A View From The Left-The Rise of British Imperialism-The Protestant Reformation to the English Revolution (Part One) Workers Vanguard No. 1062	20 February 2015

The Rise of British Imperialism-The Protestant Reformation to the English Revolution

(Part One)

One hundred years ago, World War I, which brought unprecedented suffering and mass slaughter to working people, demonstrated that capitalism had reached its final, barbarous epoch, the epoch of imperialism. As Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin noted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established” and “in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” A small club of wealthy imperialist powers, currently dominated by the U.S., subordinates and oppresses the vast majority of the world’s population. Today, most of Asia, Africa and Latin America, “politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.”

As a world economic system, imperialism took shape in the late 1800s. However, to understand how and why imperialism emerged out of the political and economic logic of capitalism requires going back to the origins of the world capitalist system in the 16th century, some three centuries earlier. This subject was addressed in a presentation by comrade Russell Stoker at the Trotskyist League of Canada/Ligue Trotskyste du Canada Thirteenth National Conference in summer 2013, an edited version of which was printed as a two-part article in Spartacist Canada Nos. 182 and 183 (Fall 2014 and Winter 2014/2015). We reprint below the first part of the article.

*   *   *

This class is about the rise of British imperialism, the first of that economic order to arise. Arguably it was also the first to decline. Because Britain was the first, it represents the “classical” rise of imperialism, which developed quite differently elsewhere. For instance, in America, which had capitalism in its bones, there was no previous epoch of feudalism to overcome; a relatively small indigenous population was easily overwhelmed and militarily crushed by the settlers’ regime. Capitalism developed quite differently too in Germany, France and Japan especially, but that is well beyond the scope of this talk.

Originally I had considered presenting the elements of the structure, the relentless and bloody march of British capital across the globe, etc. But in the end, comrades asked why Britain was first and not Spain or India—and that was a brilliant question.

To attempt to answer that, I have to take us on a bit of a selective romp through the ages, well before the onset of British imperialism. Now I will not be discussing the Scramble for Africa, the Opium Wars, the Near East, China, the French Revolution or even the Napoleonic Wars, which are not at all unrelated to the rise of imperialism and more specifically the rise of British imperialism. In particular I regret giving France such short shrift, but there you go. This is a one-hour climb and I am sure to shift my ladder on many sets of PhD toes—apologies in advance.

The Feudal Order

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

So begins the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847.

What did this class struggle look like in feudal Europe? The early medieval Catholic church, in the absence of printing presses and a literate populace, possessed a virtual monopoly of technical and literary knowledge. The church became the ideological and political power which transcended the local authority of the lords and chieftains, great and small.

As the church vigorously expanded and consolidated its empire and wealth, in alliance with the rising nobility, it came to mirror that nobility in aristocratic structure, ostentatious wealth, corruption and a capricious cruelty toward its subjects. Monarchs were given the authority of church and God when they were crowned by some high clergyman or other.

And the church was far and away the largest feudal landlord, owning up to a third of the land. That included the sovereign papal states. Moreover, many of the clergy were feudal lords in their own right. Later, as trade revived and the new town merchants grew rich from that trade, the landed nobility in the countryside allied with the church to rob the peasantry of their common land and find the means to extort the growing wealth of the merchants. In particular they made use of revenue-generating “indulgences”—the forgiveness of sins for cash—essentially as a form of extortion by threat of eternal damnation.

It became increasingly intolerable for the rising new classes—artisans, merchants, peasant smallholders—to bear the weight and insult of this idle and parasitic class. That impelled the revolt known as the Protestant Reformation. You can read about the German Peasant War, the first key confrontation which culminated in 1525, and its outstanding leader, the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer, in The Peasant War in Germany by Friedrich Engels, which I can’t get into here. Suffice it to say that the bloody end result of the first serious attempt at a bourgeois revolution was a victory for the other side—the old ruling class.

The fractious German nobility was then able to retrench itself in a constellation of decentralized and highly autocratic princely states, which retarded the political and industrial development of Germany.

Meanwhile, Charles V used a monstrous pile of cash from a family of German loansharks—the Fuggers—to get himself christened Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. Charles was the guy who really set to robbing the Americas and got the fires of the counterreformation cooking. I want to highlight the economic and political degeneration of the Spanish towns and cities under Charles V, as opposed to the situation of the towns in England and Holland which were flourishing. This is relevant to why Britain—not Spain, which was far richer—was first to industrialize.

The Spanish towns had been previously compacted by the Moorish incursions, becoming centres of advanced manufacture and economic activity. That period ended with the completion of the Reconquista, a period spanning some 700 years and ending in 1492—the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That also marked the year of the Alhambra Decree by which the Spanish Inquisition forced the Sephardic Jews into hiding or exile from Spain and, later, Portugal. Most went to the more tolerant Ottoman Empire, but some made their way to Brazil where they later played a role in the spread of sugar production to the West Indies. Others, like the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s folks, went north to Protestant Amsterdam.

The Spanish Reconquista, a piecemeal “liberation” from the North Africans, established a sort of realm where Catalonia, Castile, Aragon and such were all semi-independent kingdoms. From there, the kings of Spain dealt with councils, alliances through marriage, negotiations and all of that. Then along comes Emperor Charles V. He was having none of it. He well and truly smashed the independent power of the nobility and laid into the merchants with heavy new taxes to pay back the Fuggers and especially to finance his wars across Europe.

When the nascent bourgeoisie of the Spanish towns, bleeding from the pocketbook, rose up in revolt in the early 1520s, they were crushed. The local town councils were destroyed, and henceforth Spain suffered under an absolute monarch and was thoroughly drained of capital. The urban areas of Spain disintegrated as economic and political entities. The nobility lost its power, but retained privileges totally dependent upon their support to the King. Then, inheriting a Spain which had been bankrupted by his father’s military ventures, Philip II proved to be very much his father’s son. He carried on absolutely, as it were. It’s from him that the Philippines, a Spanish colony for more than three centuries, got its name.

The Reformation in Scotland

Unlike the furious retrenchment of the German nobility or the feudal impoverishment of Spain, the Reformation unravelled feudal relations in England and Scotland, culminating in the English Civil War of 1642-51, which Engels pointedly called the second great bourgeois upheaval. Thomas Müntzer was dead and Martin Luther’s half-hearted measures could not quench the human bonfires set by the Inquisition in Spain or Bloody Mary in England. The Reformers required a harder leader and doctrine, and that they found in John Calvin. In doctrine, the Calvinists loathed all tyranny, all dishonesty, pretty much all moral wrongs of every sort so far as they could determine them. As Engels noted in his 1892 introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords?”

The man who more than any other carried forward Calvin’s war on the corrupt feudal church, and who now moves to the centre of this story, is the totally fearsome figure of John Knox. Knox made it his personal holy mission to turn Scotland into the New Jerusalem. He believed political power was ordained by God but that the power was vested in the people, not in kings and especially not in the Catholic clergy. “Punishing idolatry and destroying tyranny” was a sacred duty God had placed on “the whole body of the people…and of every man in his vocation.”

That meant invading Catholic churches, smashing the religious artwork and driving off the papal clergy who rightly feared for their lives. Knox fiercely despised the political authority of the monarchy. He dismissed the divine right of succession and fervently preached that any monarch ruled by the consent of the people—all tyranny must be destroyed. In 1563 he famously brought Mary, Queen of Scots to tears when he told her as much to her face.

The Calvinists’ emphasis on reading the Bible was a great stimulus to literacy in Scotland. Their primary motivation was putting the common man in touch with the word of God, not seeding the ground for future scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Nevertheless, it is a notable fact that by the time of the Act of Union in 1707, most parishes in Scotland had a school paid for by the Reformed Church of Scotland, and those schools were open to both boys and girls regardless of social status. Scotland, with less than one-quarter of the population of England and Wales, boasted five merit-based universities as opposed to England’s two upper-class institutions. Mind you, the Scottish Highlands remained economically more backward, less literate and more Catholic.

