Global Crisis
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Shortly afterwards, the new monarchs approved several critical measures. The Mutiny Act left them in charge of the kingdom's armed forces – but only for six months, which in effect meant that they would need to convene Parliament frequently in order to renew it. The Toleration Act, although it did not mention Catholics (nor indeed the word ‘toleration’), abolished the mechanisms that had allowed the bishops and the law courts to enforce conformity. Above all, instead of allowing the crown to levy customs and excise, Parliament retained control of all state taxation and from this allotted William a ‘Civil List’ to defray the expenses of the crown's household, officials, judges and diplomats. Parliament had now regained almost all the powers it had won in 1641 – and this time it would keep them.
After the Revolution
Many participants in the ‘events of 1688’ nevertheless felt betrayed by the 'Revolution Settlement’. In England, John Locke and some of his radical colleagues did not want to stop merely after ‘mending some faults peice meale, or anything lesse than the great frame of government’. They therefore saw the Convention as 'an occasion, not of amending the government, but of melting itt downe and make all new’.83 Their expectations were just as dangerous (and unrealistic) as those of the Levellers a generation before, and they found little support because they were equally unacceptable to the political elite. The wisdom of the ‘minimalist’ revolution in England appears most clearly in comparison with the settlements implemented elsewhere. In Scotland, the insistence of the Presbyterian majority on excluding from power all who did not share their views strengthened the Jacobites (as the supporters of James II and his descendants were known), and although a Jacobite uprising in 1689 failed, the victors lacked the strength to resist another forced union with England in 1707. No Scottish Parliament would meet again until the late twentieth century. In Ireland, the Jacobites (with French aid) triumphed until William invaded in person, at the head of his foreign troops, and in July 1690 the battle of the Boyne consolidated the ‘Protestant Supremacy’ established by Cromwell, reducing Catholic influence and prosperity even further.
Some observers made an explicit comparison between the two leaders. One verse in a poem entitled The weasel uncased, sung to the tune of ‘For he's a jolly good fellow’, claimed:
So let O. P. or P. O. be king,
Or anyone else, it is the same thing
‘O. P.’ stood for ‘Oliver Protector’, and ‘P. O.’ for the ‘Prince of Orange’. Other English works in the 1690s, both in prose and verse, compared and condemned both men as tyrants and usurpers. The return of extremely cold weather and a succession of disastrous harvests added to the misery of what became known as ‘King William's Ill Years’. In London, John Evelyn reported in May 1698 that such unseasonably cold weather ‘had not ben known by any, almost, alive’ with ‘all tree fruits ruined and threatning the rest with famine’. Scotland suffered far more: in upland regions, cold and wet summers caused the harvest to fail every year between 1688 and 1698, a year when the Scottish government lamented the onset of ‘a perfeit famine, which is more sensible than ever was known in this Nation’. The population of the northern kingdom fell by one-tenth in the course of the decade, with losses of up to one-third in upland communities. Even in the 1780s, a survey of Scottish parishes recorded several areas abandoned at ‘the end of the last century, when that part of the country was almost depopulated by seven years of famine: and now they lie neglected, along with many thousand acres, in like situation, in different parts’.84
The political legacy of the seventeenth-century revolutions also endured. In a debate on the repeal of the American Stamp Act in 1766, an English Member of Parliament asked ‘Shall we stay until some Oliver rises amongst them?'; and in 1775, an Essay upon government adopted by the Americans, wherein the lawfulness of revolutions are demonstrated, published in Philadelphia, juxtaposed a section on ‘the late civil war condemned’, which dwelled upon ‘the barbarous murder of King Charles I’ by ‘a few particular persons’, with one on ‘The Revolution justified’. If a monarch should refuse his subjects protection, it argued, ‘they may refuse him their obedience’, the anonymous author conceded (following Thomas Hobbes), ‘but this does not give them any power over his person’:
[If] such principles and such practices upon such pretences were to be allowed, they would make the right of princes and the peace of society the most precarious thing that can be; and lays [rulers] open to the insults of every Massinello, who has but impudence enough to charge the government with popery or tyranny … and cunning enough to time it with some popular discontent.85
The Essay therefore expressed the hope that America might experience a bloodless revolt by ‘the whole society’, like the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and thus avoid the violence of the 1640s.
