The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 26

Fat'h recognized the threat posed to Persia by the Russian Empire, which in 1801 annexed the Kingdom of Georgia (traditionally Persian territory), but he overestimated Persia's chances against the Russians. Two wars ended in disastrous defeat, setting the stage for even more humiliation. The Brits jumped into the ring in 1856, supporting Afghan rebels against the Qajars and seizing territory in the Persian Gulf. With Russia's conquest of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in 1881, Persia found itself surrounded by powerful European empires. From here on out, things would only get worse.China: DOWN (BUT HIGH) DOWN (BUT HIGH) China may be the oldest continuous civilization on earth, but the Chinese soon discovered that Westerners have no respect for age. In fact, being old and decrepit makes you an easy target-especially if you're addicted to opium!By 1830 the British opium trade had reached 1,400 tons a year, serving about 12 million Chinese addicts. In some coastal areas, where the drug was easiest to get, as much as 90 percent of the population was addicted.Skyrocketing Chinese addiction rates and the resulting crime wave even got the attention of the out-of-touch emperor Dao-guang. In 1839 he appointed an honest, energetic official, Lin Zexu, to halt the British opium trade. Lin Zexu sent a letter to Queen Victoria warning her that he planned to stop the flow of the drug into China, then confiscated all the opium in the British warehouse in the southern city of Canton (Guangzhou) and dumped it in the ocean.Infuriated by the destruction of property, in 1840 the Brits dispatched an invasion force that seized Canton and forced the Chinese to make peace in 1842; as part of the peace terms, the emperor ceded them the island of Hong Kong under a long-term lease. Now the opium trade kicked into high gear, and it was just a matter of time before another "Opium War" broke out. In 1856, the Second Opium War was sparked by a Chinese pirate operating out of the new British colony at Hong Kong. The war ended in 1860, with the Chinese signing two humiliating treaties-the first of many "unequal" treaties with European powers-that legalized opium and granted the Brits extraordinary rights in Chinese ports, including exemption from Chinese laws.Native Americans: DOWN (AND DRUNK) DOWN (AND DRUNK) One of the first orders of business for the newly created United States was settling the Louisiana Territory purchased from France by Thomas Jefferson in 1803. The only problem was there were millions of people there already: the Native Americans, who stubbornly refused to stop existing. So the U.S. government decided to give them a hand, beginning with ma.s.s deportations such as the Cherokee "Trail of Tears" in 1838, when seventeen thousand men, women, and children were force-marched from Georgia to Oklahoma, with about four thousand of them dying along the way.The sale of liquor to Native Americans also served to speed the destruction of their society. Liquor was hardly new in the nineteenth century, but it hit Native Americans like a ton of bricks-and that was the whole point. The native trappers loved it, and it was easier to transport than other goods: fur traders could smuggle barrels of pure alcohol into "Indian Country," dilute it with river water, and trade it on the spot. To make this "firewater" look and taste like liquor, they added things like tobacco, red pepper, black mola.s.ses, and strychnine.The U.S. government tried to cut off the liquor supply by inspecting the cargo of steamboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, so the American Fur Company did the logical thing: it secretly built a distillery inside Indian Country, sending farmers to grow corn to distill into whiskey.Mormonism (and Weddings): UP UP In 1829 a farmer in upstate New York named Joseph Smith told friends and family that an angel named Moroni had guided him to two golden tablets buried in the wilderness near his home outside the small town of Fayette.The tablets, Smith said, contained the religious writings of a lost tribe of Israel that had migrated to North America around 600 BCE, where their descendants created a great civilization. According to Smith, after his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ visited the New World to preach the gospel to the people of this civilization, who were converted and saved.In 1830, Smith published the contents of the tablets as a new gospel of Jesus Christ called the Book of Mormon, which didn't replace the Bible, but added to and "confirmed" it. Smith also said the angel had directed him to found a new church and to baptize its members.In 1831, after their neighbors in upstate New York hara.s.sed them for their strange ways, including polygamy, Smith led his followers to Ohio. Here the Mormons built a church or "temple" and sent out missionaries, who attracted more converts. But the Church was again attacked by neighbors. So the congregation moved to Missouri, where the real trouble started.In a series of prolonged riots called the Missouri Mormon War, their neighbors in northwestern Missouri attacked Smith's roughly twelve thousand followers. In the end, Missouri's governor, Lilburn Boggs, issued Executive Order 44, also known as the "Extermination Order," ordering Missourians to kill any member of the Church caught in Missouri (of course, this was blatantly illegal).To stop the killing, the Mormons signed over their property to Missouri militiamen and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois. But Nauvoo was just as bad. Here, the Illinois Mormon War of 1844 deprived the Church of its leader. After a disagreement with a local newspaper, Joseph Smith was arrested and then shot in his jail cell by an angry mob.Now under the leaders.h.i.+p of Smith's disciple Brigham Young, the Mormons moved again-this time to the faraway Salt Lake Valley, in Utah. After the 1,300-mile trek ended in 1847, they immediately began clearing farmland and surveying plots for Salt Lake City, with broad streets and lots of parkland. The community centered on a cathedral-like temple and an adjacent tabernacle that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had described from visions.