The Reformation in England

The ascension in 1485 of a new lineage in the English monarchy—the Tudor kings who were the victors in the Wars of the Roses—had effectively obliterated the old nobility. Henry VIII, the second Tudor king, broke from Rome and went on to expropriate and redistribute much Catholic property and wealth with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Those nobles who profited from his favour became a sort of nouveau riche, much more closely aligned with mercantile enrichment than feudal land wealth.

The new nobles then proceeded to strip the land of people in favour of more profitable usage. Karl Marx put it this way in Volume One of Capital:

“The great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry.”

Engels succinctly captured the process in an 1881 letter to Marx’s daughter, Jenny Longuet:

“The whole Protestant reformation,…apart from its dogmatical squabbles and quibbles, was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land confiscated.”

As Protestants like to say, “God helps those who help themselves.”

The whole process had been preconditioned by earlier population losses from the Black Death in the mid 1300s. That produced a high demand for labour. Naturally, the much smaller surviving population of peasants worked only the best and most productive land. Combined with an extended period of excellent weather, this likely resulted in bumper crops followed by a slump in grain prices and a corresponding higher cost of city manufactures. Feudal relations would become less and less remunerative to the lords and nobles.

That “Most Catholic” King Philip II, the absolute monarch of Spain, and his gigantic bureaucracy fought tooth and nail to retain the feudal Catholic political economic order. He waged wars against England, France and the Netherlands, wars which effectively and repeatedly emptied the royal coffers. The ill-fated “Spanish Armada” of 1588 was but one episode.

The armada was mostly savaged by a storm, a defeat celebrated in England with a commemorative medal embossed with the words Flavit Jehovah et Dissipati Sunt—Jehovah blew, and they were scattered. The very next year a similar armada was sent by the English Queen Elizabeth against the Spanish. It met a similar fate—being scattered and sunk in a huge gale—but they didn’t sing any songs or strike any medals about that one.

As with the Spanish crown, the wars depleted the wealth of the English queen. She depended financially upon the booty collected by her sea pirates like Francis Drake and also the granting of various monopolies like that of her land pirates of the East India Company.

On the continent, Philip II revived the Inquisition as an ideological terror weapon against the Reformation. If one considers the enormous parasitic bureaucracy of Spain, the vast military expenditures, including the escalating costs of extracting gold and silver from the New World (harried as they were by Drake and company), and the retrograde effort to constrain mercantile trade, etc., it is little wonder the Spanish empire eventually collapsed.

Comrade George Foster of the Spartacist League/U.S. mentioned another interesting factor which worked in both directions, bleeding feudal Spain and enriching the new merchant class. He pointed out that because Spain lacked manufacturing capacity, much of the gold and silver which that empire looted from the New World made its way into the hands of the great manufacturing and banking centres elsewhere. The Spanish people and towns were in fact quite poor. At any rate, whatever successes favoured Rome and Spain in defense of the feudal order were insufficient to stem the tide of history.

The English Civil War

Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, there had been a parliament or council of some sort in England ostensibly representing the “people” to the crown. Regardless of how much the parliament of the 1640s considered itself the representative of the people, it was, as Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted, “based on the most whimsical franchise” (“Where Is Britain Going?” [1925]). The king dissolved and recalled that body as ever he saw fit. Mostly he saw fit to recall it in order to provide funds for his military ventures. Those were not often, if ever, in the best interests of the city merchants who filled the Lower House, which Trotsky wryly notes was found to be three times as wealthy as the House of Lords.

In Scotland, the Calvinists were pressing for independence after a successful revolt in 1637 against taxation and insufferable religious interference by the government of Charles I. Charles recalled the English Parliament and put the squeeze on it to fund yet another foray against the Scots. Parliament resisted. The Royalist forces, short on cash, went ahead regardless. They got themselves badly spanked, and the Scottish army invaded in defense of Parliament—an intervention which accelerated the outbreak of the bourgeois revolution in England.

The English bourgeoisie then set about creating an army of its own in defense of its representative body, the Parliament. It was a bold and insubordinate act, one which posed a revolutionary insurrection against the monarchy. And there’s the rub: as the bourgeoisie gained greater economic power, it became both necessary and possible to fashion a state apparatus better suited to its needs. The New Model Army, created by Parliament in 1645, concentrated in its ranks the most courageous and resolute elements. Very soon those elements far exceeded the determination of the bourgeois parliamentary representatives themselves. To the head of that Puritan army rose one Oliver Cromwell, the great Calvinist leader, a commoner who called to himself like-minded warriors to lead the revolution.

Cromwell’s task was to destroy the tyranny, the tyrant’s court nobility and the tyrant’s natural ally, the High Church, which had maintained a hierarchical form of church governance not much removed from the Catholic Holy See. That task required mobilizing the masses and building the New Model Army with professional soldiers representing the interests of the Parliament, as opposed to the personal interests of one or another lord or baron as had been the medieval practice. Those soldiers were “Roundheads,” that is, lacking the curly big hair wigs of the gentry. The revolutionary army pretty much pounded the gentry’s mercenaries wherever they met.

Charles I then hied-thee-hither off to Scotland of all places, where he promised heaven on earth, and somewhat surprisingly the dim leaders of the Scots said, “well, alright then,” shifted sides, marched off with Charles to mix it up with the New Model Army and basically got what they deserved.

In the fall of 1649, when Cromwell invaded Ireland, Royalist forces from outside were also converging there. The thing is, Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland was not only carried out to defeat the Royalists. It wasn’t simply an extension of the English Civil War on Irish terrain. From the time of the 1641 uprising in Ireland—before the Civil War—both Royalists and Parliament agreed that Ireland must be subordinated to England. The only question was which side would command the English army that would carry this out. As an added incentive for a military conquest, Parliament had passed an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 inviting English moneymen to “invest” in the army, in return for which they were guaranteed Irish land. Under this scheme Cromwell himself put in over £2,000 and had been promised land in Leinster.

Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland was designed to colonize Ireland with settlers by seizing land from Catholic landowners, who were sent to Connaught. Along the way, he expropriated some 2.5 million Irish acres. Tenants were offered the choice of going with the landlord, or remaining to serve the new lord as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Cromwell also instituted severe repression for the earlier uprising; he shipped off a whole mess of the unrepentant Irish rebels to the West Indies as indentured servants.

Marxist historian Christopher Hill describes Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland as “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy” (The English Revolution of 1640). He’s echoing Karl Marx who wrote in 1869 that “English reaction in England (as in Cromwell’s time) had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). Cromwell’s army conquered Ireland, crushed the resistance and seized two-thirds of the land. In addition, Cromwell encouraged colonial settlement of Ireland, particularly from among the most radical regiments in his army, as a way of dispersing troublemakers.

So, to recap, under Cromwell’s leadership the revolution conquered England, smashed a recalcitrant Scotland and defeated rebellious Ireland. The British Isles were thus unified through force of arms under the newly confident bourgeois class. Trotsky relates:

“The British social crisis of the seventeenth century combined in itself features of the German Reformation of the sixteenth century with features of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.

“In Cromwell Luther joins hands with Robespierre.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?”

Parenthetically, it is under Cromwell that the navy becomes a permanent force. Once Charles I famously lost his temper along with his head, Cromwell sagely reasoned that the monarchs of Europe would be right pissed. And so in 1651, directly challenging the Dutch command of maritime trade, Cromwell imposed duties on imported goods. His Navigation Act—essentially a declaration of war—forbade Dutch merchant shipping to English ports or colonies and harried them in “English” waters like the North Sea, the English Channel and so on.

