The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism

by Joyce Appleby

  Businessmen are not by nature reflective; they like to act. The leviathans of industrial capitalism had worked wonders in mills, plants, and mines across the world during the nineteenth century. Proud of their own accomplishments, they had contempt for employees who would use group power to coerce concessions from them. Yet there existed a puzzle at the heart of their economy that Gompers and Patten had hit upon. Workers were both employees—an element in determining prices—and customers, with the power to drive sales with their purchases. It takes time for ideas to catch up with events. Consumer capitalism came on quickly, pushed forward by the marvels of electricity and telegraphy. What it revealed was that men and women play many roles in the economy: breadwinner, full or part-time worker, saver, spender, consumer, register of tastes, and producer of future workers. Any adequate analysis of the developing economies of the West has to probe the meaning and efficacy in all these phases of a person’s experience.

  RULER AS CAPITALISTS

  DURING THE LAST QUARTER of the nineteenth century, European nations became venture capitalists with unhappy results for them and much of the rest of the world. For the previous two hundred years the free market economy had followed the path that private investors laid out. The informal communication of the market, spoken through the language of prices and rates, directed participants to the best deal. Information itself became a material good, orienting workers, producers, and investors toward their interests. During this long gestation period, governments played a supporting role. They sponsored industrial espionage, erected tariffs, and adjudicated contracts in their courts of law. In some countries they built railroads and established national banks. Still, kings, presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers gave the high politics of diplomacy and war making the lion’s share of their attention.

  European leaders were no longer willing to sit in the stands, watching their people steer this prodigy alone. They had acquired a lot of money from their wealthy subjects, and they began using it to invest in empire building, not to extract tribute as the Romans and Mongols had, but rather to command subjects’ labor and resources to make things for the market. Kings and statesmen became entrepreneurs. Much attention has been given to the challenge of accumulating capital; much less thought has gone into studying how excess capital has affected economic choices. By the end of the nineteenth century most people in the West knew that money should be making money—all the time. The idea of idle money seemed abhorrent. Rulers in this regard were no different from others. With their enhanced revenues, the heads of state for Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy turned to reckless overseas adventures. Capitalism’s unparalleled capacity to generate profits had reshaped the political landscape.

  Bringing the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into capitalism’s orbit promised both power and wealth to Europe’s rulers. But, alas, capitalism hadn’t modified the intense rivalries among European nations. Thomas Paine anticipated that commerce would “cordialize” mankind, but that was not to be. Instead countries now had more money for arming themselves. More arms spawned grander ambitions. Western European countries began competing for territories abroad while Spain, France, Great Britain, and Portugal had old empires to exploit. Generating new sources of income provided the means and the motives for Europe’s rulers to engage in an international contest that ended in the disastrous First World War.

  Neither the world nor capitalism would ever be the same after Western nations thrust themselves into the hinterlands of Africa in search of exotic raw materials. The difference between industrial and commercial expansion became crucial. Trade had touched only merchants, their servants, and those who lived near coasts, whereas producing goods in foreign lands involved whole populations put to work for their new masters. Typical of earlier foreign forays was the conduct of Great Britain toward China in the 1830s. Its East India Company was eager to establish a trade in opium grown in India. The Chinese government was loath to allow its people access to such an addictive drug. It prohibited the trade and expelled British merchants. Despite protests at home, the British forced their will upon China. After bombarding coastal cities, they succeeded in gaining commercial access to five Chinese ports and took control of Hong Kong. Though violent, the intrusion was limited.

  Mobilizing labor abroad changed the character of capitalist enterprise, for it took more than economic incentives to ensnare the men and women found living near oil deposits and tropical forests. Harvesting tropical crops and extracting precious minerals created a need for workers close to these raw materials. Of course the factories in the fields of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Caribbean sugar plantations and the silver mines of Mexico and Peru offered something of a template for the new capitalist thrust to make colonies centers of production.

