by Judy Jones
John Huss, a Bohemian from central Europe who lived at about the same time, took things one step further by turning his ritual-resistant Hussites from a religious group into a Czech national movement in protest of German supremacy in the area. Both Wyclif and Huss were branded as heretics.
John Calvin, a Frenchman who lived from 1509 to 1564, is a much bigger deal. A generation younger than Luther, he experienced a sudden conversion at the age of twenty-four, joined forces with the religious revolutionaries, and published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, addressed—unlike Luther’s writings—not just to Germans but to everybody who was dissatisfied with the existing Roman setup. Because Calvin did so much with the idea of predestination (God had chosen some people to be saved, others to be damned; you knew who you were, and that was that, don’t even bother to struggle), Calvinists tended to be militant, uncompromising, self-righteous—i.e., Puritans. They also refused to recognize the subordination of church to state or the laying down of rules by any king or parliament. Rather, Christians should, according to Calvin, Christianize the state, as Oliver Cromwell would do a century later in England. In the meantime, Calvinism took root in France (the Huguenots were Calvinists) and spread not only to England and Germany, but to the Netherlands, Poland, and Hungary, too.
In Scotland, John Knox, a particularly sober-sided type who would give Mary, Queen of Scots, a bad case of the shakes, made Calvinism—later called Presbyterianism—the established Scottish religion. jacobean, Jacobite, Jacobin, Jacquerie
All four come from the Latin given name “Jacobus,” the ancestor of our “James” (and the Frenchman’s “Jacques”). Jacobean describes the period—rich, exuberant, and increasingly cynical—during which the Stuart king James I ruled Britain, right after Elizabeth. More a cultural term than a historical one, it evokes the late, great tragedies and romances of Shakespeare; the grisly, overwrought drama of his contemporaries John The Duchess of Malfi Webster and John Tis Pity She’s a Whore Ford; the poetry of Donne and the Metaphysicals; and, natch, the King James version of the Bible.
Jacobite describes those Brits who, several decades and an expulsion or two later, were trying to get James I’s Stuart descendants—Scottish, Catholic, and firm adherents of the divine right of kings—back on the English throne. Even with a lot of collaboration on the part of the French and a couple of out-and-out invasion attempts, via Scotland, in 1715 and 1745, the Jacobites, who’d hoped to turn the clock back by a century or so, didn’t so much as get the minute hand moving. The net impact of their scheming was the stripping down of the traditional Scottish Highlands clans and the banning of kilts and bagpipes for thirty years.
Today, “Jacobite” is pretty much relegated to the history books (except when used, impishly, of Henry James fans). Jacobin, by contrast, still shows up in the odd George Will or Mary McGrory column. Originally, it signified the most radical of the essentially well-educated, middle-class revolutionaries during the French Revolution (who’d met in an old Jacobin, or Dominican, monastery in Paris); it embraced such subgroups as the Girondists and the “Mountain”; and it included almost every French revolutionary leader you ever heard of: Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Condorcet, St. Just, etc. Eventually, the Jacobins were found—by the rabble, the popular revolutionaries like the sans-culottes (so called because they went around not in knee breeches but in trousers)—to be insufficiently militant, and most of them wound up, like the royalists before them, at the guillotine. Today, “Jacobin” is used to describe radicals, or extreme leftists, who are determined to carry on the revolution at any cost; who like to talk political theory into the wee hours; and who, in general, have contempt for the will of the majority, the persons-in-the-street, believing that it’s they, the intelligentsia, who are best equipped to call the shots. The Bolsheviks, behind Russia’s 1917 revolution, are this century’s most famous Jacobins.
