest of the Americas, it was not initially a republic.
Instead, it became known as the Empire of Brazil, and at the time its territory also included today’s Uruguay. This monarchial government only ceased in 1889 as slavery came to an end, although the political transition unfolded more with a whimper of contested politics than with a bang of revolution.24 For almost seven decades, then, Brazil functioned as a constitutional monarchy in which the state’s central power resided in a parliament ostensibly founded on liberal ideas of citizenship except for women, slaves, and Indigenous peoples. In most respects, however, Brazil’s nineteenthcentury political history looked a lot like other parts of the Americas, including US history: the contradictions of liberal citizenship and political exclusion; a relatively weak central state that relied on local and regional warlords to secure regional control; the importance of militaries; droughts in the 1840s, 1860s, 1870s (the Grande Seca), and 1890s; and the violence of internal colonialism that came with the unsteady extension of state power into frontier areas. The latter process continues today across the northern half of the country and especially in the Amazon basin.
Brazilian independence found its footing within a broader international context of European and American imperialism, both formal and informal.
From the beginning, European and especially British capital insinuated itself throughout Latin America and dominated the financial and export sectors. Like Mexico, Brazil fell into debt to foreign lenders. In 1884 during a commodity boom, Brazilian debt climbed to just over 120 percent of GDP. The country barely escaped default the following decade. (Mexico defaulted in 1861. Soon European warships arrived off the coast of Veracruz to remind its leaders to pay their bills.) Foreign merchants largely controlled Brazil’s export market: they were also responsible for the flood of weapons into the country. So powerful were the British in the first half of the nineteenth century that they could choose their own judge in criminal and civil cases. In 1892, three-quarters of the firms responsible for rubber exports in the crucial Amazonian town of Manaus were foreign.25 The stability of Brazil’s central state and the spread of liberal political ideas, including critiques of slavery, belied what was in fact a period of enormous fragmentation and conflict. Throughout the nineteenth century and in some cases beyond, Brazil remained a patchwork of divergent polities and political imaginations, an array of fundamentally different worldviews. Between the mid-1820s and 1880, the country saw at least sixteen major revolts in addition to protracted Indian and slave resistance, perhaps most famously the 1835 Malê Revolt of African Muslims in Bahia.
Enslaved people constantly attempted to flee their plantations and escape into the interior, where successful escapees established maroon communities (quilombo, derived from the Kikongo language from WestCentral Africa), including in the greater Amazon region. These communities became polities in their own right, elaborating African conceptions of sovereignty and distinctive Afro-Brazilian identities.
Brazil was very far from being liberal, however defined, and was barely a nation-state in the usual sense, as it lacked a widely shared common identity and a government that controlled its own frontiers. As in Mexico and across the Americas, Brazil’s independence saw the consolidation of oligarchical power in which a few well-armed men monopolized ownership of land and controlled local and regional political systems. Voting did not take place by secret ballot until 1891, a fact that helped cement a clientelist politics and warlordism. If the powers-that-be knew you hadn’t voted for them, reprisals could be swift and ruthless. Stability was as distant a dream as liberalism. The country seethed with racialized hatred, militarized politics, and violence and political instability across frontier areas. Many of these areas reeled from drought and famine.
Half a million people perished in the Grande Seca between 1876 and 1879, and another one million perished in the second half of the 1890s, nearly a tenth of Brazil’s population.
In the closing years of the century, a massive rebellion that became known as the War of the Canudos (1896–1897) broke out in the arid interior regions of Bahia. The rebels consisted of recently emancipated slaves, debt peons, and landless peoples who had witnessed the consolidation of landholding by warlords. Together, they followed the teachings of the lay priest Antônio Conselheiro and his vision of a communal world free of the state. Their devotion to God, the rebels believed, would bring rains and fertility to the drought-scarred Sertão, the “backcountry.” “Restitution shall be made in war” became a heartfelt refrain.26 For rebels carrying their Banner of the Divine, the terrible droughts indicated nothing less than the arrival of the Antichrist. And by “Antichrist,” they did not mean some abstract religious figure. The Antichrist was the Brazilian state, nothing more and nothing less: specifically, the republic founded in 1889, along with the warlords who dominated it. These were the powers responsible for the land’s death and the people’s suffering, indeed the very epitome of evil.27 Or as folklore would put it, Cursed are those Who make elections, Putting down the Law of God To raise the law of the devil The Antichrist has arrived To Govern Brazil But in the interior is the Conselheiro To free us from him.28 The federal republican state was demonic, “backed up by the law, those evil ones abound.”29 The rebels could see that the political changes entailed in the creation of the republic actually strengthened warlordism in the countryside by granting the various states significant sovereignty. Local bosses would have free rein to seize land, monopolize politics, and terrorize populations.
But in Canudos, people would create a different world, a visionary, nearly anarchistic community of the poor and the disavowed, a city of miracles.
The rebels were not revolutionaries seeking to overturn the state. Rather, they wanted to be free of warlords, to be left alone, and, in their devotion and their millenarian violence, to heal the land with the heavens’ gentle rains.
Cruelty was meted out on both sides. The rebels scored a stunning defeat of the army, an event that only fueled republican sentiment and retribution.
The aggressive tactics deployed to defeat the rebels were unprecedented, even in a country infamous for brutality. The rebels mostly had muskets and often just knives and scythes. The army, in contrast, showed up with advanced rifles, machine guns, and howitzers. “It was a slaughter-house,” one commentator reported.30 Hundreds had their throats slits and their heads hacked off, and bodies were tossed in mass graves or left to rot.
Rivers turned red as fifteen thousand to thirty thousand people died.
Conselheiro’s priestly body would be exhumed, his head sent to a laboratory for phrenological analysis in this age of racialized science.
FIGURE 18.2. Drawing of Canudos, ca. 1895. Author unknown.
Brazil has had a long and continuous history of violence toward Indigenous populations, one dating back to the early sixteenth century, including a history of enslavement. The Portuguese Crown had attempted to provide some limited protections to Brazilian Indians, in addition to prohibiting settler expansion in frontier areas, as in the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines), the so-called Forbidden Lands outside the colonial areas of gold and diamond mining. This pushback on the part of the Portuguese was born in part of mercantilist ideas and state regulation. More pragmatically, it also represented an attempt to avoid the economic costs of instability in the region: rapacious settler expansion combined with vigorous Indian resistance did not line the wealthy’s pocketbooks consistently.
31 Violence against Indians in Brazil’s history represented a deliberate strategy aimed at helping the independent Brazilian state expand, including its local government, what in the republican era became the “politics of the governors,”32 a euphemism for decentralization and warlordism. In Minas Gerais, an unstable cohabitation emerged of provincial officials and settlers interested in expanding into the Forbidden Lands, where they hoped to find new supplies of gold or, failing that, to establish farms. Violence and Indian resistance multiplied steadily. Settler attacks ranged from organized official depredations to paramilitary attacks by bandeirantes, much of these lumped into reprisals against Indian raids.
The distinction between officially sanctioned and privatized violence had always been blurry if not almost nonexistent. The early independence period saw a “violent colonization of indigenous territory” and an entrenchment of chattel slavery.
33 The cycle of invasion and resistance continued. In the 1835–1840 revolt of Indians and mestizos in the jungles around the mouth of the Amazon, roughly 20 percent of the population perished. Rebels saw in Rio everything they thought they hated: whites, planters, and the powerful. Complex politics persisted within and between Indian communities, including war and alliances with settlers. But overall, the chaos on the ground, including disease outbreaks, hastened a decline in the Indigenous population. Six hundred thousand Indians perished during Brazil’s era of independence and its national consolidation as a republic as the state extended its rule over the frontier regions and warlords solidified their control over land, labor, and the local territories.34 Brazil, then, was pursuing its own imperial project, an experiment under way within its ostensibly national boundaries, thus making the term “Empire of Brazil” (1822–1889) especially apposite. In Minas Gerais, violence worsened between about 1850 and the 1880s, intensifying into what some called a “war of extermination,”35 despite legal prohibitions. Warlords helped organize and sometimes lead raids against Indigenous communities, and the discovery of new mineral sources often resulted in spasms of violence. In the 1870s, German settler Georg Stolze, for example, worked with the government to push expansion into the country’s interior.
Stolze also held considerable properties and other economic interests and was involved in a particularly brutal massacre in 1881 in which at least thirty people perished, matar uma aldeia indeed.
Like Mexico’s strongmen, many who perpetrated this violence were warlords, men with one and sometimes two feet firmly planted in the official state while they simultaneously chased their economic dreams through nefarious activities.36 In Brazil, the gray zone between legal and extralegal, private and public, was long-lasting, with plenty of room for maneuvering.
Under the 1891 Brazilian Constitution, the structure of the government itself—states had “territorial integrity,” “political autonomy,” and the “right to self-government”—comprised a near-perfect recipe for warlordism.37 The jarring paradoxes of the liberal age, where violence, inhumanity, and exclusion coexisted with citizenship, rights, and the rule of law, thus characterized Brazil and indeed almost all of the Americas.
In large areas of the country, bloodshed would go hand in hand with the commodity booms (and busts) of the second half of the nineteenth century, much of it bankrolled by British and, to a lesser extent, American capital.
Between 1841–1850 and the 1870s, coffee grown mostly in the Brazilian southeast soared to five times its previous value. Brazil would continue to be a major world supplier of the stimulant. Cotton and cacao, a forest crop, increased by nearly the same factor as coffee, and sugar’s value doubled.
The most profound economic growth, however, came from the rubber of the forested Amazonian region. Rubber exports took off almost immediately following Charles Goodyear’s breakthrough technological discovery that adding sulfur to the latex makes it far more durable and easier to turn into a multitude of shapes. (Vulcanization consumes large quantities of fossil fuels and produces the sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain, in addition to other greenhouse gases.) The value of rubber exports increased by fifty-one times in these years and continued rising dramatically in the 1880s and 1890s.
Rubber exports even remained strong during the financial crisis of the 1890s that brought the Brazilian economy to its knees. Between 1870 and the beginning of World War I, in short, Brazil became the world’s largest supplier of natural rubber, a newly vital commodity in North America’s and Europe’s industrial economies, providing as much as 60 percent of the product.38 Not until 1910 would cheaper Asian rubber trigger a collapse in the Brazilian industry.
Rubber helped define and construct the modern age. It was in the shoes people wore, the bicycles they pedaled, the hoses that helped power combustion engines and the weapons of modern war, and—of course—car tires. Without rubber, industrialization would have grown more slowly, including the rates of greenhouse gas emissions. Rubber was central to not just the expansion of industry but also the mechanics and speed at which machines functioned.
Even the best leather belts made from bison hide struggled to spin faster than 1,000 rpm.
Rubber belts, by way of contrast, could operate at speeds of 3,500 rpm, an extraordinary increase. At the beginning of the rubber revolution, a single American company in 1875 produced more than 1.2 million feet of industrial rubber belting, enough to stretch from New York to Washington, DC.39 Thousands of pounds of sulfur dioxide drifted into the mid-Atlantic air.
FIGURE 18.3. The rubber boom. Reproduced with permission of the British Library, London.
But at what cost? Many tens of millions of trees would be cut down over enormous areas of Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, the first wave of a systematic deforestation that continues today.
40 Small rubber traders proliferated in the region, and rubber barons emerged as well, men who ruled over discrete territories and ensured the collection and transport of latex to an export market largely controlled by British and American companies. Foreign capital helped drive the entire process, funding the steamboats that moved rubber down to ports and extending loans deep into the jungle. Not surprisingly, many of those responsible for the worst violence during this boom were also in debt to companies.41 Rubber became tied up with Brazil’s internal colonization, as it also did in other states such as Peru. Brazil sought consolidation over the region so it could tap into the profits of the booming new industry but also as part of its national project. The state thus “grew” considerably during the rubber boom, at precisely the same time that ecological destruction was under way alongside extreme aggression against Indigenous peoples (including the rapid expansion of slavery and debt peonage). Money from rubber thus went to “geopolitical ends” to secure continued exploitation of the forest, although given the uncertain international boundaries of the greater Amazonian region, further expansion raised regional tensions.42 Warlords controlled much of this process, especially given the structure of the republic. Many of them received large concessions over which they ruled, in effect doing the work of the central state. Often, these strongmen received orders to extend colonization into the interior and were given state loans to carry out the work. Many were also intimately tied to or served as an extension of foreign capital, such as the British Peruvian Amazon Company, which was responsible for the devastation of the Putumayo region around what is today the hinterlands of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. These firms helped spread debt into the interior, ultimately leading to the explosion of slavery and debt peonage.
The warlords of the Amazon might have functioned as extensions of both the state and foreign capital, but most of these men also had their own dreams of expanding and consolidating power. The central state remained weak. Conquest, whether by an empire or an expanding state, inevitably involved the problem of rule. The solution wasn’t unique to the Brazilian state; it was also appearing around the emerging modern world: to amass more power, the state had to be willing to give some of it away. Rule always entails the elaboration of new patterns of collaboration between local elites and central government. And as long as they quieted their dreams of secession, these local and provincial governments could retain a good deal of autonomy. In Brazil, then, warlords put on their good suits in the morning; strongmen became officials, just as they did in the Yucatán.43 National integration thus evolved to preserve patronage, corruption, and violence that served the elites.
It is no accident that the decline of the Amazon’s Indigenous population accelerated in the years of some of its greatest wealth accumulation. In three decades during the rubber boom, fifty thousand people perished. The bloodshed during this era became the stuff of legends.
The Amazon was “a splendid market . . . for all kinds of firearms.” Merchants were more than happy to satisfy the demand for weapons. Massive numbers of American and British guns moved into the jungle, so readily available that they were used to build contraptions to torture people by “trussing a man with his legs and arms closely bound to a triangle formed by several crossed rifles.”44 Without guns, the exploitation of Brazil’s Indians would not have been possible. With guns, Brazil’s Indigenous peoples were enslaved, worked to death, tortured, and murdered.