Cromwell rapidly built and manned large naval warships to defend the Commonwealth. They also protected convoys to the English colonies and successfully recaptured Royalist strongholds in the nearby islands, the West Indies and America. The most powerful merchant fleet by far belonged to the Dutch, larger and richer than all the other European merchant fleets combined. During the 17th century Holland had the most advanced capitalist economy in the world. If you wanted in on stock trading or banking or tea, coffee, chocolate, ostentatious spending and high living…well that was Amsterdam all over, not London. And for venal exploitation, corruption and brutal colonialism, you couldn’t top the Dutch East India Company. But the rising British bourgeoisie was a quick study. Eventually the Dutch were beaten, blockaded and otherwise forced to accept Cromwell’s Navigation Act. The English bought up, captured or sank scads of Dutch merchant ships.

And while I am on the subject, that was another advantage the British possessed: they were able to concentrate on building up their navy. Whereas the continental powers had to maintain huge land-based armies, the British could get by with much smaller and less costly strategic forces. And they could be rapidly deployed as fast as the wind—literally—as they were carried by the navy with its big guns and dropped practically anywhere. The British perfected naval military warfare through a century and more of practice against the Dutch, Spanish, Ottoman pirates and privateers, but mostly against the French. That power to project the armed might of the British ruling class anywhere in the world loomed large with the later rise of British imperialism.

The Restoration and After

The landed nobility derisively called the bourgeoisie Whigs, which is thought to come from the Scottish whiggamor or cattle driver, because they had mobilized the plebeian masses during the Civil War. And that became the name associated with bourgeois liberalism—the supporters of a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch shared power with a parliament representing wealthy men of property. As comrade Joseph Seymour noted, “liberalism represented the interests of the bourgeoisie as against the landed nobility on the right and the workers and peasants on the left” (Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism, Spartacist pamphlet, 1998). The landed nobles resented the wealth and power of Parliament and supported a strong monarchy against that.

The English bourgeoisie learned something from gaining political power with Cromwell’s Commonwealth and then losing it after his death when the nobles succeeded in restoring the monarchy and placing Charles II on the throne. Charles inherited Cromwell’s navy, renamed it the Royal Navy and promptly dispatched it to capture New Amsterdam (New York). By the by, Charles II is the guy who signed off on the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly in 1670. The monarchist party of the landed nobility then came to be known derisively as Tories from the Irish word tóraí, which meant a robber. That was not because of the Hudson’s Bay Company—it was because they stole the power from “the people.”

The Royalists exhumed Cromwell’s body, and he and his confederates, both living and dead, were most gruesomely executed. Cromwell’s head was stuck on a spike above Westminster Hall and put on display for a quarter century. But the restoration of the monarchy didn’t end well for the nobility. Their guy proved a little too sympathetic to the Catholic church. The Scots in particular had a rough time. I mean, first they got beaten with a stick by Cromwell, then when their guy finally gets on the throne he decides to force the Presbyterian Scots to kiss his royal arse, as it were. Well, these were John Knox’s people—who were not well known for supplicating any worldly monarch. It is not for nothing that Charles II’s gruesome repression of the 1680s was known as “the Killing Time” in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the English bourgeoisie regroups and enlists the aid of the Dutch Protestant William III of Orange to put down Charles’ successor, the Catholic James II. William is only too happy to oblige, providing Parliament will help with his ongoing war with France. So, William is invited to take the English throne; he comes to town with a gigantic armada, four times the size of the earlier Spanish one. They have a gigantic party; he assumes the throne and signs all sorts of proclamations securing Parliament’s position in governance. James meanwhile is allowed to scurry off across to the continent.

This, the so-called Glorious Revolution, is henceforth lauded as the foundation of the modern constitutional monarchy which enshrined by law a Protestant succession to the crown, and moreover, the constitutional supremacy of Parliament over the king.

This process is mythologized by the ruling class as the “glorious” dawn of true British democracy. However, for black Africans, it represented something else again. By ending the Duke of York’s Royal African Company monopoly on the African slave trade in 1698, the “Glorious Revolution” heralded not the broadening of freedom but the massive expansion of slavery, horrendous servitude in the broiling sun of the British sugar colonies. And that is what truly began to build up the wealth that underwrote the British Empire.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1062	20 February 2015

The Rise of British Imperialism

The Protestant Reformation to the English Revolution

(Part One)

One hundred years ago, World War I, which brought unprecedented suffering and mass slaughter to working people, demonstrated that capitalism had reached its final, barbarous epoch, the epoch of imperialism. As Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin noted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established” and “in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” A small club of wealthy imperialist powers, currently dominated by the U.S., subordinates and oppresses the vast majority of the world’s population. Today, most of Asia, Africa and Latin America, “politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.”

As a world economic system, imperialism took shape in the late 1800s. However, to understand how and why imperialism emerged out of the political and economic logic of capitalism requires going back to the origins of the world capitalist system in the 16th century, some three centuries earlier. This subject was addressed in a presentation by comrade Russell Stoker at the Trotskyist League of Canada/Ligue Trotskyste du Canada Thirteenth National Conference in summer 2013, an edited version of which was printed as a two-part article in Spartacist Canada Nos. 182 and 183 (Fall 2014 and Winter 2014/2015). We reprint below the first part of the article.

*   *   *

This class is about the rise of British imperialism, the first of that economic order to arise. Arguably it was also the first to decline. Because Britain was the first, it represents the “classical” rise of imperialism, which developed quite differently elsewhere. For instance, in America, which had capitalism in its bones, there was no previous epoch of feudalism to overcome; a relatively small indigenous population was easily overwhelmed and militarily crushed by the settlers’ regime. Capitalism developed quite differently too in Germany, France and Japan especially, but that is well beyond the scope of this talk.

Originally I had considered presenting the elements of the structure, the relentless and bloody march of British capital across the globe, etc. But in the end, comrades asked why Britain was first and not Spain or India—and that was a brilliant question.

To attempt to answer that, I have to take us on a bit of a selective romp through the ages, well before the onset of British imperialism. Now I will not be discussing the Scramble for Africa, the Opium Wars, the Near East, China, the French Revolution or even the Napoleonic Wars, which are not at all unrelated to the rise of imperialism and more specifically the rise of British imperialism. In particular I regret giving France such short shrift, but there you go. This is a one-hour climb and I am sure to shift my ladder on many sets of PhD toes—apologies in advance.

The Feudal Order

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

So begins the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847.

What did this class struggle look like in feudal Europe? The early medieval Catholic church, in the absence of printing presses and a literate populace, possessed a virtual monopoly of technical and literary knowledge. The church became the ideological and political power which transcended the local authority of the lords and chieftains, great and small.

As the church vigorously expanded and consolidated its empire and wealth, in alliance with the rising nobility, it came to mirror that nobility in aristocratic structure, ostentatious wealth, corruption and a capricious cruelty toward its subjects. Monarchs were given the authority of church and God when they were crowned by some high clergyman or other.

And the church was far and away the largest feudal landlord, owning up to a third of the land. That included the sovereign papal states. Moreover, many of the clergy were feudal lords in their own right. Later, as trade revived and the new town merchants grew rich from that trade, the landed nobility in the countryside allied with the church to rob the peasantry of their common land and find the means to extort the growing wealth of the merchants. In particular they made use of revenue-generating “indulgences”—the forgiveness of sins for cash—essentially as a form of extortion by threat of eternal damnation.

It became increasingly intolerable for the rising new classes—artisans, merchants, peasant smallholders—to bear the weight and insult of this idle and parasitic class. That impelled the revolt known as the Protestant Reformation. You can read about the German Peasant War, the first key confrontation which culminated in 1525, and its outstanding leader, the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer, in The Peasant War in Germany by Friedrich Engels, which I can’t get into here. Suffice it to say that the bloody end result of the first serious attempt at a bourgeois revolution was a victory for the other side—the old ruling class.