Not all colonists saw the past in this way. Although most New England patriots recalled with pride their ancestors’ struggle against Charles I's tyranny, many in the Upper South nourished with equal pride their ancestors’ victory over the Puritan regicides. Thomas Ingersoll has argued that these conflicting memories of the 1640s constituted one of the principal impediments to a Declaration of Independence; and that taking this decisive step became possible only after a collective amnesia developed about the English Civil War. ‘Pamphlets written by the leading rebel politicians in the last year of the crisis before July 4, 1776,’ Ingersoll notes, unlike those written earlier, ‘do not mention the revolution of 1649’.86
English politicians also continued to wrestle with the ideological debris left by ‘Oliver’ and the regicides. When in 1791 Edmund Burke reflected on the likely outcome of the recent revolution in France, he noted how England's troubles in the 1640s had begun with modest constitutional demands but ended in civil war, concluding that violence formed an inseparable element of rebellion. ‘These politics of revolution,’ he claimed, ‘temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions.’ ‘Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution,’ he continued caustically, and on the very next page launched into a diatribe on the regicide. Burke viewed the Glorious Revolution in a very different light. ‘What we did’ then, he wrote in another publication of 1791, ‘was in truth and substance, and in a constitutional light, a revolution not made but prevented’, because (he continued) the events of 1688–9 resolved most of the contentious issues that had led to civil war in all three kingdoms, and also in New England, where James had worked to suppress representative assemblies throughout in favour of an authoritarian viceroyalty.87
To Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing in 1848 as ‘all around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations’, and ‘governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown’, it might ‘seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of Revolution. And yet,’ he continued, the events of 1688–9 in England, ‘of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent’. It brought to an end all three sources of chronic instability discerned by J. H. Plumb – inadequate monarchs, badly advised; a Parliament at Westminster that the court could neither control nor ignore; and the implacable hostility of London towards its sovereigns – and instead ushered in a state dedicated to the vigorous promotion of economic development, broad religious tolerance and free competition among political interests, characteristics that still define liberal democracies today. The Glorious Revolution therefore remained, as Macaulay proudly proclaimed, ‘our last revolution’. It provided for England, albeit at a very high cost, a complete and (so far) permanent escape from both the General Crisis and the Little Ice Age.88
PART III
SURVIVING THE CRISIS
IN 1623 AN ITALIAN PREACHER, SECONDO LANCELLOTTI, BECAME IRRITATED BY those who compl
ained about the unprecedented harshness of the world and set out to refute them. His best-selling book Nowadays, or how the world is not worse or more calamitous than it used to be, identified 49 ‘fallacies’ held by contemporaries whom Lancellotti called hoggidiani – ‘whiners’ – and then listed examples in each of the 49 categories to prove them wrong. Thus ‘princes nowadays are not more avaricious or indifferent towards their subjects than they used to be’, while ‘human life nowadays is not shorter, so that men do not live for less time now than they have done for thousands of years’. Lancellotti devoted his last chapters to natural phenomena. He reviewed recent accounts of famines, fires and plague epidemics as well as natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods and cold weather) ‘nowadays’, and argued that such catastrophes in the past had been far worse and far more frequent. According to Lancellotti, life had never been so good – but proving his case took over 700 pages.1
Although Nowadays sold so well that Lancellotti wrote a sequel (claiming to show that science and literature too were ‘not worse than before’), his vision was deeply flawed.2 To claim that seventeenth-century princes were no more ‘avaricious or indifferent towards their subjects’ than their predecessors (in itself hardly a ringing endorsement) obscured the fact that, in many cases, their misguided policies caused far more damage than those of their predecessors; while the data in this book reveal that ‘human life’ was indeed ‘shorter’ than in the past, and that famines, fires and epidemics as well natural phenomena (not only earthquakes, floods and cold weather but also fireball fluxes, volcanic eruptions and El Niño episodes) all increased markedly. Not surprisingly, as the seventeenth century advanced, the ranks of ‘whiners’ swelled and their assessments became ever more pessimistic. ‘The worst news keeps coming in from everywhere,’ the Spanish intellectual Francisco de Quevedo lamented to a friend in 1645. ‘I cannot be sure whether things are breaking up or have finally broken up. God knows!’ A few years later, in Paris, Thomas Hobbes complained about the ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’ in which he and his contemporaries lived, while Renaud de Sévigné, a rebellious lawyer, believed that ‘If one ever had to believe in the Last Judgment, I think it is happening right now’. In a nearby convent, Abbess Angélique Arnauld thought that the death of ‘one-third of the world’ and the prodigious material destruction ‘must signify the end of the world’. Meanwhile the Spanish Jesuit, Baltasar Gracián, published El Criticón (The Critic), a vast allegorical novel that divided human life into four ‘seasons’, and divided each season into chapters that Gracián entitled ‘crisis’. Each of the 38 ‘crises’ presented a bitter and desolate survey of the human condition.3
Nevertheless, Lancellotti had a point. On the one hand, some of the pessimists lived longer than their ‘whining’ might have predicted: although Gracián was only 58 when he died, Quevedo and Sévigné both died aged 65; Arnauld died aged 70; and Hobbes died aged 91. Moreover, all five died in their beds of natural causes. On the other hand, although unparalleled hardships befell many of those who lived in composite states, in urban areas, in marginal lands and in macro-regions during the mid-seventeenth century, the inhabitants of some other regions largely escaped. Put differently, even if ‘one-third of the world died’, the other two-thirds survived. Thus, although Mughal India, Safavid Iran and Tokugawa Japan all experienced extreme weather events and some rebellions in the seventeenth century, they avoided the fatal synergy between human and natural factors that elsewhere turned crisis into catastrophe. Moreover, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Americas appear to have remained largely unscathed by both the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis (although this conclusion may reflect absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence). Finally, although government oppression at a time of climatic catastrophe provoked major rebellions in two of the Italian states ruled by Spain – Sicily and Naples – strategic concessions restored control in a matter of months; while Spanish Lombardy remained loyal. The experience of these regions thus supported the vision of Secondo Lancellotti: life was not ‘worse’ or ‘more calamitous than it used to be’.