Oldest of all is jacquerie, from “Jacques,” the generic French nickname for a peasant, used to describe an insurrection of peasants, such as was first set off in France in 1358, a response to the economic hardships brought about by the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War. Similar massive uprisings took place in England, most notably Wat Tyler’s rebellion of 1381, during which, shaking their pitchforks, peasant spokesmen wondered aloud why some people were rich and fancy, others poor and drab—or as they put it in a famous couplet, “When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then a gentleman?” Puritans, Pilgrims, Dissenters, Roundheads
The Puritans were the extreme, Calvinistic Protestants—as opposed to the moderate, Church of England ones—in seventeenth-century England. The Pilgrims were those Puritans who left England for Holland in 1608, and eventually arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The Roundheads (so called because of their close-cropped hair) were the Puritan followers of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s war between the forces of Parliament (spearheaded by Cromwell) and those of the king, Charles I, whose followers had long hair, wore too much lace and cologne, and were known as Cavaliers. By the 1650s, Dissenters, a broader term that took in a variety of anti–Church of England nonconformists, was how you would have designated the fellows you used to think of as Puritans. Diggers, Levellers, Luddites, Chartists
British antiestablishmentarians, all. The Levellers (many of whom were, for the record, Puritans) and the Diggers were both fixtures in Cromwellian England. The former pushed for almost-universal male suffrage, a written constitution, subordination of Parliament to the will of the voters, and other things it would take the American and French Revolutions (and another century) to get a real taste of. The latter thumbed their noses at the idea of private property and went around occupying and occasionally cultivating other people’s land.
The Luddites were rioters who took to destroying machinery in the factories of northern England between 1811 and 1816; especially averse to textile machines, they blamed the impact of the Industrial Revolution for their unemployment and misery. Their leader was Ned Ludd.
The Chartists were a working-class group, named after the People’s Charter they’d drafted in 1838, advocating, among other things, universal adult male suffrage, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the annual election of the members of the House of Commons, and the payment of salaries to those members so that you wouldn’t have to be independently wealthy to be able to spend your days in session there. The Chartist movement died down as the result of opposition from the government and from businessmen, as well as from internal dissension. But, unlike the Diggers, the Levellers, and the Luddites, the Chartists had at least gotten a lot of smart, influential people to listen. Their full program would be in place shortly after World War I. Whigs, Tories
Both arose in seventeenth-century England in response to the controversy surrounding the pro-French, pro-Catholic policies of Charles II. The Whigs—also known as the Country Party, made up of the biggest-deal aristocrats, always eager to weaken a king since it automatically strengthened them, and backed by the middle class and the merchants of London—wanted to see Charles II (not to mention his even more Catholic brother, James II, due to succeed him) checked. They stood for the supremacy of Parliament and for religious toleration. The Tories—also known as the Court Party, consisting of the lesser aristocracy, the country squires, and the Anglican clergy—supported Charles and were suspicious of the Whigs’ commercial leanings, among other things.
Of course, neither the Whigs nor the Tories were anything like an organized political party back then (even taken together, there were only a few thousand of them), but by the next century they would be the two leading parties of the country, and would remain so right through the nineteenth century, when the Tories renamed themselves Conservatives and the Whigs renamed themselves Liberals.
Both terms were less than complimentary in origin, and were in each case first used by the opponents of the faction in question. A “whig” was originally a Scottish cattle rustler, a “tory” an Irish plunderer. You don’t hear much about Whigs these days, but even now,
in England, a Tory is a mildly hostile name for a conservative, especially a right-wing one. Colony, Protectorate, Dominion, Territory, Mandate, Trusteeship, Dependency, Possession
Enjoy them while you can; the era of imperialism is winding to a stop. The familiar word here is colony, but it has an edge: A colony, strictly speaking, consists of a company of people transplanted somewhere for the purpose of settling it; as a result, a colony should have a fair sprinkling of faces that remind you of what folks look like back in the Mother Country. (Canada was a colony of Great Britain’s, whereas in China—except for Hong Kong, another colony—Britain just had a lot of treaties and trading concessions in effect.) In a protectorate, an imperial power doesn’t claim to be settling anything; it just strides in and takes over in the name of the existing ruler, presumably to save him and his subjects from other, less noble-minded imperial powers. A dominion is a specifically British concept, used of a particularly well-regarded colony that, while still tied to the mother country, was largely self-governing—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for example; today, the dominions are independent (which is not to say the queen isn’t still constantly popping by). Territory applies to a portion of a country—usually remote and undeveloped, like Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories—that’s not deemed ready to become a full-fledged state or province.