The fractious German nobility was then able to retrench itself in a constellation of decentralized and highly autocratic princely states, which retarded the political and industrial development of Germany.

Meanwhile, Charles V used a monstrous pile of cash from a family of German loansharks—the Fuggers—to get himself christened Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. Charles was the guy who really set to robbing the Americas and got the fires of the counterreformation cooking. I want to highlight the economic and political degeneration of the Spanish towns and cities under Charles V, as opposed to the situation of the towns in England and Holland which were flourishing. This is relevant to why Britain—not Spain, which was far richer—was first to industrialize.

The Spanish towns had been previously compacted by the Moorish incursions, becoming centres of advanced manufacture and economic activity. That period ended with the completion of the Reconquista, a period spanning some 700 years and ending in 1492—the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That also marked the year of the Alhambra Decree by which the Spanish Inquisition forced the Sephardic Jews into hiding or exile from Spain and, later, Portugal. Most went to the more tolerant Ottoman Empire, but some made their way to Brazil where they later played a role in the spread of sugar production to the West Indies. Others, like the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s folks, went north to Protestant Amsterdam.

The Spanish Reconquista, a piecemeal “liberation” from the North Africans, established a sort of realm where Catalonia, Castile, Aragon and such were all semi-independent kingdoms. From there, the kings of Spain dealt with councils, alliances through marriage, negotiations and all of that. Then along comes Emperor Charles V. He was having none of it. He well and truly smashed the independent power of the nobility and laid into the merchants with heavy new taxes to pay back the Fuggers and especially to finance his wars across Europe.

When the nascent bourgeoisie of the Spanish towns, bleeding from the pocketbook, rose up in revolt in the early 1520s, they were crushed. The local town councils were destroyed, and henceforth Spain suffered under an absolute monarch and was thoroughly drained of capital. The urban areas of Spain disintegrated as economic and political entities. The nobility lost its power, but retained privileges totally dependent upon their support to the King. Then, inheriting a Spain which had been bankrupted by his father’s military ventures, Philip II proved to be very much his father’s son. He carried on absolutely, as it were. It’s from him that the Philippines, a Spanish colony for more than three centuries, got its name.

The Reformation in Scotland

Unlike the furious retrenchment of the German nobility or the feudal impoverishment of Spain, the Reformation unravelled feudal relations in England and Scotland, culminating in the English Civil War of 1642-51, which Engels pointedly called the second great bourgeois upheaval. Thomas Müntzer was dead and Martin Luther’s half-hearted measures could not quench the human bonfires set by the Inquisition in Spain or Bloody Mary in England. The Reformers required a harder leader and doctrine, and that they found in John Calvin. In doctrine, the Calvinists loathed all tyranny, all dishonesty, pretty much all moral wrongs of every sort so far as they could determine them. As Engels noted in his 1892 introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords?”

The man who more than any other carried forward Calvin’s war on the corrupt feudal church, and who now moves to the centre of this story, is the totally fearsome figure of John Knox. Knox made it his personal holy mission to turn Scotland into the New Jerusalem. He believed political power was ordained by God but that the power was vested in the people, not in kings and especially not in the Catholic clergy. “Punishing idolatry and destroying tyranny” was a sacred duty God had placed on “the whole body of the people…and of every man in his vocation.”

That meant invading Catholic churches, smashing the religious artwork and driving off the papal clergy who rightly feared for their lives. Knox fiercely despised the political authority of the monarchy. He dismissed the divine right of succession and fervently preached that any monarch ruled by the consent of the people—all tyranny must be destroyed. In 1563 he famously brought Mary, Queen of Scots to tears when he told her as much to her face.

The Calvinists’ emphasis on reading the Bible was a great stimulus to literacy in Scotland. Their primary motivation was putting the common man in touch with the word of God, not seeding the ground for future scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Nevertheless, it is a notable fact that by the time of the Act of Union in 1707, most parishes in Scotland had a school paid for by the Reformed Church of Scotland, and those schools were open to both boys and girls regardless of social status. Scotland, with less than one-quarter of the population of England and Wales, boasted five merit-based universities as opposed to England’s two upper-class institutions. Mind you, the Scottish Highlands remained economically more backward, less literate and more Catholic.

The Reformation in England

The ascension in 1485 of a new lineage in the English monarchy—the Tudor kings who were the victors in the Wars of the Roses—had effectively obliterated the old nobility. Henry VIII, the second Tudor king, broke from Rome and went on to expropriate and redistribute much Catholic property and wealth with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Those nobles who profited from his favour became a sort of nouveau riche, much more closely aligned with mercantile enrichment than feudal land wealth.

The new nobles then proceeded to strip the land of people in favour of more profitable usage. Karl Marx put it this way in Volume One of Capital:

“The great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry.”

Engels succinctly captured the process in an 1881 letter to Marx’s daughter, Jenny Longuet:

“The whole Protestant reformation,…apart from its dogmatical squabbles and quibbles, was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land confiscated.”

As Protestants like to say, “God helps those who help themselves.”

The whole process had been preconditioned by earlier population losses from the Black Death in the mid 1300s. That produced a high demand for labour. Naturally, the much smaller surviving population of peasants worked only the best and most productive land. Combined with an extended period of excellent weather, this likely resulted in bumper crops followed by a slump in grain prices and a corresponding higher cost of city manufactures. Feudal relations would become less and less remunerative to the lords and nobles.

That “Most Catholic” King Philip II, the absolute monarch of Spain, and his gigantic bureaucracy fought tooth and nail to retain the feudal Catholic political economic order. He waged wars against England, France and the Netherlands, wars which effectively and repeatedly emptied the royal coffers. The ill-fated “Spanish Armada” of 1588 was but one episode.

The armada was mostly savaged by a storm, a defeat celebrated in England with a commemorative medal embossed with the words Flavit Jehovah et Dissipati Sunt—Jehovah blew, and they were scattered. The very next year a similar armada was sent by the English Queen Elizabeth against the Spanish. It met a similar fate—being scattered and sunk in a huge gale—but they didn’t sing any songs or strike any medals about that one.

As with the Spanish crown, the wars depleted the wealth of the English queen. She depended financially upon the booty collected by her sea pirates like Francis Drake and also the granting of various monopolies like that of her land pirates of the East India Company.

On the continent, Philip II revived the Inquisition as an ideological terror weapon against the Reformation. If one considers the enormous parasitic bureaucracy of Spain, the vast military expenditures, including the escalating costs of extracting gold and silver from the New World (harried as they were by Drake and company), and the retrograde effort to constrain mercantile trade, etc., it is little wonder the Spanish empire eventually collapsed.

Comrade George Foster of the Spartacist League/U.S. mentioned another interesting factor which worked in both directions, bleeding feudal Spain and enriching the new merchant class. He pointed out that because Spain lacked manufacturing capacity, much of the gold and silver which that empire looted from the New World made its way into the hands of the great manufacturing and banking centres elsewhere. The Spanish people and towns were in fact quite poor. At any rate, whatever successes favoured Rome and Spain in defense of the feudal order were insufficient to stem the tide of history.

The English Civil War

Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, there had been a parliament or council of some sort in England ostensibly representing the “people” to the crown. Regardless of how much the parliament of the 1640s considered itself the representative of the people, it was, as Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted, “based on the most whimsical franchise” (“Where Is Britain Going?” [1925]). The king dissolved and recalled that body as ever he saw fit. Mostly he saw fit to recall it in order to provide funds for his military ventures. Those were not often, if ever, in the best interests of the city merchants who filled the Lower House, which Trotsky wryly notes was found to be three times as wealthy as the House of Lords.

