A Short History of the World (18 page)

Napoleon Bonaparte: Emperor of the French (1799–1815)

Filled with revolutionary zeal, the French rapidly achieved a number of stunning victories. The exploits of one young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, were recognised by the French to such an extent that in 1799, at the age of 30, he was able to seize power and claim a military dictatorship without too much opposition; all this despite his inglorious defeat at the hands of the Englishman Horatio Nelson during Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Egypt and block Britain’s route to India. Five years later, Napoleon became emperor of the French, inviting the Pope to crown him in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, but famously putting the crown on his own head at the last minute in a sign that he was in control not only of France, but also of his own destiny.
 

The British continued to frustrate Napoleon’s ambitions, notably smashing a combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of south-west Spain in 1805 – a battle during which the British destroyed or captured some 20 French and Spanish ships without losing one themselves. Napoleon’s anger at this defeat was perhaps somewhat assuaged by the death of his old adversary, Admiral Nelson, who was mortally wounded. Despite this defeat on sea, the French continued to have great success on land, defeating Austrian, Russian and Prussian armies in quick succession.

Increasingly concerned by the possibility of Europe becoming unified under a hostile power, the British organised a new anti-French coalition, an act which naturally infuriated Napoleon. Unable to invade Britain while the British navy commanded the English Channel, Napoleon sought to implement a blockade of British goods, forbidding their import into any part of Europe under his control – or even allied to him for that matter – and declaring all British ships open game. He hoped that this action would force Britain to sue for peace.
 

Most countries fell in line, but the Portuguese, old allies of Britain, proved recalcitrant. This provided Napoleon with a reason to invade the Iberian peninsula in 1808 and place his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. The king of Portugal fled to his colony in Brazil, which was established as the temporary capital of the Portuguese Empire. To Napoleon’s dismay, the Spanish did not accept a French king and, with British help, the entire Iberian peninsula caused Napoleon problems for many years and succeeded in distracting his attention when it needed to be focused elsewhere.
 

Despite these setbacks on the peninsula, by 1812 Napoleon controlled a quarter of Europe’s population and members of his family sat on thrones in Spain, Naples and Holland, creating a new dynastic family in Europe. He even took for his wife Marie Louise, the Habsburg daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis I, who happened to be a niece of Marie Antoinette, the queen the revolution had executed.

Yet it was not only the Portuguese who refused to play ball; the Russians also continued to trade with Britain. Distrusting Russia’s imperial intentions, Napoleon invaded the country in the summer of 1812 with approximately half a million men, but the Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy that deprived Napoleon of food to feed his army. Disease, desertion and an inconclusive battle just outside Moscow at Borodino, in which some 50,000 of his soldiers were killed, meant that Napoleon reached Moscow with only 100,000 of his men.
 

Worse still, when it finally became clear to Napoleon that the Russians had no intention of surrendering, his army was forced into a retreat during the Russian winter. Where desertion and hunger failed to work, ‘General Winter’ and ‘General Typhus’ succeeded. Of the half a million men that had set out, only some 20,000–40,000 returned. The huge number of horses that died en route, estimated by some at up to 200,000, also contributed directly to Napoleon’s defeats over the coming years in a world in which the cavalry could make or break a battle.
 

Like the Habsburg Empire before it, Napoleon’s growing empire was a threat to other European powers. Encouraged by his defeat in Russia, these powers formed yet another alliance against him, advancing together on Paris where, in 1814, Napoleon was forced to surrender. He was sent to exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba, which he was effectively given as a sovereign principality, along with an income and title. Not one to give up easily though, Napoleon escaped from the island, managed to pull together a huge army of loyal soldiers while marching north through France, and waged war in Europe one last time.
 

But his time had passed. He was finally and decisively beaten in 1815 by an allied army led by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo,
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near Brussels, in present-day Belgium, and banished to the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, under British guard and far enough away for him never to cause trouble again. He lived peacefully for another six years before dying of cancer in 1821 at the age of 51.
 

Napoleon’s thirst for power had led to death and destruction and, ‘
far from establishing a united Europe under French command, he accelerated the growth of nationalism which would eventually lead to the First ‘World War’.
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Nevertheless, his numerous reforms changed the way in which Europe was run: he introduced a legal code that serves as the basis for the legal system in many European countries today, and his regime challenged the institutions and beliefs of the old order. For better or for worse, he brought the secularism of the revolution into mainstream thought. It is to Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt that we owe the discovery of the Rosetta Stone that allowed us to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a discovery that subsequently opened up the world of Egyptian history to mankind.
 

The Industrial Revolution (1780s–1900)

Britain was not without its own revolution in the 18th century, albeit one of a different kind. A major turning point in human history, some have gone so far as to call the Industrial Revolution the most far-reaching, influential transformation of human society since the advent of agriculture.
 

Early 18th-century Britain, and most of the world for that matter, was predominantly agricultural, with economic activity focused around products farmed from – or on – the land, chiefly crops and wool. Britain had a small population of five million and modest life expectancy. Malnutrition and famine were common. Moreover, there was no electricity, nor cars or trains, but only wind power, water power, horsepower and manual labour. A person in 1750 could travel no faster than Caesar had travelled 1,800 years previously.
 

