by Tom Anderson
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The deaths of two monarchs had important ramifications for the East India trade. King Johannes II and IV of Denmark-Sweden passed away in 1813 at the age of sixty-three, having presided over the restoration of a Scandinavian union and the expansion of Danish control into northern Germany. He was survived by his widow the Queen, Mildred of Great Britain, who had used her influence at court to help bring Denmark into the war against Lisieux towards the end and also to try and support Britain in her recovery. Her son the new King, who became Valdemar V and II, informed his mother that the scheme fit well with his own policy ideas, but it would have to be a two-way trade. Valdemar had inherited a good position in Europe from his father, but disagreed with his grandfather Christian VII’s belief that overseas colonies were an unnecessary extravagance and only invited conflicts. The Danish Asiatic Company had been allowed to dwindle under the reigns of Christian and Johannes, and were now the smallest of the various European trading companies in the East. Valdemar wanted to benefit from the opening of Eastern trade that was just starting to kick off as he began his reign. To do this, he used his contacts with Great Britain through his mother (the great-aunt of the boy king Frederick II) to establish an agreement that the British East India Company would provide assistance to the Danes in the East in exchange for Denmark providing tax breaks to Britons attempting to re-establish their country’s home trade in European waters. It helped that the Danes now controlled much of the old Hanseatic League cities which would give the English a gateway to broader continental trade.
The Churchill regime agreed to this, and Valdemar had the Danish Asiatic Company amalgamated with the Swedish East India Company, which had been attempting to trade with the East for a century without establishing many permanent trade outposts.[242] This approach meant that they had lost a disproportionate number of ships compared to other companies. Valdemar’s approach meant that the Swedes’ ships augmented the flagging Danish trade fleet while the Swedes could now use the Danes’ own outposts in Christiansnagore,[243] Tranquebar[244] and Calicut. As part of the agreement with Britain, the Danish factory at Balasore was also turned over to the BEIC.
The rejuvenated joint Company – known simply as the Danish Asiatic Company until the Arandite reforms of the Popular Wars – also expanded further east, establishing a strong interest in Feng China. The actions of the valiant Danish captain Arne Rasmussen in the taking of Hainan from the pro-Qing warlord Jiang Xiameng helped create a name for the Company at the table of the Phoenix Men, and when the Rogue Isles were divided into European trade bases at the Treaty of Tayoan,[245] half of Hainan went to Denmark (the other half became French; Hainan would not be returned to China until the aftermath of the disastrous Typhoon of 1860).
However, there was no getting away from the fact that rounding the Cape of Good Hope was a daunting proposition for any nation engaging in trade with the East. While some preferred to instead round the Horn and cross the Pacific, the African route remained the primary one. Most European trading nations began establishing new settlements around southern Africa to help resupply their ships enroute and provide ports in a storm; the fact that half of them were still indulging in the slave trade doubtless also helped. Some countries already had suitable outposts. The Dutch had the Cape Colony, of course, over which the Dutch East India Company assumed more direct control after the failed rebellion of Hermanus Potgieter’s Boertrekkers – driving many of his former supporters into a northern voyage (“trek”) into the interior to establish a new free settlement. Portugal had Angola and Mozambique, and under the new King John (João) VI (the second of the new monarchs who had a great effect upon Eastern trade) began to explore further into their interior. Britain had established her own outpost at Natal, which had strong links with the British East India Company’s holdings in India proper and a large percentage of its population consisted of Bengalis who had come over to work as labourers. France lacked any continental possessions, but the Mascarene Islands[246] served equally well in their stead.
As more countries expanded their trade, new outposts sprung up. The Russian explorer Vladimir Lisyansky[247] rediscovered in 1819 a suitable location for a port in the otherwise barren coast of southwestern Africa, a bay which the fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias had called “O Golfo de Santa Maria da Conceição”.[248] As this was little known, Lisyansky renamed the area Zaliv Pavlovka (the Gulf of Paul) after the Tsar. In the end the Russian government was too publicly committed to the overland route to the east to make establishing an outpost politically possible, but as with the case of Navarre they worked through their Lithuanian allies. The hastily founded Grand Ducal Lithuanian African Company, a subsidiary of the RLPC, instead established the town of Pavlovsk-na-Baravakhul (Paul’s Town on the Bravahul[249]) which proved to be a useful stopover point for Russian and Lithuanian ships, but also soon developed a reputation as a hellish outpost at the end of the world. Suffice to say that if Siberia ever became too pleasant, the Tsar now had a new place to send undesirables…
King Valdemar of Denmark-Sweden saw that Denmark required her own outpost to facilitate her increased Eastern trade, and the Danish explorer and adventurer Malthe Conrad Bruun[250] was placed in charge of the project. In 1820, after a voyage of discovery around the Cape of Good Hope, Bruun presented his findings to the court and recommended the establishment of a settlement on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar had seen limited European contact for years (mostly from the French, who had attempted to set up several colonies over the years but never seen sufficient return on trade versus problems to maintain them). While previous colonists such as the French and the former Pirate Utopia of Libertalia had seen trouble with warfare from the native tribes, Bruun reported that the tribes appeared to have exhausted themselves for the moment from overly violent internecine warfare – “not unlike ourselves,” he commented whimsically in his report. To that end, and given that the Danes’ primary aim was a stopover point rather than a trade outpost, he recommended the Danes repair the old French outpost at Fort Dauphin[251] and use it for that purpose.
