Chapter -2

An Empire Across Three Continents

Why is it called An Empire across Three Continents?

The Roman Empire covered a vast stretch of territory that included most of Europe, a large part of the Fertile Crescent in Asia and major territories of North Africa.

What are the sources available to understand the history of Roman Empire?

1.      Roman historians have a rich collection of sources to study its history which we can broadly divide into three groups: (a) texts, (b) documents  (c) material remains

2.      Textual sources include histories written by contemporaries/ historians of that time  These texts were usually called ‘Annals’, because the narrative was constructed on a year-by-year basis,-letters, speeches, sermons, laws, and so on

3.      Documentary sources include mainly inscriptions and papyri. Inscriptions were usually cut on stone, so a large number survive, in both Greek and Latin languages.

4.      Material remains include a very wide assortment of items that mainly archaeologists discover (for example, through excavation and field survey), for example, buildings, monuments and other kinds of structures, pottery, coins, mosaics, even entire landscapes (for example, through the use of aerial photography).

Explain the Boundaries of Roman Empire

1.      Rome dominated the Mediterranean and all the regions around that sea in both directions,

2.      To the north, the boundaries of the empire were formed by two great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube;

3.      To the south, the Roman Empire was extended up to by the huge expanse of desert called the Sahara.

4.      In the east the Roman Empire was extended up to river Euphrates

5.      In the west  the Roman Empire was extended up to Atlantic Ocean

Divisions in Roman history

1.      The Roman Empire can broadly be divided into two phases, ‘early’ and ‘late’, divided by the third century as a sort of historical watershed between them.

2. In other words, the whole period down to the main part of the third century can be called the ‘early empire’, and the period after that the ‘late empire’.

What is the Third-Century Crisis in Roman history?

If the first and second centuries were by and large a period of peace, prosperity and economic expansion, the third century brought the first major signs of internal strain.

1.      From the 230s, the empire found itself fighting on several fronts simultaneously In Iran a new and more aggressive dynasty emerged in 225 ,called the ‘Sasanians’ within just 15 years sasanians were expanding rapidly in the direction of the Euphrates.

(In a famous rock inscription cut in three languages, Shapur I, the Iranian ruler, claimed he had annihilated a Roman army of 60,000 and even captured the eastern capital of Antioch)

2.      Meanwhile, a whole series of Germanic tribes (Alamanni, Franks ,Goths) began to move against the Rhine and Danube frontiers, from 233 to 280 saw repeated invasions of a whole line of provinces that stretched from the Black Sea to the Alps and southern Germany. The Romans were forced to abandon much of the territory beyond the Danube.

3.      While the emperors of this period were constantly in the field against what the Romans called ‘barbarians’. The rapid succession of emperors in the third century (25 emperors in 47 years!) is an obvious symptom of the strains faced by the empire in third century.

Social, Economic, political and cultural conditions of Early Roman Empire

1.The Roman Empire was culturally much more diverse , it was a mosaic of territories and cultures that were chiefly bound together by a common system of government in Europe, Asia and Africa and various cultures and religions.

2. Many languages were spoken in the empire, but for the purposes of administration Latin and Greek were the most widely used, indeed the only languages. The upper classes of the east spoke and wrote in Greek, those of the west in Latin.

3. The Senate, the body which had controlled Rome earlier, when it was a Republic.The Senate had existed in Rome for centuries, and had remained as a body representing the aristocracy, that is, the wealthiest families of Roman and Italian descent, mainly landowners.

4. The monarchy was established by Augustus, the first emperor, in 27 BCE was called the ‘Principate’. Although Augustus was the sole ruler and the only real source of authority, the fiction was kept alive that he was actually only the ‘leading citizen’ (Princeps in Latin), not the absolute ruler.

5. The other key institution of imperial rule was the army. Romans had a paid professional army where soldiers had to put in a minimum of 25 years of service. Indeed, the existence of a paid army was a distinctive feature of the Roman Empire.

6. To sum up, the emperor, the aristocracy and the army were the three main ‘players’ in the political history of the empire. The success of individual emperor is depended on his control of the army, and when the armies were divided, the result usually was civil war.

7. Succession to the throne was based as far as possible on family descent, either natural or adoptive, and even the army was strongly wedded to this principle.

8. An important characteristic of ERE was the gradual extension of Roman direct rule. This was accomplished by absorbing a whole series of ‘dependent’ kingdoms into Roman provincial territory.

9. Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life and urban populations also enjoyed a much higher level of entertainment. For example, one calendar tells us that spectacula (shows) filled no less than 176 days of the year!

Later Roman Empire

 

Gender Role

1.      One of the more modern features of Roman society was the widespread prevalence of the nuclear family. Adult sons did not live with their families, and it was exceptional for adult brothers to share a common household. On the other hand, slaves were included in the family as the Romans understood this.

2. By the late Republic (the first century BCE), the typical form of marriage was one where the wife did not transfer to her husband’s authority but retained full rights in the property of her natal family.
3. While the woman’s dowry went to the husband for the duration of the marriage, the woman remained a primary heir of her father and became an independent property owner on her father’s death.
4. Thus Roman women enjoyed considerable legal rights in owning and managing property. In other words, in law the married couple was not one financial entity but two, and the wife enjoyed complete legal independence.
5. Divorce was relatively easy and needed no more than a notice of intent to dissolve the marriage by either husband or wife.
6. On the other hand, whereas males married in their late twenties or early thirties, women were married off in the late teens or early twenties, so there was an age gap between husband and wife and this would have encouraged a certain inequality.
7. Marriages were generally arranged, and there is no doubt that women were often subject to domination by their husbands.
8.  Augustine*, the great Catholic bishop who spent most of his life in North Africa, tells us that his mother was regularly beaten by his father and that most other wives in the small town where he grew up had similar bruises to show!
9. Finally, fathers had substantial legal control over their children – sometimes to a shocking degree, for example, a legal power of life and death in exposing unwanted children, by leaving them out in the cold to die.

Literacy in Later Roman Empire:

1.      It is certain that rates of casual literacy* varied greatly between different parts of the empire. *The use of reading ,writing and counting in everyday contexts.

2. For example, in Pompeii, which was buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, there is strong evidence of widespread casual literacy. Walls on the main streets of Pompeii often carried advertisements, and graffiti were found all over the city
3. One of the funniest of these graffiti found on the walls of Pompeii says: ‘Wall, I admire you for not collapsing in ruins When you have to support so much boring writing on you.’
4. By contrast, in Egypt where hundreds of papyri survive, most formal documents such as contracts were usually written by professional scribes, and they often tell us that X or Y is unable to read and write.
5.  But even here literacy was certainly more widespread among certain categories such as soldiers, army officers and estate managers.

Culture in Later Roman Empire

•      The cultural diversity of the empire was reflected in many ways and at many levels:

•       The vast diversity of religious cults and local deities;

•      the plurality of languages that were spoken;

•       the styles of dress and costume,

•      the food people ate, their forms of social organisation (tribal/non-tribal),

•      even their patterns of settlement( village/city)

Economic Expansion under later Roman Empire

1. The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc.
2. Wheat, wine and olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and Italy, where conditions were best for these crops.
3. Liquids like wine and olive oil were transported in containers called ‘amphorae’. The fragments and sherds of a very large number of these survive. It has been possible for archaeologists to reconstruct the precise shapes of these containers,  what they carried, and where they were made
4. The Spanish olive oil was mainly carried in a container called ‘Dressel 20’. Finds of Dressel 20 are widely scattered across Mediterranean,
5. This suggests that Spanish olive oil circulated very widely. By using such evidence archaeologists are able to show that Spanish producers succeeded in capturing markets for olive oil from their Italian counterparts.
6. The empire included many regions that had a reputation for exceptional fertility. Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Galilee, Tunisia, southern Gaul and Baetica were all among the most densely settled or wealthiest parts of the empire, according to writers like Strabo and Pliny.
7. Large expanses of Roman territory were in a much less advanced state. For example, transhumance* was widespread in the countryside of Numidia .These pastoral and semi-nomadic communities were often on the move, carrying their oven-shaped huts (called mapalia) with them. As Roman estates expanded in North Africa, the pastures of those communities were drastically reduced and their movements more tightly regulated
8. Diversified applications of water power around the Mediterranean as well as advances in water-powered milling technology,
9.  The use of hydraulic mining techniques in the Spanish gold and silver mines and the gigantic industrial scale on which those mines were worked in the first and second centuries .
10. The existence of well-organised commercial and banking networks, The widespread use of money are all indications of how much we tend to under-estimate the sophistication of the Roman economy. This raises the issue of labour and of the use of slavery.

Controlling Slaves/Workers in Later Roman Empire

 

1.      Slavery was an institution deeply rooted in the ancient world, both in Roman Empire and in the Sasanian Empire.

2.      Christianity (when it was the state religion) did not seriously challenge the slavery.e

3.      The bulk of the labour in the Roman economy was performed by slaves in large parts of Italy in the Republican period.

4.       Under Augustus there were  3 million slaves in a total Italian population of 7.5 million but it was no longer true of the empire as a whole.

5.      Slaves were an investment, and at least one Roman agricultural writer advised landowners against using them in contexts where too many might be required ( for harvests) or where their health could be damaged (by malaria).

6.      These considerations were not based on any sympathy for the slaves but on hard economic calculation.

7.      Roman upper classes were often brutal towards their slaves, ordinary people did sometimes show much more compassion

 

Use of Free and wage labour in later Roman Empire

 

1.      As warfare became less widespread with the establishment of peace in the first century, the supply of slaves tended to decline and the users of slave labour thus had to turn either to slave breeding* or to cheaper substitutes such as wage labour which was more easily dispensable.

2.      Unlike hired workers, slaves had to be fed and maintained throughout the year, which increased the cost of holding this kind of labour.

3.      This is probably why slaves are not widely found in the agriculture of the later period, at least not in the eastern provinces.

4.      In fact, free labour was extensively used on public works  in Rome precisely because an extensive use of slave labour would have been too expensive.

5.      Freedmen , slaves who had been set free by their masters, were extensively used as business managers, where, obviously, they were not required in large numbers.

6.      Masters often gave their slaves or freedmen capital to run businesses on their behalf or even businesses of their own

Management of labour in later Roman Empire

1.                  The Roman agricultural writers paid a great deal of attention to the                                     management of labour.

2.                  Columella, a first-century writer who came from the south of Spain,           recommended that landowners should keep a reserve stock of implements       and tools, twice as many as they needed, so that production could be    continuous, ‘for the loss in slave labour time exceeds the cost of such items’.

3.                  There was a general presumption among employers that without supervision           no work would ever get done, so supervision was paramount, for both free           workers and slaves.

4.                  To make supervision easier, workers were sometimes grouped into gangs or            smaller teams.

5.                  Columella recommended squads of ten, claiming it was easier to tell who was       putting in effort and who was not in work groups of this size. This shows a   detailed consideration of the management of labour.

6.                  Pliny the Elder, the author of a very famous book ‘Natural History’,     condemned the use of slave gangs (as the worst method of organising         production, )mainly because slaves who worked in gangs were usually chained   together by their feet.

7.                  The late-fifth-century emperor Anastasius built the eastern frontier city of   Dara in less than three weeks by attracting labour from all over the East by offering high wages.

 

 

 

Condition of workers in factories of Roman Empire

 

1.      All the practices  in factories look draconian*, but we should remember that most factories in the world today enforce similar principles of labour control.

(Draconian: Harsh 6^th  century BCE Greek lawmaker called Draco, who prescribed death as the penalty for most crimes.)

2.      Indeed, some industrial establishments in the empire enforced even more tighter controls

3.      The Elder Pliny described conditions in the frankincense** factories  of Alexandria, where, he tells us, no amount of supervision seemed to suffice.

(**Frankincense – the European name for an aromatic resin used in incense and perfumes)

4.      A seal is put upon the workmen’s aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and before they are allowed to leave the premises, they have to take off all their clothes.’

5.      Agricultural labour must have been fatiguing and disliked, for a famous edict of the early third century refers to Egyptian peasants deserting their villages ‘in order not to engage in agricultural work’. The same was probably true of most factories and workshops.

6.      A law of 398 referred to workers being branded so they could be recognised if they run away and try to hide.

7.      Private employers cast their agreements with workers in the form of debt contracts to be able to claim that their employees were in debt to them and thus ensure tighter control over them.

8.      An early, 2^nd -century writer tells us, ‘Thousands surrender themselves to work in servitude as slaves although they are free.’ In other words, a lot of the poorer families went into debt bondage in order to survive.

9.      From one of the recently discovered letters of Augustine we learn that parents sometimes sold their children into servitude for periods of 25 years.

Augustine asked a lawyer friend of his whether these children could be liberated once the father died.

Social Hierarchies in Roman Empire

 

1.      Tacitus described the leading social groups of the early empire as follows: senators , leading members of the equestrian class; the respectable section of the people, those attached to the great houses;  the unkempt lower class who, were addicted to the circus and theatrical displays;  and finally the slaves.

2.      Senetors: In the early third century when the Senate numbered roughly 1,000, approximately half of all senators still came from Italian families. By the late empire, during the reign of Constantine I the first two groups (the senators and the equites*) had merged into a unified and expanded aristocracy.

3.      One writer of the early fifth century, the historian Olympiodorus who was also an ambassador, tells us that the aristocracy based in the City of Rome drew annual incomes of up to 4,000 lbs of gold from their estates, not counting the produce they consumed directly

4.      *The equites, (‘knights’ or ‘horsemen’) were traditionally the second most powerful and wealthy group. Originally, they were families whose property qualified them to serve in the cavalry, hence the name. Like senators, most ‘knights’ were landowners, but unlike senators many of them were shipowners, traders and bankers, that is, involved in business activities.

5.      The ‘middle’ class now consisted of the considerable mass of persons connected with imperial service in the bureaucracy and army but also the more prosperous merchants and farmers of whom there were many in the eastern provinces.

6.      Tacitus described this ‘respectable’ middle class as clients of the great senatorial houses. Now it was chiefly government service and dependence on the State that sustained many of these families.

7.      Lower class  Below them were the vast mass of the lower classes known collectively as humiliores (lit. ‘lower’). They comprised a rural labour force of which many were permanently employed on the large estates; workers in industrial and mining establishments; migrant workers who supplied much of the labour for the grain and olive harvests and for the building industry; self-employed artisans who, it was said, were better fed than wage labourers; a large mass of casual labourers, especially in the big cities;

8.      Many thousands of slaves were kept as the last social group. They were still found all over the western empire in later centuries.

cultural transformation of the Roman world in its final centuries

 

1. ‘Late antiquity’ is the term now used to describe the final, fascinating period in the evolution and break-up of the Roman Empire and refers broadly to the fourth to seventh centuries.

2. At the cultural level, the period saw momentous developments in religious life, with the emperor Constantine deciding to make Christianity the official religion

3. Diocletian introduced ‘cut back’ by abandoning territories with little strategic or economic value. Diocletian also fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries, He separated civilian from military functions, granting greater autonomy to the military commanders (duces), who now became a more powerful group.

4. Constantine introduced a new denomination, the solidus, a coin of 4½ gm of pure gold that would in fact outlast the Roman Empire itself. Solidi were minted on a very large scale and their circulation ran into millions .

5. He divided the Roman Empire into East and West .The other area of innovation was the creation of a second capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul in Turkey, previously called Byzantium), surrounded on three sides by the sea.

 

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The Making of a Global World

1.      Globalisation

Globalisation refers to an economic system of trade, migration of people in search of work, the movement of capital, and much else. (visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today is called Globalisation)

Earliest evidence for Globalisation

1.              As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley civilisations with present-day West Asia.

2.     For more than a millennia, cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa.

Silk Routes Link the World

1.      The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links between distant parts of the world.

2.      The name silk routes points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoes  along this route.

3.      Historians have identified several silk routes, over land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa. .

4.      But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route, as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia.

5.      In return, precious metals gold and silver  flowed from Europe to Asia. Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand.

Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato

1.      Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Even ready foodstuff in distant parts of the world might share common origins.

2.      Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed that noodles travelled west from China to become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders took pasta to fifth-century Sicily, an island now in Italy.

3.      Similar foods were also known in India and Japan, so the truth about their origins may never be known.

4.      Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to our ancestors until about five centuries ago.

5.      These foods were only introduced in Europe and Asia after Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the vast continent that would later become known as the Americas.

6.      Europe`s poor began to eat better and live longer with the introduction of the humble potato. Ireland`s poorest peasants became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died of starvation

Conquest, Disease and Trade

1.      The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully crossed the western ocean to America.

2.      Indian Ocean was known for bustling trade, with goods, people, knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters.. The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect some of these flows towards Europe.

3.      Before its discovery America had been cut off from regular contact with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from 16^th  century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to  transform trade and lives everywhere.

4.      Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present- day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe`s wealth and financed its trade with Asia. Many expeditions set off in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.

5.      The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America was decisively under way by the mid-16^th  century. They carried smallpox on their person. Because of their long isolation, America`s original inhabitants had no immunity against these diseases that came from Europe.

6.      Smallpox in particular proved a deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent, ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated whole communities, paving the way for conquest.

7.      Guns could be bought or captured and turned against the invaders. But not diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors were mostly immune.

8.      Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe. Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread. Religious conflicts were common, and religious dissenters were persecuted.

9.      Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here, by the eighteenth century, plantations worked by slaves captured in Africa were growing cotton and sugar for European markets.

10.   Till 18^th  century, China and India were among the world`s richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asian trade. However, China had restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation.. So Europe now emerged as the centre of world trade.

Economists identify three types of movement or flows within international economic exchanges in 19^th century.

1.       The first is the flow of trade which in the nineteenth century referred largely to trade in goods (e.g., cloth or wheat).

2.      The second is the flow of labour  the migration of people in search of employment.

3.   The third is the movement of capital for short-term or long-term investments over long distances.

All three flows were closely interwoven and affected peoples lives more deeply now than ever before. The interconnections could sometimes be broken for example, labour migration was often more restricted than goods or capital flows.

World Economy Takes Shape

 Traditionally, countries liked to be self-sufficient in food. But in nineteenth-century Britain, self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social conflict. Why was this so?

1.      Population growth from the late eighteenth century had increased the demand for food grains in Britain.

2.      As urban centres expanded and industry grew, the demand for agricultural products went up, pushing up food grain prices.

3.      Under pressure from landed groups, the government also restricted the import of corn. The laws allowing the government to do this were commonly known as the Corn Laws.

4.      Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws. After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into Britain more cheaply than it could be produced within the country.

5.      British agriculture was unable to compete with imports. Vast areas of land were now left uncultivated, and thousands of men and women were thrown out of work. They flocked to the cities or migrated overseas.

As food prices fell, consumption in Britain rose. From the mid- nineteenth century, faster industrial growth in Britain also led to higher incomes, and therefore more food imports.

1.      Around the world in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia lands were cleared and food production expanded to meet the British demand.

2.      It was not enough merely to clear lands for agriculture. Railways were needed to link the agricultural regions to the ports.

3.      New harbours had to be built and old ones expanded to ship the new cargoes. People had to settle on the lands to bring them under cultivation. This meant building homes and settlements.

4.      All these activities in turn required capital and labour. Capital flowed from financial centres such as London. The demand for labour in places where labour was in short supply as in America and Australia led to more migration.

5.      Nearly 50 million people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in the nineteenth century. All over the world some 150 million are estimated to have left their homes, crossed oceans and vast distances over land in search of a better future.

Global agricultural economy

1.     By 1890, a global agricultural economy had taken shape, accompanied by complex changes in labour movement patterns, capital flows, ecologies and technology.

2.     Food no longer came from   a nearby village or town, but from thousands of miles away. It was grown by an agricultural worker, perhaps recently arrived on a large farm that was converted from forest.

3.     It was transported by railway, built for that very purpose, and by ships which were increasingly manned in these decades by low-paid workers from southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

4.     Some of this dramatic change occurred in west Punjab. Here the British Indian government built a network of irrigation canals to transform semi-desert wastes into fertile agricultural lands that could grow wheat and cotton for export. The Canal Colonies, as the areas irrigated by the new canals were called, were settled by peasants from other parts of Punjab.

5.     Cultivation of cotton expanded worldwide to feed British textile mills. Between 1820 and 1914 world trade is estimated to have multiplied 25 to 40 times. Nearly 60 per cent of this trade comprised primary  products that is, agricultural products such as wheat and cotton, and minerals such as coal.

What was the role of technology in Global agricultural economy ?

1.      The railways, steamships, the telegraph were important inventions without which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world. But technological advances were often the result of larger social, political and economic factors.

2.      Colonisation stimulated new investments and improvements in transport: faster railways, lighter wagons and larger ships helped move food more cheaply and quickly from faraway farms to final markets.

3.      The trade in meat offers a good example of this connected process. Till the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe and then slaughtered when they arrived there. But live animals took up a lot of ship space. Many also died in voyage, fell ill, lost weight, or became unfit to eat.

4.      Meat was hence an expensive luxury beyond the reach of the European poor. High prices in turn kept demand and production down until the development of a new technology, namely, refrigerated ships, which enabled the transport of perishable foods over long distances.

5.      Now animals were slaughtered for food at the starting point in America, Australia or New Zealand  and then transported to    Europe as frozen meat. This reduced shipping costs and lowered meat prices in Europe. The poor in Europe could now consume a more varied diet.

6.      To the earlier monotony of bread and potatoes many could now add meat (and butter and eggs) to their diet. Better living conditions promoted social peace within the country and support for imperialism abroad.

 Late 19^th century Colonialism

1.      Trade flourished and markets expanded in the late nineteenth century. But this was not only a period of expanding trade and increased prosperity. It is important to realize that there was a darker side to this process.

2.      In many parts of the world, the expansion of trade and a closer relationship with the world economy also meant a loss of freedoms and livelihoods.

3.      Late- nineteenth-century European conquests produced many painful economic, social and ecological changes through which the colonised societies were brought into the world economy

4.      In Africa some countries` borders run straight, as if they were drawn using a ruler. European powers in Africa drew up the borders demarcating their respective territories. In 1885 the big European powers met in Berlin to complete the carving up of Africa between them.

5.      Britain and France made vast additions to their overseas territories in the late 19^th  century. Belgium and Germany became new colonial powers. The US also became a colonial power in the late 1890s by taking over some colonies earlier held by Spain.

Let us look at one example of the destructive impact of colonialism on the economy and livelihoods of colonised people.

 Rinderpest, or the Cattle Plague

1.                  In Africa, in the 1890s, a fast-spreading disease of cattle plague or rinderpest had a terrifying impact on people`s livelihoods and the local economy.

2.                  This is a good example of the widespread European imperial impact on colonised societies. It shows how in this era of conquest even a disease affecting cattle reshaped the lives and fortunes of thousands of people ..

3.                   For centuries, land and livestock sustained African livelihoods and people rarely worked for a wage. If an African possessing land and livestock and there was no need to work for a wage.

4.                  Europeans came to Africa hoping to establish plantations and mines to produce crops and minerals for export to Europe. But there was an unexpected problem- a shortage of labour and no body was willing to  work for wages.

5.                  Employers used many methods to recruit and retain labour. Heavy taxes were imposed which could be paid only by working for wages on plantations and mines.

6.                  Inheritance laws were changed so that peasants were displaced from land: only one member of a family was allowed to inherit land, as a result of which the others were pushed into the labour market. Mineworkers were also confined in compounds and not allowed to move about freely.

Then came rinderpest, a devastating cattle disease.

1.                  Rinderpest arrived in Africa in the late 1880s. It was carried by infected cattle imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea in East Africa.

2.                  Entering Africa in the east, rinderpest moved west like forest fire, reaching Africa`s Atlantic coast in 1892. It reached the Cape (Africa`s southernmost tip) five years later. Along the way rinderpest killed 90 per cent of the cattle.

3.                  The loss of cattle destroyed African livelihoods. Planters, mine owners and colonial governments now successfully monopolised what scarce cattle resources remained, to strengthen their power and to force Africans into the labour market.

4.                  Control over the scarce resource of cattle enabled European colonisers to conquer and subdue Africa.

5.                  Similar stories can be told about the impact of Western conquest on other parts of the nineteenth-century world.

Indentured Labour Migration from India

1.                  The indentured labour migration from India also illustrates the two-sided nature of the nineteenth-century world. It was a world of faster economic growth as well as great misery, higher incomes for some and poverty for others, technological advances in some areas and new forms of coercion in others.

2.                   In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese labourers went to work on plantations, mines and in road and railway construction projects around the world.

3.                  In India, indentured labourers were hired under contracts which promised return travel to India after they had worked five years in  plantation.

4.                   Most Indian indentured workers came from the present-day regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India and the dry districts of Tamil Nadu.

5.                  In the mid-nineteenth century these regions experienced many changes  like cottage industries declined, land rents rose, lands were cleared for mines and plantations. All this affected the lives of the poor: they failed to pay their rents, became deeply indebted and were forced to migrate in search of work. ( why were Indians forced to become indentured migrants?)