Some tried to hide their brutality behind the artifice of monuments and the vacuous language of “civilization” and “progress,” just as slave masters in Saint-Domingue had listened to classical music while thousands died around them. Beneath edifices such as the Amazon Theater in Manaus, a grandiose opera house located deep in the Amazonian jungle, lay immense human suffering: punishing debt bondage, widespread enslavement, entire villages destroyed, and people set on fire, all in a mad effort to secure rubber for international markets.45 (This perverse combination of high art and the relentless search for rubber, of culture and cruelty, would be depicted nearly a century later in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo.) FIGURE 18.4. Slaves, from W. E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise (London, 1913).
The poor were in debt, but then so was most everyone else, including many warlords and even the laborers who built the great theater in Manaus.
Just over a decade after the theater’s completion in the late 1890s, the town owed foreign creditors more than $25 million.46 * Warlordism has persisted in Brazil for much of its modern history. The 1891 Brazilian Constitution, modeled on the US Constitution but without a Second Amendment, created a weak central government. States’ rights (before 1889, they were provinces) invited local tyranny. Each state effectively had its own militia. Various iterations of authoritarian rule and political instability persisted through much of the twentieth century, including two decades of military dictatorship. The military junta’s 1967 constitution, following a coup d’état three years earlier, marked an attempt by the dictatorship to increase the power of the central government and extend greater control over the various states. Authoritarianism and dictatorship marked an attempt to demilitarize some aspects of Brazilian society while concentrating weapons in the hands of the despotic few. Not surprisingly, widespread torture and human rights abuses followed.
The extraordinary deforestation across Brazil, which has accelerated profoundly in the twenty-first century and is tied to a resurgent warlordism, relaxed gun laws, and a new wave of violence against Indigenous peoples, reminds us of the fact that frontiers have not disappeared from our modern world; they remain a continuous part of human history, and states are always (re)colonizing their national spaces, often with limited success. Very large numbers of weapons have flowed into these areas. Along with Mexico, Brazil now has the largest number of guns in private hands in Latin America. And ecological destruction and global warming come at the barrel of a gun. Grass and forestlands in the northeast of the country have been burned away and turned to cropland, while tropical forests in the vast Amazon basin—often dubbed Earth’s “lungs”—have been transformed into sprawling cattle ranches. Illegal logging of precious hardwoods and smallscale mining operations for gold and rare earth minerals crop up amid these devastations. In 2019, smoke from seventy-four thousand or more fires was clearly visible from space as the equivalent of 140 million metric tons drifted over the Atlantic.47
19 The Great Lands of the Dead WHAT OF THE BEHEMOTH that became the United States of America? What explains the meteoric rise in wealth, equaling if not already surpassing Great Britain in GDP by 1861, emitting over a quarter of global CO2 by century’s end, and surpassing emissions in the United Kingdom by the start of World War I?
Modern America was founded on modern violence. Without the gun there would be no United States of America. Violence against Native Americans and slaves increased in the early national period, while the cotton revolution and the corresponding rise in the value of slaves were accompanied by a rise in whipping. Conflict seemed to be consuming the country. In just over three decades before the American Civil War, well over one thousand riots broke out across the country. Political violence was commonplace, including in Congress, where legislators came to debates armed with pistols and knives. Threatening your opponent with a thrashing or worse was expected, especially as the debates over slavery heated up. Most famously, a proslavery congressman from South Carolina caned and very nearly killed the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, one of more than seventy incidents of politicians behaving badly.
1 Citizens of the United States generally prefer their empires elsewhere.
Most seem attached to the pretense that the United States did not have an empire, at least not like the British or French did, and that the country’s very founding was anti-imperialist.
US history is told as a transition from British Empire to independent nation-state, a narrative that turned into foreign policy and spread around the world with American hegemony after 1945. When pushed, some begrudgingly admit that American dominance in places such as the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, not to mention large areas of Central America including the invasion of Mexico, looks a lot like its European counterparts, whether formal or informal empire or both.
The United States was as much a territorial settler empire as an overseas one. Both regimes developed nearly simultaneously and roughly at the same time that nationalism and imperialism were redrawing the world’s political geography. The United States grew tremendously from the 1870s through the 1890s, a scramble for America in the same decades that saw the European conquest of Africa. The United States also expanded externally, muscling its way into much of Latin America and formally conquering the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the late 1890s, and acquiring the former entailed decades of violence across the archipelago.
Leading politicians had spoken of the United States as a settler empire almost from the very beginning, as Alexander Hamilton did in his Federalist No. 1 essay and again in Federalist No. 13. So also did other founding fathers, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
The forced expulsion of native populations—Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and others —in the South in the 1820s and 1830s, culminating in the Trail of Tears, took place at the same time as the growth of settler societies elsewhere in the world, such as in southern Africa, Algeria, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, neighboring Canada. Each country experienced what often amounted to little more than ethnic cleansing.
Once we begin seeing the United States as less exceptional than various nationalist myths suggest, major events such as the American Civil War begin to look different. The conflagration of 1861–1865 was many things, to be sure, but one element that often goes unnoted is its imperialist dimensions: two imperial formations struggling over their competing colonial futures and a fight sparked by frontier crises in which warlords and their planter successors played crucial and formative roles. The South, after all, was fundamentally a frontier region, America’s great citadel of warlordism, impossible without the spread of weapons and the militarycommercial revolution. Would the tyrannies perfected in the South comprise the country’s future even if this meant its dissolution? Or would the country chart a different, less despotic, path?
Gun-toting and slave-owning Andrew Jackson, who served as president from 1829 to 1837, had set out a brutalist vision of ethnic cleansing and of opening the South to plantation slavery, a dramatic rebuttal of the imperial vision imagined by Jefferson of an expanding country of agrarian smallholders. Jackson’s first vice president was the legendary defender of slavery South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, who also supported relentless westward expansion. The period roughly from the late 1830s through the outbreak of war in 1861 was marked by debates about not only the problem of slavery but, crucially, also westward expansion and the future of warlordism.
The problem of slavery in America was also the problem of its frontier; the two issues could not be separated. The US crisis transpired on borderlands experiencing dispossession, animal destruction, slavery’s expansion, and rising thuggery as territories became states. As late as 1857, a massive geographical area remained undecided on the issue of slavery: the Nebraska Territory, which stretched all the way to Canada, Utah, New Mexico, and the deeply divided Kansas Territory, admitted to the Union just months before the outbreak of war.
In the thirty years after the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, what is now the contiguous United States of America had largely taken shape.
Much of the vast region west of the Mississippi River was conquered only after 1850 and large areas not until the 1880s, much of it at the expense of Indigenous communities and of Mexico in the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The United States had grown enormously. Ten more states had joined the union.
This remarkable expansion evolved in the context of a planet that was becoming warmer with the (natural) end of the Little Ice Age and the (unnatural) beginning of global warming.
Droughts afflicted much of North America (and across Latin America, Africa, and Asia) in 1856–1865, 1870– 1877, and 1890–1896 and then nearly every decade beginning with the 1930s Dust Bowl. The lack of rain was especially severe in the South and West, precisely the areas that would experience the most protracted violence and rapid settlement. Between 1830 and 1861, the white settler population exploded. By the racial classifications of the time, every population group had grown, including enslaved people, with the pronounced exception of Indians. The second half of the century, however, stood in stark contrast. Now, between 2.25 million and 2.35 million people died from war, disease, or starvation. Native American populations declined by 90 percent at the same time that large numbers of people were dying elsewhere in the Americas and across the colonial world. By the end of the nineteenth century, an Indigenous population that had reached the millions in the late 1700s and in the early years of the republic had plummeted to under 250,000.2 Politicians and people of goodwill knew what was going on. They grasped that what was taking place in the South and becoming federal policy was nothing less than colonization and extermination, the proverbial work of empires. They also knew what would happen once the Indian Removal Act became law: the displacement of Indigenous peoples would be followed by an inexorable expansion of slavery. Jackson encountered stiff opposition in Congress, particularly from the Northeast, the American center of abolitionism. His bill barely passed.
Critics constantly returned to the issue of conquest, some worrying that the United States was becoming as bad as the cruel conquistadors or, as a northern congressman yowled, the British “sweeping India with the hand of rapine and holding fifty millions of people in thralldom!”3 But southerners, who benefited from the US Constitution’s three-fifths clause, which counted slaves as part of the population determining representation in Congress, and had the most to gain, carried the day eventually. In the same breath, they cried for federal policy removing the Indians and insisted that states were independent and sovereign, with complete control over their territory and whoever resided within it.
Although Cherokee leaders disagreed over how best to respond to these developments, they did seek an injunction from the US Supreme Court.
That effort failed. A subsequent 1832 ruling brought more hope for a moment: it recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokee “nation” and in doing so provided the Cherokees with some legal protection. But the ruling was never enforced; it was toothless. The removals proceeded, and they went beyond Cherokees alone. The US Army, aided by state militias and settlers led by local warlords, forced upwards of sixty thousand people west to what would become Oklahoma, affecting Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes; thousands of Cherokee died along the way in what was also a trail of settler greed.4 The politics around the Indian Removal Act involved issues that all empires confront as well as the distinctive conundrums facing the early American republic: the relationship between center and periphery, the constant generation of crises along borders and frontiers, the massive dissemination of weapons in the context of a weak central state in which white settlers resisted and subverted the federal government, the politics of sovereignty and conquest and the problem of rule, and the challenges of difference and incorporation.
Expulsion further inscribed these differences between newcomer and native peoples, in effect making the latter a foreigner in what had been their own land. Indian sovereignty, it was said, resided elsewhere, across the Mississippi, beyond the nation-state, while the sovereignty of the states was reinscribed as the preserve of white settlers.
The most prosperous landowners became the equivalent of southern nabobs—the country’s “divine caste”—a rapidly forming oligarchy committed to slavery, with ostentatious mansions exploiting the labor of hundreds and at times more than a thousand slaves. Some of these strongmen became state or federal officials, men such as Andrew Jackson and James Polk, both from Tennessee and both becoming presidents. Very soon, a cloak of decency and decorum began to cover over the legacy of settler predation and colonization. Those who had engaged in fraud and bloodshed now presented themselves as respectable, although most eastern abolitionists knew better. The whitewashing of American history continued when some of the same men who had engaged in horrific violence and predation remade themselves into pioneers of democracy.
5 Some found immortality in the process, with their likenesses bronzed and turned into statues venerated in town squares for generations to come.
*
The rise of men such as Jackson and Polk brought home the importance—if not the dominance—of regions that just a few decades earlier had functioned as frontiers and now flourished as central sites for commodity production in the Industrial Age. The ascendance of these men also raised fundamental issues around power and the state, most acutely in the slave South. Like other parts of the Americas in the years following independence, political power in the United States remained largely fragmented, with a weak central government.
Decentralization was written into the very making of the United States, as it was in places such as Brazil and Mexico. The relationship between states and the federal government was contentious from the beginning, and in many ways the argument continues to this day.
During the Jacksonian era, a common US identity barely existed; being a Mississippian often trumped feelings of being a national citizen. The Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, which centered on the federal government’s taxation rights or lack thereof, took up the (still) unresolved issue of state versus federal power. Southern politicians insisted that they had the right to reject, “nullify,” federal policies they did not like. The crisis revealed the emergence of a distinctive conception of the South that privileged white (male) power as personal property and fiercely reaffirmed states’ rights, including a claim to a monopoly on violence.6 Jackson, then president, sided with the federal government, but in other respects he was a staunch supporter of states’ rights and a quintessential warlord, the “warrior president” standing up for the common (white) man, much like the faux populism of Donald Trump, who would venerate the famous Tennessean nearly two centuries later. But Jackson’s life spoke to a broader emerging pattern on the plantation frontier and across the slaveholding South. Most acutely within the plantation itself, owners were warlords in their elaboration of patriarchal power and in the violence they prosecuted against slaves, from rape to beatings to murder. These uniquely American strongmen also displayed a commitment to hierarchy, a deep suspicion of equality, a belief in codes of honor, strong ideas about how law should be enforced, adamant insistence on the private right to violence, and ultimately a foundation in white supremacy.
7 We have seen variations of this warlord world elsewhere: in the estuaries of Nigeria and in the predations of British East India Company officials and in the henequen lords of the Yucatán, each emerging from economic revolutions in areas marked by political fragmentation and saturated with guns. In the end, all were profoundly undemocratic, indeed authoritarian, and committed to violence.8 It was precisely this world that so alarmed American abolitionists, who feared that a tyrannical slavery had taken root in America and was spreading westward. In his famous 1856 speech that would incite the man who later assaulted him, abolitionist senator Charles Sumner invoked tyranny more than fifty times. He and others worried that the United States might become little more than a criminal republic, a rule by men toting guns. Unsurprisingly, Sumner, a keen student of history, referenced the trial of Warren Hastings, former governor-general of India, in his Senate floor screed.9 These contradictory and intractable issues—some unresolved to this day —became more acute with the rapid westward expansion of slavery into Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Even if southern dominance in Washington, DC, was beginning to wane with broader demographic changes nationwide, prominent slaveholders still harbored hopes of a near-endless expansion of slavery. The term “manifest destiny” may have been coined in the 1840s, but the policy was being practiced decades earlier.
The years following the Indian Removal Act witnessed an intensification of the crises of warlordism within and along the peripheries of America’s settler empire. These contests were resolved—at the cost of enormous bloodshed—by the intervention of the central state.
America’s warlords were pacified, if not quite disarmed. Slavery was a lightning bolt of an issue, triggering volatility wherever it was discussed, often refracted through the language of states’ rights. West of the Mississippi loomed autonomous Indian polities and an exploding trade in animal carcasses and other goods that the federal government could not control or monitor, especially after the 1822 end of the system that had forced traders onto stations.
And with that trade came the widespread decimation of North American animals, an explosion of indebtedness, and new patterns of inequality, rising violence, and proliferating weapons.
*
Between the 1830s and the 1890s, conflict engulfed an enormous region of North America, more than two-thirds of the contemporary United States and much of Mexico. From the 1830s through the 1860s, war and widespread raiding took place across what became Texas. From 1846 to 1848, the Mexican-American War brought American troops all the way to Mexico City and resulted in a massive gain of US territory. From 1861 to 1865, the American Civil War decimated communities from Texas to Maryland. And from the 1860s through the 1890s, a series of extraordinarily violent colonial conflicts dominated the Great Plains.