In Scotland, the Calvinists were pressing for independence after a successful revolt in 1637 against taxation and insufferable religious interference by the government of Charles I. Charles recalled the English Parliament and put the squeeze on it to fund yet another foray against the Scots. Parliament resisted. The Royalist forces, short on cash, went ahead regardless. They got themselves badly spanked, and the Scottish army invaded in defense of Parliament—an intervention which accelerated the outbreak of the bourgeois revolution in England.

The English bourgeoisie then set about creating an army of its own in defense of its representative body, the Parliament. It was a bold and insubordinate act, one which posed a revolutionary insurrection against the monarchy. And there’s the rub: as the bourgeoisie gained greater economic power, it became both necessary and possible to fashion a state apparatus better suited to its needs. The New Model Army, created by Parliament in 1645, concentrated in its ranks the most courageous and resolute elements. Very soon those elements far exceeded the determination of the bourgeois parliamentary representatives themselves. To the head of that Puritan army rose one Oliver Cromwell, the great Calvinist leader, a commoner who called to himself like-minded warriors to lead the revolution.

Cromwell’s task was to destroy the tyranny, the tyrant’s court nobility and the tyrant’s natural ally, the High Church, which had maintained a hierarchical form of church governance not much removed from the Catholic Holy See. That task required mobilizing the masses and building the New Model Army with professional soldiers representing the interests of the Parliament, as opposed to the personal interests of one or another lord or baron as had been the medieval practice. Those soldiers were “Roundheads,” that is, lacking the curly big hair wigs of the gentry. The revolutionary army pretty much pounded the gentry’s mercenaries wherever they met.

Charles I then hied-thee-hither off to Scotland of all places, where he promised heaven on earth, and somewhat surprisingly the dim leaders of the Scots said, “well, alright then,” shifted sides, marched off with Charles to mix it up with the New Model Army and basically got what they deserved.

In the fall of 1649, when Cromwell invaded Ireland, Royalist forces from outside were also converging there. The thing is, Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland was not only carried out to defeat the Royalists. It wasn’t simply an extension of the English Civil War on Irish terrain. From the time of the 1641 uprising in Ireland—before the Civil War—both Royalists and Parliament agreed that Ireland must be subordinated to England. The only question was which side would command the English army that would carry this out. As an added incentive for a military conquest, Parliament had passed an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 inviting English moneymen to “invest” in the army, in return for which they were guaranteed Irish land. Under this scheme Cromwell himself put in over £2,000 and had been promised land in Leinster.

Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland was designed to colonize Ireland with settlers by seizing land from Catholic landowners, who were sent to Connaught. Along the way, he expropriated some 2.5 million Irish acres. Tenants were offered the choice of going with the landlord, or remaining to serve the new lord as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Cromwell also instituted severe repression for the earlier uprising; he shipped off a whole mess of the unrepentant Irish rebels to the West Indies as indentured servants.

Marxist historian Christopher Hill describes Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland as “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy” (The English Revolution of 1640). He’s echoing Karl Marx who wrote in 1869 that “English reaction in England (as in Cromwell’s time) had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). Cromwell’s army conquered Ireland, crushed the resistance and seized two-thirds of the land. In addition, Cromwell encouraged colonial settlement of Ireland, particularly from among the most radical regiments in his army, as a way of dispersing troublemakers.

So, to recap, under Cromwell’s leadership the revolution conquered England, smashed a recalcitrant Scotland and defeated rebellious Ireland. The British Isles were thus unified through force of arms under the newly confident bourgeois class. Trotsky relates:

“The British social crisis of the seventeenth century combined in itself features of the German Reformation of the sixteenth century with features of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.

“In Cromwell Luther joins hands with Robespierre.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?”

Parenthetically, it is under Cromwell that the navy becomes a permanent force. Once Charles I famously lost his temper along with his head, Cromwell sagely reasoned that the monarchs of Europe would be right pissed. And so in 1651, directly challenging the Dutch command of maritime trade, Cromwell imposed duties on imported goods. His Navigation Act—essentially a declaration of war—forbade Dutch merchant shipping to English ports or colonies and harried them in “English” waters like the North Sea, the English Channel and so on.

Cromwell rapidly built and manned large naval warships to defend the Commonwealth. They also protected convoys to the English colonies and successfully recaptured Royalist strongholds in the nearby islands, the West Indies and America. The most powerful merchant fleet by far belonged to the Dutch, larger and richer than all the other European merchant fleets combined. During the 17th century Holland had the most advanced capitalist economy in the world. If you wanted in on stock trading or banking or tea, coffee, chocolate, ostentatious spending and high living…well that was Amsterdam all over, not London. And for venal exploitation, corruption and brutal colonialism, you couldn’t top the Dutch East India Company. But the rising British bourgeoisie was a quick study. Eventually the Dutch were beaten, blockaded and otherwise forced to accept Cromwell’s Navigation Act. The English bought up, captured or sank scads of Dutch merchant ships.

And while I am on the subject, that was another advantage the British possessed: they were able to concentrate on building up their navy. Whereas the continental powers had to maintain huge land-based armies, the British could get by with much smaller and less costly strategic forces. And they could be rapidly deployed as fast as the wind—literally—as they were carried by the navy with its big guns and dropped practically anywhere. The British perfected naval military warfare through a century and more of practice against the Dutch, Spanish, Ottoman pirates and privateers, but mostly against the French. That power to project the armed might of the British ruling class anywhere in the world loomed large with the later rise of British imperialism.

The Restoration and After

The landed nobility derisively called the bourgeoisie Whigs, which is thought to come from the Scottish whiggamor or cattle driver, because they had mobilized the plebeian masses during the Civil War. And that became the name associated with bourgeois liberalism—the supporters of a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch shared power with a parliament representing wealthy men of property. As comrade Joseph Seymour noted, “liberalism represented the interests of the bourgeoisie as against the landed nobility on the right and the workers and peasants on the left” (Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism, Spartacist pamphlet, 1998). The landed nobles resented the wealth and power of Parliament and supported a strong monarchy against that.

The English bourgeoisie learned something from gaining political power with Cromwell’s Commonwealth and then losing it after his death when the nobles succeeded in restoring the monarchy and placing Charles II on the throne. Charles inherited Cromwell’s navy, renamed it the Royal Navy and promptly dispatched it to capture New Amsterdam (New York). By the by, Charles II is the guy who signed off on the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly in 1670. The monarchist party of the landed nobility then came to be known derisively as Tories from the Irish word tóraí, which meant a robber. That was not because of the Hudson’s Bay Company—it was because they stole the power from “the people.”

The Royalists exhumed Cromwell’s body, and he and his confederates, both living and dead, were most gruesomely executed. Cromwell’s head was stuck on a spike above Westminster Hall and put on display for a quarter century. But the restoration of the monarchy didn’t end well for the nobility. Their guy proved a little too sympathetic to the Catholic church. The Scots in particular had a rough time. I mean, first they got beaten with a stick by Cromwell, then when their guy finally gets on the throne he decides to force the Presbyterian Scots to kiss his royal arse, as it were. Well, these were John Knox’s people—who were not well known for supplicating any worldly monarch. It is not for nothing that Charles II’s gruesome repression of the 1680s was known as “the Killing Time” in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the English bourgeoisie regroups and enlists the aid of the Dutch Protestant William III of Orange to put down Charles’ successor, the Catholic James II. William is only too happy to oblige, providing Parliament will help with his ongoing war with France. So, William is invited to take the English throne; he comes to town with a gigantic armada, four times the size of the earlier Spanish one. They have a gigantic party; he assumes the throne and signs all sorts of proclamations securing Parliament’s position in governance. James meanwhile is allowed to scurry off across to the continent.

This, the so-called Glorious Revolution, is henceforth lauded as the foundation of the modern constitutional monarchy which enshrined by law a Protestant succession to the crown, and moreover, the constitutional supremacy of Parliament over the king.