STRANG-ER THAN FICTION.

In 1848 a rival of Brigham Young named James Strang led several thousand Mormon dissenters to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself king in 1850. After being elected to the Michigan legislature in 1853, Strang used his office to annex neighboring islands into Manitou County, a sort of Mormon island empire. But his tactics alienated his followers: in 1856, two disgruntled followers a.s.sa.s.sinated him (probably with the connivance of the U.S. Navy). His sect still has several hundred adherents, mostly in the Midwest.

Mormons have since become known for their clean living (forbidding alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and work ethic-the original name they chose for their state, Deseret, meaning "honey bee" and symbolizing industry.

Revolution Watch American Revolution, Round Two Though history (that's us!) has judged them harshly, the Confederate States of America were on pretty solid legal ground when they seceded from the United States in 1861. After all, there was no rule in the Const.i.tution forbidding a state from leaving the Union if it wanted to; indeed, to Southern rebels, the American Civil War was nothing less than a "Second American Revolution," protecting states' rights against the big federal bully.Of course, the Civil War was about a lot more than states' rights. The Northern and Southern economies had been diverging since colonial times. With smaller farms, manufacturing, and commerce, slavery didn't make economic sense in the North. The South, by contrast, was dominated by giant agricultural estates-plantations-where slaves were needed to grow labor-intensive crops such as cotton and tobacco.But the regional economies didn't split-just the opposite. As Northern cities industrialized during the 1820s1850s, their textile mills depended on cotton from Southern plantations. The Southern plantation aristocracy feared (correctly) that the industrial North wanted to make them political and economic va.s.sals-just as Great Britain, another industrial power, was subjugating less developed agricultural areas for her world empire.Against this backdrop of economic tension, Northerners and Southerners disagreed ever more bitterly about slavery, the "real" cause of the Civil War. The Northern movement to abolish slavery was fueled by fanatical evangelical Christians, many from New England, who believed they had a divine mission to abolish slavery.Enter Abe Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer from the Illinois frontier. In 1854 Lincoln helped found the antislavery Republican Party, and ran for senator from Illinois in 1858. (He lost.) At first Lincoln insisted he didn't want to end slavery in the South-just keep it from spreading to more states. Of course he couldn't allay the fears of Southern slave owners, and in December 1860, one month after he was elected president, South Carolina seceded from the Union, soon followed by ten other "slave" states. On April 12, 1861, the new Confederate army bombarded Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston Harbor. The Civil War had begun.Early on, the North was defeated left and right. Virtually all all the best generals hailed from Southern states and returned to fight for their homes. For example, the country's best general, Robert E. Lee, felt honor-bound to fight for his home state of Virginia. But in the long run, the North enjoyed key advantages with its large population, industry, and navy. As a Union naval blockade cut off cotton exports, literally starving the South, Lincoln finally found a winning commander in Ulysses S. Grant. Grant wasn't actually a very good general, but he was ready to accept unlimited casualties as he chased Lee across northern Virginia. With "Butcher Grant" (his nickname in Northern newspapers) in charge, the Union finally triumphed at a cost of at least six hundred thousand dead on both sides. the best generals hailed from Southern states and returned to fight for their homes. For example, the country's best general, Robert E. Lee, felt honor-bound to fight for his home state of Virginia. But in the long run, the North enjoyed key advantages with its large population, industry, and navy. As a Union naval blockade cut off cotton exports, literally starving the South, Lincoln finally found a winning commander in Ulysses S. Grant. Grant wasn't actually a very good general, but he was ready to accept unlimited casualties as he chased Lee across northern Virginia. With "Butcher Grant" (his nickname in Northern newspapers) in charge, the Union finally triumphed at a cost of at least six hundred thousand dead on both sides.War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.-Gen. William Tec.u.mseh Sherman The Civil War saw the end of slavery with Lincoln's Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation of 1863. But many freed black slaves found their position little improved, with no land, money, or education. Meanwhile, the war totally devastated the South, where defeated whites were left embittered. This foreshadowed another century of horrific racial strife throughout the United States, North and South.Beyond the astonis.h.i.+ng body count, the war was breathtakingly brutal in other ways: during his infamous March to the Sea, the Union general William Tec.u.mseh Sherman burned or stole everything in his path, devastating a twelve-thousand-square-mile swathe of Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Meanwhile new weapons such as the Gatling gun, a predecessor of the machine gun, allowed ordinary men to ma.s.s-produce death on the battlefield. This mechanized ma.s.s killing foreshadowed the bloodiest, most destructive wars in world history, about to unfold in the heart of "civilization" itself.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