After some consideration, the King’s council and the Diet of Denmark agreed to the plan. The Swedish Riksdag felt aggrieved that it had not been consulted, considering most of the ships and men Bruun would be using for his colonisation plan were of Swedish origin. This was only one of the many grievances that would contribute to the events that hit Scandinavia during the Popular Wars. The plan went ahead and, despite many setbacks, the fort was established by 1823 and renamed Johanneshavn after the king’s father. It was a drain on Danish finances as the natives proved to be not quite as quiescent as Bruun had optimistically hoped, but it did help the Danish Asiatic Company in its rejuvenated quest for eastern trade…
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At the same time as the European powers became invested in the East via the African route, the powers of America (though not so hurt in the wars that they urgently required the trade funds) began to look to the west. The Empire of North America mostly worked with its British partners in India and especially China, where the Americans enjoyed an important position due to being the source of the Appalachian ginseng that was a vital trade good in China. The Empire of New Spain was rebuffed from its early attempts at trade after being defeated by the Portuguese and Castilians in the Philippine War (1817-21), and instead began to back the Dutch against the Portuguese in exchange for a cut of the Dutch profits. The Spanish exiled royals found themselves strange bedfellows with their enemy the United Provinces of South America, which was equally opposed to the Portuguese thanks to their stab in the back during the Third Platinean War and persistent land disputes with Portuguese Brazil. This alignment would contribute to later events.
Furthermore, the Dutch were also supported by their allies to the south, the Flemings; Charles Theodore II resurrected the former Ostend Company, a Flemish trading venture that had been briefly instituted when the region was under Austrian rule. The new company’s men, drawn from Charles Theodor
e’s possessions in the former Holy Roman Empire as well as old Flanders, helped expand Dutch control across the Nusantara by working with the VOC. It was in Indochina, however, that the Flemings decided to become rather over-ambitious, though the impacts of their policy would not make themselves clear for some time to come.
The Meridians, however, also explored the South Seas more thoroughly with their own navy as they slowly rebuilt from the disasters of the Third Platinean War, helped by having the naval-sympathetic General Pichegru who was kicked upstairs to be Head of the Fuerzas Armadas during the presidency of José Jaime Carriego López. This meant that as the Meridians explored the South Sea islands, they became the second Western power, after the French, to land in Autiaraux and engage in trade with the Mauré…
Chapter #98: Lighting the Fuse
Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.
My apologies for the delay in our last transmission, sir. Events have been… shall we say, hectic. My addendum containing further details shall follow the transmission of this segment of our research.[252] Now we have fully shifted working operations to our new site, hopefully further delays should be kept to a minimum.
The text follows this message.
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“The Whig historians of the last two centuries have perpetuated a view of history which can be compared to an ancient Mauré canoe voyaging across the South Sea by navigating from one island to the next, with each island being a Historical Event, each native chief ruling over it being a Great Man…
…no, on reflection, for a Mauré canoe could nonetheless choose which island to navigate to. No, the Whiggish history suggests a single straight road in which the mobile[253] of the world travels, occasionally being refilled by Great Men in their oil-spotted coveralls, and if any one of these reloadings – these Historical Events – fails to happen, then the engine will sputter and the mobile will crash. A Whig historian can seem as deterministic as a devout Calvinist…
…in truth it is provable that history is not pre-set on such a path. We might take one of the Whigs’ Great Men, Frederick Paley, and presuppose that without such a man the Principle of Environmental Breeding would never have rationalised evolution. Yet to do so is to ignore the fact that the French naturalist Étienne Dutourd concocted an almost identical hypothesis mere months behind Paley, and entirely coincidentally. If Paley had not lived to make his theory, another would have done. But perhaps in a different manner, and the world is not restricted to any such singular, dull path.