This process is mythologized by the ruling class as the “glorious” dawn of true British democracy. However, for black Africans, it represented something else again. By ending the Duke of York’s Royal African Company monopoly on the African slave trade in 1698, the “Glorious Revolution” heralded not the broadening of freedom but the massive expansion of slavery, horrendous servitude in the broiling sun of the British sugar colonies. And that is what truly began to build up the wealth that underwrote the British Empire.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1063	6 March 2015

The Rise of British Imperialism-Capitalism and Slavery

(Part Two)

 

In a preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), V.I. Lenin described how imperialism is “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.” Lenin emphasized that in this period marked by the dominance of finance capital the imperialist powers are impelled to carve up the rest of the globe in a race for new markets, raw materials and cheap labor. The scramble to leech the greatest profits possible through the exploitation of working people is the root cause of wars of imperialist plunder and of the miserable conditions under which the overwhelming mass of the world’s population lives and dies. The only way out for the exploited and the oppressed is through socialist revolutions that expropriate the bourgeoisie’s productive property and establish an internationally planned socialist economy.

We reprint below Part Two of a presentation, delivered at the Troskyist League of Canada/Ligue Trotskyste du Canada Thirteenth National Conference in Summer 2013, by comrade Russell Stoker on the developments that made Britain the first modern imperialist power. The edited version of the talk was first printed as a two-part article in Spartacist Canada Nos. 182 and 183 (Fall 2014 and Winter 2014/15). Part One, which appeared in WV No. 1062 (20 February), covered the Protestant Reformation and 1642-51 English Civil War; the second part addresses the connection between the Industrial Revolution and the slave trade.

In the U.S., as in Britain, early capital accumulation was made possible by the New World’s slave-based agricultural economy. The competing expansionist appetites of the Northern capitalists and the Southern plantation owners eventually reached a breaking point, culminating in the 1861-65 American Civil War. That war, the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, smashed the slavocracy in the U.S. South but did not end the deep-seated oppression of the black masses, which today remains a central feature of this class-divided society. By the turn of the 20th century, U.S. capitalism had entered onto the imperialist stage, and with its ascendancy a long trail of savageries and depredations the world over has followed ever since.

*   *   *

Eric Williams’ book Capitalism and Slavery was a shocker when he wrote it in 1944 and is still controversial today. He ripped the self-righteous mask from the apologists for the British ruling class who claimed the moral high ground and who tut-tutted American slavery because the British had passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act as early as 1807. Williams’ premise is that the profits of the British slave trade financed the Industrial Revolution. Even today, many respectable British academics damn Williams with faint praise, denying the fundamental role of the British slave trade in the development of British capitalism.

It’s entirely accurate to say that the blood and sweat of African slaves were both fuel and lubricant for the Industrial Revolution. Neither the early spice trade with India nor the lucrative extortion of wealth by the land pirates of the East India Company stimulated manufacture in Britain to any great extent. But for Liverpool and Lancashire in England’s northwest, the slave trade was quite a different story.

Liverpool was a sleepy fishing port at the mouth of the River Mersey for 500 years before it was declared a parish in 1699, the year the first slave ship departed from that village. Well, that was a roaring success. The town merchants could see the writing on the wall and the coins falling into their pockets. A few of the more farsighted pooled their capital and in 1715 they built their first wet dock, where ships could be rapidly loaded and unloaded, tied alongside the dock at a constant water level regardless of tides. Otherwise, rowboats were required to ferry goods back and forth while the ship lay at anchor in the river current. That was nearly 100 years before London had such advantages.

Liverpool dominated the trade because it had geographic advantages, especially during wartime, which was most of the time. The port was much farther north and away from the French and Spanish privateers. The Mersey provided cheap transportation from the Lancashire textile mills just inland. It was a natural fit.

Shortly after the wet docks were completed, four or five slave ships were setting out from Liverpool each year. I should mention that these slave ships and their voyages were financed by shareholders. Everyone got in on the action. Even the sons of carpenters and sailmakers found the means to invest and become slave merchants themselves, as did many slave ship captains.

By the mid 18th century, the port was launching some 24 slave ships per year, and thereafter Liverpool went to the head of the class in the British slave trade. Of the 8,000-plus British ships that were purpose-built for the slave trade, over 2,100 were made in Liverpool itself and almost all of those were built after 1750. That works out to one complete ship every ten days.

All those ships required skilled workers to build and outfit them. They required vast quantities of Baltic timber, iron, sails, blocks and tackle and miles of hemp rope, not to mention capital to finance them. The canal-building craze was directly stimulated to cut transportation costs and increase production for both the slave trade and exports to the planter colonies. The manufacture of small arms, gunpowder, chains and shackles boomed. And all those workers needed housing and food.

The shipyards alone represented a vigorous economic undertaking, and they produced a large and growing population and a profitable market for regional agriculture as well. And that is just the ships that were built in Liverpool. Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves, half of them out of Liverpool. Six wet docks were constructed at a cost in excess of one million pounds. Then for ship maintenance there were the dry docks, where the water could be completely drained out.

And none of those 5,000 ships departed empty. Manchester, like Liverpool, was at the very heart of the slave trade. Most of the woven goods pouring out of Manchester factories filled their holds and went to Africa in trade for slaves…or out to the colonies to clothe them. Nor did any ship return empty. They brought back raw sugar for distilleries, molasses, rum, tobacco and later, vast quantities of cotton. All this was part of the slave economy. Lloyds of London, the world’s oldest and largest insurance market, reaped enormous wealth from the Atlantic slave trade.

Sugar Colonies and the Planter Parliament

The Liverpool merchants and Manchester mill owners were just raking in the money and falling over themselves to improve production. But that was chump change to the sugar planters who were already rich as Rockefellers and twice as fat. The sugar plantations were gigantic hellish machines which ground up human lives and sugar cane and squeezed out vast fortunes for the slave owners.

Before they seized upon African slaves, the planters had pressed indentured servants into the fields—mostly poor people, many Irish—and there were kidnappings and corrupt judges who served as press gangs for the planters. But try as they might, the legions of defeated Irish rebels or scrawny souls plucked from the English prisons or off the damp London streets mostly died in their tropical servitude—from beatings, from malaria, or from all manner of ailments and mistreatment.

The planters tried enslaving the native populations as well, but the latter were too few in numbers and failed to perform for their masters. The healthy populations ripped out of Africa proved to be just the forced labour the planters were looking for, and they seized upon them with a vengeance.

It is hard to overstate the wealth the slave sugar generated. Many planters moved their persons back to England at the earliest opportunity and ruled in glorious absentia. Once home, they settled into fine country estates or magnificent town homes. With their great wealth, many bought seats in parliament to protect their interests. The planters’ grip on parliament would have made Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall jealous.

The Slave Trade and Scotland

Glasgow became a major trading port in the 18th century. Not unlike Liverpool, the city was bursting with industry and wealth generated by the slave economy. Sugar refining was the first industrial boon in Glasgow. Before the 1707 Act of Union, which merged Scotland and England to form the United Kingdom, direct trade with the colonies was prohibited, and Glasgow was forced to import sugar from Bristol and to engage in no small amount of smuggling.

Meanwhile, the Scottish merchants were pickled with envy over the booming English trade and decided: “Man! I have got to get me some of this!” They pooled all their ready cash, something like half of the total Scottish capital. Then they outfitted some ships, and in 1698 sailed across the Atlantic to set up a colony of their own in Panama. This was the “Darien Scheme,” which comes down to us as the “Darien Disaster.”

When the English found out, they were having none of it—right shirty [angry] they were—and forbade assistance or trade with the Scottish colonists, who were by now starving and otherwise having a very bad day. Actually, a couple thousand out of the 2,500 colonists perished, for which no tears were shed by the indigenous people I am sure.