Canned Peaches and Condensed Milk [image]

Napoleon Bonaparte commanded larger armies than any general in previous history, which presented a huge logistical problem. With more than 1,500,000 soldiers across Europe, Napoleon had to make sure he had enough food for his troops.

An army marches on its stomach.-Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1800 Napoleon created a 12,000-franc prize (about $3,000 at the time, or $1.4 million in today's dollars) for anyone who invented a way of keeping food fresh indefinitely without ice or salt. Both methods were expensive, and neither prevented spoilage in the long term. That's where Nicolas Appert came in.Although he was a candy maker, not a scientist, Appert had plenty of resources to experiment with packaging and treating food in his Paris candy factory. But one of Appert's most important observations came from a vice other than sugar: in wine making, he noticed that sealing bottles with airtight corks prevented wine from spoiling indefinitely.Appert's stroke of genius was packaging food in airtight containers (wine bottles, in fact) and then cooking it, rather than vice versa. By sealing off food from the air before heating it to a high temperature, Appert killed whatever bacteria were present and also prevented new ones from getting a foothold.He collected his prize in 1809, and Napoleon's troops carried with them all kinds of food preserved in wide-mouth bottles, including milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables. Appert patented the method, launching the world's first "cannery," and described his discovery in a book. In one of his bigger PR stunts, Appert once even preserved a whole sheep.

HAPPY HOUR.

In the eighteenth century, tonic water containing quinine was one of the few ways to reduce malaria among British troops in Asia. Meanwhile, limes were required in sailors' diets to prevent scurvy. The British East India Company decided to mix it all up into a concoction so foul that n.o.body would drink it-until some clever realist suggested adding gin. Voila! A c.o.c.ktail is born.