No, our worldly mobile does not stand upon a road, but in the middle of a vast park. Many parts of it are unkempt and mysterious, some swampy and boggy which threaten to draw the mobile down into their cold embrace, others bright and sunny and uplifting. And it is entirely our choice which way the mobile travels, which places it visits. And there is no need for refilling its fuel. Regardless of what we do, that mobile will keep rolling along…
- Ezra Theodore Sprague, A Scientific Manifesto for Speculative Romances (1940)
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From: "The Man With Three Names – A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962)—
To understand the France in which Leo Bone, or rather “Napoleon Bonaparte”, made the latter part of his career, one must realise that the supposed European peace of the 1810s was in reality anything but peaceful. Appearances might deceive the casual observer, but all with the most rudimentary knowledge of domestic and international politics knew that the supposed calm waters of the Watchful Peace had simply had a thin layer of oil poured on the raging tempest the Jacobin Wars had unleashed.
And it would take just one spark to set that oil alight once more.[254]
Every man (and woman) of substance in Europe knew this, and also knew that it was in no-one’s interest to disturb such a fragile peace. Governments, industrialists, the Church – the establishment everywhere was still reeling from the shock of the French Revolution and the horrors of the Jacobin Wars. Everyone regardless of station remained uncertain of where to go from here. It was not, as the ultraroyalistes in France and Francis II in Austria both believed, that the genie of the Revolution could simply be squashed back into its cursed bottle, the clock of the world turned back, the bloodied page torn out of history. There could be no return to the cyclical Wars of Supremacy that had characterised the eighteenth century. Things had changed forever, and – though at first this was less obvious – not solely for the European powers.
Furthermore, it was clear to all that the Jacobin Wars had not ended on an especially decisive note. Inevitably, there had been back-room deals and agreements and truces with those whom the ultraroyalistes would have preferred to see ground to dust. Though the conservative powers of Europe had triumphed, even those that had been more liberal before the war drifting into that same reactionary orbit, they had failed to come up with a satisfactory answer to the questions the Revolution had posed. That meant pressure built up beneath the stifling blanket of peace that the Congress of Copenhagen had thrown down, like unto one of the steam engines whose adoption characterised the Watchful Peace, and one day the whole system would inevitably burst.[255]
Therefore many countries had governments which in less tense times would not have been tolerated by the bourgeoisie and nobility, but were allowed to remain in power out of sheer fear of the uncertainty that might replace them. Nations such as Denmark and Portugal, which had overseen liberalising measures in the previous century, now saw their parliamentary assemblies calcifying into paralysis, their members leery of disturbing the status quo. France herself was an exception to this. Louis XVII’s Grande-Parlement was proving to be a great success, if a somewhat chaotic one. The institution was presently still located in Nantes, as indeed was the King as often as possible (few men loved the grey utilitarian spiderweb that was the Paris that Jean de Lisieux had built). Louis’ great achievement had been to engage with the concerns that had provoked the Revolution while rejecting the monsters it had produced. This may seem rather obvious in retrospect, but was a shocking third way to much of Europe, especially ultraconservative states such as Austria and the Mittelbund.
The Grande-Parlement had been designed to address some of the issues raised in the early days of the Revolution (it is therefore sometimes termed ‘Proto-Adamantine’ by scholars in retrospect) but in so doing reject the solutions that the Republic had devised. Those solutions on paper had soon been simply ignored by Robespierre and Lisieux in any case, both largely reducing the early egalitarian dreams to a one-man dictatorship far more absolute than any that Louis XIV could have dreamed of.
The Parlement was unicameral, integrating the former Three Estates into one. It represented a compromise between the demands of the nobility and clergy – who were in a strong negotiating position, considering how they had stuck with Louis in Royal France through thick and thin – and of the common people, those of them who both still had a political thought in their heads and had somehow managed to avoid Robespierre’s chirurgeons and Lisieux’s slave labour gangs. In the Parlement nobles elected nobles, clergy elected clergy, and commoners elected a larger number of commoners on a local circonscription (constituency) basis loosely inspired by Britain’s. This was organised according to the Republican Thouret square département grid rather than the old provinces, a case of a system being stuck with through administrative inertia despite being disliked even by most Jacobin sympathisers.
This model, combined with the communications of the growing Chappe Optel system, meant that France had the most functional representative system of government in the world. The UPSA’s was more liberal and egalitarian, but it took weeks to collect all the votes. Ironically, a system which Lisieux had originally designed vaguely with the purpose of elections in mind (before he unaccountably forgot all about such silly concerns) now fulfilled its original purpose for Lisieux’s ultimate foe.
Once a Grande-Parlement was elected, the noble and clerical deputies were each assigned a plural vote each
so that, when the numbers were counted up, the former First and Second Estates would collectively possess exactly fifty percent of the votes in the Parlement, with the more numerous commoner deputies (each having one vote each) making up the rest. This system was considered to be a reasonable balance between dictatorship by either the nobility and clergy (as had been under the ancien régime) or by the common folk (as had been under the Republic).