A mandate is what the victorious Allied powers handed out to themselves from the former empires of the defeated Central Powers after World War I. Thus Britain got Palestine and Transjordan; France, Syria and Lebanon; Japan, some of Germany’s former holdings in the Pacific; and—abbreviating the list somewhat—South Africa got the former German colony of Southwest Africa, a.k.a. Namibia, which finally achieved independence in 1990. The same thing happened after World War II, except this time the United Nations supervised the doling out of former Italian and Japanese possessions, plus assumed responsibility for the mandates. The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the United States (which, just between us, seems very reluctant to let go of it completely, though it’s granted varying degrees of independence to its component parts), was the last remaining trusteeship, officially dissolved in 1986.
A dependency could be any of the above, plus the little sheikdom or sultanate whose foreign affairs you’re helping to handle even though you don’t claim to own it. If you did, it—like colonies, protectorates, dominions, etc.—would be a possession, and you would be both occupying and controlling it. The Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion
We know you think you know—and you’re probably right. But today’s Boer War and Boxer Rebellion are tomorrow’s Persian and Punic Wars, so let’s run through them just to make sure.
The Boers (from the Dutch word for “farmer”) were the descendants of the Dutchmen who’d originally settled the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, in the seventeenth century. After 1815, when England annexed the Cape according to the terms of the Congress of Vienna, the Boers, simple, old-fashioned folk, made the “great trek” inland and cleared the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in an effort to get away from the British. They didn’t think much of slavery or miners or adventurers or fortune-hunting Englishmen. Unfortunately, the English, in the course of their planning for a Cape-to-Cairo railway, now found themselves confronted by two little Boer republics just where a few hundred miles of track were supposed to go down. The discovery of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal pressurized matters further. Brits poured in, the Transvaal refused to pass the bills that would allow the Brits to build their mines, the Brits started to terrorize the Boers, and Europe started screaming about British bullying. (The German emperor, William II, even sent a telegram to the president of the Transvaal congratulating him on having staved off the British raiders “without having to call for the support of friendly powers.”) Three years later England went to war with the two Boer republics, and over the course of the next three years, conquered them in the Boer War (1899–1902). Incorporated into the British Empire, but with various of their institutions (including their language, Afrikaans) pretty much intact, the Boers soon found themselves a part of the Union of South Africa, today’s Republic of South Africa, about which we’ll not get going here. Britain, for her part, found herself the least popular nation in Europe—which encouraged her to rethink matters enough to present herself as an acceptable potential ally for a war that, it would turn out, was only a decade away.