War with Mexico led to the 1836 creation of the Republic of Texas, effectively a new warlord polity committed to the expansion of slavery and settler violence against Indian communities.
Large numbers of weapons moved into Texas from New Orleans and St. Louis and through the port at Galveston. “Texas . . . was disjointed, expansionist, volatile, and potentially self-destructive,” one historian has written recently. “Those were also the attributes of its Indian policy.”10 It was a deeply vicious region, at times nearly descending into anarchy.
Settler violence was often inchoate, at other times more coordinated, as were Indian raiding and resistance. Formal war between Texas and the Comanches launched in 1850, five years after the United States annexed the republic and just two years following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. Federal troops aided Texan militias, who engaged in wanton violence. Three years later the Comanches had been defeated, although raiding along the expanding settler cattle frontier continued well into the next decade.
MAP 19.1. Conflicts across North America in the nineteenth century Politics surrounding the “Indian problem” fed into rising tensions with Mexico. These tensions were driven by tyrannical Texans seeking coveted territory and looking to expand slavery as well as by northern speculators who saw potential riches in US expansion and had wheedled their way into the Mexican economy. Mexico had its own frontier problems, compounded by political division and deep internecine conflict in the years following its 1821 independence.
The central government had failed to consolidate its power over the Mexican states that comprised its northern region, which included areas controlled by the Comanches. Instead, warlords largely dominated these regions, including much of Texas.
James Polk, US president from 1845 to 1849, was a fervent Jacksonian; indeed, Jackson was a hero to Polk, and the two enjoyed a close friendship. Like Jackson, Polk had roots in North Carolina. The family grew rich from land speculation and slavery, with Polk becoming an extensive landowner and slaveholder in Tennessee in addition to pursuing a legal career and other business activities. (Other family members were involved in various mercantile pursuits.) Polk participated in the speculation that followed the Indian Removal Act, acquiring large amounts of Choctaw land in Mississippi near the Yalobusha River that very quickly became a large and prosperous cotton plantation in the years following the economic crisis of the mid-1830s and the temporary decline in cotton prices.11 Polk and his relatives became prominent slaveholders across the South, including Arkansas; the profits from cotton helped finance his political career. In the White House, Polk somewhat quieted his commitment to slavery. During his presidency, however, he continued purchasing and selling people, looking for new lands out of which Indians had been recently removed, and profiting from plantation agriculture.
Here was a man who had come of age on the rapidly developing frontier of America’s settler empire in which the expulsion of Indians and the development of slavery went hand in hand.
From relatively modest beginnings, the family did well through westward expansion and colonial conquest. Polk had grown wealthy, respectable, and powerful out of the land speculation and the dispossession of Indian communities, much of it involving violence, intimidation, and outright fraud. On these lands emerged the Cotton Kingdom in the Deep South. Polk’s Mississippi plantation paid him well, particularly in terms of the rising value of the human beings he owned and sold, and continued being profitable following his unexpected death in 1849 just after the end of his presidency.
Slavery, Polk had believed, was the surest path to wealth, a conviction that helps explain why he sought the annexation of Texas immediately after becoming president and one reason why he prosecuted war against Mexico the following year. Jackson had had eyes on expansion into Mexican territory, as did many committed to the Cotton Kingdom. Polk followed in his hero’s footsteps. To many, he appeared more refined (Polk established the Smithsonian museums) than the gruff, even uncouth, Old Hickory (Jackson). But in many basic respects, Polk was Jackson through and through, only dressed in better clothes and with finer speech and benefiting from the veil of a new southern decorum that covered over a deeply violent world.12 The Mexican-American War enjoyed massive support in both houses of Congress, although criticism rose with the war’s costs. Unsurprisingly, Sumner denounced the conflict, considering the war “an enormity born of Slavery.”13 But so also did slaveholder Calhoun, who feared that the war would exacerbate sectionalism. Financiers and speculators envisioned easy profits; the lure of silver attracted quite a few businessmen. In many respects, this was a southern war led by a southern president, an extension of frontier violence and warlordism into Mexico under the guise of protecting or pursuing national interests. One of the striking features of the Mexican-American War was the role of southerners; volunteers played an important role, outnumbering US Army soldiers by two to one. Most of the volunteers came from the slaveholding South and fully embodied Jacksonian ideals, including the sacrosanctity of states’ rights and the racism of manifest destiny. These volunteers also committed the worst atrocities.14 The Mexican-American War killed many and cost dearly, leaving some forty thousand dead and costing the federal government nearly $3 billion today. The war also largely created the boundaries of the continental United States. California joined the union just two years after the war’s end. As Sumner anticipated, many southern politicians fought for an extension of slavery to the Pacific Ocean, part of their dream of a nearly endless empire of servitude. Their efforts were not successful, but debates around what to do with the country’s newly acquired territories created and reawakened more fundamental problems, deep divisions that would be resolved—or at least prosecuted—in the next decade. Imperial folly, in short, had helped produce a domestic crisis so severe that civil war inevitably followed.15 *
Both Sumner and Calhoun were right, at least partly. Calhoun, the slaveholding senator from South Carolina, worried that the MexicanAmerican War would further split the country apart.
The move to expanding US territory, a prospect he had supported earlier, would mean incorporating a population that was at least 50 percent “pure Indians, and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood.” For Calhoun, nothing could be worse.
“I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he wrote. “Ours is the Government of the white man. The great misfortune of what was formerly Spanish America is to be traced to the fatal error of placing the colored race on an equality with the white.”16 For Sumner the abolitionist, the war was equally wrong but for other reasons: it marked an unholy union of imperialism, human bondage, and tyranny itself. Others shared his sentiments if not quite his rhetorical ferocity. The Mexican-American War inspired Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he argued that both the war and the institution of slavery were inherently wrong if not evil. A junior congressman from Illinois, a tall fellow named Abraham Lincoln, denounced the conflict as a case of naked aggression, begun on a pretense if not an outright falsehood.17 President Polk was not amused.
Each of these very different men was highlighting the contradictions at the center of the American body politic, including or especially the warlordism created by the broader military-commercial revolution. At stake was not just the uneasy and paradoxical coexistence of slavery and freedom; guns were also enmeshed in the discussion. Guns had made America possible; even more, they made it powerful and economically successful. They dominated the fur trade, settler expansion, slavery, genocide, and ultimately the plantation complex itself. But modern weapons also produced catastrophe.
By midcentury, persistent frontier crises, entrenched violence, the continuing spread of guns, and rapid territorial expansion had threatened to make the United States not just unworkable but also impossible, a grand failed political experiment.
The Mexican-American War thus returned congressmen and senators to some of the same issues they had attempted to resolve, or at least postpone, nearly three decades earlier in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which created a new slave state west of the Mississippi in return for admitting Maine into the union. What would happen with newly acquired territory that now reached the Pacific Ocean? How would political power be organized, especially the role of the federal government? Would slavery expand north and west? Who would have the vote? These questions consumed Congress between 1848 and 1850, leading to the Compromise of 1850. California would be free (although the enslavement of Indians was widespread), despite the strong presence of slavery supporters in that region. Utah and New Mexico could decide what they wanted to do, while the Nebraska Territory remained mostly unresolved and Kansas would slip into civil war. In short, slavery would remain an open question across a massive territory right up to the Canadian border. Meanwhile and importantly, the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in September 1850 as part of the new compromise, secured the interests of slaveholders and legalized terror.
The act constituted polite recognition of a weak central state and the warlord world of privatized violence, noting that individuals could seize suspected fugitives. These contradictions and crises became unworkable, at least to southerners who seceded from the union and initiated war just thirteen years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an official end to the Mexican-American War. Historians have long debated the American Civil War; more books have been written about it than the American Revolution. Some have argued that the Civil War was inevitable, the only possible resolution to the coexistence of two fundamentally different, indeed contradictory, economic systems and of two different cultural worlds, “premodern” versus “modern,” as some have described it.
Others have emphasized the fluidity of politics in the nineteenth century that did not make the war inevitable and the economic dynamism, indeed the modern capitalist nature, of the Cotton South.18 These divisions are too pat. They forget the two crooked roads to modernity: democracy and despotism. They also tend to forget that the war emerged from an imperial and frontier crisis that was becoming a national disaster. The American Civil War was not unique in this respect, perhaps not in any respect. It strongly resembled other nineteenth-century conflicts, especially strife in other parts of the Americas but also in India and Africa.
Pillaging, endemic violence, and conceptions and practices of power as personal property had built the world of the southern warlords. Now this world had become nearly unworkable, particularly as some politicians expounded liberal ideas about federal power informed by the rule of law and democratic citizenship. Lincoln would describe the slaveholder world as nothing less than despotism, which it was. And while tensions within the South and between the southern states and the federal government had existed from the beginning, at last they had reached the boiling point.
Slaveholders had dreamed of an ever-expanding empire of slavery, a world of loosely affiliated sovereign states in which white men exclusively enjoyed citizenship and were free to mete out violence against slaves and Indigenous peoples. They wanted, in short, what the republic itself had promised in its beginnings: the freedom to kill, loot, confiscate land from Indigenous peoples, and, most of all, dominate and exploit others. These activities were, as one proslavery filibuster put it, “the moral necessity of all the Anglo-Norman breed[,] . . . the necessity of all progressive races.”19 Southern slaveholders saw this imperialist dream—most clearly articulated in the drumbeat of “states’ rights” and the defense of slavery—as being cut short by a different, if also inherently contradictory, vision of nation and empire. This new vision promised, even if it did not always deliver, the possibility of citizenship for all and the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The two crises—nation and empire—were thus bedfellows. Accordingly, like the many gruesome contests waged elsewhere around the world during the same period, America’s civil war was fought for a basic reason: to determine how power would be consolidated and organized in the wake of the military-commercial revolution. Who counted as a citizen in this new world? And what did it mean to be or not be a subject in the modern age?20 * South Carolina seceded in December 1860, just months before Lincoln’s inauguration. The war began a little more than a month after Lincoln swore his oath of office and ended almost exactly four years later, when Robert E.
Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant; both men had fought in the MexicanAmerican War. No one anticipated the carnage that would take the country to its knees in a four-year time frame. But maybe they should have. The United States had been helping to militarize the world, its weapons arriving in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The country was saturated with weapons, many millions of them.21 During the course of the war, over six hundred thousand soldiers died, far more than in any other American war to date including twenty-four thousand in a single battle, many of the dead buried far from their homes. In the end, an estimated two million people died, just under 10 percent of the total US population.22 Although the war ground on for four brutal years, the South quickly began collapsing. Union troops weren’t the only factor. Drought played a role, as increasingly the South could not feed itself. Simultaneously and in a move that would bear affinities with French West Africa later in the century, enslaved peoples began abandoning their plantations, often taking property with them. At least 12.5 percent of the total US slave population left, or half a million people, with many setting out on long, dangerous treks to freedom. Roughly one hundred thousand former slaves joined the Union Army.
Migration was most pronounced along frontier and newly settled areas, in places such as Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, as well as in states closer to free labor states. In these areas, anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the slave population voted with their feet. Initially, Lincoln had not supported what was becoming a slave rebellion, whether desertion or taking up violence.23 Enslaved people had other ideas. The long historic patterns by which captive peoples had always carved out a sliver of autonomy now helped them attack the powers-that-be in small yet cumulatively devastating ways. Slowly, the world that men such as Jackson had created began hemorrhaging labor and resources.
At the beginning of January 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring that slaves were free. The war continued for more than a year. Lincoln died by an assassin’s bullet in 1865, the same month that saw the conflict’s end. President Andrew Johnson immediately began a process of disarmament; he also offered rewards for the arrests of leading Confederates. At the end of that year the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified, followed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (1868 and 1870, respectively) that provided due process, citizenship, and voting rights to former male slaves.
Crucially, the Fourteenth Amendment clearly established the supremacy of the federal government over the rights of states, a resounding repudiation of the arguments put forward by members of the slaveholding oligarchy.
Here, then, was America’s solution to warlordism: stripping weapons away from rebels and extending and consolidating the power of the central government. This was the internal colonization of the modern state, and it unfolded at almost precisely the same time that another cohort of violent warlords—the British East India Company rulers in South Asia—was effectively replaced by civil servants of the British Empire with their faith in the rule of law. This was not an easy process, nor were its outcomes inevitable. Confederate leaders loathed the military occupation, which took away many of their weapons and forced political change at the barrel of a gun. They deeply resented the new constitutional amendments, and they especially fought the Fourteenth Amendment’s rejection of the gospel of states’ rights. They hoped to reinstate, if not slavery, at least an organized system of forced labor.
But unlike India, much of Africa, and elsewhere in the Americas, the United States still had the Second Amendment, which guaranteed access to guns. Here the United States was truly exceptional, offering its subjects what amounted to constitutional protection of privatized violence. The effect of the amendment was to concentrate the means of destruction in the hands of the settler or colonizer. White southerners returned to what they loved: amassing weapons and pursuing violence and despotism in what amounted to a new internal (re)colonization of the American South. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 immediately after the war, a militia that was technically private but, we now know, included local officials.
Across the South, paramilitary groups sprang up. Soon these groups were terrorizing African Americans and anyone who challenged their commitment to creating a new white supremacist order. These aggressive activities went together with various laws now known as the Black Codes that restricted gun ownership to whites. The first section of a November 1865 Mississippi law declared, for example, “that no freedman, free Negro, or mulatto . . .
[s]hall keep or carry firearms of any kind.”24 Other states followed suit. The protections offered by the Second Amendment were sacred to whites but verboten to everyone else. At the same time, the political mobilization of African Americans and radical Republicans created a new moment for the still-young nation, a moment that briefly honored the liberal promise within the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal.” As a percentage of the population, more African American men voted in 1866 than in any other year until the 1960s. That moment began to fade in the 1870s; by the 1890s, it had dimmed to near darkness.25 What emerged in its place was not just a reassertion and reworking of white supremacy within the making of the Jim Crow South. It was also a reassembling of the tried-and-true relationships that preserved a nation-state and the future of capitalism at the expense of a large proportion of that nation’s people, just as the British and other imperialist governments had worked out arrangements with the same rebel groups they had battled against and often derided. Stability seemed more important than the protection of democratic rights promised by liberal humanitarian sentiments. In these decades, progress, indeed American democracy itself, foundered on the rocks of accommodation.
