History in Focus: The Stonewall Riots

The only photo actually taken during the Stonewall Riots

Gay Pride this year has become very important - not only due to the rising bigotry against LGBTQ+ communities across the world in recent years - but also due to it being the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. On June 28 1969 police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York, a noted gay bar, causing a riot after crowds witnessed police brutality. This sparked LGBTQ+ communities to begin the fight for their rights in the United States. Since then Stonewall and Pride has served to inspire resistance against bigotry over the last fifty years.

LGBTQ+ Rights Before Stonewall

Unlike in other countries, such as the UK, homosexuality was never illegal across the United States, however, LGBTQ+ communities were far from accepted. Several states had a history of banning same-sex male sex, such as Virginia. The Comstock Laws in 1873 which aimed to suppress, 'Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use', including pornography, sex toys, and contraception. It also included literature on sex and sexuality, especially LGBTQ+ literature, meant that LGBTQ+ Americans were practically erased from written history. One of the first gay rights advocates, Harry Hay, stated that homosexuals were 'the one group of disadvantaged people who didn't even think of themselves as a group'. Colonialism further wiped out LGBTQ+ identities. Many Native American cultures had concepts of a third gender, but colonialism forced a Euro-Christian view of gender onto Native American cultures. Periodically, laws would be passed further persecuting LGBTQ+ individuals - in 1917 Congress passed an Immigration Act which barred mentally ill and openly homosexual individuals from entering the United States. It would take until 1973 for homosexuality to stop being seen as a mental illness. Open, sate-sanctioned bigotry boomed in the 1940s and 1950s thanks to the Red Scare. US Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up fears that the US government, media, and society were being infiltrated by communists causing the US to crack down heavily on suspected communists. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interviewed suspected communists and got significant figures to testify before the committee. Most famously, Walt Disney gave evidence of individuals with communist sympathies in Hollywood before HUAC causing those accused of being blacklisted. With the Red Scare came the Lavender Scare. Homosexuals were seen as being mentally ill, depraved, and susceptible to blackmail making them stooges for communists, or actively working for them. McCarthy and other anti-communists, like Richard Nixon, used homophobia to attack the LGBTQ+ community. Between 1947 and 1950 420 federal government employees had been fired for being homosexual; 91 were fired the night after McCarthy's infamous 'Wheeling Speech' which sparked the Red Scare. The Red Scare would impact other oppressed groups - African-American, women, and Puerto Rican rights movements were also targeted for being possible allies of communists.

The Mattachine Society

Despite persecution gay communities did emerge, mainly in the big cities where the anonymity allowed the flourishing of identities outside of hegemonic power. American branches of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) offered a way for men to explore their own sexualities with them existing in male-only atmospheres. The Sloane House YMCA in New York became renowned in the early-1900s proved to be a fertile ground for a gay community. When Prohibition was implemented during the 1920s this saw the origins of the modern gay bar. Prohibition drove alcohol underground into 'speakeasies' and illicit bars - this allowed a persecuted minority to explore their identities safely. They could not be reported to police as that would expose the speakeasy. The 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance where African-Americans could produce a new wave of culture including poetry, novel writing, and jazz. It was also a time of flourishing LGBTQ+ culture. Of course, the Harlem YMCA was a focal point of the gay scene, but there were many other sites, such as the Gumby Book Studio. The 'Empress of the Blues' Bessie Smith was an open bisexual woman who regularly performed in Harlem, Ethel Waters performed for guests, and Langston Hughes wrote his poetry. When the Lavender Scare hit it also allowed the seeds of the gay rights movement to be planted. According to Linda Hirshman, 'It took a Communist to start the revolution. After 1914, it almost always has.' The emancipatory aspect of socialism meant that civil rights activists, and their allies, were either socialists or allied to them: Martin Luther King's close friend Bayard Rustin was a Communist Party member; the Communist Party defended the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African-American accused of the rape of a white woman in an unfair trial; feminist Betty Friedan had engaged in left-wing politics; and gay veteran Chuck Rowland joined the Communist Party when he felt that they were doing something. A key figure is Harry Hay. Hay was a gay communist who would go on to co-found the first gay rights movement in the US. Supporting the Progressive presidential candidate in the 1948 election, Henry Wallace, he founded 'Bachelors for Wallace' which would evolve into a group for gay rights in 1950 called the Mattachine Society. As most leaders of the Mattachine Society were communist, by 1955 the Red Scare had dinted the group's mobility. However, that same year, a lesbian couple, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, in San Francisco wanted to organise lesbians in a support group. This evolved into the Daughters of Blitis, the first lesbian rights group, and quickly formed a newsletter called The Ladder. It would take over another decade for the gay rights movement to come into effect.

New York and the Stonewall Inn

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera

With New York being one of the largest cities in the world, never mind the US, it naturally developed a vibrant gay community. The New York drag scene, even today, could only be rivalled by the San Francisco drag scene. Late-night clubs accompanied the anonymity of the big city allowed individuals to challenge and explore gender identities. A large African-American and Latino community meant that the New York drag scene was incredibly diverse - it was for this reason why RuPaul Charles moved to New York. However, discrimination, especially racialised bigotry, meant that New York's LGBTQ+ community was very politicised. Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as how different forms of oppression overlap, and New York's LGBTQ+ community definitely experienced it. It was not uncommon for an individual to face classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and trans-misogyny. It is not surprising that many activists for gay, Latino, African-American, and women's rights came from New York. Audre Lorde describes in I am Your Sister (1985) how lesbian rights activists did not emerge from nowhere - she herself had marched for black rights with Martin Luther King. One of the key figures in the gay rights movement was already prominent in the New York gay community long before Stonewall: Marsha P. Johnson. Originally from New Jersey Marsha P. Johnson was an African-American trans-woman who performed drag. Before moving to New York she thought that being gay was 'some sort of dream' and officially came out when waiting tables in Greenwich Village in 1966. Performing drag cheaply she explored nonconforming gender identities, and became involved in the early movements against police brutality and homophobia.

The Stonewall Inn in September 1969

Gay clubs were regularly subjected to raids by police throughout the 1960s, except for one: the Stonewall Inn. The reason for this was that it was mafia owned - the mafia used Stonewall for their activities and bribed the local police to turn the other way. Located in Greenwich Village, the heart of New York's gay community, it became the largest gay club for its mafia connections. The mafia had no love for the gay community; instead, it was through pragmatic reasons. Bribing the police kept them away, or made them come early evening when no-one was there, and by turning Stonewall into a gay bar it allowed a clientele openly persecuted by police to come without fear that one would rat them out. Mafia signs were all over Stonewall: it lacked running water, the alcohol was heavily watered, and for a while women, non-conforming individuals, and drag queens/kings were barred. When this ban was lifted one of the first new costumers was Marsha P. Johnson. Despite poor conditions in the bar it was well loved. It was a place where the LGBTQ+ could be free to be themselves without the fear of persecution and police brutality - as long as they arrived after the early evening raids. 

The Stonewall Uprising

June 1969 was an election period which was always a precarious time for the gay community, and this coincided with the ruthless Lieutenant Seymour Pine being transferred to the Manhattan vice squad with orders to clean up the mafia in Greenwich Village. Within three weeks five gay bars had been raided, some of them permanently closed, and on June 23 Stonewall had been raided. Pine wanted to hurt the owners of Stonewall, who had given him abuse, so the police made an unexpected raid at 1.20 AM on June 28 when over a hundred people were at the bar. The police made a few degrading arrests - New York law required you to wear at least three garments of clothing which corresponded to your genitals or face arrest. Being in a bar where drag queens/kings, trans-women and men, and gender non-conformists frequented this meant many were subjected to abuse. People refused to give them IDs and to enter bathrooms for their genitals to be checked - this was actually legal for police to do, so much were the LGBTQ+ community persecuted back then. The police had not brought back-up so they had to wait for paddy wagons to arrive to take away those who had been arrested, but tonight, unlike normally, the crowd did not disperse. Onlookers rang their friends from pay phones who came to join those already there. Braver individuals taunted, jeered, shouted 'Gay Power', sang the song of the Civil Rights movement 'We Shall Overcome', and performed camp dances as a means of protest. By the time the wagons arrived over 150 had gathered at Stonewall. Pine stated that:

Instead of the homosexuals slinking off, they remained there, and their friends came, and it was a real meeting of homosexuals.