Fast Food What do nineteenth-century Russian hors.e.m.e.n have to do with your hip neighborhood eatery? Well, the name, for one: bistro bistro, a French word that has become common English usage, isn't really French at all. It comes from a Russian word, usually transliterated bistra bistra or or bistrot bistrot, which means "now!"If this seems rude, that's because it is. The word came to be a.s.sociated with small street-level cafes when Russian troops occupied Paris after Napoleon's defeat and abdication in 1814. Fresh from the Russian countryside, these "rustic" Russian soldiers made a lasting impression on the French by getting belligerently drunk in restaurants and pounding on tables to encourage faster delivery of their food-shouting "Now! Now!" in Russian.They even influenced the physical layout of cafes. Throughout the eighteenth century, restaurants and taverns were typically walled off from the street to keep out the odor of horse manure and other "bad air." But all that changed with the arrival of the Russians in 1814. The Cossacks-Russian cavalry descended from Central Asian nomads-refused to dismount to enter restaurants. They preferred to eat on horseback, so they tore down walls and rode into restaurants, where they placed their orders from the saddle. Thus the typical bistro now has large "French doors" that open on to the street.There's an interesting parallel on the Russian side: the modern Russian term for "to beg," sheramiz avat sheramiz avat, comes from the French words cher ami cher ami, or "good friend"-the desperate plea of French soldiers scrounging for food during Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow.Good Times with Nitrous Oxide Anyone who's ever received nitrous oxide or "laughing gas" at the dentist's knows something about its whacky effects. The British chemist Joseph Priestly first identified nitrous oxide in 1772, but it wasn't until the 1790s that another scientist, Humphry Davy, discovered that inhaling it was, well, lots of fun. After Davy's discovery, traveling carnivals began charging a penny for a minute's worth of intoxication by laughing gas. Around the same time, Davy's student Michael Faraday also experimented with sulfuric ether, whose effects were similar (meaning, it was also good for getting high).Both gases became important anesthetics-substances that can dull sensation and even produce unconsciousness to reduce pain during surgery. But in an age before ma.s.s communications or standardized medical language, it was hard to get the word out. So knowledge about the gases spread through "laughing gas parties" and "ether frolics," where doctors and their friends got high together. As part of their education, medical students were given doses of ether and laughing gas in the lecture hall. After all, what better way to understand the effects than experiencing them firsthand?Absinthe Minds Absinthe is one of history's more "romantic" liquors, despite being known for causing blindness, insanity, and death. When it works right, it produces a sense of euphoria like that produced by opium or cocaine, with an extra hallucinogenic "kick" thanks in part to leaves of the poisonous wormwood bush (in addition to an alcohol content that varies between 45 and 90 percent). The herb anise gives absinthe an emerald green tint, so its nineteenth-century devotees called it "the green fairy." It was first distilled in Switzerland in 1792, but the cla.s.sical period of absinthe use/abuse didn't begin until the second half of the nineteenth century, when French artists popularized the drug.

G.o.d SAVE THE QUEEN.

In the Christian era, European women weren't allowed to take pain killers or anesthesia to dull the pain of childbirth, because the pain was considered G.o.d's punishment for Eve's sin. Public opinion s.h.i.+fted, however, when it became known that Queen Victoria asked for chloroform anesthetic during the birth of Prince Arthur in 1850. Victoria's endors.e.m.e.nt made it acceptable for ordinary women.