Well, things went downhill from there. The English were able to leverage a hostile takeover of Scotland with a big plump bag of cash and the juicy news that Scottish merchants could take part in the lucrative slave trade if Scotland joined in. That was the glorious Act of Union.

The ink was hardly dry before Scottish merchants owned nearly a third of the slaves in the sugar colony of Jamaica, which England had snatched from under Spain’s nose some 50 years previous. Post-1707, Glasgow rapidly came to specialize in the tobacco trade and the wealth associated with that trade washed over the city and along the River Clyde.

As in England, the rapid rise of the wealthy bourgeoisie coincided with the relative decline of the landed gentry and the old society, particularly following the bloody destruction of the Stuart-loyalist Jacobite clans at Culloden Moor in 1746. Amidst the new wealth, scholars and intellectuals began to meet freely to discuss radical new ideas in the taverns and public houses of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. A well-lubricated intelligentsia began to take form, you might say.

The fierce Calvinism of John Knox, which was needed to topple the tyrants, had given way to the enlightened liberals asserting the fundamental importance of human reason and empiricism, which were more useful tenets for capitalist development. The intelligentsia sported a new and optimistic belief that man could improve society and conquer nature with scientific discovery through experimentation. The great advances in Scottish science and engineering in the next century were the fruits of this process.

By the early 18th century, Scotland had become the first literate society in Europe. While Britain was besting the French all over the world during the Seven Years War, in Edinburgh, with a population of 60,000, there were six publishing houses and papermaking was an important part of the economy. An official survey in 1795 showed that out of a population of 1.5 million, 20,000 depended on writing and publishing and another 10,500 on teaching.

American Independence and the End of the Sugar Monopoly

Because of sugar, Jamaica was, bar none, the most valuable British colony anywhere. Yes, even including India and the spice trade. The wee American colonies existed to provide foodstuffs and such for the sugar colonies—primarily Jamaica and Barbados—where every inch of arable land was taken up with sugar cane. But Britain’s sugar monopoly had already been broken on the European continent and in America, where smuggling cheap sugar for the rum distilleries to avoid crown taxes was a significant and growing part of the colonial economy.

America’s War of Independence against Britain was waged from 1775 to 1783 by an alliance with a built-in contradiction. Two different classes, the Northern manufacturers and the Southern slave owners, joined forces because both economies suffered under the strictures imposed by the British mercantile system. This system was a closed monopoly in which British manufactures had command of a protected market and the sugar planters controlled the flow and price of sugar. American independence finally shattered British mercantilism.

Much blood and ink was spilled by the British rulers, who feared both the catastrophic destruction of the regulated trade and the loss of tax revenue from the colonies. The lords and planters ran point on this. The industry-based capitalists were not especially animated by opposition to mercantilism or slavery so long as they were making tons of money manufacturing goods necessary to the slave trade and the colonies. When the industrialists discovered later, to their great surprise, that far higher profits could be made outside of the mercantile system, only then did the tide begin to turn in favour of “free trade.”

In Britain, the landed gentry had been natural allies of the sugar planters. For decades the government was dominated by the fabulously wealthy planters, who planted their seats in parliament whenever the fancy struck them. Parenthetically, that relationship was markedly different in France, where the king didn’t lose his head until nearly 150 years after the English one did. The French monarchy distrusted its planter nobility and instead formed an alliance with what West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James called the “small whites,” the petty bourgeoisie, in his seminal book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963).

The French planters never acquired anything like the power of their British counterparts, and that was despite the French sugar colony in Haiti being vastly more productive. C.L.R. James also intimates that some of the British forces advocating abolition in the late 18th century were cynically manipulating French revolutionaries to do the same in order to undermine sugar production in the French colonies. There may be some truth in that.

The powerful British planter faction faced an opposition which included both enlightened intellectuals and capitalists promoting free trade. The growing conflict between the interests of the industry-based bourgeoisie and agriculture-based slave owners foreshadowed much of the economic and ideological conflict that would play out decades later across the Atlantic in the American Civil War of 1861-65. That war was begun by the South as a predatory campaign for the expansion of slavery, and the victory of the capitalist North meant slavery’s abolition. At the time, Karl Marx was leading the International Working Men’s Association (First International) and he penned articles and declarations to marshal working-class support for the North. “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black skin it is branded,” he went on to note in Volume One of Capital.

Back in Britain, the passage of the Abolition Act had come in 1807, but concessions to the planters meant that slavery actually continued in the British colonies for another 30 years or so. The Abolition Act nevertheless marks the significant point at which the economic and political power of the industrialists overwhelmed that of the planters. Thereafter, as Eric Williams put it, “The center of gravity in the British Empire shifted from the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, from the West Indies to India.”

Historians generally date the origins of the Industrial Revolution to the latter part of the 18th century. Certainly, the American War of Independence and the collapse of the mercantile system uncorked production. And James Watt’s improvement to the Newcomen steam engine is more or less concurrent with American independence—about 1776, which is to say 30 years before the Abolition Act in Britain and 60 years and more before slavery in the British colonies had mostly ended. Moreover, Watt’s efforts at re-engineering the steam engine were directly underwritten by profits of the slave economy. And in 1860, 53 years after the Abolition Act, 75 percent of all British cotton was slave cotton from the American South. That is why the rulers of Britain supported the South during the American Civil War, as Marx pointed out at that time.

To recap, the Industrial Revolution grew out of a ready-made industry just humming along on the slave economy. Port facilities were marvellously improved at great expense and supported by factories with a quite modern proletariat. The slave trade wasn’t the whole of the Industrial Revolution—not by a long shot—but it definitely was its firm foundation. For further study I would highly recommend comrade Jacob Zorn’s presentation, “Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism” (WV Nos. 942, 943 and 944, 11 and 25 September and 9 October 2009).

The Industrial Revolution and India

Earlier we looked into why Germany, Spain or France did not become the first advanced capitalist-imperialist empire. Well, why not India?

In 1600, when Queen Elizabeth founded the East India Company, India had a huge economy and possessed weaving technology at least equal to that of contemporary England. India alone produced about 25 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, more than all of Europe combined. That continued right up to the 18th century. Compared to Elizabethan England, India had well over 25 times the population and land, which included present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

But Mughal India had begun to disintegrate and the emerging rival princely states were increasingly subordinated in alliances with the various colonial powers. This started with the Portuguese who arrived in the 1500s, followed by the Dutch and then the English in the early 1600s and later the French. The race to dominate the highly lucrative spice trade with India became a huge impetus for all the European powers to develop their naval power and extend their reach economically and militarily.

Britain succeeded in dominating French power in the Seven Years War between 1756 and 1763. This was a conflict between all the great powers of the day, and it extended across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the Philippines and, of course, India. The outstanding issue, as with all “great power” conflicts, was over who would rule the world.

The British victory in the 1757 Battle of Plassey is seen as the pivotal point in British supremacy in South Asia. It established the rule of the British East India Company in Bengal, which provided a rich staging ground to drive out the Dutch and French rivals. The British expropriated huge tracts of land, providing revenue through taxes and plunder for further conquest by the Company. This early period of colonial rule extracted enormous revenue through outright pillage, taxation and extortionate “tributes” from the besieged and occupied princely states.

By the end of the 18th century, cotton had already displaced British wool. It’s no wonder, given that the bulk of British cloth went into Africa in trade for slaves or to the colonies. Both destinations were hot and humid climes where cotton clothing is superior to wear.

However, Indian cottons upset the proverbial apple cart. Better and cheaper, they were displacing the English product in Africa and even threatened to dominate the domestic English market. Prohibitive import duties were slapped on Indian products coming into England. Export duties were also imposed in British India, and together those quickly destroyed India’s trade in cotton and soon that of all other Indian manufactures. Although India had long been a producer and exporter of fine cotton goods, it was shortly reduced to exporting raw cotton to Manchester and importing finished English material on a scale that kept Manchester booming for decades.