When the wagons arrived the police they continued brutalising those arrested to an increasingly angered crowd. Some through coins yelling 'Let's pay them off' while others shouted 'Pigs' as they threw beer cans. What sparked the violence was when the police forcibly tried to arrest someone, possibly the mixed-race butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie, who shouted 'Why don't you guys do something?'. A brick/stone was then thrown at the police; now widely believed to be by Marsha P. Johnson. The crowd then fought with the police. Quickly, the police radio broke so they could not call for backup, and they opted to barricade themselves in the Stonewall Inn. Decades of persecution spilled out and the crowd put the bar under siege throwing rocks through the windows, making Molotov cocktails using cigarette lighters and cans, and even using an uprooted parking meter as a battering ram. Sylvia Rivera, a Latino transgender woman, remembered thinking that: You've been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it's our turn!... It was one of the greatest moments in my life.' The crowd started chanting 'We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls' in protest of the arriving riot police. To the police's surprise they got into a small scale guerrilla skirmish with unorganised gay groups; they would chase off rioters, who would then regroup and chase off the police. 

The rioting continued into the next day. As the gay community had been so downtrodden the papers initially could not believe that it was done on their own volition - instead they tried to argue that the Black Panthers or the anti-Vietnam War Students for a Democratic Society had been behind the riot. Sylvia Rivera even saw Marsha P. Johnson climb a lamppost to drop a heavy bag onto a police car. Beat poet Allen Ginsburg said that 'Gay power! Isn't that great!...It's about time we did something to assert ourselves' and 'You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago'. Graffiti emerged declaring 'Drag Power!', 'Gay Power!', and 'Legalize Gay Bars!' emerged across Greenwich Village in solidarity. By 4 AM on June 29 the rioters had dispersed ending the riot, but beginning the gay rights movement.

Aftermath

Martin Boyce remembered the Riot, 'When it was over and some of us were sitting exhausted on the stoops, I thought, My God, we're going to pay so desperately for this, there was glass all over. But the next day we didn't pay. My father called to congratulate me. He said, "What took you so long?" The next day we were there again. We had had enough. Every queen in that riot changed.' Immediately, things did not change - raids on gay bars would continue until homosexuality was decriminalised in New York in 1980 - but things started to move. The Mattachine Society on July 4 marched holding hands in Washington; tame today but very taboo in 1969. One of Stonewall's main militants, Craig Rodwell, on June 28 1970 organised the first New York Pride march to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riot while others cropped up in other cities. He could only have achieved this thanks to a bisexual woman called Brenda Howard who planned the march and organisation of the march itself. The initial Pride marches were very radical being called 'Gay Liberation' and 'Gay Freedom' marches, as well as 'Gay Pride', to openly state their rights. Gay activism - although very divided along gender, sex, sexuality, class and race - did manage to make notable marks on society. The feminist National Organization of Women (NOW) had expelled lesbian activists through fear of opponents using homophobia to discredit the group. Lesbian activists managed to force NOW to admit lesbians in 1970 and fight for lesbian, and bisexual, rights. Importantly, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in 1969 to campaign for equal rights by figures including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Not only battling LGBTQ+ bigotry, it adopted an anti-capitalist platform, solidarity with the Third World and Black Panthers, and attacked traditional gender roles. It was very important as it was the first gay rights group to have 'gay' or 'lesbian' directly in its name. The GLF would inspire gay rights movements to emerge in Canada, Brazil, and Europe, and it had smaller split-offs to focus on specific issues. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to support drag queens and transgendered youths on the street or prison, and Lavender Menace by  Martha Shelley, Lois Hart, and Michela Griffo to fight for lesbian rights. The gay rights movements would have peaks and troughs - homosexuality was slowly destigmistised and accepted, but bigotry prevailed. During the AIDS crisis the US government purposefully dragged its feet about fighting the epidemic as it largely affected poor, LGBTQ+, and non-white communities costing thousands of lives in a wilful act of neglect. In 1992 Marsha P. Johnson was murdered and the police did little to investigate the murder; the murder case was only reopened in 2012 and her murder is still unresolved. 

Conclusion

Edinburgh Pride 2019

As someone who identifies as pansexual, and is currently questioning their gender identity, the Stonewall Riots is a personal important piece of history for me. It marked the day when the LGBTQ+ community said 'enough is enough' and decided to fight back. Since the 1980s Pride has started to lose its radicalism, and is increasingly being taken over by companies - the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall this year has tempered that in some areas. Since 1969 the situation for LGBTQ+ communities have been improving. Gender and sexuality is slowly being decolonised as Native Americans have brought back the Two-Spirit identity, South Asia has started recognising hijras, and African countries are starting to reverse the anti-gay colonial era laws, most recently Botswana. In many regions of the world gay marriage is legal, people can get sex changes, and intersex peoples are now being recognised. However, a lot of work is still needed. Uganda, Brunei, and Tanzania have recently instituted harsher laws criminalising homosexuality, in 2018 Romania tried to issue a referendum to ban gay marriage, and hate crimes against LGBTQ+ peoples are on the rise. In the UK, where I live, within the last year a lesbian couple was attacked by a group of teenagers on public transport when they refused to kiss in front of them; following a recent transphobic article by the BBC hate crimes against trans-people rose by 81%; and at Edinburgh Pride transphobes attacked an 11-year old non-binary individual after a good year of transphobic stickers being plastered around the city. This is why we must remember Stonewall. The fight was not won in 1969, it only began. To liberate ourselves we must look to the fights of the past. At Edinburgh Pride I saw a group of transphobes, ironically one was wearing a shirt depicting Marsha P. Johnson, but were roundly booed, despite the claims in the media. Bigotry may be growing in strength, but Stonewall's legacy means that it won't remain unchallenged.

Your LGBTQ+ author at Edinburgh Pride 2019

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Linda Hirshman, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution; How a Despised Minority Pushed Back, Beat Death, Found Love, and Changed America for Everyone, (New York, NY: 2013)

-Michael Kasino, Pay it No Mind - The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson, (2012)

-Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Rights, (New York, NY: 2009)

-David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked a Gay Revolution, (New York, NY: 2010)

-David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution, (New York, NY: 2006)

-Audre Lorde, I am Your Sister, (New York, NY: 1985)

-Naoko Shikusawa, 'The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics', Diplomatic History, 36:4, (2012), 723-752

Thank you for reading and I hoped you found it interesting. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

Paleo Profiles: Meganeura

Meganeura monyi

A common feature of media depicting prehistoric environments is the presence of giant insects or other arthropods. In reality, the truly giant invertebrates were not as common as they are often depicted, but that does not mean that they did not exist. They exist even today - the goliath beetles can reach over 11 centimetres in length (about 4.3 inches). However, during the Carboniferous period (358-298 million years ago) arthropods got to truly staggering sizes - a millipede called Arthropleura could grow to as long as a human is high. One of these giants was the Meganeura - a giant relative of today's dragonflies. 

Discovery and Fossils

The Meganeura was discovered in 1880 in among coal in Commentry, France, and five years later a palaeontologist called Charles Brongniart. He would become one of the pioneering palaeontologists in the study of insect evolution; he would often return to the coal sites in Commentry which regularly offer new and interesting insects from the Late Carboniferous. In 1885, Brongniart would look at the fossil and name it Meganeura, (Large-Nerved), for the perfectly preserved network of veins in the wings of the dragonfly-like insect. Luckily, palaeontologists have managed to unearth many specimens from Commentry, and in 1979 another well-preserved specimen was discovered in Derbyshire, northern England. We have discovered so many specimens that it is possible to identify three different species: M. brongniarti, M. monyi, and M. vischerae.