There's a whole ritual a.s.sociated with drinking absinthe. Wormwood and anise extracts are very bitter, so drinkers (called absintheurs absintheurs) usually mix sugar and water into the brew before drinking. Typically the person preparing absinthe puts a sugar cube in a slotted spoon, caramelizes it over an open flame, and then pours cold water over it into the drink. The cold water turns the absinthe cloudy, another integral part of the experience.Absinthe was a big hit with intellectuals and artists living in Paris, including the Spanish painter Pablo Pica.s.so, the French poet Guy Rimbaud, the French painter Pierre Manet, and the Irish author Oscar Wilde. The most popular absinthe brand was Pernod Fils. Of course, the drinkers weren't deterred by the occasional case of kidney failure, blindness, or death-caused by thujone, a potent neurotoxin found in wormwood that can induce fatal convulsions. Some poisonings were probably also due to knockoff brands, whose distillers added copper, zinc, and methanol.Death Spirals For two centuries European soldiers were armed with muskets-the firearm of choice during the wars of Louis XIV and the American Revolution. The problem with muskets is they aren't terribly accurate. In the mid-eighteenth century, a brilliant English engineer named Benjamin Robins realized that cutting spiraling lines on the inside of the gun barrel could vastly improve accuracy. While it might sound counterintuitive, "rifling" the gun barrel this way makes the bullet fly in a straight line by putting spin on it-exactly as with a football (this worked better when musket b.a.l.l.s were replaced by elongated sh.e.l.ls).Robins was ahead of his time, so rifled guns were used only by sharpshooters-i.e., snipers-until 1800, when Ezekiel Baker produced the Baker Rifle, also called the Infantry Rifle. From 75 feet, the effective range of the "rifled muskets" grew to 600 feet...and beyond. During the war against Napoleon, one expert rifleman using the Baker Rifle killed a French general at the incredible distance of 2,400 feet. Later models, such as the Snider-Enfield, produced in 1853, were accurate up to 3,000 feet, and the Martini-Henry rifle of 1871 was good up to 4,200 feet.Rifling also worked to improve the accuracy of cannons. The British first used rifled cannons accurate up to 3,300 feet in 1776, during the American Revolution. In 1846, Swedish and Italian engineers built rifled cannons that were loaded at the "breech" end rather than the mouth of the barrel, which made it easier and safer to load the guns. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Prussians used rifled cannons built by Krupp (still a famous German manufacturer) that were accurate up to 9,000 feet.The American Consumerist Mind-set The single biggest real estate buy in history was the result of an un-characteristic decision by Napoleon Bonaparte to cut his losses. Napoleon hoped to rebuild the French empire in the New World, with grain from the Midwestern "Louisiana Territory" feeding slaves on France's island colonies in the Caribbean. But a successful slave uprising in the French colony of Haiti and Britain's Royal Navy made his dream impossible.This was good news for the United States, because Napoleon decided to sell the Louisiana Territory at a bargain price. In December 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought the two-million-square-mile territory for $15 million. It was later divided into the modern American states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Pretty good deal.Another good buy for the United States was Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million-though at the time, people thought it was a waste of money.The Russians had colonized Alaska in 1741 for one reason: otters, whose luxurious fur was turned into clothing for Europe's fur-obsessed upper cla.s.ses. But the Russians never settled Alaska in force, and after the otters ran out, there wasn't much reason for them to be there at all, so they decided to get rid of the useless territory in exchange for cold, hard cash. The only problem was that most Americans thought Alaska was useless, too.Fortunately Russia's amba.s.sador to the United States, Edouard de Stoeckl, knew the way to U.S. senators' hearts: in 1868 he dispensed ma.s.sive bribes to dozens of senators to smooth the way for the acquisition. For $7.2 million, the U.S. Secretary of State William Seward picked up territory measuring 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas. That works out to about 2 cents an acre. Nonetheless many people still dismissed the deal for "Seward's Icebox" as a waste of money-until they discovered it had some delicious frozen treats. In 1896, prospectors discovered gold, triggering the great Klondike gold rush, and in the twentieth century, huge oil deposits were discovered.Train Delays Railroads of a sort were in use in Europe since the 1550s-rutted wagon ways lined with wood rails in Germany, later used in England, too. Wood rails were replaced with stronger iron rails by 1776, just as steam engines came on the scene.In 1803 an English businessman Samuel Hofray offered a cash prize to any engineer who could design a steam engine to haul loads over unpaved (mud) roads, and an engineer named Richard Trevithick stepped up to the challenge in 1804. Then, in 1814, a self-taught engineer, George Stephenson, built the world's first steam locomotive for use over rails. Stephenson convinced his bosses at the Stockton & Darlington Railway to use steam power-rather than animals-to haul loads. He was quickly promoted to chief engineer.Stockton & Darlington was soon offering regular combined pa.s.senger and freight service, and compet.i.tors began springing up. Railroads were faster, smoother, and more dependable than any system of land transportation in history, and were soon also remarkably cheap, allowing ordinary people to travel longer distances than ever.An American example: heading west from Missouri in the midninteenth century, wagon trains typically took four to five months to reach destinations in California and Oregon. Then, by two acts of Congress, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were built (the former heading east from California, the latter west from Nebraska; finally meeting up in 1869). With the first transcontinental express in 1876, the wagoneers' 45-month trip now took 83 hours and 29 minutes (about 3.5 days).AND THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, FOR...