What did this evolution look like on the ground? So long as southern Democrats abandoned their talk of secession and their dreams of an empire of slavery, they could do pretty much whatever they wanted, especially after the departure of radical Republicans such as Sumner, who died in 1874, and Thaddeus Stevens, who had gone to his grave six years earlier. Guns returned to the American South by the tens of thousands; more precisely, they returned to the hands of whites, who soon owned more weapons than they did at the height of slavery.
The powers of the Fourteenth Amendment were progressively weakened in a series of rulings, including most notoriously Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537, 1896), which permitted “separate but equal” and helped solidify the new white regime in the former Confederate South. The liberal dream that all men were citizens in a democratic society suffocated in this environment, although the struggles against racial injustice never ceased. The promise—let alone the reality—of democracy would be subverted for decades, at least until the 1960s.
But as we know, the explosion of violence and the erosion of voting rights beginning in the 2010s has reasserted the specter of white supremacy and racial exclusion in America once again.
*
The extraordinary violence in the American South during the first six decades of the nineteenth century—wars and dispossession of native communities, the intensification of a ruthless slavery system in the mad rush to produce cotton and turn a profit, and the great conflagration of 1861–1865—can lead one to forget what was happening in the vast areas to the west, where hundreds of millions if not billions of animals were killed.
Congress passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that opened those areas up to slavery during the same period that saw the accelerated destruction of the region’s bison herds, with white settlers (as opposed to Indians) now doing most of the killing. Many species were hunted to the edge of extinction, some soon to disappear for good.26 Native Americans were also being hunted; western settlers regularly and openly used the word “extermination” in discussing the destruction of Indigenous communities. Others endured capture and enslavement, especially though by no means only in the “free state” of California.
Soon after the American Civil War began, war also broke out on the upper Great Plains. By 1865, the conflict had engulfed territory from Montana to Colorado. Just months after the end of the Civil War that year, General William Tecumseh Sherman took over command of the Military Division of the Missouri, where he prosecuted violence against Indians across the southern Plains. Other Union generals headed west, most famously (or infamously) Philip Sheridan and George Custer. These were years of punishing droughts, some of the worst in many centuries. The land, to some the world itself, was dying on multiple fronts. Humans were largely responsible; this much Native Americans knew. In their “winter counts,” pictorial calendars that allowed tribes to record key events and memories, Indigenous peoples recorded these and other tragic changes.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the debt crisis among the Dakota Sioux had resulted in a massive loss of land and an explosion of poverty.
These events took place amid a flood of mostly European immigrants staking claims to the rich lands of the Minnesota Valley.
27 Early Sioux victories against settler expansion were followed by punishing defeats as the Union general John Pope declared his intention to “exterminate the Sioux.”28 Many natives died. The Minnesota Historical Society, founded in 1849, displayed the body parts of Chief Taoyateduta (Little Crow), a Sioux leader who had escaped north and turned to raiding to survive. He did not receive a proper burial until 1971, over a century after his death.
Much of the colonial West was a defiantly southern space. Early settlers in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas came from places such as Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere across the South, some from as far away as Virginia. Unsurprisingly, most Kansas border ruffians who supported slavery and created a bloody crisis there in the 1850s joined the Confederacy. In the grand strategy of national politics, some hoped to repeat what had taken place in the early decades of the nineteenth century: to dispossess native communities and convert their lands into farms using slave labor. Expanding the South westward would also increase settler power in Washington.29 Violence west of the Mississippi had been escalating for years, in quite a few areas for many decades if not a century. The reasons were complex and overlapping: the general militarization of both Indian and settler societies, the exhaustion of animal populations, Indian loss of control over trapping, white settlement, the federal government’s reneging on treaty obligations, diseases that regularly coursed their way through communities, and— relatively new to the mix—major environmental changes such as recurrent droughts resulting from the end of the Little Ice Age and the beginning of modern global warming.
Each of these played out differently depending on the area. In Kansas, the explosion of intrawhite violence in the 1850s was preceded by and in some respects became part and parcel of the dispossession of the Kanza (Kansa) and other tribes. The Kanzas had lost most of their lands in the 1820s, when beaver and bison populations had largely been exterminated throughout the eastern half of the state. Native people were reduced to begging. Various treaties and revisions of treaties produced yet more dislocation, paving the way for white settlement and changes to federal Indian reservations across the state.
What was different in the 1850s was the combination of rising violence with prolonged drought, which took hold around 1853 and continued intermittently for the next half century.
“There is scarcely any grass to be found, it having been almost literally burned up by the heat,” the St. Joseph Gazette reported. The year 1860 was a particularly bad season to live in the Plains. Indigenous Americans, already dislocated by white settlement and the slaughter of wild animals, were now becoming climate refugees as well: drought, fires, and massive dust storms raced across the region, “so extraordinary . . . as to seem out of the course of nature,”30 according to the Oskaloosa Independent. But the settlers didn’t let a good crisis go to waste: amid famine and displacement, a new spasm of violence engulfed the western half of Kansas in the 1860s.
Politicians in Washington knew who was responsible for the surge in bloodshed. The convenient narrative of rapacious Indians and innocent settlers only came later, often part of an attempt to cover up white-initiated massacres. Congress regularly commissioned reports on events in the region, and each time the same or similar conclusions came back: the violence of “lawless white men” was “becoming a war of extermination.”31 This “war of extermination” was also systematic: settler violence was rarely inchoate. Much of the activity was organized and led by warlords who commanded paramilitary forces, at times confiscating Indian property and at other times simply hunting people down. The slaughter of over one hundred native people at Camp Grant, Arizona, in April 1871 was not an isolated occurrence; it represented a deliberate tactic of domination common across the West.
Paramilitary groups had attacked Indian communities since the latter 1850s. White settlement of Arizona following the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, by which the United States acquired yet more land from Mexico, immediately led to raids and counterraids. The aggressiveness surprised even some of the settlers: “savage civilized men are the most monstrous of all monsters.”32 Nonetheless, Arizona newspapers called for “extermination” of the natives.
Warlord William Oury led the Camp Grant massacre. A Virginian by birth, Oury had participated in the founding of Texas. Along with other southerners, he had joined an 1842 pillaging incursion into Mexico and had become part of the Texas Rangers, notorious for its extrajudicial killings.
Oury then threw himself into the Mexican-American War before settling in Arizona, where as Tucson’s first mayor he helped organize the flow of weapons into the settler community. He later became Pima County sheriff, and his brother became a US congressman.33 The sectional controversies of the 1850s and the Civil War that followed did not take place in a vacuum. They formed part of a broader panoply of violence, crisis, and settler aggression that would possess the entire imperial periphery of the United States, from Minnesota and the Dakotas to Arizona and Texas. Warlordism and chronic instability across the West would eventually summon intervention by the federal government, measures that began halfheartedly but over time swelled with aggression and imperialist resolve. In the ensuing crackdown, decades of uncertainty would be quieted. Lincoln’s decision to open the floodgates to white settlement in the West, together with legislation providing for the rapid expansion of railroads, proved decisive in the development of an aggressive statecentered imperialism. Lincoln, of course, was concerned with the Confederacy’s own imperial eyes on the West that, if successful, would have entrenched slavery and warlordism across the country’s periphery.
Thwarting the southern strategy, a rapid expansion of a free settler empire thus formed part of what historians have described as the “Greater Reconstruction of the West.”34 In the second half of the 1860s and while white southerners seethed under military occupation, the federal government initiated a sweeping modification of the political geography of the West, a transition that marked the definitive consolidation of state authority.
35 The government soon dispensed with the treaty system premised on a recognition of Indian sovereignty and insisted on Indians moving to reservations. Quite a few officials would be troubled by the violence meted out against Indian communities, even some who commanded federal troops, including Sherman, who was pursuing his scorched-earth campaign across the Plains.36 But conquest continued nonetheless.
Central to these developments was the disarming of Indigenous Americans, made all the easier by the disappearance of animal populations. Without skins, Indians had little to trade for guns. But now the state was actively beginning to demilitarize native communities. The 1867–1868 Indian Peace Commission had spelled out what everyone already knew: Indians had guns, lots of them. They were expert marksmen. The 1871 Indian Appropriation Act, the same legislation that ended the treaty system and dramatically boosted federal control, contained a section that explicitly prohibited the sale of firearms and ammunition.37 And since Indians were not citizens until the 1920s, they had no recourse to the Second Amendment. Whites, of course, had no such restrictions. They were purchasing guns by the tens of thousands.
The so-called Indian Wars of the 1870s through the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota grew out of this turbulent storm: the resolute intervention of the federal government, the rapid spread of well-armed white settlers, the disarming of Indigenous communities, the collapse of animal populations, and not years but decades of punishing droughts and dust storms that turned the sun into a “sickly, ashy light.”38 Indians resisted, most famously in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn (the Lakotas called that battle Greasy Grass), where Custer met his legendary end. But Native Americans found themselves victims of both political cruelty and a changing climate, trapped on reservations that were little more than refugee camps.
Eleven years later, the 1887 General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act) stole another eleven million acres of Indian land.39 The law effectively concluded the formal conquest of the remaining Indigenous communities west of the Mississippi. Some Sioux ended up as laborers in the new colonial economy; others took up farming. By this time, however, most native communities across the northern Plains had collapsed into dire poverty and depended on food rations from the federal government. The Sioux population, whose ranks had begun recovering in the eighteenth century, now declined precipitously. Disease, crop failure, and drought seemed unbreakable, as if the world was caught in a massive storm sweeping the Plains that left only death and despair. FIGURE 19.1. Pictograph of the Battle of Greasy Grass, by Red Horse, 1881. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian, NAA MS 2367A 36 NAA INV 08570700 OPPS NEG 47001E B/W OPPS NEG 765591 OPPS NEG 72-3950 CN.
It was within this environment of colonial conquest, exploding poverty, and ecological catastrophe that the Ghost Dance arose across wide swaths of the American West. It began in 1889 in Nevada with the prophet Wovoka, who spoke of the rebirth of worlds destroyed.
People traveled from all over to hear him speak, some taking the train, others arriving by horseback. In an Arapaho version of the prophecy, “Every body is alive again. . . . Every body never get sick, be young again,” once people had performed the dance.40 The dead would return, but those who did not follow the dance would disappear into the abyss of time.
Buffalo would reappear across the prairies. Importantly, Wovoka’s prophecies preached nonviolence. Indeed, in some versions he even instructed native people to continue working for whites.
By the fall of 1890 and the beginning of a new drought that would continue for six terrible years, the Ghost Dance had spread from the Dakotas through much of the West, in some respects continuing a set of prophetic visions that had begun decades earlier in the 1870s.
On the Pine Ridge (Sioux) Reservation, one man would write about how “he has been to [the] Indian nation of ghosts, and tells us [the] dead Indian national [are] all coming home.”41 The army was having none of it. However peaceful, the very idea of a Pan-Indian movement was an anathema to settlers and the government.
Ghosts be damned: troops were called into Pine Ridge, and on a frigid day in late December 1890, more than 270 native people died in what came to be known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
The Ghost Dance would continue, as would the memory of the massacre in the minds of Native Americans. In textbooks and in the dominant American public memory, however, the violence of those decades—indeed the entire bloody making of the American empire—nearly disappeared.42 Great historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, who helped create the myth of American exceptionalism in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lauded the frontier and his country’s empire.
For Turner, the frontier was what made America great.43 Men such as William Oury had streets named after them, statues, and entire monuments.
In 1973, however, members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee, suddenly bringing into public attention what had happened nearly a century earlier. And in June 2020 a statue of John Sutter, the warlord who participated in genocide and had slaves eat from a pig trough, was removed in California. According to the Los Angeles Times, the statue of “Sutter, a colonizer of California during the Gold Rush[,] . . . was taken down . . .
amid complaints of racism.” Protestors had splashed red paint across his face and chest.44
Epilogue The Modern Age OVER A MILLION PEOPLE were injured and over four hundred thousand perished across the rolling hills of northern France during five months beginning in July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme. In World War I (1914– 1918)—what many would call the Great War and the “war to end all wars”—nearly twenty million people died, Europe’s greatest bloodletting since the Thirty Years’ War three centuries earlier. Thousands died in distant lands that had only recently become European colonies. Thousands more— colonial subjects, men from Africa and Asia—died in Europe’s muddy trenches and killing fields, including at Somme.
There were other connections to empire, just as the world’s twentiethcentury conflicts are the descendants of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury military-commercial revolution that created a new world and a new political map from 150 years of relentless violence and destruction. Some commanders who led their men into the maelstrom and certain death had fought in Asia and Africa just a few years earlier, where many tens of millions had died needlessly. British leader Douglas Haig had fought in the Sudan, helping put down the Mahdist Revolution and the 1899–1902 South African (Anglo-Boer) War. Educated at Oxford and Sandhurst, Haig had seen death and the terrible suffering that is war. Some would call him “Butcher Haig.” Much of Europe had armed itself over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: Western states grew in power as they defeated warlords and secured their exploitation of vast areas of the globe. The expansion of industry helped drive the mass production of weapons, which now included tanks, planes, and chemical weapons.
Military spending had risen steadily over the decades and then skyrocketed around the time of the South African War. British military and naval personnel almost doubled between 1880 and 1900, from 367,000 to 624,000; in the same period, warship tonnage rose from 650,000 to 1,065,000, and then to 2,714,000 by 1914. No longer could nonstate actors such as the British East India Company boast militaries that rivaled the most powerful countries. Other nation-states followed suit. By the early 1900s the West’s economic and political supremacy had been secured, for Europe had created the largest militaries in human history.