Biology

Meganeura size, Prehistoric-Wildlife.com

Despite their appearance Meganeura were not actually dragonflies. Instead, they belonged to a now extinct order called Meganisoptera, but better known as griffinflies. Griffinflies are currently classed in the same order as contemporary dragonflies and damselflies, so they are closely related to the insects which we recognise today. Meganeura and other griffinflies, like the even larger Meganeuropsis, were far larger than any current living dragonfly. The largest member of the odonta family, a damselfly from Central and South America called Megaloprepus caerulatus, has a wingspan of 19 cm (7.5 inches) whereas the smallest Meganeura specimens had a wingspan of 65 cm (25 inches)! Meganeura was a true giant of the Carboniferous skies. The largest species, M. monyi, could have a wingspan of up to 75 cm. This is about the same size as a pigeon, so the next time you see someone throwing seed at them just imagine a dragonfly that size. Insects share several body parts which are present in Meganeura. One of these is how the Meganeura got so massive. Across the body of insects and other arthropods are holes called spiracles, which can be seen on the moth larva below:

The spiracles of an Indian moon moth larva, wikipedia.org

Spiracles lead to a series of tubes called trachae, and smaller ones called tracheoles, which allows the arthropods to breathe through a process called diffusion. Substances move from an area of high concentration to low concentration, so oxygen moves from the air to the tissues through the trachae and tracheoles while carbon dioxide moves the other way. When we look at the atmosphere of the Carboniferous this will explain why the spiracles and trachae allowed the Meganeura to grow so large.

To imagine what a Meganeura looked and lived in life just look at today's damselflies and dragonflies. Meganeura would start life in the water as a nymph preying on other aquatic life, including other nymphs, until they grew large enough to take to the air. Brightly coloured and very fast they would dart through the air of the Carboniferous swamps catching smaller insects on the fly. Dragonflies and damselflies are predators rapidly striking and catching prey so Meganeura would do the same. As modern dragonflies are territorial, to have the best perches to lunge from after food, so would the Meganeura. It takes a lot of energy to keep up the rapid wing beats needed to sustain fast and agile flight, so dragonflies need a monopoly on possible prey in their vicinity. With the smallest Meganeura being three times larger than the largest of modern dragonflies or damselflies it required a lot more energy - luckily its prey was also fairly large. Dragonflies and damselflies have a unique mating system forming a circle or heart shape with the ends of their abdomens, as well as seeing males fighting over females. Imagine seeing that with dragonflies the size of pigeons!

When and Where

Meganeura in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters

The Meganeura lived at the end of the Carboniferous period between 305 and 299 million years ago. This was during the Paleozoic, and many forms of life we recognise today did not exist - at least on the land. The first reptiles had arrived, but they small, being able to easily fit in the palm of your hand. If you wanted to look for large vertebrates you would have to look in the water - amphibians like Proterogyrinus resembling crocodiles or monitor lizards would roam the shorelines. Meganeura has been found in the coal rich regions of Western Europe - particularly northern England, Commentry in France, and some remains in Scotland. The swamps which existed during the Carboniferous over millions of years fossilised and formed coal - the Industrial Revolution relied on the burning of plants from millions of years before the first dinosaur evolved. The Carboniferous was wetter, hotter, and richer in oxygen compared to today's atmosphere. Today, the air we breathe is roughly 21% oxygen (unfortunately that is rapidly changing due to carbon emissions), but in the Carboniferous it was around 35%. Plants and trees were the reason for this. The bacteria which decomposes foliage and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had yet to evolve to fully breakdown plant matter. As a result, more carbon dioxide was taken in by plants but not released through decomposition creating an atmosphere with greater oxygen content. Hotter and wetter environments not only created swamps across the world, but it also allowed more forests to flourish. This was the perfect environment for griffinflies. Lots of water to lay eggs, and flourishing plant life allowed more animal life to eat. It also allowed arthropods to grow to giant sizes.

As we discussed earlier, insects breathe using spiracles leading to tracheoles. They are also used for thermoregulation - water can exit and enter the spiracles, so arthropods can close the spiracles to stop water loss. An atmosphere rich in oxygen gave arthropods the opportunity to grow larger - more oxygen allows larger bodies without compromising diffusion. This is why the Carboniferous forests became coal after millions of years; humans are now releasing their carbon. The humidity affected this as well. Larger bodies mean larger spiracles, and a larger surface area to lose water from; a humid environment heavily reduced the amount of water lost. Carboniferous swamps allowed Meganeura to grow large without suffocating or dehydrating. We see this today - the largest damselfly is found in the rainforests of Central and South America, and the goliath beetles are found in the rainforests of central Africa. Scientists at Arizona State University raised insects in controlled oxygen rich environments, and found that, over just a few generations, their size rapidly increased. Another theory has emerged which also explains the size of Meganeura and other arthropods. Unlike adults, larva cannot control their oxygen intake, and oxygen can be dangerous in high quantities - that is why you get light headed when you breathe directly from oxygen canisters. In an oxygen rich environment regular sized larva could potentially be killed from too much oxygen. However, a larger size means that larva can safely take in oxygen without posing a health risk, this leads to larger adults. Finally, palaeontologists have also stated that Meganeura could grow to such large sizes as they had few large predators. The only fully terrestrial animals were either invertebrates and small reptiles, so Meganeura could become large thanks to lack of competition.

Extinction

Why then did the Meganeura go extinct? The same thing which is currently driving thousands to millions of species to extinction now: climate change. While we know what is causing contemporary climate change (our own actions), we still are unsure of what caused the Carboniferous climate shift. From around 305 to 300 million years ago the planet became both warmer and drier. This devastated the swamps which covered particular Europe and North America. As swamps started disappearing this put increased pressure on the habitats of Meganeura and other large invertebrates, like the 2 m long millipede Arthropleura. Swamps also trap carbon dioxide, so as swamps vanished the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose. The bacteria which decomposed foliage and trees also began to evolve, and decompose dead trees in higher numbers releasing carbon dioxide which otherwise would not have been released. Between shrinking forests and bacteria releasing more carbon dioxide the Meganeura could not adapt. A small mass extinction event happened - the Arthropleura went extinct around 300 million years ago and the last Meganeura followed it 299 million years ago. Griffinflies continued to exist until the early Permain with the even larger Meganeuropsis existing until 283 million years ago. The drop in oxygen levels and disappearance of giant swamps meant that griffinflies could not compete, especially as reptiles bounced back quickly from the Carboniferous extinction event. The Age of Invertebrates soon gave way to the Age of Reptiles.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Robert Dudley, 'Atmosphere Oxygen, Giant Paleozoic Insects, and the Evolution of Aerial Locomotor Performance', The Journal of Experimental Biology, 201, (1998), 1043-1050

-'Meganeura', Prehistoric-Wildlife.com, [Accessed 22/06/2019]

-Alan Cannell, 'The Engineering of the Giant Dragonflies of the Permian: Revised body mass, power, air supply, thermoregulation, and the role of air density', Journal of Experimental Biology, 221, (2018), 1-7

-Michael May, 'Heat Exchange and Endothermy in Protodonata', Evolution, 36:5, (1982), 1051-1058

-PBS Eons, 'The Age of Giant Insects', YouTube, 18/09/2017, [Accessed 22/06/2019]

-Gauthier Chapelle and Lloyd Peck, 'Polar Gigantism dictated by Oxygen Availability', Nature, 399, (1999), 114-115

-'Reptile's Beginnings', Walking with Monsters, (2005), BBC, 15 December

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. For other Paleo Profiles we have a list here. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

World History: Colonialism and Imperialism

One of the most influential aspect of history which shaped the present day was the rise of European, and later American and Japanese, empires in Africa and Asia. We briefly looked at colonialism when we discussed Britain in India and the rise of modern capitalism, but today, we will look at this in greater detail - especially the European empires in Africa. One of my specialities is colonialism in Africa, which I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on, so this post will primarily look at the impact of colonialism and imperialism on Africa. However, we shall still look at other regions as a means of cross-comparison - such as India and southeast Asia. Colonialism would greatly shape the history of the world, and its impact is definitely felt today; especially as in many areas colonialism continues.