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Death by Undergarments You may have heard of "suffering for fas.h.i.+on," but in the nineteenth century, people took this expression literally. Women and men both started wearing corsets in the first half of the nineteenth century to slim their figures but often caused themselves serious medical problems in the process.The stereotypical corset is the "under-bust" model that fits under the chest and above the hips. The corset is made of leather or cloth sewn onto a grille of metal wires or whalebone "ribs" or "stays," with a lace-up back. Because the laces were usually out of reach to the wearer, a second person had to tighten and tie it.In the nineteenth century women, especially, strove to have very small waists-in fact, at one time the ideal waist size was considered to be under twenty inches, with some waists getting as small as fifteen inches! One "rule of thumb" measure for feminine beauty: the woman's lover should be able to put his hands around her waist and have the tips of both his thumbs and middle fingers touch, implying a waist size of sixteen to eighteen inches. Women who wore corsets regularly found they could achieve smaller waist sizes over time, as their bodies readjusted to the clothing.Women weren't the only ones wearing corsets, however. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many men wore looser corsets to conceal their pot bellies. And from the 1820s to 1850s, men in Victorian Britain and America wore "tight-lacing" corsets to achieve the "hourgla.s.s" shape then considered attractive for men. In this period, many men's fas.h.i.+ons, including narrow waistcoats and tight trousers, required wearers to avail themselves of a corset.Of course, radically reducing waist size could lead to some serious health issues. Victorian doctors blamed a host of ills on overzealous corset wearers lacing their corsets too tight. Corsets compressed the liver and displaced the heart, uterus, ovaries, and kidneys. They also constricted the lungs, making breathing difficult and causing chronic pain. Finally, they impeded blood flow, leading to fainting spells.

ANOTHER FAs.h.i.+ON FAUX PAS.

During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers began using chemicals to speed production of felt for hat-making. One of the most important chemicals for the process was mercury, which helped separate fur from animal skins. Unfortunately for workers in hat factories, mercury is also incredibly toxic. Even if they handled the mercury safely (they didn't) the rest of the hat-making process-which involved rinsing the felt with hot water and drying it repeatedly-ensured that workers inhaled plenty of mercury-laden steam. Many suffered from debilitating physical ailments, and some went totally bonkers. Hence the term "mad hatter."