That marked the first step in the transformation from the earlier, direct piratical extortion of wealth to a more modern and “respectable” bourgeois form of expropriation—which would become a classic impediment to the growth of the productive forces of the captive consumer nation. By the 1850s, the British East India Company in league with the British army and navy had control of most of the Indian subcontinent. This was the nursery of the British foreign policy famously known as “divide and rule,” which exploited regional and religious rivalries. Britain imposed a dumbed-down education system stripped of science in an attempt to create a subordinate and dependant population.

Wherever and whenever the Industrial Revolution took hold, it meant the destruction of the artisan class. Not infrequently this was a brutal process. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution transformed society as it unleashed productive capacity: steam power, iron smelting, innovations with chemicals, mining and transportation. There was all that and more. Old, outmoded thinking fell away alongside the outmoded productive forms. In this sense, early capitalism was a powerful economic driver of innovation and technological achievement and science. The Industrial Revolution ramped up production and catapulted Britain into becoming the undisputed dominant world power with a virtual monopoly in manufacturing.

But in colonial India the Industrial Revolution played out quite differently. For centuries, the state exacted taxes and wealth from the villages in the form of goods and produce, but largely maintained the ancient village-based land system which generated that wealth. Public works provided regular irrigation to deliver water and nutrients for agriculture, which consisted of food, cotton and jute production. The village system provided economic sustenance to the village-based artisans including those of the important cotton trade. Now, this was a class-based society—not some kind of primitive idyllic communism—and there were larger urban centres with manufacture as well.

The British East India Company extorted Indian wealth on a massive scale. Economic disruption, both intentional and incidental, and the thorough neglect of public works, led to a collapse of Indian manufacture and agriculture. It produced intense impoverishment of its peoples which continues to this day. It is interesting to note, however, that the falling rate of profit and the declining ability of India to absorb British manufactures forced the British to begin manufacturing in India. That is to say, one could not endlessly extract wealth, impoverish the populace and pour British manufactures into the country without effect.

In 1830, the railway between Liverpool and Manchester opened. It was the beginning of the modern rail era and it sparked a worldwide railway construction boom, marking the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. Incidentally, it was in 1836 that the first railway opened in Canada; all the early equipment was British made. Rail construction was the selling point for Confederation here. B.C. joined explicitly on that promise of a transcontinental railway, which was financed through a scandalous land-grant scheme and finally completed, to great fanfare, in 1886. In India, British finance capital had by 1875 poured upwards of 100 million pounds into the railways and by 1880 had laid nearly 15,000 kilometres of rail there. That was initially with British locomotives and rolling stock of British manufacture, which were later manufactured locally in India.

Though British firms owned outright five-sixths of the tea industry from an earlier period, I think that the rail investment demonstrates the importance that the export of capital had assumed. The British rulers were massively extorting dividends for the Indian rail system. Moreover that system was designed not to connect the Indian economy together, but to send its wealth abroad with as little delay as possible.

Concurrent with the spoliation of India, Britain of course applied itself vigorously and imperiously throughout Asia, especially in China, as well as in Africa and the Near East, but that is all well beyond the scope of this talk. The epoch of imperialism started at the very end of the 19th century. But as Lenin noted, “two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century—vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market.”

Marxism and the Colonial Question

Frequently one encounters the assertion by Third World nationalists that Marx and Engels were somehow tainted with colonialism. There are often two complementary sides to this hind-sighted discourse. On the one hand, there is an associated fantasy image of the idyllic peasant life prior to industrialization. On the other, there is a false and haughty rendering of Marx and Engels’ positions and sympathies.

Marx and Engels originally had hoped that the positive aspects of industrialization and free trade would spread to the colonies as a liberating force which would elevate those pre-industrial nations into the modern world. In 1853 Marx wrote an article titled “The Future Results of British Rule in India” where he said:

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”

Remember, at that time, imperialism was not fully developed.

But there was never any confusion about Marx and Engels’ sympathies. They were not blind or indifferent to the monumental crimes committed by Western powers against the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They viewed such crimes as the overhead historical cost for the modernization of these backward regions.

This projection was not borne out by the actual course of development. In fact, even though the capitalists did introduce certain elements of modern industrial technology into their colonies and semicolonies, for example transportation, the overall effect was to arrest the social and economic development of these countries. By the mid 19th century, the European bourgeoisies ceased to be a historically progressive class against the old feudal-derived aristocracies—with the key turning point being the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions.

Marxism is a science. It is based not on received wisdom but on observation and analysis of social reality. Marxists are not infallible and, indeed, Marx and Engels learned from their observations and analyses of capitalist development and expansion. They developed a different attitude toward colonialism, which was expressed, for example, in their defence of the 1857-58 Sepoy rebellion in India and their condemnation of its torturous repression by the British.

In Ireland, too, the British smashed down every industry. Reactionary oppression and continued impoverishment reduced the Irish to being mere providers of cheap, consumable foodstuffs for English tables and cheap, consumable workers for British factories. Marx came to recognize that the liberation of Ireland from under the British boot was a precondition for the liberation of the British proletariat. Writing in a 9 April 1870 letter to Siegfried Meyer and August Vogt, he states:

“Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker.... The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.”

The Imperialist Epoch and Labour Reformism

In a 7 October 1858 letter to Marx, Friedrich Engels pointed to the corrupting influence of imperialism on the proletariat of the advanced countries. He wrote:

“…the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie.”

Britain was the first of the modern imperialist powers. But it couldn’t hold onto its place of privilege forever. By the dawn of the 20th century, the entire world had been divided among rival imperialist powers, centrally France, Germany, the United States and Japan. The epoch of imperialism—the final stage of capitalism—had begun. In 1914 came World War I, interimperialist slaughter on a scale never before seen.

As the British rulers came under pressure from other imperialist powers, they could no longer aim at buying off or “bourgeoisifying” the entire British proletariat. Instead, in all the imperialist countries there emerged a thin layer, the labour aristocracy, bribed with some of the superprofits that the bourgeoisie reaped from its colonies. In most cases, this aristocracy of labour became the bulwark of reformist parties of the working class—what Engels and later Lenin called “bourgeois workers parties.” With leaderships and outlooks that were pro-imperialist, these parties used their connections to the workers movement, as well as the occasional dubious pretension to socialism, in order to rally support for their own ruling classes in the First World War.

In sharp contrast to such parties, like the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats in Germany and the Mensheviks in Russia, Lenin’s Bolsheviks led a socialist revolution through taking a clear stand against imperialism and reformism. Calling for the defeat of all the great powers in World War I, the Bolsheviks had some success in transforming the interimperialist war into a civil war—a revolutionary war of workers and other oppressed peoples against their exploiters. In contrast to imperialist wars of predation, wars that were waged by colonial countries against their colonizers were considered by the Bolsheviks to be just and progressive. Lenin and his cothinkers fought for the international working class to wield its social power in support of such wars of liberation, while at the same time seeking to break the colonial masses from their existing leaderships, which were rooted in bourgeois and pre-capitalist exploiting classes.

I think that’s a good place to wrap up our class on the rise of imperialism. We started out with the forging of the capitalist system in the Protestant Reformation, from the 1525 Peasant War in Germany through to the English Civil War of 1642-51. As Engels put it:

“In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time.”

— The Peasant War in Germany (1850)

From there, we tackled slavery and colonialism—how they fueled the Industrial Revolution and paved the way for the imperialist epoch. And that is where we remain today. To put an end to the imperialist system of war and neocolonial domination and replace it with a planned, socialized economy, the proletariat needs to smash the capitalist system. That in turn requires a political struggle against the reformists who are an obstacle to that perspective.