1 The arming of the West served in part as an attempt to solve a contradiction entirely of its own making. For over a century the West had spread weapons around the globe, sowing the worst violence since humans had emerged as a species, in Yeats’s memorable words an “anarchy loosed upon the world.”2 This storm of killing and commerce served the West very well until it didn’t. Our modern world, including an Industrial Revolution dependent on the burning of fossil fuels, was born from this violence, and bloodshed was the progenitor of its meteoric rise. But the anarchy that weapons unleashed ultimately posed obstacles to continued exploitation and the generation of wealth, especially when it came to securing resources needed for industry. The spread of weapons, it was decided, must be stopped if not reversed. The great disarmament of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere thus began with grand Western pronouncements, followed by treaties and laws and then everywhere by force as the West steadily built up its technologies of death. From this “mad terror,” empires and nation-states took their first breaths. “I should think,” Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness, that “the cause of progress got them.”3 The colonial world became a laboratory for new ways of killing or, in a commonly used euphemism, “pacification”: the deathly thumping of the Gatling gun across Africa, the new ironclad modern warships lobbing bombs as they glided up China’s Yangtze River, the telegraph cables stitched across the globe carrying military intelligence, and countless other examples. The Ottoman Empire (allied with Germany) used mustard gas in the Middle East before that weapon’s devastating appearance across Belgium’s flatlands. The Germans, who had been amassing their own chemical weapons and may well have supplied the Ottomans, were impressed by its effectiveness. British and Allied forces were horrified by the yellow clouds that blistered their skin and lungs. Years later in the 1930s, Italian fascists used the gas in their imperialist war against Ethiopia.
World War I ended nearly a century of relative calm across much of Europe. The bloodshed had been taking place elsewhere. After the 1850s and especially in the last quarter of the century, European leaders had grown accustomed to prosecuting violence in Africa and Asia. This is why many of the individuals responsible for the carnage during World War I had prior experience in the colonial wars of the 1870s through the early years of the new century.
They understood what it was to kill someone. They were accustomed to wasting human life.
These politicians and military men, the nineteenth century’s best and brightest, soon discovered just how easy it was to turn such violence onto the continent itself.4 World War I did not erupt out of interstate rivalries tied to overseas imperial expansion, although tensions in that domain certainly remained. Most of the overseas arguments had found resolution in a deluge of treaties and international agreements by which the West disarmed and carved up the rest of the world: the 1885 General Act emerging from the Berlin West African Conference, the 1890 Brussels Conference Act, and the near dozens of treaties between the 1840s and 1890s by which Europe divvied up Asia. (The United States and Japan also joined in the imperialist gorging.) World War I erupted from internal European crises. It had roots in a toxic and now well-armed mixture of nationalism, fantasies of territorial empire, militarism, and rigid, antiquated alliances built around the fiction of a balance of power. That combination would eventually lead Europe into an insane conflict of monstrous proportions.
What should have been a regional war in the Balkans quickly metastasized into a conflagration that many recognized as sheer madness, including the millions of men who were led to their deaths.
The League of Nations, formed in the winter of 1920 out of the Treaty of Versailles signed the previous summer that had brought a formal end to the war, listed disarmament as one of its goals. Some hoped that the very psychosis of World War I would shake politicians to their senses, that a new political world might be created based on peace and cooperation. In this way, the League of Nations continued the work of the Brussels diplomats three decades earlier. The 1925 Geneva Protocols formally banned the use of poisonous gases and biological weapons. Other bodies within the League of Nations, notably the Temporary Mixed Commission, pursued arms reductions. These efforts largely failed. War debts and the Great Depression (1929–1939) did more to slow militarization than any treaty or international body.
And the design of new more lethal weapons continued apace, as did a general rise in military spending especially from the latter 1930s, most profoundly in Germany, which invaded Poland in the fall of 1939. Deaths in World War II exceeded seventy million. Unlike World War I, significant killing during World War II took place far outside Europe. Millions died in Burma, Indonesia, and China and across the western Pacific.
An unintended consequence of World War II was a new rearming of the world, a return to historic patterns set in the century between 1750 and 1850 but with important differences.
We are still trying to determine with more precision the extent of the arms transfers after 1945, including an extensive black market trade. Just as the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw a large outpouring of surplus weapons, many into the hands of nonstate actors, so also the period after World War II saw a major uptick in gun distribution.
Guns were cheap. Many had been left behind. Various groups, including underpaid soldiers, could turn an easy profit selling a pistol or rifle. Soon an illicit trade in small arms was burgeoning. These black market items would become the instruments that led to most of the deaths in postwar conflicts throughout the world and continuing to the present day.
The global spread of weapons served a range of agendas. It proved crucial to anticolonial movements, to attempts by the British, the French, and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch to maintain their empires and to the rising Cold War. Japanese and Dutch weapons ended up in the hands of Indonesian communists and nationalists. Chinese communists bought their guns from the Soviet Union and obtained weapons left over from the Japanese occupation, in addition to capturing Western weapons that had gone to the nationalists. British and Japanese arms and weapons supplied by China after Mao came to power in late 1949 helped fuel the war in Malaysia, or what the British called an “emergency.” There and in other parts of its empire, especially in Kenya, colonial overlords began perfecting torture, assassination, and other counterinsurgency techniques alongside attempts to win people’s “hearts and minds.” The colonial overlords passed these methods on to the Americans, who used them from the Vietnam War to the country’s longest war in Afghanistan (2001–2021).
The list goes on: French, Soviet, Chinese, and American guns were pointed at the French in the Indochina War of 1946–1954, ending in the French defeat at the 1954 Battle of Bien Dien Phu. The anticolonial Viet Minh obtained some guns from communist supporters and captured the rest.
Algeria’s National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale) stole French weapons and acquired others on the black market. Nigeria’s 1967– 1970 civil war, fought largely in the same coastal areas that had once supplied slaves and palm oil, depended heavily on the black market. Guns were used even in areas where decolonization took hold less violently, as in the Gold Coast, which became an independent Ghana in 1957.
Very soon, the United States and its allies were supplying areas of the world with guns as part of their Cold War efforts, much of it covertly through the US Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI5, and other intelligence organizations. Much information on these activities as well as the secret work of China and the Soviet Union has yet to be made available to the public.5 But the ideological struggles of the Cold War were only part of the emerging twentieth-century picture. Political religions might be good to believe in, but they don’t put food on the table, gas in the car, or uranium in nuclear bombs. Weapons flowed and continue to flow to those regions of the world that held strategic resources: Niger’s uranium, the Congo’s minerals, and most of all the Middle East’s oil. The results of these weapons imports often appeared deeply contradictory. The postcolonial state was cobbled together on unstable foundations, and these weaknesses served Western interests. Many governments began failing within a decade. Weapons went to shore up or install cooperative regimes when possible and to a new generation of warlords when necessary. Securing access to resources was all that mattered ultimately.
Especially from the 1970s, the world has seen a growing incapacitation of many postcolonial states and a resurgent warlordism, from Cambodia’s killing fields to Kazakhstan, the Niger Delta, and, later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, almost exactly as was the case two hundred years ago, warlords provide some of the world’s most important resources.6 *
President Woodrow Wilson set out his “Fourteen Points” while World War I was still grinding to an end. His ideas of self-determination and a world of nation-states inspired nationalists across Africa and Asia. It came as a crushing disappointment when they learned that Wilson’s vision of a political future was not meant for them.7 The president, who harbored deeply racist ideas about Black and Brown peoples, was thinking more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire than the British or French ones. The postwar period, including the League of Nations itself, saw not a lessening of colonial rule but instead a renewed commitment by the West to its global empires. Years later when revolutionaries took up arms against oppressor European empires, they returned to the betrayals that followed World War I and lifted them up as grievances that had gone unanswered.
In these ways, the war and its immediate aftermath saw both the culmination and the consolidation of the nation-state and overseas empire, the two bumpy roads to political modernity that the world had been traveling on since the late eighteenth century. A few areas saw reforms and expanding democracies, but most regions remained firmly secured in an assortment of decidedly undemocratic colonial regimes.
This was a period of substantial progress punctuated by cataclysms of economic crisis and war. The Americas, for example, generally became more peaceable, especially the United States but also Mexico following the culmination of its violent revolution in 1920. There were exceptions, such as the various civil wars in Central America, but in total, violence abated.
Significant reforms unfolded in Mexico, and life expectancy there improved dramatically. The Progressive Era in the United States, beginning in the late 1890s and continuing into the 1920s, saw a fundamental decline in violence and a rise in multiple reforms, from labor to health and education to the franchise, granted to women in 1920, in theory irrespective of race. The outstanding exception was the American South, where racialized terror only began declining after 1945.
Even empires saw significant reforms during this period, something revolutionaries (and today many academics) conveniently forgot. The extraordinary killing of conquest gave way to more uniform systems of colonial rule and at least the rhetoric, if seldom the practice, of the rule of law. Throughout much of Africa and parts of Asia, violence declined. Life expectancy increased. Incomes and literacy rates generally improved. Even though many areas of the world still revolved around agriculture and infrastructures were at best uneven, the fossil fuel revolution was slowly globalizing. By 1930 more than fifty thousand miles of railroad track had been laid just in India, and many thousands of miles of track snaked into Africa’s interior. Trucks carrying goods and people were becoming a fixture of life across the colonized world.
At their core, these were “resource empires,”8 to borrow from one historian, increasingly built on foundations of oil and other fossil fuels, much of it passing through that quintessentially colonial project, the Suez Canal.9 Great Britain had been importing coal from its colonies from the end of the nineteenth century, with a surge after 1945. Imported fossil fuels helped defang British working-class movements. Crude petroleum production rose meteorically beginning in the 1930s, now controlled by Western capital, colonial overlords, and local collaborators. Large quantities of oil also came from countries such as Mexico and Venezuela, the latter an informal empire of the United States. Nigerian oil exports launched in 1956, four years before that country gained its independence from Britain.
The global consumption of fossil fuels multiplied exponentially in Europe’s age of overseas empire. In the century after 1850, consumption rose by a factor of more than thirty-five. In 1890, global fossil fuel consumption stood at about 3,978 terawatt-hours (TWh), the equivalent to burning more than 488 million tons of coal, almost all of it consumed in Europe and the United States. Two decades later, consumption had more than doubled to more than 9,000 TWh and by 1950 to more than 20,000 TWh, or from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion tons of coal. More and more, these fossil fuels came from abroad or from former frontier areas. In the fossil fuel–rich United States, energy production came from west of the Mississippi, areas that had been absorbed into the country starting in the 1840s. Wyoming, admitted to the union in 1890, is today the largest US coal producer. Alaska, a major supplier of oil, became a state in 1959.
Alongside these increases in consumption, CO2 emissions steadily escalated, from about 1.5 billion tons annually in 1890 to about 3.4 billion tons in 1917. Just before the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, emissions reached more than 4 billion tons annually and exceeded 6 billion tons annually from the early 1950s.
These figures boggle the mind. Twenty thousand TWh is equivalent to over 450 million tons of coal, about the same weight of 1,250 Empire State Buildings. Four billion tons of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is the equivalent of about 11,000 Empire State Buildings crushed up and thrown into the atmosphere in a single year.
World War I thus marked a fundamental revolutionary moment in history, the culmination of processes that the military-commercial revolution had unleashed from the middle of the eighteenth century. The continents were intertwined in profoundly new ways by the actions of a single species, Homo sapiens, now a force permanently altering planetary systems. * None of this was clear or certain a century earlier. There was nothing inevitable about the Industrial Revolution, with its engines as temperamental as they were expensive, although some might wish to believe that our global predicament today is an accident of history, born of the unintended consequences of technologies that require fossil fuels. This is a paltry explanation. Machines were not the cause of our present dire predicament. The Industrial Revolution would not have been possible apart from a sustained and deliberate decision by human beings to pursue and fall in love with violence. Greed and killing brought the world together and tore it apart, from the enslavement and exploitation of people to the mass destruction of mammals. There was nothing especially magical about the factory system as it churned out guns and ate up bales of cotton as gears spun around greased with palm oil, powering belts of slaughtered bison beneath oil lamps that burned with the remains of slaughtered whales, and with pollution flowing up stacks into the atmosphere.
In every age and every region, voices arose to contest these developments.
And also in every age and every region, attempts were made, too often successfully, to silence these voices of reason, resistance, and courageous— often deeply spiritual—ways of imagining the world.10 People knew what was happening, which makes our violence all the more hideous. People knew that the world being created was unsustainable, toxic, and for some profoundly wrong, indeed evil incarnate. Countless people in Africa knew it as they sought protection from the forces that conspired to send them to the Land of the Dead. The southern African prophet Nehanda knew it, as did the Brazilian lay priest Antônio Conselheiro. And the many thousands of Indigenous Americans who followed Wovoka knew that the land was dying right before their eyes.
Many across the West knew it as well, including writers such as Herman Melville. We have known almost from the beginning that CO2 traps solar radiation and that the burning of fossils fuels releases large amounts of the gas. Scientific research was widely circulated from its earliest days, including to the reading public. By the middle of the nineteenth century and just as industrial emissions were changing the world’s oceans, scientists knew what the Industrial Revolution portended: a warmer planet.
At the turn of the century, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Svante Arrhenius extended the research of earlier scientists such as John Tyndall and writers such as the lawyer Eugène Huzar. Arrhenius expounded on the role of what we now call “carbon sinks”: the oceans, plants, peat, and so on.
In his 1904 Worlds in the Making, translated and published in English four years later, Arrhenius unequivocally established the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and atmospheric temperature. “The percentage of carbon dioxide in the air,” he wrote, “has varied to an extent sufficient to account for . . . temperature changes.”11 Arrhenius was remarkably accurate in his estimate of coal consumption of nine hundred million tons in 1904. He was much less correct in his conclusions about the rate of fossil fuel consumption and, critically, warming. Both were increasing not at a “constant rate,” as he believed, but exponentially. And recent research has established that human-induced global warming actually began decades earlier, in a few areas by the 1830s and most everywhere by the 1880s. Perhaps because Arrhenius was a Swede he welcomed the warmer temperatures, suggesting that increasing emissions of CO2 might prevent a new Ice Age. In this estimation, the scientist appears to have been correct.12 Worlds in the Making was not an esoteric tome accessible only to people with scientific training, relegated to dusty library shelves. It was written for a general audience. The book was widely reviewed in scholarly journals and in newspapers such as the New York Times. Reviewers often seemed more interested in Arrhenius’s thoughts on stars and planets than what was happening down the road, but even those most fascinated by the cosmos and the fate of the universe took note of his insights on heat and thermal radiation.