Origins

The EIC logo

We saw the origins of nineteenth century imperialism taking root centuries prior when we looked at earlier colonialism. Europeans, initially Spanish and Portuguese, formed trading alliances in Asia and Africa in order to benefit from new resources. In 1510 Portugal captured the city of Goa in India, and formed a 'factory' - an armed fortification where trade could take place. They were later joined by the English, later British, East Indian Company (EIC), French East Indian Company, and the Dutch Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). These trading companies formed alliances with local rulers in order to better monopolise trade in regions - when the British edged France out of India during the Seven Years' War in 1765 the Mughal Emperor granted the EIC the legal claim to collect tax in Bengal. These alliances were not limited to India - the VOC made alliances with Indonesian rulers to monopolise spice, and the Portuguese made alliances with the Kongo Kingdom to gain access to gold, slaves, and rubber. The Atlantic Slave Trade emerged due to this formation of trade-based alliances - the kingdoms of Dahomey and Asante traded slaves, ivory, and gold in vast quantities in return for firearms and textiles. In turn, they would use the slave trade to give them the edge over states further from the coast. Walter Rodney argued that this would begin the underdevelopment of Africa - the African economy would be devoted to supplying slaves for the benefit of Europeans limiting their ability to develop their own economy. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth mercantilism gave way to industrial capitalism and modern capitalism. Industrial production required large quantities of raw materials which slavery and empire offered. As described by Shashi Tharoor: Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India's thriving manufacturing industries. The Bengal textile exports were estimated to be worth over 6.5 million rupees until 1753 amounting to a quarter of global trade in textiles; a sizeable rival to Britain's growing industrial economy. Imposing duties and tariffs of up to 80% (according to Tharoor) was designed to wipe out the competing industry. 

Empire in Africa developed for similar reasons. After the decline of the slave trade in the early-1800s European powers tried to develop 'legitimate commerce' in order to replace the now illegal profits from slavery. As in India and southeast Asia, imperial rule in Africa began not from formal agents of power (like colonial bureaucrats and the military), but by informal agents of power like traders, scientists, and especially missionaries. We shall discuss some of this later, but traders and missionaries were vital in the development of colonialism. A concept of Africa being a 'land of darkness' requiring salvation mixed with growing secularism in Europe and America, so Christian missions ventured inland to 'save' Africa. Often Christian missions claimed to be doing more than just spreading the gospel - aiding trade, spreading medicine, or even fighting slavery. The topic of my dissertation, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was formed in 1857 with the purpose to 'fight slavery' and 'spread the Light of Christ'. Antislavery, often mixed with anti-Arab racism, was a prominent feature of UMCA reports. Industrial steamships allowed better transport by the 1850s, and better medicines allowed some form of protection against diseases like malaria. This would pave the way for the 'Scramble for Africa'. The 'Scramble' was sparked thanks to the Berlin Conference of 1884/5. Wanting to enrich his small nation, and himself, King Leopold II of Belgium founded the International African Association, and hired explorer-missionary Henry Stanley to traverse the Congo in 1876. Along the river, Stanley would form treaties with local leaders and form trade depots so Leopold could claim sovereignty over the region and the lucrative production of ivory and rubber. However, France found out so began their own project by sending out Pierre de Brazza in 1881. Often these treaties left out that African leaders had to cede their land - when Tio chief Makobo signed one with Brazza in 1880 he thought it was a defence pact against the Belgians. Fearing being left out German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called a conference in Berlin inviting the major European powers, and the US, who would then carve up Africa.

Orientalism

The Snake Charmer (1880), an Orientalist painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904

In this post I want to look at a socio-cultural history of colonialism, but in order to do so we have to look at an important idea - Orientalism. In 1978, Palestinian theorist Edward Said published his groundbreaking work Orientalism. He argued that Occidental perceptions of the Middle East were subjected to power relations - 'The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” …but because it could be…made Oriental'. Colonialists came to the Middle East with preconceived notions, and a belief that their own culture was superior. Misunderstanding of colonised culture made it appear decadent and barbaric. Said's theory has been highly influential - my own writing has been inspired by his. However, it does have its flaws. For one, Said wrote about the Middle East only - it does not map neatly onto other areas of the world. Gayatri Spivak has also identified an important critique in her landmark work, Can the Subaltern Speak?. Post-colonial theorists had focused on indigenous sources to break out of imperial narratives, but these sources were written by indigenous elites so sidelined the voices of 'subalterns' - those excluded from hegemonic power. Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amal further critiqued Said by arguing that there is little class analysis of Orientalism; Said largely discusses high culture sources, and pays little account to how class came into colonialism. Nevertheless, Orientalist theory is important, and as we shall see, Orientalist views influenced how colonised regions are seen to this day.

Forging Identities

Ganesh became widely worshipped thanks to British rule in India

As argued by Jean and John Comaroff, 'Colonialism was simultaneously, equally, and inseparable a process in political economy and culture'. Ideas of culture, faith, and even ethnic identity were subjected to change under colonial rule. Informal agents of power, especially missionaries and anthropologists, were integral to the formation of these ideas. Moreover, local elites were deeply involved in this - elites had to manage both local ideas and the wants of colonial officials. For example, Nicholas Dirks has discussed how modern caste developed under British rule. Pre-colonial caste was subject to change, and although Brahmans were supposed to supersede Kshatriyas, in reality Kshatriyas held greater power. Kshatriyas worked with the British, according to Dirks, to place themselves in power. This is further prevalent in Africa. In East Africa identity was subject to change - in what would become Kenya the only difference between a Kikuyu and Maasai in certain areas was due to how you were circumcised, it was possibly for a parent to have one Maasai child and one Kikuyu child. Missionaries and anthropologists were important in reifying and categorising identity. Helen Tilly has discussed how Africa became a 'living laboratory' for anthropologists where they could debate the lives of local peoples. Links between ideas which they knew were forced onto indigenous culture, and ideas of one group could be forced onto a different group. An example can show this well. Leading UMCA bishop Edward Steere in 1869 when in Magila, northern Tanzania tried to convert the local peoples to Christianity. Steere argued that they had no concept of a soul, despite belief in spirits, but disliked a local idea of 'kizuli' which was seen as an immortal breath. He found it 'a puzzle...how the breath could be immortal' and that kizuli was 'thoroughly and hopelessly heathenism'. He instead used an idea from Mbweni, Zanzibar for the soul writing that 'the people understood "Roho" to mean 'the heart'. I did not know it before. However, I suppose that the heart is a very fair analogue for the soul. It is a very great deal better than "Kizuli"'. Despite 'Roho' being from an entirely different culture, it was applied to mean the 'soul' and today local languages, and Swahili, uses 'roho' to mean this.

Anthropologists built upon what earlier informal agents of power had started, especially after the First World War in Africa, and used local peoples to formulate their ideas. At times colonial officials acted as amateur anthropologists as it would directly benefit themselves. How better to govern people than to 'study' them. Of course, this was heavily dehumanising and intrusive to the peoples being subjected to these anthropological studies. C.W. Hobley was an administrator in Kenya and wrote about the Kikuyu in Bantu Beliefs and Magic (1922), while Charles Dundas around Kilimanjaro wrote about the Chagga in Kilimanjaro and Its People (1924). We see these Orientalist depictions of African culture in these works. Dundas wrote that Chagga creation stories resembling Christian creation stories had to be due to an 'ancient Semitic connection' as Christian missionaries had only been in the region for a few decades; a perception that Africans were rooted in tradition meant that they surely could not have belief subjected to change from recent influences. Not only does Dundas ignore the presence of Islam along the coast and centuries of trade with the Middle East possibly introducing these ideas, but he contradicts himself by stating that white Europeans are ruling in the Chagga afterlife. Similarly, Hobley exhibits these views. He lists over sixty 'curses' called thahu, which he compares to sin, which the Kikuyu rigidly live by - one of the things which can implement a thahu is a dog knocking over a pot - with the worst being a man seeing a girl undergoing circumcision during irua, the ceremonial rite of passage. However, African-American anthropologist Ralph J. Bunche was allowed to see it in 1941, and local chief, Koinange, even threatened to take his daughters from the ceremony if Bunche was barred from seeing it. 