  Governments had what companies lacked, the power to commandeer workers by extorting concessions from their compliant leaders or moving in with force where there was no recognized political order, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. European colonies already existed on the coasts as supports to long-distance commerce. The untapped riches in the African interior stirred imperial designs. European countries began to scuffle over who would get what, with little thought of the people who lived there. Cupidity, curiosity, Christian proselytizing, and militant strong-arming came into play. Abuses, unacceptable at home, became common when capitalism moved outside its original borders. Long forgotten was how long it had taken before the forebears of the colonizers had adjusted to modern work rhythms. Their new colonial subjects just appeared to be backward, evoking little interest in their well-being from their new masters. Their resistance was met with violence.

  European Missionaries to Africa

  Considering the amazing reach of Western explorations, it’s quite stunning how little was known about sub-Saharan Africa before the 1850s. Somehow it had never become a candidate for colonization as had North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and India. Deadly diseases, especially malaria, made it a deathtrap for Europeans. Just as remarkable, a single person, David Livingstone, opened up the eastern half of the continent.

  Livingstone has one of those life records that shame mere mortals. From the age of ten until twenty-four he worked in the cotton mill of his Scottish hometown. Awakening to learning and Christianity in his late teens, he taught himself Latin, a requisite for a college education. He even contrived a way to read during his fourteen-hour shift by mounting his books on the spinning jenny. He saved enough money to go to medical schools in Glasgow and London. From there he went to South Africa as a medical missionary and soon married into a prominent missionary family. Livingstone found his twin vocations as Christian healer and intrepid explorer soon after he arrived in Cape Town in 1841. The two remained entwined for the next thirty years as he organized expeditions into “darkest Africa,” a popular designation that suggests both a lack of knowledge and the skin color of the inhabitants.

  Until his death Livingstone traveled by foot and oxen into the center of the continent, following the course of rivers, going up and down and around mountain ranges where no white man had ever been. Trekking through thousands of miles of pristine savannas, plateaus, deserts, lakes, streams, and rapids, he filled his journals with evocative descriptions of Africa’s flora, fauna, and people, the whole interspersed with affirmations of his abiding Christian faith. Livingstone was the first European to cross the African continent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In these arduous trips he discovered the beauties of Africa and the fortitude of its people. Suffering bouts with both lions and malaria, he wrote copiously about the diseases he treated, among them malaria, against which he effectively used quinine. Subsequent explorers were less fortunate. Malaria remained a deadly disease, which, as late as 2006, killed a million African babies annually.

  Unwittingly Livingstone stoked the avarice of his compatriots with concrete details about a land filled with resources in mint condition. Returning to England in 1857, he published Miss
ionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, which excited readers much as Raiders of the Lost Ark does fans today. But Livingstone was no Indiana Jones. All agreed that he was the gentlest of men, a trait that explains how he always succeeded in winning over tribes hostile to his intrusion.

  In the course of bringing his medical skill and Christian faith to those he met, Livingstone came face-to-face with a lively slave trade carried on in central Africa by Muslim and Swahili-speaking Africans. Powerful Arab leaders had penetrated Africa from both the west and east coasts during the nineteenth century, converting many tribes to their faith. They also enslaved Africans, sending them to buyers in Zanzibar, Persia, Madagascar, and plantations on the Arabian Peninsula. Livingstone devoted the last decade of his life to exposing the cruelties of the East African slave trade. When his Zambesi and Its Tributaries appeared in 1865, hundreds of Christians rallied to the cause of ending this nefarious trade, made even more odious to them by its Muslim imprint. Horror at this slave trade and European’s insatiable demand for ivory for their pianos, billiards, jewelry, and furniture inlays proved mutually reinforcing. The universal respect accorded Livingstone sustained a new and vigorous campaign to bring civilization to the people of the “Dark Continent,” a European conceit that covered a multitude of sins. Returning to Africa once more, Livingstone plunged into the interior, this time to find the source of the Nile. He lost all contact with European correspondents for five years, adding a fascinating mystery to his already great reputation as a humanitarian.