Much of this knowledge subsequently faded from view or was simply forgotten and later actively suppressed, especially by fossil fuel companies that by the late 1960s were well aware that their products were melting polar ice and raising sea levels. Occasionally articles would appear on the changing climate, and starting especially in the 1970s, scientists began rediscovering the work of people such as Arrhenius.13 But scientists can make poor historians. When Paul Crutzen invented the concept of the Anthropocene in 2000, he did so almost entirely devoid of historical context beyond the simple recognition of James Watt’s steam engine. Everything else that might be considered historical disappeared from Crutzen’s explanation.14 Other historical erasures took hold. Over the first half of the 1900s, the violence that made the world was forgotten across much of the West. In the United States, historian U. B. Phillips (1877–1934) wrote about the supposed mildness of southern slavery, how the slave trade all but saved Africans from themselves. Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) helped further erase Indigenous Americans from history in his enormously influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” “American democracy,” Turner wrote in 1910, “was born of no theorist’s dream. . . . It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.
Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for their centuries while it occupied its empire.”15 Across the Atlantic, the history of the British Empire became a history of the adventures and exploits of men bringing commerce, Christianity, and civilization to Black and Brown peoples the world over.
This history was, according to the founder of British imperial history John Seeley, a tale of the “expansion of England.”16 One cannot confront violence without also confronting the sorrows it creates. The social sciences, however, dealt with facts, not with suffering or feelings; those topics, historians argued, were best taken up by novelists and poets. Modern history, especially as it developed in the academy in the nineteenth century, strenuously distanced itself from literature as it became a handmaiden of nationalism and empire. The formation of the American Historical Association in 1884 had the explicit goal of placing the study of the past on a firm “scientific basis,” inspired by “a spirit which emulates the laboratory work of the naturalists.” Here, history made little room for the unbearable experiences of the downtrodden and the forsworn.17 But the violence of history would not simply be forgotten. People had to work at it, had to turn forgetting into its own enterprise. In later years, British officials would incinerate millions of documents in an attempt to sanitize their nation’s past.18 Much the same appears to have happened in the document destruction by fossil fuel companies and their attempts to spread climate denialism. To this day, companies are committed to profits, often at any cost, including erasing their unsavory pasts. Ends justify means.
Few learned men at the rise of the modern age were interested in what the great masses of humanity had to say, still less in how they felt, agonized, dreamed, pleaded, loved, hoped, or suffered. All that knowledge, including all the admonitions and warnings of peoples across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, was cast off as irrelevant or even irrational, curiosities best handled by folklorists and, later, by anthropologists. And while anthropology and history are today disciplinary cousins, for many decades they operated more like distant ancestors. The West was separated from the rest of the globe, and the modern individual was separated from the natural world. The latter existed to be dominated. To be “independent of Nature,” as the writer Amitav Ghosh has put it, “was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself,” the very essence of being a modern subject.19 How wrong we all were.
Here is a fundamental paradox, if not a contradiction, and one we are only beginning to recognize. The more life became interconnected, the more it seems Westerners avoided acknowledging the relationship between their actions and consequences and separated out precisely the connections that were being brought together. In contrast to cultures where people had derived meaning by recognizing the intimate entanglements of all life—the intertwined world of humans, objects, and spirits—a disavowal in the West took root, a kind of amnesia, a great forgetting. Even bodily experiences, such as the taste of marmalade and the sugar in one’s tea during a work break, demanded a kind of forgetting or, at best, a postponement of recognition, in this case of the brutal connections that tea and sugar held to slavery, to suffering human beings half a world away.
20 A universal history was being forged from a world born in blood, but in the West, or in what was becoming the West, that forging took place in the dark, in almost complete silence, in wholesale denial of both the entanglements of the newly modern world and its bloody making. The violence of modernity’s creation was disavowed if not altogether forgotten.
Today this is no longer true. In growing numbers, more and more people are refusing to accept the world as it has become. Even as tribalism, sectarianism, and authoritarianism have once again taken hold, human beings the world over are waking up. We are rediscovering a common history. Crucial to this new understanding, to this dawning awareness, is a recognition of the lives, even worlds, of those who are not human. Animals, plants, and even geologic forces are just as powerful—if not more powerful —in determining the course of our shared history. This is not without paradox: we are beginning to recognize the sentience of nature even as we persist heading toward destruction. The natural world will continue after we are long gone as a species. But in our simple acknowledgment of the world around us, in the clear awareness of our dependence on one another, humans and nonhumans alike, we can begin to imagine new ways of caring for each other and for the planet. May it be enough.
Acknowledgments In some respects, this book began forty years ago when I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in a seminar taught by the late anthropologist William Roseberry. Hopkins was one of the earliest places in the United States where collaborative work among historians and anthropologists led to new approaches and discoveries in comparative world history. There was a sense of excitement with trying to understand our intertwined worlds, now again being felt because of the urgency of addressing global warming. The Killing Age is a kind of return to beginnings.
Along the way, I have been fortunate to work with and learn from many scholars and students at various intellectual homes—Hopkins, Kenyon College, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, Stanford University, and Emory University—and in scores of conferences and seminars across three continents. If I fail to recognize all of them here, it is only because of the impossible debts one accumulates over a lifetime. These include the financial assistance without which scholarship is impossible: the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the Stanford Humanities Center, Emory University, and Kenyon College.
I began actively researching and writing The Killing Age in 2017 and 2018 during research trips to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and west across the United States all the way to Helena, Montana, when I set out in my Subaru Outback visiting archives, speaking with people, and beginning to learn anew my country’s fraught history. I am indebted to the many archivists and librarians in the United States and in Great Britain, from a small reading room in Jackson, Wyoming, to one of the world’s largest archives in Kew, outside London. Thanks also to Mervyn and Lola Frost and Katherine Elks for providing a place to rest my head during multiple UK research trips.
COVID-19 remains a brutal reminder of our entangled world, including the relationships between human and nonhumans. In that first year, I was taken in by the stillness and by the animals that had retreated from the busy streets of Atlanta suddenly reappearing as I took walks around the block or stared out the window. I wrote early drafts of many of the chapters in the loneliness of those years.
The pandemic severely disrupted archival research but perhaps not as severely as one might expect. In those trying times, archivists and librarians around the world kept the lights on, doing their best to make materials available, fielding questions, and helping make scholarship possible. They are among the many unsung heroes of that devastating time.
Without their help, this book would have not been written.
Work on The Killing Age coincided with my participation with an ongoing collaborative and interdisciplinary project, “Horror & Enchantment,” on the terrors of history and the ways in which we are drawn to its study. At the center of this project has been the indefatigable work of the organizers Kenneth Mills at the University of Michigan and Kris Lane of Tulane University. I have learned so much from working with this project during which I presented several draft chapters from The Killing Age. Thanks, then, to the remarkable Josiah Blackmore, Hayley Bowman, David Carrasco, John Charles, Helen Hills, Megan Holmes, Paul Johnson, Nicholas Jones, Annabel Kim, Dana Leibsohn, Anne Lester, Barbara Mundy, Marcy Norton, Katrina Olds, Helmut Puff, Richard Reinhardt, Heidi Scott, Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, Dale Shuger, and Zeb Tortorici and, sadly, Harry Garuba, who died too young in 2020.
Closer to home, at Emory University I owe special thanks to the Department of History, the Institute of African Studies, and, for financial support, the Halle Institute for Global Research, the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence (and the indefatigable Allison Adams), the College of Arts and Sciences, the Laney Graduate School, and the Office of the Provost.
Special thanks to department colleagues who answered queries and offered helpful criticism: Tonio Andrade, Mariana Candido, Adriana Chira, Astrid Eckert, Jeffrey Lesser, Kristin Mann, Tom Rogers, Brian Vick, and Yanna Yannakakis. Thanks also to Mary Dudziak in the Law School and Arun Jones in the Candler School of Theology, who offered helpful comments.
Special thanks to Phil MacLeod, librarian par excellence. I am thankful also for having been blessed with so many extraordinary undergraduate and graduate students going back decades, many who have gone on to academic careers and wonderfully rich lives. Special thanks go to students in two seminars: “Comparative Empire” and “Capitalism and the Anthropocene.” Many others have answered questions and shared their research, including databases. Thank you to Rafe Blaufarb, the generous Trevor Burnard who like Harry died before his time, Daniel Domingues da Silva, Shane Doyle, Chris Evans, Susan E. Gagliardi, Aaron Graham, Pamela Haag, Andrew Isenberg, Kris Lane, Richard Reid, Richard Roberts, Elena Schneider, Ashley Tan, Nancy van Deusen, Kerry Ward, Warren Whatley, Promise Xu, and Zhi-wen Zeng.
Special thanks to Nicholas Radburn, one of the most generous scholars I have ever encountered. I am profoundly grateful to Professor Radburn for sharing years of his unparalleled research on the British customs records.
Thanks also to Steve Harris, who shared his database on treaties.
I have greatly benefited from the labors of research assistants and others.
Madelyn Stone worked through copies of British customs records provided by Nicholas Radburn, which I extended during research trips to London.
Bradley Erickson, a PhD student in political science at Emory University, assisted with data visualization and checked some of the final figures.
Anjuli Webster fact-checked the manuscript and offered many helpful comments. Marissa Nichols prepared the bibliography. Dian Dian translated Chinese sources. Dr. Chelsey Laurencin in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University helped with some of the data and charts. Megan Slemons prepared the maps, a huge project. I am very indebted to the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, especially Bailey Betik, for helping build the website that accompanies this book.
Several people read parts of an earlier draft of The Killing Age: Debjani Bhattacharyya, Benjamin Crais, Kristin Phillips, and Jill Rosenthal. Each made helpful comments.
Special thanks to Jane Hooper, Andrew Kahrl, Thom McClendon, and Kenneth Mills. Each read the entire manuscript and made many helpful comments; I can only hope I have attended to them. Ken, you are one of the most creative, wonderful, and generous people I have ever met (imagine a heart emoji here!). Thank you! Stacia Pelletier edited a latter draft of the manuscript. I am very much in Stacia’s debt for her keen eye and many suggestions. Two readers for the University of Chicago offered excellent comments and corrections. My agent, Jill Kneerim, did not live to see this book published. A legend in the industry, Jill helped me develop The Killing Age, quite literally from a single sentence. I owe so much to Jill. Katherine Flynn and Sarah Khalil at Calligraph took over after Jill’s death. Katherine and Sarah have been unflaggingly helpful, as have my UK agents Caspian Dennis and Rachel Clements at Abner Stein. I have been so very lucky to have such great teams of agents on both sides of the Atlantic.
I have been blessed with wonderful editors at the University of Chicago Press and at Picador. Mary Al-Sayed at the University of Chicago Press and Ravi Mirchandani at Picador began shepherding the project. Dylan Montanari and Fabiola Enríquez Flores at the University of Chicago Press and Alpana Sajip and Lewis Russell at Picador made many incredibly helpful comments on the manuscript and guided the project to completion.
Yvonne Ramsey expertly copyedited the manuscript. Theresa Wolner prepared the index.
Thanks also are due to the art and publicity departments at Chicago and Picador, including Caterina MacLean and Kristen Raddatz and the entire team at Picador.
Family and friends have lived with—perhaps the best word is “endured”—this project from the beginning. They are a reminder of the infinite powers of love and grace even in the darkest of times. I am grateful for two friends I have known since I was a teenager living in Carthage, Tunisia: Edward and Victor, who have heard this story too many times. It is rare in this day and age to have friends going back over fifty years.
Benjamin Crais, now a PhD, read the proposal and parts of the manuscript.
Pamela Scully, my partner of nearly forty years, read through the penultimate manuscript and made many useful comments. This book would not have been possible without Pamela’s support. Christine Crais, a star in the movie business, made important suggestions and (politely) reminded me that writers are among the craziest of artists. It has been an absolute joy and a constant source of wonderment and inspiration watching Benjamin and Christine becoming the extraordinary people they are. What a wonderful life!
Atlanta, Georgia, and Castine, Maine, 2024
Appendix 1 WEAPONS, 1700–1900 Assessing weapons circulating outside national militaries poses multiple challenges in terms of both their numbers and their effectiveness.
Governments maintained precise records on troop levels and kept inventories of weapons ranging from ships to rifles. Outside national militaries, however, the evidence is fragmented and what social scientists call “noisy.” The manufacture and sale of weapons was decentralized: in eighteenth-century England there were many thousands of gunsmiths, some producing large numbers of weapons, others just a few. Such was also the case elsewhere across Europe. Records are uneven and in many instances nonexistent. The same holds true for other countries that were manufacturing weapons: all of Europe, the United States, India, China, and a few places in Latin America. Even with the rise of large companies, it is difficult to determine production levels and intended markets, especially for earlier periods. Companies, moreover, are averse to sharing their records, especially corporations in the business of weapons, fossil fuels, and pharmaceuticals. Data on sales are likewise hard to determine. In the United States, where gun ownership is an extremely volatile issue and many tens of thousands die each year from gun violence, the absence of regulations prior to the twentieth century makes it difficult if not impossible to precisely determine just how many weapons were exported.1 From the beginning, the gun trade and smuggling went together. British customs records for the eighteenth century, themselves incomplete, generally group together various forms of ammunition and do not specify weapons sales. This is one reason why I have used gunpowder as a proxy.
Nineteenth-century customs records are both more precise and, paradoxically, especially after the 1850s, less helpful. The decline of mercantilism and the triumph of free trade changed government regulation of the international gun trade, with resulting changes to the official archive.
Occasionally, gunpowder was used for medicinal purposes and in some parts of the world in various rituals. (Saltpeter was also used as a food preservative.) China in particular used gunpowder for fireworks. Some was used for blasting. The quality of gunpowder could be and often was quite variable, although British gunpowder was generally considered among the very best. Some was spoiled during shipping or spilled out of its container.
Mostly, however, gunpowder was used as the explosive material (the charge) in guns and, especially in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, found its way down the barrels of flintlock muskets.
Only occasionally did nonstate actors have cannons, and when they did these were usually small, such as the swivel cannons mounted on Indonesian prahus that used balls weighing not more than four pounds.