Forms of Colonial Rule

Colonial rule took many different forms across even the same empires. Rule by companies often predated formal rule - the EIC in India until 1857, the VOC in Indonesia until 1799, and the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) until 1906 in the Congo. As we have already looked at, capitalism and imperialism marched hand-in-hand so they positioned themselves as a way to extract resources from colonised regions. Formal rule which replaced company rule built upon these institutions - these companies attempted to 'reform' indigenous cultures at the same time trying to make a profit. Company rule could end due to loss of profit (with the VOC), mismanagement (the VOC and the EIC's inability to deal with the 1857 Indian Rising), or brutality (with the ABIR). The Belgian Congo became synonymous with colonial brutality. To maximise rubber production (from 100 tons in 1890 to 6,000 in 1901) Leopold oversaw long work hours in poor conditions enforced through violence. Individuals, including pregnant women and children, were forced to work over 80 hours a week with the viboko (hippo-hide whip) hanging over them. In 1904 Roger Casement issued a report called King Leopold's Rule in Africa detailing the atrocities, such as the depopulation of the Bolobo mission station which saw its community decimated from 40,000 to 1,000, and the brutal mutilations as punishment for fleeing forced labour. Casement's book featured the infamous photo by Alice Seeley Harris of a man called Nsala in Wala district mournfully looking at a severed hand and foot, the only remains of his five-year-old daughter. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) depicts an ivory collector, Marlow, working for ABIR going insane with greed and power.

Nsala looking at his daughter's foot and hand

'Indirect rule' was a common form of colonial rule. This was coined by Frederick Lugard in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa to describe a form of rule where the British, and other colonial powers, would rule through local elites. Lugard would govern in Nigeria operating through local leaders, like the former Sokoto rulers. This was not limited to Africa - France ruled through Vietnamese and Cambodian kings and the Dutch ruled through Indonesian sultans as well. This was a cost effective way to rule large areas cheaply - Britain barely had a few dozen individuals operating in Nigeria. Settler colonialism saw large communities of white settlers displace indigenous peoples from their land in order to establish their own communities. We saw this in South Africa, Rhodesia, Algeria, Australia, the American West, Taiwan, and Hokkaido to name a few notable examples. Today, white families still hold the majority of land in Zimbabwe and South Africa. African settler colonies saw indigenous Africans being reduced to tenant farmers who had to find work on white farms. Indirect rule could be mixed with settler colonialism - Kenya is a good example of this. The colonial government seized over 7 million acres of land to form the White Highlands while, simultaneously, implementing indirect rule for larger ethnic groups - like the Kikuyu. A further form of colonialism, which still exists today, is informal empire; foreign powers could exert varying economic and political power over weaker states. At times this paved the way for formal colonial rule - Britain and France used Egypt's debts to build the Suez Canal to exert control, the US used American plantations in Hawaii to overthrow the monarchy, and Japan used railways and political influence to informally control Korea and north China before formally annexing them. China is the perfect example of informal empire. British opium imports were used to justify a war in 1839 resulting in Britain taking 'treaty ports', like Hong Kong, where Britain could exert free control. Other powers including France, Russia, Germany, and Japan similarly carved up China forming their own treaties granting them political and economic influence.

Adaptation to Empire

The Masasi Church

Empire greatly shaped the demographics and cultures of the colonised peoples. Indentured servitude created a significant Indian diaspora across the world. Regular famines under British rule put incredible strain on communities, so Indians - especially Bengalis, Tamils, and Gujaratis - engaged in indentured servitude to escape famine despite the brutality of the labour system. As a result, South Africa, east Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania developed significant Indian populations. The Uganda Railway, constructed in 1895, was primarily built with Indian labourers. Eventually, thriving and successful Indian communities, over 84,000 in Uganda by 1940, emerged. White farmers in Kenya, after 1929, became angered that Indians, like Mohamed Ahmed, were gaining enough wealth to own land, so campaigned the colonial office to prevent their land ownership. Those from wealthier families, or in the right circumstances, could use imperial structures to become deeply involved in the colonial project. The UMCA heavily relied on Leonard Pesa and Cecil Majaliwa to convert Africans, and they too infused racism to Africa in their rhetoric; Pesa said that 'evils would tend to disappear' under European rule. Meanwhile, Mohandas Gandhi became a lawyer and travelled to both South Africa and Britain; future president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, was educated at Makerere College; and Senegalese president Leopold Senghor managed to attend university in Paris. Work and demographics shifted thanks to imperialism. Increased urbanisation meant that primarily rural cultures became involved in urban economies, or economies geared towards industrial consumption. For example, industrial peanut production became important to Senegal, so much so that women began singing folk songs about how peanuts were more dependable than men. Koreans moved to cities like Tokyo and Osaka to work in industry forming vibrant Korean communities. While in the metropole there were discussions of reforming work this was not the case in colonial states. Corporal punishment and forced labour remained common - the Congo Free State was only targeted as it went beyond 'acceptability'. 

As we saw when we looked at India, reforms were subject to being contested. Ostensibly benevolent reforms - like medicine and education - were often used to increase colonial power. Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism would explain how colonial medicine was distrusted as it was linked to colonial powers, and the fact that colonial doctors ignored the needs of colonial patients. Censuses in India to prevent female infanticide were used to keep tract of peoples, bringing women into education were used to reinforce female domesticity, and medical programmes, while healing patients physically, could cause major mental damage. Janice Boddy has discussed how the Wolff sisters in 1930s Sudan tried to reform female circumcision and midwifery. Part of their reforms placed more emphasis on the midwife to make birth safer; by doing so they inadvertently took agency away from the mother. Colonised peoples did adapt colonial changes, everything from faith to language. In Singapore 'Singlish' emerged combining English, Malay, Tamil, Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese is a notable example. As France placed emphasis on making Africans citoyens noirs formally educated Africans could use French courts to improve their own rights. 

Race and Sex

An infamous Pears' Soap ad depicting The White Man's Burden

Our next post will be about racism so we'll discuss it more there, but it is vital to understand empire. Race thinking was integral to how empire was structured. Certain ethnicities, called 'races' or 'tribes', were deemed superior so colonial powers chose to rule through them - in Rwanda and Burundi Germany, and later Belgium, declared the Tutsi to be 'natural rulers' so had to rule over the Hutu. In India, the Public Service Commission in 1886 declared that the British Raj was made up of 'passive' Hindus, 'lawless' Muslims, 'manly' Punjabis, and 'effeminate' Bengalis. As early as the 1810s a woman called Saartjie Baartman was kidnapped from South Africa and forced to perform in a freak show, shaking her hips to accentuate her large buttocks. When she died she was even put on display in a museum. Racial scientists would use Saartjie Baartman to formulate their eugenics and social Darwinist theories. Human zoos emerged across the worlds including at the 1878, 1889, and 1900 Parisian World's Fair which featured a 'Negro Village', and a Japanese exhibition depicted 'savage' Ryukyuans, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Ainu. Anne McClintock has emphasised the intersection between commodity capitalism and colonial racism. Soap, in particular, was used with it being linked to 'white civilisation' against 'unwashed black savagery'. Pears' Soap regularly featured Africans becoming white thanks to soap, proudly proclaiming that it was doing its part in 'The White Man's Burden'. Ann Stoler has linked racism to the fragility of white identity, especially with the idea of interracial relations. Originally, concubinage had been allowed in Dutch Indonesia, however, this changed by the early-twentieth century for fears of 'racial impurity' and mixed race children, the 'fruits of a regrettable weakness'. White women were seen as tempting non-white men, due to white male fears of racial mixing. In 1926 in Dutch New Guinea rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a non-white man would result in the death penalty. The rape of a non-white woman by a white man would not result in death, however, indicating a fear of white prestige being challenged.