The Boxer Rebellion also broke out in 1899 and also involved Britain, along with every other Western power with a stake in China—formerly a proud empire, now weakened, demoralized, and on her last legs. Seems a Chinese secret society bent on revolution and named something like the Order of Righteous Harmonious Fists (the Westerners doubled over with laughter at the nickname “Boxers”) had besieged all the Western legations—French, Russian, and German, as well as British—in northern China, killing missionaries and railway workers, as well as Chinese converts to Christianity. The European powers, joined by Japan and the United States, sent an international force against the Boxers, squashing them in very short order. The victors made things even harder on the Chinese, hitting them with, among other things, a bill for $330 million. The upshot: The Chinese government decided it was high time to join its neighbor Japan in a Westernization program. And younger Chinese, deciding it was high time to get rid of both the foreigners and the government, rallied to a fellow named Sun Yat-sen. It was the beginning of a Chinese revolution that, with time out for World War II, would go on for half a century. Redshirts, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Black and Tans
The Redshirts were Garibaldi’s (he’d gotten the wool for them cheap from the government of Uruguay, whose independence he’d helped secure), and with them he helped achieve the unification of the modern nation of Italy in the early 1860s. The Brownshirts were Hitler’s; they constituted the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Nazi “stormtroopers.” The Blackshirts were also Hitler’s, in the persons of his elite Schutzstaffel, or SS, the “security echelon,” but he’d gotten the idea from Mussolini, who’d first come up with the notion of color-coded private militias. The Black and Tans were Britain’s, recruited to fill vacancies in the Royal Irish Constabulary caused by the killing or intimidation of its native-Irish members during the Troubles of 1919–1923; themselves given to terrorist tactics (and named after a local breed of hound), the Black and Tans wore khaki uniforms and black belts. Epoch, Era, Period, Age, Eon
“Epoch” and “era” present the big stumbling block here, because almost nobody uses them anymore the way the historians meant them to be used. Which is: An epoch is the date of an occurrence that starts things going in a new direction or under new conditions (i.e., a point in time). An era is the time during which what started as an epoch continues, building steam, gaining momentum, becoming established—at which point you’ve got a period, an era that’s run its course and is ready for another epoch-making event. An age is pretty much an era (the Age of Reason, the Era of Good Feeling: both have a sense of center to them); an eon any immeasurably, even infinitely long time. Anything else? Well, a cycle is a succession of periods followed by another, similar succession. And your birthday is the day you were born, celebrated with a cake in most Western countries.
Note to geology majors: You shouldn’t have to be reminded—and no one else cares—that the geologic time scale’s largest division is the eon (one or more eras), followed by the era (one or more periods), the period (one or more epochs), and the epoch. Thus, one—that is, you—speaks of the Pliocene epoch of the Tertiary period of the Cenozoic era. Right?
Reds
Contributor Michael Sorkin casts a cold eye on the men—and the woman—who took Karl Marx’s more or less straightforward theory of history and did so much thinking, rethinking, second-guessing, and arguing among themselves as to what he really meant, didn’t mean, might have meant, and ought to have meant that poor Marx had no choice but to confess, famously and fairly early on, “Je ne suis pas un Marxiste.” But first, a look at the old boy, M
arxist or not, himself. KARL MARX (GERMAN, 1818-1883)
Marx, and Marxism, didn’t simply happen. A German, born in 1818, Karl Marx was influenced by the social ideas that came out of the French Revolution, the economic ideas that came out of the British Industrial Revolution, and, especially, by the philosophical ideas that were now coming—and coming and coming—out of Germany as it emerged into the European high noon. In fact, Marx can himself be thought of as one in an ever-lengthening line of German philosophers, the most notable of whom was Hegel, to whom he—along with other “Young Hegelians” like Engels—was much devoted in his youth and from whom he picked up the very useful dialectical method. Like any philosopher, Marx was interested in the big questions, and the one his system “solves” is that most basic quandary of history; namely, what makes it go, and where. Marx answers the question by taking dialectics (Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis dynamic) and combining it with materialism, the half of philosophy that says matter constitutes, and has precedence over, mind. The result, as if you didn’t know: dialectical materialism.
In a nutshell, Marx’s argument is that economic relationships are the basic forces in history and that it is only around them that the whole complex of social relationships arises. Marx called these two interrelated aspects the economic “base” and the social “superstructure.” As a materialist, he felt that the “relations of production”—the basic setup and reciprocal interaction among those people or classes who are doing the work and making (or not making) the money— defined by the “base” decreed the “general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their existence that determines their consciousness.” (Those who really know their Marxism like to observe along about now how Marx has found Hegel “standing on his head” and—by insisting that actualities come before ideas, that the mind doesn’t conceive of freedom, then decide to go out and found a Greek city-state, but the other way around—is here “setting him on his feet again.”)