There were many variations of the flintlock musket. Some used larger amounts of gunpowder, and others used less. The weight of musket balls also varied considerably, generally anywhere between about 0.5 to just over 1 ounce (14–28 grams). Gunpowder charges were often measured in drams; at the time there were about 16 drams to an ounce.
I have used the Brown Bess to calculate the amount of powder per shot.
This common gun, which over the years came in different models, used anywhere from 0.23 to nearly 1 ounce of powder per shot; a reasonable average would be 10.66 grams, or 0.376 ounce, per shot. The projectile— the musket ball—generally weighed around an ounce, about twice the weight of today’s .45-caliber slug (14.9 grams), one reason why muskets were so destructive. Some muskets used less, and some used more. Some musket balls were much smaller than the one-ounce projectile that traveled around 1,000 feet (304 meters) per second toward its target. The 1853 Minié rifle used 0.16 ounce of explosive. The 1853 Enfield rifle used a bit less, 0.125 ounce. The Enfield became the most used gun in the British Empire, superseding the Brown Bess. (For eighteenth-century cannons, a rough estimate is a gunpowder charge equal to one half the weight of the cannonball, so that a 16-pound ball used 8 pounds of powder. Given the size of the Royal Navy, this is one reason why controlling supplies of Indian saltpeter was so important.) At 1 ounce per shot figure, 1 pound of powder yields 16 shots; 1 million pounds yields 16 million shots. At the lower end of 0.22–0.28 ounce per shot, 1 million pounds of gunpowder was enough for about 57 million shots, or 57 shots per pound. The 80,561,456 million pounds exported by the British in the eighteenth century to Africa, Asia, and the Americas was enough charge for 1.28 to 4.59 billion shots.
Other weapons, especially cannons, obviously consumed vastly more gunpowder. The massive and massively destructive 1871 35-ton Woolwich “Infant” took upwards of 120–130 pounds per shot, sending a 700-pound projectile upwards of six miles at a speed of 1,320 feet (400 meters) per second.2 Information on gunpowder exports is based on official British export figures; even these most certainly do not capture the true scale of British exports. Nor have I tabulated exports from other countries in Europe or from the very extensive gunpowder industry in India. Every country that developed an arms industry exported their wares. In 1700, for example, the Dutch, at the time the world’s most important producer of gunpowder, flooded part of West Africa with perhaps as much as forty million pounds of the explosive, enough for well over half a billion musket shots when the world population at the time was likely not more than six hundred million people. “The great quantity of guns and powder,” the Dutch leader at Elmina reported in 1730, “caused terrible wars between the Kings and Princes and Caboceers [warlords] of these lands.”3 Thanks to the extraordinary labors of Dr. Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University and to the work of my research assistants, Dr. Madelyn Stone and Bradley Erickson, using Radburn’s copies of the original documents and his database, we have begun developing a fine-grained understanding of the globalization of the means of destruction, at least in terms of the British role. Their work centered on the eighteenth century; in the summer of 2023, I extended this research into the nineteenth century.
4 FIGURE A1.1. Official British cumulative gunpowder production, 1698–1806. Based on data provided by Professor Nick Radburn. According to this data, between 1698 and 1808 Great Britain produced a total of about 522,260,764 pounds of gunpowder, as figure A1.1 illustrates.
This was enough charge for between 8.3 billion and 29.7 billion musket shots. Where did it all go? Just over 15 percent was exported, not including Europe, Ireland, and western Eurasia.
Radburn’s unparalleled and very precise work focuses primarily on Africa up to the British ending of the slave trade. In a major contribution to Atlantic history, Radburn has definitively established the relationship between guns and slaves, as the figure A1.2 demonstrates.
Official British shipments of gunpowder to Africa between 1698 and 1808 totaled more than 58 million pounds (more than half of total exports), enough charge for between 934 million and over 3 billion musket shots. Note how closely the import of British gunpowder tracks the export of African slaves. Note, also, that this correlation tightened roughly from the middle of the eighteenth century: At the height of the Atlantic slave trade, Africa accounted for much of the total British export of gunpowder. This is not surprising, although the amounts are.
Africans wanted guns. Europe wanted slaves for its American plantations. This was a marriage made in hell.
FIGURE A1.2. Official British gunpowder cumulative exports to Africa and the slave trade, 1698–1806.
Based on data provided by Professor Nick Radburn.
After a short lull following the end of the Atlantic slave trade, imports of powder took off.
Indeed, they soon reached new heights, over 4 million pounds in 1865, nearly twice the record annual amount during the external slave trade: 4,010,099 pounds in 1865 compared to 2,056,356 pounds in 1790. Four million pounds is enough charge for between 64 million and 228 million musket shots, many more shots than there were people in all subSaharan Africa. Total imports of gunpowder in the period between the middle of the eighteenth century and the 1860s exceeded 100 million pounds. This massive arming of a continent helps explain both the violence of enslavement and violence in the age of European imperialism.
Africa was not unique. Wherever guns spread and people were considered a scarce resource, enslavement and slavery followed, weapons were turned on killing animals, or both. What of those other areas of the world? In the eighteenth century, Great Britain exported over 18 million pounds of powder and well over 75 million pounds of lead to the Americas. The vast majority went to the Caribbean and to the thirteen colonies that would become the United States, enough for between 290 million and nearly 1 billion shots. A fantastic amount of lead was also moving across the Atlantic, enough for 1.2 billion musket balls. Arms were also heading to Asia during this same period: well over 78,000 tons of lead and 3.8 million pounds of powder. This was enough powder and lead for upwards of 219 million more shots and nearly 2.5 billion musket balls, even as India remained a large manufacturer and exporter of weapons and gunpowder.
Britain was the world’s largest producer, but others were not all that far behind. The United States became a massive producer of gunpowder, especially in the nineteenth century.
During the American Revolutionary War, mills were already churning out powder, at least 815,000 pounds over a period of two and a half years. By 1810, the young country had more than two hundred gunpowder mills and produced 1.5 million pounds or more yearly. By the Mexican-American War production had risen to many millions of pounds, and during the American Civil War upwards of 33 million pounds were produced annually.
5 After the Civil War, production settled back down to about 7 million pounds annually.
Arms continued spreading across the world well into the nineteenth century. In Africa between 1814 and 1865, British gunpowder exports well exceeded thirty-one million pounds.
In fact, the largest exports of powder to the continent occurred in this period, right up to the eve of formal imperial intervention. In the fourteen years after 1871, official gunpowder exports were enough for more than thirty-one billion musket shots.6 And as we have seen, weapons were spreading to other parts of the world, particularly the Americas and China.
These data help us understand both the spread of weapons and violence across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why the Western powers pursued arms control in the era of formal imperial expansion. Between 1750 and 1900, likely upwards of half a billion guns manufactured in the West made their way into the hands of people during a time when the world’s population (in 1800) had not yet reached one billion. Guns dominated not just the rise of global capitalism but also the violent economic and ecological transformation of the world. Without guns, the Industrial Revolution would not have unfolded the way it did, if at all, for it was weapons that made environmental destruction, the expropriation of land, and the expansion of slavery possible. And it was the products of slavery that kept the earliest factories going.
Appendix 2 HUMAN DEATHS AND LOSS, 1750–1914 Determining the number of weapons spreading across the world is challenging. Estimating human and nonhuman mortality figures is even more difficult and grim, not to mention a political football.1 Censuses only become widespread in the twentieth century, and in many parts of the world such as Africa they are notoriously inaccurate. Distinguishing between “natural” and “excess” death rates is similarly fraught; since the days of Malthus (1766–1834), social scientists often have mistakenly assumed that disease and famine are natural causes and “checks” on population growth.
In Western Europe, where the work of demographers is richest, estimates of natural death rates in the eighteenth century extend from twenty-five to forty people per thousand yearly—a very considerable range—declining markedly in the 1800s to about twenty per thousand and today just eleven per thousand, about the same as in the United States. Death rates for other parts of the world have similar wide ranges for periods prior to the twentieth century. Africa Approximately 7.9 million slaves were exported from Africa from the middle of the eighteenth century. This population was “lost” to the continent, one of the reasons why scholars consider the slave trade as a kind of death. Historians estimate that 20–50 percent of people who were enslaved died before reaching the coast. We also know, based on the above information on gunpowder, that the slave trade entailed a massive arming of the continent, a process that continued into the nineteenth century. Guns invariably lead to excess deaths.
One outstanding question concerns the deaths directly or indirectly related to the processes of enslavement. I have offered a range of between one and three people who died as a consequence of enslaving a single person in the period when weapons were arriving on the continent in very large numbers.
Based on these data and assumptions, for the period 1750 to the beginning of colonial conquests in the nineteenth century, Africa lost 19.2 million to 48 million people.
In some areas, estimates range as high as 50 percent for the number of Africans who died in the era of the European colonial conquests due to war, famine, or, in some areas, diseases such as sleeping sickness. There is nothing natural about diseases, including malaria; these were always already entwined with human history. Historical demographers have estimated Africa’s 1850 population at about one hundred million people. At the very upper end, this would mean that there were upwards of fifty million excess deaths, most concentrated in just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century. A conservative estimate would be twenty million excess deaths, with nearly half of this total coming just from the Congo.
As a total, then, in the period 1750–1900 Africa lost anywhere between 29.2 and nearly 100 million people; a very conservative estimate would be 50 million people.
Asia India’s first modern famine unfolded in 1770 in Bengal, where the population may have declined by a third. Between 10 million and 20 million people perished across South Asia.
Scholars have estimated famine mortality figures for the nineteenth century, especially between 1876 and 1902, at between 12.2 million and 29.3 million.2 This means that in the period under study, when climate, colonialism, capitalism, and weakened governments all conspired to wreak devastation across the subcontinent, Indian famine victims numbered between 22.2 million and 49.3 million people. These figures do not include people who died in political violence involving guns, most catastrophically in the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Here estimates are as high as 800,000 dead. A crude estimate for the entire period would be 1.4 million dead in political violence involving guns.
As a rough total, then, India needlessly lost between about 24 million and 51.7 million people. Again, distinguishing between natural and excess deaths is particularly challenging considering the climatic and other forces at work. Droughts and famines are nothing new in Asia and in other parts of the world, although we also know that weak and unresponsive states seriously compound natural disasters. China was worse. Twenty million to thirty million died in just the Taiping Rebellion. Famine victims in the period 1876–1900 range between 19.5 million and 30 million dead. China thus lost between 40 million and 60 million people.
Our information for the rest of Asia and the South Pacific is very uneven.
Approximately twenty thousand died in just New Zealand’s Musket Wars in the early part of the nineteenth century. Vast numbers died in more populated places such as Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Over three hundred thousand died in Indonesia in just the period between 1870 and the end of the century. In the Philippines, anywhere between two hundred thousand and one million died in the years around the American conquest at the close of the nineteenth century. A very rough and very conservative estimate of total deaths roughly from 1750 to 1900 for these areas stands at between two million and six million people.
As a whole, then, total Asian deaths ranged from 66 million to upwards of 118 million.
Americas In the United States, the estimated Indigenous population in 1750 was between 2.5 million and 5 million people. In 1890, it was 248,000. In other words, the population declined by between 2.25 million and 4.75 million people. Canada also experienced significant population loss, although not on the scale of the United States. In Mexico in 1750, the native population was between 4 million and 6 million. Mexico was one of the few places where the Indigenous population appears to have increased, to approximately 7 million by the end of the century. In some areas, however, the population declined significantly, such as in the Yucatán, where the population declined from about 500,000 to around 300,000.
Brazilian population estimates are all over the map, especially estimates of the Indigenous population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the native population likely declined by 75 percent. Argentina’s native population declined from three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand to around one hundred thousand during the same period. In some areas, these were catastrophic declines. Drought and disease did its work, but genocidal violence was one of the main factors for the steep decline in Indigenous populations.
The above figures do not include the civil and other wars that engulfed nearly all of the Americas in the nineteenth century. Taken as a whole, human deaths in the Americas totaled between 5.6 million and 10.15 million.
*
In terms of total deaths worldwide, then, the above figures range from about 100 million to more than 228 million people. Even this higher number is far too low, since it does not include other parts of the world or many formal conflicts, such as the Seven Years’ War. It would not be surprising if outside Europe more than 300 million people perished unnecessarily in the period between 1750 and 1900, perhaps adding between 5 and 15 percent to the yearly natural death rate for sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, and the Americas. Since ecologists often use the term “biomass,” the weight of a given organism, which we will turn to below, 300 million at 90 pounds per person is 27 billion pounds. Unlike the horrific population decline across the Americas in the sixteenth century, which lowered global temperatures, human deaths in the modern period unfolded at a time of rising emissions of greenhouse gases.
TABLE A2.1. Unnecessary human deaths, not including Europe, 1750–1900 Africa 29–100 million Asia 66–118 million Americas 5.6–10.15 million Total 100.6–228.15 million
Appendix 3 WILD ANIMAL DEATHS, 1750–1900 Consider the passenger pigeon. This small North American bird weighed not more than six to eight ounces fully grown. Passenger pigeons went extinct, the last one dying in a zoo in 1914. A century earlier, there had been anywhere between one billion to two billion of them.
Just the killing of this one species totals upwards of 500 million pounds. We have discussed the destruction of other North American mammals: approximately thirty billion pounds of bison (sixty million bison averaging five hundred pounds per animal); twelve billion pounds of beaver (three hundred million averaging forty pounds per animal); and other fur-bearing mammals (especially deer but also bear and other animals), likely another 10 billion or more pounds.
This means that a conservative estimate of the North American land mammals killed in the period 1750–1900 totaled 52.5 billion pounds of animal biomass. This does not include the depletion of freshwater fish species in addition to many other animals and the destruction of trees.
Approximately two million whales were slaughtered in the period 1750– 1900. Weights varied tremendously; some were infants, others full-grown massive blue whales that can weigh 300,000 pounds. An adult southern right whale weighs about 50,000 pounds, and a bowhead whale weighs approximately 120,000 pounds. (Weights are also determined by sex.) Newborn whales can weigh around 2,000 pounds.
Two million whales at ten thousand pounds per animal totals twenty billion pounds of animal biomass.