Resistance to Empire

A colonial depiction of the death of Major-General Gordon during the Mahdist War

Empire was never simply accepted by colonised peoples. Many of those who resisted colonialism have since become icons of national history since independence. For example, the queen mother of the Asante Kingdom, Yee Asantewaa, in 1900 led a rebellion against British rule in what would become Ghana laying siege to Kumasi. When we looked at India we discussed the 1857 Indian Uprising - growing anger over over-reach by British rule and mismanagement sparked a rebellion. However, British divide-and-rule policy, divisions among the rebels, and British armaments meant it was crushed. Violent resistance to colonial rule could vary in different ways. Some, like the Anglo-Zulu War, was a clear-cut case of trying to prevent colonial rule. Some was due to political misrule. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi in Sudan calling for a restoration of Islam and the purging of the corrupt Ottoman and Egyptian rulers. In 1884 the Mahdi defeated the British, and it took until 1899 for British rule to be re-established. Putting down rebellion was incredibly destructive. In German South-West Africa, modern Namibia, the German settlers and soldiers dispossessed and abused the Herero and Nama communities. In January 1904, a hundred Herero horsemen arrived at Okahandja to solve an inheritance dispute, but the local commander, Lieutenant Ralph Zurn, declared an uprising was underway. What followed was the German colonial army under General Lothar von Trotha issuing an extermination order resulting in the massacre of the Herero and Nama peoples. In January 1904 the Herero population was around 80,000 - by December 1905 it was about 15,000. It was to be the first genocide of the twentieth century, and sadly it would not be the last. Non-violent resistance could also take place. Gandhi and other Indians began non-violent protest against South African segregationist policies, something which would pave the way for his satyagraha protests against British rule in India. Japan tried to replace Korean with Japanese, so Koreans formed Korean language societies in the cities. The destructive schooling system for Native Americans and First Nations in the US and Canada aimed to destroy indigenous culture by taking them from their families, and raising them in abusive boarding schools. They were taught Christianity, and were beaten if they spoke their own languages. Children managed to resist by fleeing back home, and the Ghost Dance movement emerged in the 1880s to revitalise Lakota culture. It took a massacre by the US army to crush this movement. All these aspects of resistance would pave the way for future anti-colonial resistance and decolonisation.

Legacies and Conclusion

The legacies of colonialism is intrinsically felt today. Racism and Orientalist views of the former colonised world still persists today - from movies like Aladdin to how the news presents events in Africa and the Middle East. The political boundaries formed by colonial rule, and what happened in them, touches every country to this day. Divide-and-rule policies has caused deep ethnic and religious divides in Nigeria, India, and Pakistan to name a few. The legacies of German and Belgian rule in Rwanda regularly led to massacres after independence resulting in genocide in 1994. With colonies geared towards supplying the metropole with raw materials this ensured that after independence this is still the case. Zambia's economy was geared towards the export of copper, but when copper prices plummeted in the 1970s it devastated the Zambian economy. For this reason, former colonies, or informal colonies, remain tethered to their old colonial overlords, or new powers. Even now, former French African colonies have to pay a tax to France as 'gratitude' for bringing them 'civilisation'. One of the reasons why liberal democracy has largely failed to take root in most of Africa, as well as other colonies, is that there was no history of democracy before independence, and they simply have not been allowed to. We shouldn't really discuss the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, instead we should discuss how it evolved thanks to decolonisation.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavour, (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015)

-Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, (London: Hurst & Company, 2017)

-Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 1978)

-Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995)

-Richard Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 1800 to the Present, Second Edition, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

-Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

-A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The History of the UMCA, 1859-1896, (London: Office of the UMCA, 1897)

-Charles Dundas, Kilimanjaro and Its People, (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1924)

-C.W. Hobley, Bantu Beliefs and Magic, (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1922)

-Ralph J. Bunche, 'The Irua Ceremnony among the Kikuyu of Kiamba District, Kenya', The Journal of Negro History, 26:1, (1941), 46-65

-Thomas Spear, 'Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa', The Journal of African History, 44:1, (2003), 3-27

-Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

-Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late-Nineteenth Century, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995)

-Ann Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures', American Ethnologist, 16:4, (1989), 634-660

-Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World, (London: Bloomsbury, 2011)

-Nicholas Dirks, Castes of the Mind, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

-Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, Trans. by Haakon Chevalier, (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1959/1980)

-Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (London: Penguin, 1902/1956)

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. The next World History post will look at the origins of modern racism. For other World History posts please see our list. For other blog posts please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

World History: Capitalism and Socialism

Today we're looking at two ideas which have shaped the world today: capitalism and socialism. We looked briefly at these ideas when we looked at the Industrial Revolution, but we will expand on them today. Some form of capitalism and socialism have existed for centuries across the world: Joyce Appleby joked that historians of capitalism have stated that it started repeatedly since the Roman Empire; Peter Marshall has stressed how ancient Daoism and Buddhism can anachronistically be described as leading themselves into being anarchist; and the Zapatistas in contemporary Chiapas, Mexico have stated that their socialist policies are in continuation with indigenous practices. This is important to bear in mind as today we'll largely be looking at the development of modern capitalism and socialism - this leads us to a focus on Europe and North America. However, when I can, I want to expand this to look at developments in capitalism and socialism outside the Euro-American world. Before we begin, I also want to preface this post by stating that I am a socialist, so I will likely be more critical of capitalism than some other histories which you might read - such as Appleby's history of capitalism referenced in this post.

From Mercantilism to Modern Capitalism

A French seaport in 1638 during the height of French mercantilism

A basic definition of capitalism is an economic and political system where trade and the way goods are produced, the means of production, are in the hands of private owners. This is a broad definition and describes many societies throughout history, and one of the main forms which this took was mercantilism and merchant capitalism. Merchant capitalism, in particular, we have seen throughout the World History series, and could be found in most regions of the world - especially India, China, and Japan. Mercantilism, meanwhile, is a form of capitalism which aims to see the maximisation of a state's exports - trade and consumption was seen as finite, so it was believed that to survive you needed a monopoly on trade. This led to the formation of large companies, as it was a safer investment for wealthier individuals to own shares in a company than entirely rely on your own capital as in the past. A major mercantilist in England, Thomas Mun, was influential in the formation of the English East India Company (EIC), and similar ventures opened with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Hudson Bay Company in Canada to name two prominent ones. Mercantilism required state intervention in order to protect trade, so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries protectionist policies were implemented to edge out competitors, and there were even wars - especially between the English and Dutch. However, by the late-eighteenth century mercantilism started becoming routinely criticised. The best known critic is that of Adam Smith. Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher, and was highly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment which led him in 1776 to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith did not live in a vacuum: it is no coincidence that his ideas of liberty were being repeated by other economists as American revolutionaries and Thomas Paine were calling for political liberty. In Wealth of Nations Smith broke from traditional narratives that humans were unpredictable and capricious, instead he argued that 'principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave'. Smith argued that the 'invisible hand' of the free market should govern economics; states should take a backseat and allow the supply/demand generated by markets, caused by human purchasing power, to govern economies. It was human nature to naturally lead to productivity and the best market solutions.

Adam Smith

Smith based his writings on economic developments in Britain since the 1600s, and this leads us back to a discussion we had when we looked at the Industrial Revolution, why did modern capitalism emerge in Europe? Max Weber argued that it was due to the 'Protestant work ethic' - this falls apart when we look at the rapid industrialisation of Japan in the 1870s. Modern, industrial capitalism primarily emerged in Britain and the Netherlands for several reasons. The first is weakened monarchical power - the long history of republicanism in the Netherlands and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Britain resulting in the execution of Charles I gave their respective parliaments more power. This prevented possible restrictive laws on markets from being passed, and gave non-royals the ability to forge legislation - it is no coincidence that the UK and US quickly adopted aspects of Wealth of Nations. Changes in the countryside played a great influence - crop rotation and new crops from the Americas, like potatoes, allowed more crop production and population growth. Due to increasing crop yields this drove down the price of food which allowed people to have greater ability to purchase goods. In England, the Enclosure Acts, which Karl Marx placed great emphasis on for the formation of modern capitalism, placed common land in the hands of private owners which, in turn, forced tenant farmers off of land and into urban areas. Britain's easy access to coal, and the high numbers of waterways in the Netherlands and Britain allowing for easier transport, allowed for industrialisation to take place. The first chapter of Marx's Kapital explains well how this promoted the origins of industrial capitalism. He uses the example of a coat being made of 20 yards of linen, but is worth double due to the value of labour. As the factory owner owns the means of producing the coat they keep the profit after the value of the goods and labour has been taken out. To maximise profit you have to reduce the value of labour without overproducing - he uses diamonds in this case, they are valuable as they are hard to get, but if they were common their price would decrease. Mechanisation made the production of commodities faster and easier reducing the hours needed to produce our coat, so factories emerged to house the machinery and increasing urban populations created a workforce to work in the factories. Finally, modern capitalism could not exist without the exploitation of colonised peoples - as argued by David Landes, industry needed slavery. Britain and the Netherlands were deeply involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and imperialism through the EIC and VOC. Raw materials could be produced abundantly and cheaply in India, Indonesia, and the Caribbean, and the colonised regions opened up markets for the selling of finished products.

The Capital Revolution

In 1848 Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that the new capitalist, bourgeoisie class 'has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades'. Wherever capitalism touched it greatly changed. The most notable example is the impact on the environment. Lands completely changed as they were uprooted for mining and construction - the construction of the Suez Canal managed to link two of the major seas. The burning of fossil fuels warmed global temperatures putting us, unfortunately, on the current path to climate catastrophe - smoggy cityscapes became common in late-nineteenth century art. Before 1811 the peppered moth in England was white, but soot from chimneys in northern England made the trees appear darker so they rapidly evolved to be black. Thanks to deindustrialisation since the 1970s these same moths are returning to their whiter colouration as trees are less sooty. Capitalism created new industries and made older ones more profitable creating demographic shifts. In Britain, cities like Glasgow, Birmingham, and Manchester dwarfed older seats of power, so much so, that several acts had to be passed in parliament redistributing where parliamentary seats were. Gold rushes in South Africa, California, and Australia saw booms in population as people rushed to make a fortune from gold, or from miners. In Australia 'bushrangers' preyed upon prospective gold miners, and some have become subject to folk legend, like Nat Kelly. These regions saw other demographic changes. California saw an influx of immigrants from China and Mexico, and Australia from Germany and China which today influences the demographics of the regions. Africans started moving to the cities, and in the South African gold mines different ethnic groups started interacting, and new ideas of sexuality even emerged. New groups, the bourgeoisie, started supplanting traditional elites. Although new capitalists in Japan were often from poorer samurai families, and intermarriage between poor samurais and wealthy merchants had happened before 1868, Japanese conservatives in the 1870s and 1880s feared capitalism believing it was disrupting the Confucian order of the country. There was a push and pull between old elites and the new: Prussian Junkers in Germany remained influential until World War Two but ceded ground to new industrialists; and while British aristocrats balked at the idea of allowing steel magnate Andrew Carnegie into their 'circle' they had to begrudgingly marry their children to American industrialists and allowing a Jewish banker, Lionel de Rothschild, into the House of Lords in 1858. However, this did not stop the Rothschilds from being subjected to intense antisemitic attacks - a topic for when we look at racism in a future post.

Japanese women in a basket weaving factory

The bourgeoisie were not the only class to emerge thanks to capitalism - there was also the working class. We see different cultures and identities emerge consequently. Prior to industrialisation, women could find some form of emancipation thanks to textile works - they could make their own textiles in their home. The factory saw the means of production taken out of their hands which limited their agency. We will explore the idea of 'separate spheres' more when we look at the origins of feminism in a future post, but it is important to reference it here. This was an idea, primarily in Europe and the US but it was also adopted in Japan, that there were two spheres: the public, of work and politics dominated by men, and the private, of the home and family dominated by women. This was less the case for working class women - working class women, and children, regularly worked in factories or other industries. In 1882, women comprised three-quarters of textile workers in Japan, and these figures were replicated across industrial societies. Factory life was hard regardless of age and gender - to save costs owners allowed poor and dangerous conditions to flourish. Injury and death was common, and reformers largely focused on child and female labour when criticising poor working conditions. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York burnt down killing 146 garment workers, of which 123 were women, which caused outrage and the laws passed in order to improve work conditions. Women were not passive in this. E. Patricia Tsurumi has discussed how women resisted sexual abuse and poor work conditions through go-slows, strikes, running away (over 60% of Kanebo mill workers between 1905 and 1915 did so), and singing insulting songs: The owner and I are like spinning machine thread/ Easily tied, but easily broken. 

New Cultural Worlds

Carnegie Hall in 1910

An emergence of a new class with purchasing power created a new and exciting world. As argued by Eric Hobsbawm, the home 'was the quintessential bourgeois world, for in it...could the problems and contradictions of his society be forgotten or artificially eliminated'. The domestic sphere emerged to ensure that the home remained central in society - this is especially prevalent in Japan when Meiji reformers after 1868 cast the nation as one family. In Britain, Christmas was redeveloped to be about family just as much as Christ; Christmas trees, songs, and dinners were meant to symbolise the warmth of the family. The public, both bourgeois and working, looked to Queen Victoria - firmly out of political life the royals served as something to emulate, so the German Prince Albert introducing the German tradition of Christmas trees to his family was adopted by everyone. Wealthier women could work before marriage in clerical employment, but they were expected to give this up when they got married. It is notable that these women also became reformers. City life was seen as breeding sin, vice, and poverty, so they formed organisations to tackle this. The Women's Christian Temperance Movement in the US is a good example. The first suffragettes, like Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK, were also moneyed women, and they aimed to use their position to gain the vote. Clothing has always been used to signify class, and capitalism continued this trend. However, new consumption allowed those who could afford it to dress like the wealthy. This was even the case at the fringes of capitalism. Jean and John Comaroff have discussed how, before colonial rule, Tswana royals in southern Africa controlled access to European clothing and wore it to meet with Europeans. Entertainment could now be purchased. Poor and wealthy went to shows, sometimes together to the scandal of society, and holidays emerged. The Rokumeikan in Japan became a scene where elite could sip drinks and do the waltz combining European and Japanese formal wear. New and old elites started making contacts for the first time - aristocrats had to allow nouveau riche into their circles, and they became the patrons of culture. Andrew Carnegie sponsored the construction of venues, like Carnegie Hall, and even expeditions to discover dinosaurs. 1916 saw oil tycoon John Rockefeller become the first billionaire, and financier J.P. Morgan, supposedly, joked that, when asked how much it costs to own a yacht, replied 'if you have to ask, you can't afford it'.

Empire and Capitalism

Khama III, Chief of the Bamangwato and Sir Albert Spicer, London Missionary Society Treasurer

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin famously stated that imperialism was the final stage of capitalism, Hannah Arendt argued they marched hand in hand. Regardless, empire and capitalism were intrinsically linked. Colonial rule saw the economies of colonised societies to geared towards the export of raw materials and the import of finished goods - as late as the 1950s Britain tried to make nut production the crop of Tanganyika in east Africa. Although it is an exaggeration to say that Britain broke the thumbs of Bengali textile weavers, Britain did break Bengal's textile production to prevent competition. As we saw when we looked at British rule in India, key parts of the Indian continent was converted to the production of raw materials, primarily cotton, in what Romesh Chandra Dutt in 1902 described as the 'drain theory'. Britain had prevented the development of an Indian economy 'draining' it of resources. This had devastating direct consequences. When crops failed, as they were prevented from growing crops on land for cotton or saffron, it created devastating famines - a tenth of Orissa's population died in the 1865-6 famine, 3.5 million died in Madras and a million in Mysore in the devastating 1876-8 famine. While capitalism prevented famines during crop failure in Europe, it made it far worse in India. Capitalism was often used as a way for colonial expansion - Britain used opium to edge its way into China, and Britain and France used loans to Egypt in order to enforce their hegemony, and the US used companies to oust governments in Central America. Meanwhile, Leopold II of Belgium formed a company to rule the Congo for him. Today's Democratic Republic of the Congo has its shape due to traders setting up stations along rivers to best monopolise rubber and ivory. The Congo Free State, similarly, saw some of the worst atrocities in colonialism where Congolese were brutally enslaved, beaten, and killed in order to extract resources. A leather whip, the viboko, became the symbol of Belgian rule as Congolese were forced to work over 80 hours a week in poor conditions. Elsewhere, there were hopes to bring the colonised into a capitalist market. The work of the Comaroffs is especially interesting in this regards. The London Missionary Society (LMS) in southern Africa particularly tried to introduce consumerism, linking consumerism to Christian faith. Tswana were encouraged to buy European clothing as a sign of faith, and Tswana, in turn, adapted it for themselves - children and unmarried women wore pre-Christian clothing and wore European later. I want to discuss this more in our next World History post as we've just scratched the surface of colonialism and imperialism here.

The Origins of Modern Socialism

Marx and Engels

Conditions created by capitalism, although it brought benefits, it also brought intense suffering. Poverty, disease, and alcoholism were just some of the problems which capitalism either caused or accentuated. There were reformers who hoped to relieve the poor, such as York confectioner Seebohm Rowntree, but others rejected socialism entirely. Instead of private individuals owning means of production workers should own it - this was socialism. As we've already mentioned, some form of socialism have existed in some form across the world and history - Peruvian Marxists have argued that the Inca were 'feudal communists' as they did not use markets. Regardless, the first of the modern socialists emerged with the 'Utopian socialists' like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon, although George Lichtheim describes them as 'doctrinaires' instead. These socialists argued that self-governing communities should be formed based on egalitarian ideas - Fourier is believed to have coined the term 'feminism' and advocated for homosexual emancipation. However, utopian socialists were later criticised by a new generation of socialists for being utopian. The most notable of these were the 'scientific socialists' of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels in particular in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) argued that utopians created new ideas with no practical way in achieving them, whereas 'scientific socialists' looked at real world conditions and developed theory from there. Marx was born into a German Jewish family (which converted to Christianity to avoid antisemitic laws), and had a long history of radical politics. He was influenced by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel and adapted his ideas of dialectical materialism. Human history was a conflict of classes driven by ideas, a thesis combats and antithesis before reaching a synthesis which, in turn, forms its own antithesis. Engels was the son of a German factory owner, and became upon seeing the horrific conditions of his father's Manchester factory became radicalised. Mary Burns, an Irish worker in his father's factory, greatly influenced his views, and in 1845 wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marx and Engels became close friends and regularly worked together joining the Communist League. Inspired by the 1848 revolts Marx and Engels wrote their most influential piece - The Communist Manifesto - setting out their ideas in a way for workers to easily access.

In France, a different theorist emerged called Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who rejected the idea of the state entirely - Marx and Engels had advocated the proletariat, the producing class, seizing the state in order to bring about socialism. In 1840 his text What is Property? declared that 'Property is Theft', and that rejecting property and state could the proletariat be liberated. He declared, as well, that he was an 'anarchist', but, unlike later anarchists, he believed that markets could exist under socialism. Also, he was very antisemitic and sexist, so much so that he was denounced by many other anarchists, although he did state that 'In my ideal society I would be guillotined as a conservative'. Meanwhile, a Russian theorist, who became involved in the 1848 Czech Rebellion, made his way to France - Mikhail Bukanin. Bukanin was influenced by Proudhon but rejected the idea of having a market in any form. Louis Blanqui, meanwhile, controversially argued that a small cabal should take control of the state to aid the working peoples. Despite their clashes, Marx and Bukanin helped form the International Workingmen's Association, better known as the First International, in 1864 uniting all socialists and trade unions in order to plan out revolution. However, it was deeply divided and women were barred until 1865. In 1867 Harriet Law became the first female member, but she remained its only female member.

The Paris Commune

1871 proved to be the most important year in leftist history. Louis Napoleon declared war on Prussia but was roundly defeated and abdicated leaving France in disarray. The peoples of Paris rose up, and a crowd of women marched upon the local barracks seizing cannons and weapons. Leftist journalist Louis Delescluze and Polish officer Jaroslaw Dabrowski were elected to lead the newly formed Paris Commune. Proudhonists, Blanquists, libertarian socialists, and scientific socialists made up the ideology of the Paris Commune, and this is shown by their policies. Guillotines were symbolically burnt to show a break with the violent French Revolution, the Church and state were declared to be separate, the Louvre was turned into a arms factory, the Vendome Column depicting Napoleon was torn down, and workers given control over companies. Women were integral to the Commune where Louise Michel became one of the most influential figures in the revolt, and the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés was formed by socialist bookbinder Nathalie Lemel and Russian exile Elisabeth Demitrieff. The Women's Union demanded women's education, divorce, suffrage, and an end to capitalism. The Commune was very international - French, German, Russian, Spanish, and even Algerian individuals joined together in protecting the Commune. However, when the French Third Republic got together intense street fighting began and the Commune was brutally crushed. Afterwards, the First International became heavily divided over why the Paris Commune failed. Marx in The Civil War in France (1871) argued that the communards were too quick to dismantle the state, if they had taken it over they could have better defended themselves. Meanwhile, anarchists like Bukanin argued that it failed as they left too much of the state intact - no one took over the Bank of France which then funded the French army. Marx kicked the anarchists out of the First International, and since then the left has been divided between Marxists and anarchists. Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck commented that 'Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!'

Developments with Socialism after 1871

A collection of Japanese anarchists including Osugi Sekae and Ito Noe

Anarchism and what would become Marxism would continue to develop after 1871. Marx and Engels continued expanding their ideas - Engels released his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Marx would eventually release his very influential Das Kapital. Marx's ideas were always changing and he rejected the term 'Marxism' as it implied that he had the answers - he believed people should start with his ideas. Marx and Engels were also keen to dispel cult of personalities which occasionally cropped up. However, the rift with the anarchists was never healed and anarchists were barred from the Second International when it was formed in 1889. Anarchism similarly developed - a Russian aristocrat Peter Kropotkin - would become the most influential anarchist thinker helping influence anarcho-communism, and Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta helped influence anarcho-syndicalism. Marxism and anarchism went beyond their roots with European male thinkers as new thinkers and activists applied their ideas to new situations. For example, Russian Marxist Alexandra Kollontai blended Marxism and feminism, and is seen as the founder of Scandinavian feminism for her activism in the region during World War One. Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin in Germany would try and combat sexism in the labour movement, and try to apply class emancipation to the suffrage movement. Across the world activists blended local ideas with new ideas - Peter Marshall has argued that Mohandas Gandhi was even inspired by anarchism. Swami Vivekananda reinterpreted the Bhagavad Gita to craft it as a libertarian text which future anarchists, like Aurobindo Ghose, would build upon. Japanese censors prevented the translation of Marxist texts, but Kotuku Shusui managed to escape censors by translating anarchist texts - it took until the 1920s for Lenin to be translated into Japanese! Kotuku asserted that anarchism fit with Daoism and Zen Buddhism helping form the paper Heimin. Feminist Ito Noe was an influential writer for the paper Bluestockings calling for female and class emancipation. In the 1920s the anarchist movement was brutally crushed, Ito was strangled in prison, so Marxism replaced anarchism, but, even today, the Japanese Communist Party has strong anarchist leanings. In 1905 the influential 'One Big Union' the International Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Chicago. Founded by figures like Irish socialist James Connolly, Jewish thinker Emma Goldman, and 'Big Bill' Haywood, among others, it was inspired by anarchist thought to unite the labour movement. Russia was a site of both Marxist and anarchist movements, but the most significant figure to come from this was Vladimir Lenin. A history of secret societies due to state repression influenced what would become Marxist-Leninism. Lenin argued that the workers had to be guided by a revolutionary vanguardist party, as Lenin would succeed in establishing the Soviet Union Marxist-Leninism would become the dominant Marxist thought among twentieth-century communist parties.

Conclusion
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been greatly shaped by the clash between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism broke the old feudal world and forged a new revolutionary system, but, in doing so, created suffering for the masses. Socialism emerged as a force to resist and liberate the masses. Joyce Appleby argued that capitalism was a cultural system just as much as an economic one - as we have seen this is accurate. Capitalism formed new identities and cultural practices, as argued also by Marx and Engels the means of production forms a superstructure which all things in society comes from. Equally, socialism developed its own culture - as seen in the Paris Commune egalitarian and emancipatory ideas influenced a desire to emancipate workers and women. The anarchist-Marxist divide continues to divide the left - they even fought one another during the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars. These ideas continue to shape our lives today, and many of the debates we have now have been argued for the last century and a half. When we see a pop-up ad on the internet its origin lies back with Adam Smith in 1776, and the means to critique it with Marx.

The sources I have used are as follows:
-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (London: Abacus, 1975)
-Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010)
-Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (New York, NY: MetaLibri, 1776/2007)
-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Penguin, 1848/2015)
-Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, (London: Redwood Press, 1887/1971)
-Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (London: Progress Publishers, 1880/1970)
-John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
-George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970)
-Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
-T.C.W. Blanning, 'The Commercialization and Sacralization of European Culture in the Nineteenth Century', in T.C.W. Blanning, (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 120-147
-E. Patricia Tsurumi, 'Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan', History Workshop, 18, (1984), 3-27
-Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, (London: Fontana Press, 1993)
-Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, (London: Verso, 2015)

Thank you for reading. Next time we will look at imperialism and colonialism, and how that affected colonised peoples. For other World History posts we have a list here. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.