In many ways however, Britain was in a good position compared with its continental neighbours. Geographically, ‘
the steady shift in the main trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the great profits that could be made from colonial and commercial ventures in the West Indies, North America, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East naturally benefited a country situated off the western flank of the European continent’.
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For a long time Britain had a monopoly on trade with its northern American colonies which, as with Britain’s other colonies, provided both a supply of raw materials and demand for manufactured goods. The economy had become global and London had taken its place at its centre.
 

Closer to home, other advantages included large deposits of easily accessible coal and iron ore – the two natural resources upon which industrialisation would come to depend – a laissez-faire attitude by the government that encouraged innovation and trade, and a risk-taking private sector with capital to invest. Finally, an absence of internal duties on commerce meant that, compared to mainland Europe, moving goods internally was cheap.

Britain was also on the verge of a population explosion the likes of which it had never seen. Agricultural reform had encouraged larger farms, which increased agricultural output and led to cheaper food. People’s diets also improved thanks to regular imports of meat from the colonies. Advances in medical knowledge and sanitation meant that fewer people died in infancy, and the average lifespan also increased. Importantly, lower prices of food meant that people did not have to spend everything they earned on eating and could therefore purchase other products. This subsequently led to increasing pressure to produce a greater volume of manufactured goods, the most sought after of which were textiles.

Demand for cotton – both from within Britain and from its colonies – was virtually unlimited as cotton was much smoother on the skin than wool and was also longer lasting and cheaper, not to mention easier to clean. Such was the quantity of cotton imports that England banned the import of cotton cloth from India in 1700 in an effort to prop up its own wool industry. Businesses responded by importing raw cotton in order to finish it in Britain. This increased the competition for labour, which became more expensive, thereby raising production costs.
 

It was this combination of increasing labour costs and surging demand that led merchants to explore ways of reducing their costs, rather than increasing their prices, in order to become more competitive. Machines which were developed to speed up production helped make local cotton not only cheaper but also finer and stronger than Indian cotton. However, the industry became a victim of its own success; demand increased to such an extent that the supply of cotton could not keep up. The problem was only solved when an American, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton gin,
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a machine that enabled a worker to clean 50 times more cotton than normal.
 

Despite these great improvements, it was the application of the steam engine to the textile industry that really drove the revolution and changed the face of society. Initially developed to pump water from coal mines in the early 1700s, the steam engine was improved upon in the 1760s by James Watt, a Scottish engineer from whose name we get that of a unit of power: a watt. Two decades later Watt developed a rotary engine that could power machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. The new methods, which increased the amount of goods produced, while decreasing the costs, proved to be the death knell for handlooms.
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In coal, British industry had found a cheap and efficient source of power to take over from dwindling supplies of wood and its by-product, charcoal. Iron makers began preferring coal over wood charcoal as it burned cleaner and hotter. As more and more machines were manufactured out of iron – which was also used to build railway lines, trains and ships – the demand for coal increased. The revolution may well have failed, or at the very least been significantly slower, had Britain not been blessed with an abundant supply of coal.
 

Large profits were made during this time, with industrial capitalists becoming a powerful force to be reckoned with. In order to maximise their returns, many of them invested their capital into the infrastructure required to improve the transport of both coal and finished products. Canals, railways and roads all received significant investment. Steam-powered vessels that did not rely on wind for their propulsion gradually replaced less reliable sailing ships, and steam-powered locomotives revolutionised transport on land.

The improved transportation network, and the economies of scale that resulted from mass-production, put more products within the reach of more people at prices they could afford to pay. The result was a huge boost to the economy. It is even argued that the increased tax revenue that resulted played a large part in the ability of Britain to defeat Napoleon, as it provided funds to which the French did not have access.

There were also profound revolutionary changes in the social structure, with an unprecedented movement of people from the countryside to towns. Initially this was caused by peasants who had been displaced by new agricultural techniques and had migrated to towns reactively in their search for better-paid work, but the growing demand for manufactured goods required a labour force of its own, and people soon began migrating to towns in their millions. Enormous cities developed around manufacturing centres and by 1850 most Englishmen were working in industrial towns. These towns, however, were unprepared for such a large influx of population and this led to its own set of problems.

Rule Britannia: Great Britain Leads the World (1815–1900)

Britain profited greatly from France’s defeat in 1815, gaining the Cape of Good Hope and the strategic islands of Malta, Mauritius and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), among other territories. The blockade on trading with Britain that Napoleon had imposed on his European allies ironically served to give Britain a monopoly on overseas trade that helped it to grow even further. The new territories Britain gained after 1815 also expanded the number of markets for British goods and provided raw materials to feed its growth. By 1850, Britain dominated world trade in manufactured goods, supplying two-thirds of the globe with cotton from the industrial centres of northern England. It also dominated in related services such as shipping, finance and insurance, with the result that London became the largest city in the world. By the turn of the century, Great Britain under Queen Victoria ruled about 20% of the world’s land-mass.

From about 1830, the Industrial Revolution gradually spread from Britain throughout Europe and to the United States. There were numerous reasons why it took other countries so long to industrialise.

France was no longer a real competitor; any nascent industrial development had been interrupted by the French Revolution in 1789. The Napoleonic wars continued to hold France’s attention until its defeat in 1815, which saw the country stripped of much of its empire. Even after 1815 the country had limited coal supplies, a poor transportation structure, and a focus on agriculture, not to mention immature financial markets.
 

Germany, despite an abundance of coal, was still not unified, consisting of a mish-mash of 38 separate states of the former Holy Roman Empire, of which Austria and Prussia were the largest. A failure to co-operate with each other did not lend itself to national progress.