The nineteenth century was the height of the elephant trade. We can only provide a crude estimate of the numbers of animals killed. As with whales, we also cannot determine elephants’ size, although we know that over the course of the period many adults were wiped out. Adult elephants—the world’s largest terrestrial animal—range in weight from six thousand to more than twelve thousand pounds for an old bull. Estimates of the number killed in the nineteenth century are around ten million animals. At five thousand pounds per animal, this is equal to fifty billion pounds.
The above figures total 122.5 billion pounds. We think that upwards of 50–60 percent of wild species were destroyed in this period. With Homo sapiens over the long term, there has been about an 85 percent decline in terrestrial mammal biomass, with a dramatic acceleration in the last 120 years, according to one recent study.
1 Once we begin adding human and nonhuman deaths—the hundreds of millions of people dead with the billions of nonhumans—we begin reaching truly extraordinary figures. Three hundred million people at 90 pounds per person is another 27 billion pounds of biomass, or a grand total of 149.5 billion pounds of human and nonhuman (vertebrate) biomass, using my calculations. It would not be surprising if the total figures of wild animals and human deaths are not in fact dramatically higher, amounting to just over 1.5 trillion biomass pounds, or on average 10.28 billion pounds yearly for 150 years.
These figures are overwhelming. How does one imagine 1.5 trillion pounds or even 10 billion pounds? It is precisely the scale of destruction, much like the gigatons of carbon released into the air each year, that poses such challenges for human cognition in our age of global warming. As a species, we struggle to comprehend very large numbers; we become numb to the scale or are unable to place the numbers in some sort of meaningful context. One way to think of this is to remember that the combined weight of humanity’s nearly eight billion people is likely around 720 billion pounds, again assuming an average of 90 pounds per person. In 1800 when the population was about one billion people, the total weight was 90 billion pounds.
This information helps us understand the better-known increase in the rate of extinction since 1500, although even here there is widespread disagreement on the exact numbers.
The figure below offers a conservative figure of 73 vertebrate species lost forever. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s estimate is dramatically larger: 270 mammals, birds, and amphibians. Its estimate of the total number of animals that have gone extinct stands at 780.2 Whatever figure one decides on, what is clear is that the rate of extinction has dramatically increased compared to the background rate, indeed profoundly so and especially from the eighteenth century. There is also overwhelming evidence that there are more than ten thousand species that face extinction and that the planet is experiencing what many are now calling a “Sixth Mass Extinction” event.
FIGURE A3.1. Cumulative number of vertebrate extinctions, 1500–2021. Based on Gerardo Ceballos and Paul R. Ehrlich, “Mutilation of the Tree of Life Via Mass Extinction of Animal Genera,” Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences (2023).
Even the most conservative estimates point to an undeniable fact: the period roughly from the middle of the 1700s saw a phenomenally large and globalized destruction of the natural and human world. And crucially, the development of capitalism and the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant species on an ever more entangled planet coincided with the beginning of global warming.
Appendix 4 CLIMATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES Understanding climate change and global warming is the single most important issue now facing humanity, one that has generated enormous attention and debate. Many experts have determined that unless something is done and done quickly, global warming may become irreversible, with dire implications for our species.
Our understanding of climate and humans’ impact on climate and other planetary systems has advanced tremendously in just the past decade. One reason is that there are more scientists working on global warming. Another is that our data have improved. We have much more information and much more fine-grained data.
The vast majority of research has concentrated on the very recent period, especially the rapid and ongoing rise in temperatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On graphs, this rapid increase looks like a hockey stick: an increase unfolding steadily over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before rising meteorically from the mid-1900s. These increases largely track CO2 emissions, as the charts in in this appendix make clear. If we stay with the hockey stick metaphor, first imagined by the scientist Michael Mann in 1998, subsequently revised, fiercely debated, and ultimately part of a $1 million court settlement in Mann’s favor, this book has focused on the heel.
Scientists such as Mann have begun raising questions about using the period between the mid-nineteenth century and 1900 as the baseline against which to compare later measurements. We now know that warming as a result of greenhouse gases began earlier.
This scientific research returns us to several basic historical questions. What is the relationship of the contemporary climate to climates in the past? When did humans begin to have an impact in terms of changing planetary systems, especially climate?
Answering the second question is enormously complex and forms part of ongoing research and debates on the definition and dating of the Anthropocene. (As I have argued, and especially given Appendices 1–3, a more accurate word is Mortecene.) Global temperatures fluctuate for a whole host of reasons, ranging from the activity of the sun to volcanic explosions, changes in systems such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) we discussed in earlier chapters, and airflow systems (Walker Circulation) to oceanic currents and much else.
A particularly important area of research centers on the possible impact of natural phenomena and human-created forces. Neither natural events such as volcanic eruptions nor industrial greenhouse emissions “cause” change in the ways we usually think about causation; “A” does not directly cause “B.” Human and nonhuman events and forces become part of dynamic and resilient natural systems that at some point may shift, perhaps fundamentally. We know that large volcanic eruptions alter weather (much depends on what the eruptions release into the atmosphere); evidence now suggests that there are teleconnections to Walker Circulation and ENSO anomalies. And scientists are now pointing to similar teleconnections relating to industrial-era greenhouse emissions.1 Equally alarming are studies pointing to the impact of global warming on ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream.
In 2023–2024, Dr. Nakita Chelsey Laurencin in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University worked through the latest findings and datasets, represented in figures A4.1–A4.4. The information in figure A4.1 resulted from natural and human causes. Figure A4.2 helps break these down for Europe and North America. Figure A4.3 covers Asia and the Indian Ocean, and figure A4.4 offers data on cumulative emissions in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Note the very considerable volcanic activity, especially the 1815 Tambora eruption.
Particulate matter released into the atmosphere may have continued falling for as long as five months.2 These natural events resulted in cooling. In other words, had they not occurred, the upward curve from greenhouse gases, particularly noticeable for the Indian Ocean, would likely have been steeper. Most greenhouse gases during this period were emitted by the United Kingdom and the United States. FIGURE A4.1. Temperature anomalies, 1500–2000, based on Nerilie Abrams et al., “Early Onset of Industrial-Era Warming across the Oceans and Continents,” Nature 536 (2016): 411–18.
FIGURE A4.2. Forces shaping climate in Europe and North America, 1700–1900. Based on Nerilie Abrams et al., “Early Onset of Industrial-Era Warming across the Oceans and Continents,” Nature 536 (2016): 411–18.
FIGURE A4.3. Forces shaping climate in Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1700–1900. Based on Nerilie Abrams et al., “Early Onset of Industrial-Era Warming across the Oceans and Continents,” Nature 536 (2016): 411–18. FIGURE A4.4. Cumulative CO2 emissions in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1750–1915.
Information is based on “Cumulative Carbon Dioxide (CO2 ) Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion Worldwide from 1750 to 2023, by Major Country,” Statista, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007454/cumulative-co2-emissions-worldwide-by-country/ .
Future research will likely provide a more precise historical reconstruction of climate and the role of humans in shaping it. It seems safe, however, to make some general observations.
There was a generally pronounced cool period roughly between ca. 1300 and ca. 1850, the Little Ice Age, with a particularly cold seven decades after around 1645. This period was largely a result of natural changes including solar radiation, although the rapid growth of forests in the seventeenth century as the result of the deaths of tens of millions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have contributed, since trees absorb CO2 , a greenhouse gas. The Little Ice Age had definitively ended by the middle of the nineteenth century. It would have ended earlier had it not been for the massive 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption, which produced rapid cooling, although this was temporary.
Temperatures have generally risen since the mid-1800s.
Why did the Little Ice Age end? One reason is simple: Earth’s natural systems changed.
These changes create cooler and warmer periods, even epochs, such as the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, and the last Ice Age about twenty thousand years ago. Some of these only last for a short time in geophysical terms, while others go on for many tens of thousands of years. If human beings did not exist, the planet would go on without us, fluctuating between warmer and cooler periods or, like the Holocene (roughly beginning about twelve thousand years ago), experiencing a period of relative stability particularly suited to Homo sapiens. Change happens, including its intensity. Ultimately, our sun will exhaust itself. Earth will become a frigid wasteland in a few billion years.
However, humans have been and are changing the planet. Recent research suggests that human action—particularly the emission of greenhouse gases —was beginning to change planetary systems earlier than we once thought.
We used to assume that there was a significant time lag between CO2 emissions and warming, with estimates ranging from fifty years to a century or more. This assumption has been substantially revised, another reason for the urgency in addressing global warming.3 We now know that “warming from . . . carbon dioxide emission can be expected to reach its peak value within about a decade and, for the most part, persist for longer than a century.”4 We also have a rough estimate of CO2 emissions for various countries and regions, as set out in figure A4.4. Between 1750 and 1900, the United Kingdom and the United States emitted 44.14 billion tons (44GtC) of CO2 , nearly 99 percent of the global total. (GtC stands for gigaton, or 1 billion metric tons.) Already by 1850, these countries had emitted over 8,300 million tons (8.3 GtC). Note especially the steep upward curve for the United States, which exceeded that of the United Kingdom around 1910.
These decades, roughly from the 1820s to 1910, are the emissions behind the “heel” of what climate scientists call the hockey stick of global warming. These figures, of course, pale in comparison to global emissions today, some 36 GtC or more yearly, but it has become increasingly clear that human-induced emissions have been altering Earth for nearly two centuries and that it is the cumulative effects that are creating our dire planetary crisis.
The sources of this CO2 are complex, and the figure A4.4 chart likely does not represent total emissions. We know that industrial burning of fossil fuels took off from the late eighteenth century. The steam engine was certainly crucially important, but many industries were using coal to generate high temperatures. The domestic burning of coal and wood was also increasing, along with populations. Across Western Europe, coal and wood kept people warm, especially in the hard winters of the Little Ice Age. Europe’s population increased from about two hundred million in 1750 to nearly six hundred million by 1900. Scholars have estimated annual per person consumption of fuels at roughly the equivalent of half a ton of coal. Two hundred million people in 1750 thus consumed the equivalent of about one hundred million tons of coal. By 1900, that figure would have tripled to an equivalent of three hundred million tons yearly. Even at the lower figure, this means that European households burned about fifteen billion tons over the course of a century and a half, producing about 2.85 billion pounds of CO2 .
5 Future research will bring greater precision. The usual dating by climate scientists of the beginning of the Industrial Age to 1850 or 1860 will likely be pushed back in time. The estimates of CO2 emissions for the period 1750–1900 are almost certainly underestimates, although it is still important to recognize that this represents a 479,244 percent increase during this period.
To return to the central question, were these emissions significant enough to begin altering planetary climate systems? An emerging consensus is suggesting that the answer is in the affirmative, although the exact amount of change has not yet been determined. As we have seen, people around the world were commenting on and trying to understand their changing environments, including some of the most important Western scientists of the day, men such as Eugène Huzar, John Tyndall, and Svante Arrhenius. These impacts, of course, were extremely uneven. The Northern Hemisphere tended to feel global warming earlier than south of the equator, but even here change was highly variable.
Nonetheless, scientists now suspect that human-produced global warming began earlier, in some areas as early as the 1830s. The general timing of this emergence corresponds with not just the rise of industry but also the destruction of humans and nonhumans.
I am not arguing that human-created global warming caused the great droughts of the nineteenth century. I am suggesting that the emissions of greenhouse gases may have begun changing the world’s climate from around the middle of the nineteenth century. Our most up-to-date scientific knowledge suggests that warming began before the mid-nineteenth century and accelerated in later decades, although these changes were not yet felt everywhere, nor were rates of increase steady. Human-induced change was always in a dynamic relationship to natural systems that are themselves variable. Temperatures go up and down, as they always do, but generally our planet has become warmer because of greenhouse gases. An important area of research centers on if and when human-produced global warming may have begun having an impact on systems such as ENSO and ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream upon which vast populations ultimately depend.
Appendix 5 GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH, 1750–1900 A basic concern of The Killing Age is the relationship between violence and economic change. The period roughly beginning around 1750 marked not just a tremendous rise in violence against humans and nonhumans and the beginning of global warming but also saw what some have called the “Great Divergence,” an argument pioneered by scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz. Much of this work has focused on Great Britain and the United Kingdom. No one debates the remarkable economic growth in this part of the world; the debates have been how to explain this growth. Kenneth Pomeranz debunked many of the conventional arguments about Western ascendancy, such as the one first developed by the sociologist Max Weber and his thesis on the Protestant work ethic. According to Pomeranz, there were more similarities between England and China than differences.
Moreover and importantly, he argued that China was in many respects more advanced than England and remained so well into the eighteenth century.
How, then, to account for the rise of the West? Pomeranz argued that the extraction of resources from the New World windfall (sugar, cotton, and natural resources) explains the divergence, along with the availability of high-quality coal, in other words, abundant supplies of potential energy.
China enjoyed no such advantages. It had no overseas plantations that could provide cheap resources such as cotton, and its coal supplies were inferior to those of Lancashire and Wales. China was also subjected to punitive treaties and widespread looting by the West and, increasingly, Japan.
China’s GDP in the period 1700–1913 declined very substantially and perhaps as much as half. FIGURE A5.1. GDP in the United Kingdom (1700–1914) and the United States (1800–1914) I have argued for a more capacious understanding that calls attention to the combination of endogenous and exogenous forces. Crucially, the preoccupation with the British Isles misses another remarkable takeoff: the United States. New research by economic historians strongly suggests that the United States took off earlier and that “GDP per capita” had achieved “parity” with Britain by 1880 if not decades before. Note from the graph in figure A5.1 how the United States was nearly equal to the United Kingdom by 1820 and had begun surpassing its former imperial ruler from around 1830, just as it was dramatically expanding its destruction of the natural world, forcibly dispossessing Indigenous peoples and beginning to rely on coal. This is far earlier than scholars once thought. What is particularly striking is how the two areas of the world took off roughly at the same time.
The divergence was real, but it wasn’t just a British story. Two areas of the world, for a long time part of a single empire, grew dramatically from the middle of the eighteenth century.
They were the pioneers of the militarycommercial revolution and its greatest beneficiaries if also its greatest polluters.