British historian Richard Whatmore has a new book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis, and Ritchie Robertson reviewed it in the February 2 TLS. Reading this review reminded me of things about the American Revolution that I wish more Americans understood, especially the ones who seem to think it was just a power grab by devious slave owners.
While many Europeans were feeling both politically and culturally bullish in the mid 1700s, others were worried. People like David Hume feared what would happen when the soaring Enlightenment rhetoric about freedom and equality collided with aristocratic political systems and the realities of government. (Those who lived long enough saw these fears confirmed in the course of the French Revolution.) They were also worried about economic changes. The economies of Britain and France were growing because of global trade, and global trade was enmeshed in the colonial mercantile system and the brutialities of the slave plantations. This was, they thought, horribly corrupting, not to mention the exact opposite of Enlightenment calls for peace and human rights. The acts of the British East Indian company were denounced in the British Parliament, and outside the establishment more radical thinkers were even more hostile. Numerous books were written, and speeches given, calling for Britain and France to withdraw from "war and empire", embrace peace and free trade, give up trying to dominate foreign people, and focus on gradually improving conditions at home. Robertson:
One achievement of Whatmore's book is to document the actue sense of crisis that, as he says, inspired political observers with a variety of dire forebodings. Britain's wealth depended on colonies; these were enlarged and defended by wars, which demanded ever more taxation and indebtedness. Hume imagined several ways in which this cycle might be broken. One was national bankruptcy; another waas that the landed interest might accept defeat by France rather increase the national debit or that colonial revolts, combined with an economic crisis, might inspire riots at home, which would be quelled by official violence. In a letter of 1768, quoted by Whatmore, he indulged in a semi-serious flight of fancy:
Oh how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc'd to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, the third of London in ruins, and the rascally Mob subdu'd. I think I am not too old to despair of being Witness to all of these things.
Here Hume seems incongruously to join hands with Thomas Paine, who foretold the imminent collapse of funding by credit in 1796. . . . Others denounced reliance on colonies not only because it was exploitative, but because oppression overseas must rebound on the mother country.
This is Catherian Macaulay, a radical historian who crossed swords with Hume:
The conquests of foreign nations are dangerous triumphs. . . . it never fails of subjecting the conquerors to the same measure of slavery which they have imposed on the conquered.
The American Revolution took place amidst this turmoil. American intellectuals like Jefferson and John Adams wanted to withdraw America from what they saw as a corrupt system of global exploitation. They very much feared that some British corporation would do to them what the East India Company had done in Bengal. They saw the mercantile system the way many people now see the military industrial complex, as a machine that ginned up wars for its own interest and cared not how many died or were oppressed so long as profits could be made.
Which is not to say that the American revolutionaries were pure and noble, only that they were responding to fears about global economic changes that parallel those of many contemporary leftists who think the revolution was a mistake.
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ReplyDeleteI think it's vital to remember the context of Mercantilism and the nature of economics at large at the time. Putting aside whatever moral qualms there might have been in addition, by far the biggest concern at the time was the concentration of wealth in the hands of the aristocracy.
This is why Capitalism found such support in that age - in a world where countries are the personal property of kings, and where colonies exist to enrich the crown, taking some of that wealth away from the nobility and concentrating it instead in the hands of private individuals was a means of combating inequality. In the context of a Monarchic world, Capitalism was a means of relative Democratization and increasing justice.
People at the time were afraid of the exact same thing many of us are afraid of today - the rich and powerful elite becoming ever more rich and powerful, and in so doing approaching a point of no return where they become unassailable, and the common person loses all agency in life.
The problem in the 18th century wasn't Monarchy, per se - it was the kind of Monarchy being practiced at that time, increasingly Absolutist, with an increasingly lopsided distribution of wealth and power. It was the same problem as today - the legacy of too much for too few.
And so people embraced anything that seemed liable to address that inequality, and to rebalance the scales of power somewhat. Capitalism offered private individuals the means to potentially rival the amassed wealth of noble lords. Anti-Colonialism sought to take wealth away from crowns and give it instead to citizenries. Rationalism undermined the supposed Divine Right of Kings (as well as the various Clergies who profited by allying themselves with said kings).
Virtually every major social innovation of the era served the purpose of taking power away from the powerful few who were nearing a total monopoly, and dispersing said power elsewhere. Devolution of powers, both formal and informal, was the zeitgeist of the age.
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ReplyDeleteThe American Revolution spoke about Liberty and Freedom and Rights, but what it was really getting at was the excessive power of the King over the lives of American colonists. This is why all the complaints in the Declaration of Independence boil down to "The King wouldn't let us do something we wanted" or "The King made us do something we didn't want to".
This is also what sparked the French Revolution - the aristocracy was viewed as too powerful and too untrustworthy, and people fought to take that power away and place it elsewhere. Except they couldn't agree on whom to give that power to, and control vacillated between parties which were trustworthy but doomed by their ineffectuality, and those who wielded powered effectively but in so doing sparked fears of becoming yet another form of tyrant, no better than the former nobility.
This same fundamental concern flared across Europe when Napoleon came to power. It wasn't so much his adoption of the trappings of Monarchy and titling himself an Emperor that spooked other nations - it was the fear that he was amassing too much wealth and control, and upsetting the balance of power in Europe, with the risk of his becoming unstoppable if he reached a critical mass. When the coalition defeated Napoleon, they didn't install a Republic to replace him - they brought back the Monarchy! Clearly the issue wasn't with having the rulers of France be Kings, but rather with having too much power amassed in one single place. Napoleon had to be defeated because he represented a possible point of no return from Absolutist rule.
You see the same problem continuously throughout the existence of the East India Company - people resented the monopoly it held, which stood to profit only the rich aristocratic owners of the venture, and there was more or less constant (if ultimately ineffectual) pushback against said monopoly for multiple centuries. And this discontent only increased when the crown itself took direct control of the EIC, making all its holdings the personal property of the royal family. People weren't upset that India was being exploited - they were upset that they weren't getting a piece of the pie, and it was all going to the King alone.
People had some moral qualms from time to time, certainly - but the primary motivation was fear of ever growing Absolutist rule. People wanted more say in what happened to them, and more agency over their own affairs, in a world where those things were dwindling more and more in the face of aristocratic centralization.
And that's exactly where we've ended up again the present day - the rich and powerful tightening their grip on the world, and the common people losing faith in the governmental, economic, and civil institutions that have allowed for such ruthless and unjust consolidation to take place.