Four of the areas where Lancellotti's optimism seems valid – areas where the ‘footprint’ of the seventeenth-century crisis appears lighter – nevertheless shared an important negative common denominator: Japan, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas all entered the seventeenth century with a relatively low population density. The reasons for this circumstance varied – a century of civil war in Japan; the perennially harsh climate of Australia; the elimination by Europeans of indigenous peoples in both Africa and the Americas – but the result was the same: the Little Ice Age struck societies in which the demand for food did not already exceed supply. This seems to have mitigated disaster and, in the case of Japan, also promoted recovery.
13
The Mughals and their Neighbours1
‘The most potent monarchs on earth’
IN APRIL 1639, AT THE EXACT SECOND DETERMINED BY THE IMPERIAL astrologers, a lark was sacrificed on a bluff overlooking the Jumna river near the ancient city of Delhi, and workers immediately placed the bodies of several freshly beheaded criminals around the cornerstone of the new capital of the Mughal empire, to be called Shahjahanabad: the abad or city of Shah Jahan. Nine years later, Shah Jahan made his ceremonial entry and took up residence with some 10,000 followers in his palace citadel, surrounded by the huge red sandstone wall that gave the complex the name it still bears: the Red Fort. The emperor also supervised the construction of a medrese, a hospital, the largest mosque in the entire Muslim world, and a massive stone wall with 14 gates (most of them still standing) to defend the city's population of 400,000. Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1627 to 1658, created the only capital city in the world built entirely during the mid-seventeenth century.2
John Ovington, an English visitor, ascribed this and the Mughals’ other costly achievements to the fact that ‘the vast tract of land’ under their rule ‘reaches near 2,000 miles in length, some say more’, and that it provided them with ‘more than double the incomes of any [of] the most potent monarchs on earth’.3 It did indeed. The Mughals ruled an area half the size of Europe and a population of perhaps 100 million (the same as the whole of Europe and second only to Ming China). Most of their subjects lived in a ‘fertile crescent that extended from the mouth of the Indus River, northeast to the rich, well-watered, densely populated lands of the Punjab, and then down the even richer Ganges Valley to the Bay of Bengal’. Farmers there cultivated 19 spring and 27 autumn crops, sometimes securing two harvests each year. Although primarily an agrarian state, the empire included three cities with 400,000 or more inhabitants and nine others with over 100,000 people and, in both the cities and the countryside, craftsmen manufactured a vast range of high-quality goods for export.4
Although the emperors ruled substantial areas in this heartland directly, from the 1570s onwards they granted the rest to prominent supporters (known as mansabdars, literally ‘men who hold rank’) in return for serving in the imperial army with a specified number of troops. Shah Jahan maintained over 400 mansabdars, but not all received the same amount of land: by far the largest share went to his four sons, who between them ruled almost 10 per cent of the empire. Each grant of territory was known as a jagir, literally ‘holding place’ because the emperors regularly rotated their mansabdars from one jagir to another. As Stephen Dale has pointed out, ‘This system required accurate land-revenue estimates, which in turn necessitated land surveys in order to make assignments that generated sufficient funds to support the number of troops commanded by each officer. These features necessarily generated an enormous financial bureaucracy.’5 Controlling such a vast and diverse empire turned the Mughal emperors into workaholics. Whether in their capital, on progress or on campaign, every day they publicly bestowed titles and promotions, received petitions, heard claimants, and dispensed justice: a chronicler claimed that in the 1660s the emperor ‘appears two or three times every day in his court of audience
… to dispense justice to complainants’.6
The Mughals constantly presented their decisions as divinely sanctioned. Shah Jahan's father Jahangir (r. 1605–27) enrolled and initiated religious ‘disciples’ and sought advice from eminent Muslim holy men, while his son Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) could recite the entire Qur'an from memory, spent ‘whole nights in the mosque which is in his palace’, and enjoined his judges to uphold the sharî'a (Muslim law derived from the Qur'an and other ancient religious texts).7 The Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan between 1631 and 1653, emphasizes the central role of Islam in his government: lengthy inscriptions from the Qur'an explain how each part of the structure and the surrounding gardens replicate Paradise, with the dome representing the throne of God. Lest anyone miss the point, Shah Jahan ordered that his own tomb be placed immediately below that dome, together with an epitaph that described him as Rizwan, the gatekeeper of Paradise.
Nevertheless, no Mughal emperor placed his trust in God alone. Even the names they chose breathed absolute power: Jahangir means ‘conqueror of the world’; Shah Jahan means ‘king of the world’; Aurangzeb took the regnal name Alamgir (‘world conqueror’) at his accession. John Ovington noted that each emperor constantly employed ‘a numerous army to awe his infinite multitude of people, and keep them in absolute subjection’; and that he did so in person. According to Aurangzeb, ‘An emperor should never allow himself to be fond of ease and inclined to retirement,’ and he warned his successors that they should ‘always be moving about as much as possible’: