#5 The French Revolution and the Struggles for Political Transformation
This is the final Blog which examines the framework idea of a ‘world turned upside down’. By turned upside down, I mean a whole series of events across the Americas, Africa and Asia that had led to a new world. One small part of the world, in this case, Western Europe, had managed through global expansion to impoverish three-quarters of the world and enrich themselves. Put in such broad terms, it seems unlikely in the extreme. My argument in these last 5 blogs has provided an overview of events unique to global history. This was a process over several hundred years where wealth that was gained across the world was drained into Europe.
I began these blogs by arguing that in 1492 the bulk of the world’s wealth was in Asia. By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the majority of the world’s wealth was held in Europe. From the 1750s onwards, much of the new wealth gained was used to turn the world upside down a second time through industrialisation. This is all for future blogs.
The next dozen or so blogs will explore in more detail exactly what happened over the 300 years from 1492 to 1800; these were years of colonisation, slavery and intense suffering. Nothing was planned or intentional. There was no body sitting in an office working out what would happen next. Intention is certainly one aspect of history, but what occurred is equally as important.
Western Europeans turned the world upside down through colonisation; 50 years ago, they had pride in the achievement, but now ambivalence has set in.
The consequences and the means, of turning the world upside down will follow in many blogs. So far, I have only told a brief story about from Blog 2 to 4:
This blog jumps 300 years from the beginning of Western expansion in 1492 to the French Revolution in 1789. The significance of these introductory blogs is that the French Revolution and the following Napoleonic wars were the culmination of the world being turned upside down. From the 1750s onwards, nearly all of Europe was in almost constant internal wars. It was during this period that the 13 East Coast colonial American States broke from England and nearly 100 years later to eventually form the USA of today.
From the 1750s to 1815, these were years of deep turmoil and internal war. The consequence of the 300 years that had gone before, where all the old certainties had been torn down. The revolutionary struggles of these years were the first of the new era that followed. At one level, these years can be understood as the struggle for world power between nation-states. These same years can also be understood as the early struggles against the old feudal order as capitalism was about to be born.
Revolution and Transformation
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars signify both the transformative and destructive tendencies that these blogs are all about. This period can be understood as the first struggle for world power, it makes sense in terms of what was to come across the world stage:
1815 to 1914. The British defeated Napoleon and what followed was period where Britain constituted the world’s foremost powerhouse. Britain led the journey, by several decades, into Industrialisation of her economy, she ruled the sea lanes with her navy and established the world’s first global currency, the pound sterling backed by gold
1914-1945 Global turmoil and the struggle to establish British global power that failed
1945 to the present where the USA took world power, and confronted first the USSR in the Cold war and now China
After 1945, Europeans would stop competing with each other for the first time in over 400 years. Before 1945, Western Europeans had plundered the world for new wealth for 450 years. The French Revolution and then the Napoleonic wars was a deep reflection of the revolutionary changes that the colonial plundering had created.
By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the Americas had been invaded, slavery had been introduced on an industrial scale and the eradication of the native populations was well underway. Africa was being denuded of its young people and the process of impoverishing India had already begun. The balance of the world’s power and wealth had shifted and reversed. The wealth of China, India and the rest of Asia would be radically diminished, all on a historically unprecedented scale. Europe had grown in wealth rapidly while India and the Americas were invaded and deprived.
In a fundamental sense, the French Revolution was caused by the social changes to French society resulting from the new colonial order. The colonies offered new sources of wealth through the plantations of sugar, molasses and cotton. A new social class of entrepreneurs emerged as plantation owners, ships captains, and traders became extraordinarily wealthy. The old rigid social feudal framework in France had been undermined by new wealth from the colonies, and the growth of these new social classes challenged the existing order as they realised that they had no political power.
Each European state fighting against each other had become the new natural order, both in Europe and in the new colonial world. Sharing at the end of the 18th century was not an acceptable global principle. Each generation from each country obtained new wealth that exceeded previous imaginations.
The French Revolution ultimately failed and it was followed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who attempted to destroy the remaining ancient dynastic monarchies across Europe and Russia. The fundamental structural changes that were necessary to create industrialisation were begun by Napoleon. His armies altered the boundaries of states. Napoleonic was wars can be understood in retrospect as preparing the way for 19th and 20th-century capitalism in Europe. In future blogs, I discuss this important development in more detail.
Napoleon's aspirations for a new Europe failed, and much of the old order was put back in place in 1815. However, the pressure to create a new social and political order did not disappear; it was a matter of time before old boundaries in Europe were broken open, and the new industrialising social order established. Further blood flowed, and revolutions and disorder followed, before the old German states unified into a single whole in 1871. The German economy then grew rapidly and began to demand new colonies in Africa and the Middle East.
This set the scene for the next round of bloodletting when the new Germany would be set up against bombastic Great Britain whose ruling cadres at the end of the 19th century had visions to rule the world. Both parties wanted the Middle East, the only major part of the world not yet colonised by 1900, and both wanted to monopolies the oil discovered there.
I have a whole series of blogs for readers which carries this argument through between 1914 and 1945. Years where an ever wider set of wars again devastated people’s lives across the world, destroying regimes and empires, and preparing the way for a new American capitalist global empire in 1945. In this period of just thirty years, the global economy fell apart and the peoples of the world experienced a level of devastation never known before.
Recent history, since 1945, can be viewed either as a period of full-scale change or of mixed change and continuity. The latter was evident as the United States of America attempted to take charge of the world order. It was the only country that had not been invaded, and it had built up the largest reserves of gold and become the world’s creditor nation.
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By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the Americas had been invaded, slavery had been introduced on an industrial scale and the eradication of the native populations was well underway. Africa was being denuded of its young people and the process of impoverishing India had started. The balance of the world’s power and wealth had shifted and reversed. The wealth of China, India and the rest of Asia would be radically diminished, all on a historically unprecedented scale.