Royal Body Parts Think Napoleon's p.e.n.i.s was the only famous body part preserved in this period? Think again! In another bizarre French organ-stealing scenario, a physician secretly loyal to the French royal family removed and preserved the heart of the young Louis XVII, who died at the age of ten while in a French prison.Young Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, had been imprisoned by French revolutionaries in a cold, dark cell with no toilet and no bath. The revolutionaries feared that French aristocrats might try to restore Louis-Charles to power, but couldn't bring themselves to kill an innocent child. So, instead, they indoctrinated him in revolutionary ways, forcing him to take up a trade (shoe making) and teaching him to curse the names of his dead parents. Denied medical treatment, the boy died of tuberculosis. His body was supposedly riddled with tumors, sores, and scabies.Before the body was dumped in a ma.s.s grave, however, the examining doctor for the autopsy, Jean-Philippe Pelletan, cut out the dead boy's heart, hid it in a handkerchief, and preserved it, in keeping with an ancient royal custom calling for the heart of the king to be pickled separate from his body. After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of Louis-Charles's uncle as Louis XVIII, Pelletan tried to return the boy's heart to the royal family, but they refused to believe it was genuine. Later, one of Pelletan's students stole the heart. After he died, his widow gave it to the archbishop of Paris, but it was later smuggled to Spain for safekeeping. The heart currently resides in the Saint Denis Basilica near Paris.Sharing During the Industrial Revolution poor factory workers found hope in communism, a new system of thought that explained every aspect of reality with a single, sweeping worldview. In fact, Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels said they could prove the theory "scientifically," with mathematical rules that predicted the future. (They couldn't.)To explain history, Marx borrowed from Friedrich Hegel, a German Enlightenment philosopher. Like Hegel, Marx believed that history is a giant dialogue, or "dialectic," between opposing forces that unfolds in a series of cycles. But Marx said Hegel was wrong about one crucial detail: the real action doesn't take place in the world of ideas, as Hegel believed, but rather in material reality.Innovation in the means of production of goods-not philosophical debate-is the real engine of change, because it allows individuals to acc.u.mulate wealth or capital (a concept Marx borrowed from Adam Smith) and change human society. Culture, laws, and government are just by-products of this process. In this cynical view, the ruling cla.s.s-meaning, whoever controls the means of production-always creates laws and government that suit its needs, dressing them up with "ideals" to justify their oppression of other cla.s.ses.Marx and Engels grouped history into three different periods, but in each period the basic pattern was the same. First, the existing system of production was disrupted by new methods, which made innovators rich. But then "contradictions" between the new economy and the old social system eventually led to collapse. From this collapse arose a new system-and the whole thing started over again.In the first big phase of history, the Cla.s.sical Period, the big landowners of republican and imperial Rome drove smaller farmers into bankruptcy and added their land to giant plantations worked by slaves. The unemployed farmers moved to cities, where they overtaxed the welfare system-causing Rome to collapse.In the second phase, Germanic barbarians overthrew the Roman Empire and established feudal kingdoms based on their tribal customs, with serfs supporting n.o.ble lords. Marx said the feudal system brought about its own destruction with the rise of free "bourgeoisie" (city-dwellers). Led by wealthy merchants and manufacturers, this new middle cla.s.s established government based on parliaments (where only men with property could vote) and overthrew feudal power.The bourgeoisie were the most innovative cla.s.s in history, inventors of the Industrial Revolution-but also the cruelest. Pursuing efficiency, Marx predicted, bourgeois capitalists would pay workers less and less, until the latter couldn't even secure food and shelter. Marx predicted that the proletariat (workers) would eventually rebel and the system would collapse. The proletariat would abolish laws protecting property and everything, including farmland and factories, would belong to "the people."Communism was utterly terrifying to Europe's upper and middle cla.s.ses, and for good reason. To achieve this radical change in society, Marx openly advocated criminal behavior, arguing that the laws of an unjust system must be broken. In the twentieth century Marx's disciples took this to heart and implemented it on a vast scale.Later, Taters The Irish Potato Famine of 18451849 is a tragic example of the risks a.s.sociated with "monoculture"-growing just one kind of crop or (even worse) just one genetic variant of one kind of crop. When the staple crop turns out to be susceptible to new disease, the food supply can collapse overnight, leading to ma.s.s starvation. Of course, in the case of Ireland, it didn't help that the Brits deliberately ignored the problem.The potato "blight" (Phytophthora infestans) arrived in 1845 and spread across Ireland in just a few months. A family's crop could be wiped out in a day, forcing them to beg-but charity didn't exist when neighbors had no food to give. The Irish Potato Famine was characterized by the ma.s.s migration of starving refugees: first within Ireland, with millions of people heading to the coasts; then with secondary migrations to America, Canada, and Australia. Over the four-year period, about one million people died of starvation and disease, and another two million fled Ireland in conditions of indescribable misery. Rumors of cannibalism in more remote parts of Ireland persist to this day.The British government's response was, well, pathetic. To justify handouts, the Brits employed starving Irishmen in make-work tasks such as flattening hills, filling valleys, and building endless stone walls that still dot the Irish landscape, serving no purpose. To be eligible for this meaningless work, poor farmers had to give up their land, which was confiscated by rich English landlords. Wages were paid on Fridays, so workers often died of starvation before payday. Interestingly, Ireland remained a net exporter of food from 1845 to 1851, with English landlords s.h.i.+pping abroad three million live animals that could have been used as food. The English escorted the livestock past the starving Irish under armed guard.BY THE NUMBERS [image]

800,000.

number of French soldiers recruited in first draft, 1793 450,000.

size of the next-largest European army (Russia) at that time 6.25 million amount of coal, in tons, mined in England in 1790 16 million amount of coal, in tons, mined in England in 1815 31 million amount of coal, in tons, mined in England in 1839 225 million amount of coal, in tons, mined in England in 1900

100.

miles of railroad track in England in 1830 6,600.

miles of railroad track in England in 1852 22,500.

miles of railroad track laid in the United States, 18501860 28 million French population in 1800 39 million French population in 1900 29 million German population in 1800 56.4 million German population in 1900 1.4 million German iron production, in tons, 1870 4.7 million German iron production, in tons, 1890 1.2 million French iron production, in tons, 1870 2 million French iron production, in tons, 1890 2.8 million population of the American colonies in 1780 7.2 million population of the United States in 1810 23.2 million population of the United States in 1850 63 million population of the United States in 1890

14.

time zones covered by the Russian Empire at its greatest extent

THE EMPIRES STRIKE OUT.

(19001930)

IN A NUTSh.e.l.l.

In 1900, it was still good to be the king. Or the emperor, or the prince, or the archduke, for that matter. Various empires dominated the world outside North and South America. Fortified by the largest navy in the world, Great Britain supervised one quarter of the entire globe. "The sun," went a popular saying, "never sets on the British Empire." By the end of her sixty-three-year reign in 1901, Queen Victoria ruled over the British Isles, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Burma, Egypt, and a good chunk of the rest of the African continent. But the Brits were by no means alone in the ardent practice of imperialism, which could be defined as "we can run your country better than you can, we want your natural resources, and this is a good spot for our military purposes, so welcome to the empire."

