The Riches of the World
The Saga of Anglo-American Dominance (1799-2025 CE) - Part 1 of 12
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
(Professor Nazeer Ahmed’s new series "The Riches of the World" attempts to understand the complex historical interactions between the Muslim world and the Anglo-Americans. It is a grand attempt and the author intends to touch on the highlights and select a few historical events to illustrate his observations. – Editor)
A hundred years from today, a scribe looking at world history in perspective, will write that the saga of Anglo-American dominance started with the year 1799 CE and was over by the year 2025 CE when China displaced the United States as the dominant economic power of the world.
It was a fascinating period in world history when mankind made giant strides in understanding and controlling the forces of nature culminating in landing a man on the moon. Technology created enormous wealth and made a few individuals extremely wealthy.
It was also a period when the fruits of technology were not available to all and in the midst of plenty there were oceans of poverty with millions of people going hungry every day and children starving to death.
Great ideas emerged and animated the world of man - the ideas of democracy, fraternity and women's suffrage. Liberty and freedom were championed by the nations of Europe and America. But the very nations who championed them denied liberty and freedom to other nations, often by force of arms.
Technology bestowed upon man unimaginable power but this power was used to create nuclear weapons of such destructive capacity that they held all life on earth hostage.
It was a period of heavenly promise and devilish greed. Strides made in agricultural production and disease control held out the promise of eradicating hunger and epidemics. But excessive greed sucked up the wealth and poverty and disease remained endemic.
The scribe will write that the Anglo-Americans dominated this period in world history with a singular focus on cornering for themselves the giant's share of the riches of the world. Every idea, however sublime or however mundane, was subservient to this goal. Religion, democracy, military power, trade, even history and sociology became tools in the hands of economic empire builders.
The scribe will also write that the Islamic world spent much of this period gazing at its own belly button, unable to get its act together and develop a satisfactory response to the challenge from the West. It remained bogged down, at loggerheads with itself over secondary and tertiary doctrinal issues, divided, tossed around, occupied, colonized and exploited from outside. Its footprint was a near zero in world affairs, its chief function relegated to that of a supplier of oil and other resources to the ever expanding consumer appetite of the industrial powers.
This was the Anglo-American saga in which first England and then America played a leading role with Russia and France in a supportive role. It is a grand attempt to capture this fascinating period of human history in a brief paper.
We divide this saga into three parts: Conquest and Consolidation (1799-1914 CE), Conflict (1914-1945 CE), Decay and Disintegration (1945-2025 CE).
It was the year 1799 CE. The armies of Napoleon invaded Egypt on their way to India to link up with the armies of Tippu Sultan of Mysore and expel the British from India. However, Napoleon was defeated by a Turkish-British force in Palestine and Tippu fell in the Battle of Srirangapatam (1799 CE) dashing any hopes of a French conquest of Asia. Napoleon retreated to Europe, and in a fateful miscalculation invaded Russia, only to be defeated and annihilated by a combination of the harsh Russian winter and the resilience of the Russian army. Napoleon finally lost out at the Battle of Waterloo (1812 CE) and was expelled to the island of Corsica.
Meanwhile India fell to British armies. Within six years of Tippu's death, the armies of the East India Company were at the Red Fort in Delhi, the seat of the once rich and powerful Mogul Empire. The plunder of India that had started with the fall of Bengal (1757) extended to the entire subcontinent. The India that had boasted 22 percent of the GDP of the world at the height of the Mogul Empire in 1700 CE was brought to its knees and reduced to penury and famine.
After the Napoleonic wars, England, France and Russia realized that there was more to be gained in cooperating with each other over colonial spoils than in fighting with each other. An entente emerged between the three powers, sometimes written, sometimes unwritten on how to divide up their colonies. Russia occupied the Caucuses and Central Asia; France extended its hold on West Africa; Great Britain consolidated its hold on India and Egypt. With the riches of India at its disposal, England embarked on its industrial revolution and used a combination of technological superiority and economic prowess to colonize vast areas of Asia and Africa.
Even China did not escape the avarice of the European powers. Britain, with the support at various times of France, Russia, Japan and Germany, waged war on China (1839-1860) to compel it to open its borders for the opium trade and unhindered preaching of Christianity. Opium, produced in northwestern India and Afghanistan, was forced on China to weaken it from within. So the British and the other powers walked in, dope in one hand and the Bible in the other. It was the most blatant example of drug peddling in human history. It produced hordes of drug addicts and devastated the Chinese social, political and economic structures. Sun Yat-Sen (d 1925) tried to stem the decay but the process was scuttled by invasions from an aggressive, expansionist, imperial Japan.
The Dutch, not to be left out of the colonial party, carved out for themselves an empire based on Java and the Indonesian islands, while the French subjugated Indochina. The Dutch empire was a satellite empire of the British and was sustained through British support. Together, the European empires built up an interconnected web that shrouded the entire globe.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic a new power rose up, proclaiming the equality of man, emphasizing the sanctity of individual liberty, building itself up on the energies of waves of immigrants while benefiting from the enormous profits from the Atlantic slave trade. The vast North American continent was its turf, its enormous agricultural potential its wealth. The vast plains beyond the Mississippi beckoned the immigrants who stretched out, obliterating the native Indians who stood in their way. By the beginning of the twentieth century, America was the largest economic power on earth.
Standing in the way of European expansion, vaulting the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe, stood the Ottoman Empire, nominally Islamic but including a large number of European Christian subjects. Its location was its vulnerability, its decaying institutions its weakness. In the tug of war of real politic, the Ottomans lost out to the European powers. Caught between the Russian hammer from the north and the Anglo-French anvil to the south, the Ottomans lost Algeria (1840 CE), Egypt (1978 CE), Libya (1910 CE), the Balkans (1911 CE) and finally their Middle Eastern heartland (1917-1918 CE).
Overshadowing the rise of European empires was the rises of the credit economy. Wars were expensive and the warring monarchs often turned to the bankers to borrow and bankroll their imperial adventures. The industrial revolution and the growing global markets required liquidity and the merchants were forced to borrow to finance their growing operations. The bankers deftly used such occasions to elbow out the merchants and extract concessions from the sovereigns including the right to print and circulate their notes (paper money) and guarantee their convertibility. By 1825, the major economies of Europe had surrendered their monetary policies to a small body of Europe based bankers who had the right to control the supply of money and the availability of credit. It took a little longer for this control to extend to Germany (1871-85) and the United States (1913).
Britain gradually surrendered its dominant position in manufacturing to other nations. The United States captured the southwest in the Mexican wars (1846-48), survived the civil war (1861-65) and consolidated its continent sized economy interconnected by coast to coast railroads, emerging as the dominant economy of the world. In the Far East, imperial Japan invaded and occupied the Korean peninsula and Chinese Manchuria, building up a strong military. And in Central Europe, Germany, unified under Bismarck, industrialized itself, rapidly eclipsing the productive capacity of Great Britain.
(Continued next week)
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