  At this point in the story entered a Welsh immigrant from the United States, Henry Morton Stanley. A Civil War veteran, a foreign correspondent, and an amateur geographer, Stanley in 1871 accepted an assignment from the New York Herald to find the missing Livingstone. Knowing that Stanley had fought on both sides in the Civil War gives some idea of his versatility. His quest through central Africa took six months, but he had succeeded by the end of the year, when he did in fact greet the missing missionary with the famous salutation “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Stanley and Livingstone became household names during the next few years. They stimulated the imagination, the curiosity, and the ambition of Europeans who had come to think of the entire globe as their domain.

  During the next six years Stanley continued to explore Africa, circumnavigating Lake Victoria. He located the southern sources of the Nile, ending with an epoch-making journey down the Congo River. Unlike the trusting Livingstone, Stanley traveled with a well-armed band of 190 men and displayed more the attitude of a Western master than a humble Christian. He thought much like the English who went to North America in the seventeenth century, for he considered the African continent empty of people, or at least of people who counted. Feted as one of history’s greatest discoverers when he returned to England, Stanley did his best to get the British government to claim the heart of Africa. But to no avail.1

  The Imperial Ambitions of King Leopold of Belgium

  Across the English Channel, there was a European of significance fired up by the promise of Africa that Stanley had advertised. He was Leopold II, king of the Belgians. Leopold had inherited a lot of money from his father, who had astutely promoted Belgium’s industrial enterprises, among them the first European railway system. Intent upon gaining a colony to enhance the importance of his little country, Leopold actually scoured the Indies archive in Madrid to learn just how much Spain had benefited from its colonies.2 He kept up with news of Africa by reading his favorite newspaper, the Times of London, which came to him early each morning by special messenger. Here he read an English explorer declaring that Africa’s “unspeakable richness” was awaiting an “enterprising capitalist.” At the time Livingstone’s posthumous journals were horrifying readers with the graphic accounts of how unscrupulous slave traders seized African men and women, even children and sold them into slavery. Enthusiasm for stamping out a slave trade that had been pretty much unknown previously played into Leopold’s plans to create a colony in Africa. He engaged missionaries, geographers, and antislavery advocates to organize on behalf of Christianity, science, and humanitarianism. Privately he laid plans to get what he called “a slice of this magnificent African cake.”3

  Nothing will give you a greater sense of how the nineteenth-century world differs from ours than following Leopold as he managed with megalomaniacal determination to acquire for his country an African colony seventy-six times the size of Belgium. But that isn’t quite correct. For the Free State of Congo that Leopold created with such hubris was a personal possession that he ran as a company with the approval and financial assistance of the Belgian Parliament. Because Britain’s leaders showed no interest in acquiring a colony in the interior of Africa, Leopold was able to snag Stanley, the intrepid survivor of years of explorations. He put him under a five-year contract and forthwith sent him back to central Africa with the cash to build roads, establish stations through the Congo River network, buy land, and sign treaties. This Stanley did over the course of five years with great panache, persuading 450 chiefs of the Congo basin to accept his gifts in exchange for territorial rights.

  Meanwhile in Europe, Leopold carried on a brilliant diplomatic campaign under the guise of furthering science and philanthropy. His International Association of the Congo was nothing but a front behind which he manipulated the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France into accepting his acquisition of a vast territory in central Africa with no restrictions on his personal sovereignty.4 Leopold didn’t want to push the native inhabitants out of the land he coveted, for he had in mind using their skilled arms and strong backs to labor for him. What followed was as cruel a travesty as the world has ever seen, traceable to the West’s outsized appetite for the riches of Africa.