The Hapsburgs sat atop the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Romanovs over the Russian Empire, the Manchu over Imperial China, and the Ottomans over, well, the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor. The French, Italians, Germans, Belgians, and Portuguese all had colonies. j.a.pan, after centuries of mostly trying to avoid foreign entanglement, took control of Formosa (now Taiwan) in 1895 and Korea in 1910. Even the United States, which through the Monroe Doctrine had for seventy-seven years sternly warned Europe to stay out of the New World, held Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba.

Only South America was largely free of colonial influences. With the exception of small European holdings in Guiana, the rest of the continent had shed its colonial bonds by the end of the nineteenth century.

Europe had been without major conflict since 1815. But as colonialism reached its peak, the competing empires and would-be empires began b.u.mping up against each other-and rubbing each other the wrong way.

And as industrialization continued its ascent as the dominant factor in the world's economy, some countries outstripped their neighbors. The resulting tensions escalated into various small wars around the globe, from South Africa to Korea.

But there were internal conflicts as well. Fueled by the nineteenth-century writings of a German economics philosopher named Karl Marx, socialists agitated for replacement of monarchs with the ma.s.ses as the heads of government. At the same time, "colonials" were chafing at the empires' yokes. Nationalism began to take on imperialism.

These battles of "isms" boiled over in the Balkans in 1912, when Montenegro successfully rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece followed. The aftershocks rippled throughout Europe, as the flagging Romanov and Hapsburg empires tried to squeeze into the gap left by the Ottomans.

As the situation festered, nations solidified alliances, and by August 1914, Europe was at war. Horrifically effective weapons such as tanks and poison gas, coupled with disease, led to the deaths of more than eight million soldiers, and more than twenty million non-fatal casualties before the war's end in 1918.

In an effort to restore some sort of order and instill real meaning to the catchphrase "war to end all wars," the formal peace treaty eventually signed at Versailles created a League of Nations. The league lacked any military clout, but was supposed to use economic and political pressure to exert influence. It didn't work, especially when the U.S. Senate refused to authorize America's members.h.i.+p.

While America's politics were isolationist, its status as the world's postwar banker made it indispensable. Big U.S. banks made huge loans to foreign countries. When the countries couldn't, or wouldn't, repay the debts, the banks were left high and dry. Farm failures, a growing disparity between the rich and poor, over-reliance on personal credit, and a stock market overheated by get-rich-quick speculation all contributed to a resounding crash of the U.S. economy in 1929.

From an economic standpoint, when the United States sniffled, the world caught a cold. And at the end of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, you might say the world was on the edge of pneumonia.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

Jul. 2, 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launches the first rigid airs.h.i.+p. The flight lasts 18 minutes.

Jan. 1, 1901 The five British colonies in Australia are united to become a commonwealth.

1902.

A 7,000-foot-long dam is completed across the Nile River near Aswan, in Southern Egypt.

Dec. 17, 1903 Ohio bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright make several flights in a powered flying machine.

1905.

German physicist Albert Einstein publishes three groundbreaking papers, including his theory of relativity.

1908.

Henry Ford's factory in Detroit produces the first Model T.

Mar. 10, 1910 China abolishes slavery within the empire.

Apr. 14, 1912 The RMS t.i.tanic t.i.tanic, the world's largest pa.s.senger liner, strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks on its maiden voyage.

Aug. 5, 1914 What are believed to the world's first traffic lights begin operating at the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Ave in Cleveland.

Aug. 14, 1914 After a decade under construction, the Panama Ca.n.a.l is formally opened.

Apr. 22, 1915 The German military uses poison gas against French colonial and Canadian troops.

1918.

"Spanish" influenza kills an estimated 6 million people in Europe alone.

Nov. 2, 1920 Radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh makes the first regularly scheduled commercial broadcast.

Oct. 31, 1922 A thirty-nine-year-old former draft dodger named Benito Mussolini becomes the youngest prime minister in Italy's history.

1923.