  The Congo Free State, as Leopold styled it, was anything but free, for he established a vicious regime, exploiting the men and women as thoroughly as the slavery he had vowed to eradicate. All uncultivated land became his property, leaving most of the people landless. Backed by white soldiers and black mercenaries and working with compliant tribal chiefs, Leopold used threats of murder, backed up by the wholesale destruction of villages, to force the Congolese to collect latex from wild rubber trees, dig for diamonds, and hunt elephants for their ivory. Rubber alone made the Congo a commercial success. More like a modern CEO than a crowned head, Leopold followed market indicators closely. With astonishing ruthlessness, he sent regular shipments of rifles to his minions in the Congo. A similar melancholy tale unfolded in the Amazon basin, where professional rubber tappers brought their diseases and weapons to the indigenous population.5

  By the end of the century Leopold’s treatment of the Congolese had aroused critics who could not be ignored. A company employee became suspicious of what was going on. Swedish and American missionaries who were eyewitnesses to the abuse launched a crusade against Leopold’s Congo venture. People as capable of expressing themselves as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain began writing about Leopold’s mendacious brutality. The riches he monopolized stirred as well the indignation of British free traders. To add insult to injury, Leopold sustained the fiction of his benevolence by building the Tervuren Museum filled with displays of African art to celebrate the Congolese people’s liberation from paganism and slavery!6 Nearing his death in 1908, Leopold ceded his fiefdom to the Belgian nation, at which point it received the name Belgian Congo.

  Other European Nations in Africa

  Leopold’s is the most extreme record of European rapacity, but his European neighbors lost no time joining in the plunder of Africa and its people. France, having lost New France and its holdings in India at the end of the eighteenth century, started a new empire by invading Algeria in 1830. Smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War a generation later, it next sent expeditions up the Senegal River. From there France eventually succeeded in seizing the northwest quarter of Africa, four million of the continent’s some twelve million square miles, including Tunisia and Morocco.7 In addition to its holdin
gs in Africa and Indochina, France held Tahiti, where Paul Gauguin set up his studio in 1890.

  Starting de novo like King Leopold, the Germans had to cast about for a colony because they had not participated in the sixteenth-century adventures in the New World. Before pushing into Africa, Germany found a place in the South Seas sun. The drastic shortage of raw cotton occasioned by the American Civil War had hit hard the Rhine Valley textile mills and the ports that depended upon cotton exports. A prominent and imaginative entrepreneur from Hamburg sent agents to the Pacific to seek spots along the equator where cotton might be grown. He managed to get a toehold in Samoa. The German government followed up by convincing Spain to sell it the majority of the islands among the Solomons, Carolines, Marianas, and Pelews. Neither France nor Great Britain was ready to cede these luxuriant South Pacific islands to Germany, so they parceled out among themselves the remaining islands in eight different groups. Farther west, Great Britain in 1898 signed a ninety-nine-year treaty with China to hold on to Hong Kong. Meanwhile back in Africa, the Germans laid claim to Togoland, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanganyika, located on both sides of the African continent.

  Italy entered this African land rush last. It acquired Libya, Eritrea, and part of Somaliland but sustained an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians. Only Ethiopia and Liberia, the colony that Americans established for freed slaves, held on to their independence during this European free-for-all for territory. For France and Britain, the toeholds established earlier became launching pads for further global appropriations, though with markedly different styles.

  More attentive to commerce than to territorial acquisition when Leopold was finalizing his plans in 1875, Great Britain tightened its control over Egypt. Britain had acquired an interest in there after the defeat of Napoleon, who had invaded the country in 1798. Formally an Egyptian dynasty ruled the country under a loose connection to the Ottoman Empire, but practically it remained within the European sphere of influence. This humiliating arrangement became a bone of contention for Egyptian nationalists, whose agitation introduced social turmoil that threatened Great Britain’s huge investment in Egypt. On top of this, more and more of the British commercial fleets began using the Suez Canal after its opening in 1869. This hundred-mile waterway joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Its vulnerability to violence was unacceptable to British investors. The British government ordered an invasion of Egypt in 1882, demonstrating the fusion of public and private economic interests that became increasingly conspicuous.