6.                  The main destinations of Indian indentured migrants were the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji. Closer home, Tamil migrants went to Ceylon and Malaya. Indentured workers were also recruited for tea plantations in Assam.

7.                  Recruitment was done by agents engaged by employers and paid a small commission. Many migrants agreed to take up work hoping to escape poverty or oppression in their home villages. Agents also tempted the prospective migrants by providing false information about final destinations, modes of travel, the nature of the work, and living and working conditions. Often migrants were not even told that they were to embark on a long sea voyage. Sometimes agents even forcibly abducted less willing migrants.

8.                   Nineteenth-century indenture has been described as a new system of slavery.

a.       On arrival at the plantations, labourers found conditions to be different from what they had imagined. Living and working conditions were harsh, and there were few legal rights.

b.      But workers discovered their own ways of surviving. Many of them escaped into the wilds, though if caught they faced severe punishment. Others developed new forms of individual and collective self- expression, blending different cultural forms, old and new.

c.       In Trinidad the annual Muharram procession was transformed into a riotous carnival called Hosay (for Imam Hussain) in which workers of all races and religions joined.

d.      Similarly, the protest religion of Rastafarianism (made famous by the Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley) is also said to reflect social and cultural links with Indian migrants to the Caribbean.

e.       Chutney music, popular in Trinidad and Guyana, is another creative contemporary expression of the post-indenture experience. These forms of cultural fusion are part of the making of the global world, where things from different places get mixed, lose their original characteristics and become something entirely new.

f.        Most indentured workers stayed on after their contracts ended, or returned to their new homes after a short spell in India. Consequently, there are large communities of people of Indian descent in these countries. Have you heard of the Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul, West Indies cricketers Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan

From the 1900s India`s nationalist leaders began opposing the system of indentured labour migration as abusive and cruel. It was abolished in 1921.

Yet for a number of decades afterwards, descendants of Indian indentured workers, often thought of as coolies, remained an uneasy minority in the Caribbean islands. Some of Naipaul`s early novels capture their sense of loss and alienation.

 Indian Entrepreneurs Abroad

1.      Growing food and other crops for the world market required capital. Large plantations could borrow it from banks and markets.

2.      Shikaripuri shroffs  and Nattukottai Chettiars. They were amongst the many groups of bankers and traders who financed export agriculture in Central and Southeast Asia, using either their own funds or those borrowed from European banks.

3.       They had a sophisticated system to transfer money over large distances, and even developed indigenous forms of corporate organisation.

4.      Indian traders and moneylenders also followed European colonisers   into Africa. Hyderabadi Sindhi traders,  ventured beyond European colonies.

5.      From the 1860s they established flourishing emporia at busy ports worldwide, selling local and imported curios to tourists whose numbers were beginning to swell, thanks to the development of safe and comfortable passenger vessels.

 Indian Trade, Colonialism and the Global System

1.      Historically, fine cottons produced in India were exported to Europe. With industrialisation, British cotton manufactures began to expand, and industrialists pressurised the government to restrict cotton imports from India.

2.      Tariffs were imposed on Indian cloths . Consequently, the inflow of fine Indian cotton began to decline.

3.      From 19th century, British manufacturers also began to seek overseas markets for their cloth. Indian textiles now faced stiff competition in other international markets.

4.      If we look at the figures of exports from India,  Cotton textile export was 30 per cent in 1800 to 3 percent in 1870s

5.      But export of raw materials increased equally fast. In 1812 it was 5 percent and in 1871  it became 35 per cent.

6.      opium shipments to China grew rapidly from the 1820s to become for a while India`s single largest export. Britain grew opium in India and exported it to China and, with the money earned through this sale, it financed its tea and other imports from China.

7.      But the value of British exports  to India was much higher than the value of British imports from India. Thus Britain had a `trade surplus` with India. Britain used this surplus to balance its trade deficits with other countries.

8.      By helping Britain balance its deficits, India played a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century world economy.

( How did India play a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century world economy?

9.      Britains trade surplus in India also helped pay the so-called `home charges` that included private remittances home by British officials and traders, interest payments on India`s external debt, and pensions of British officials in India.

The Inter-war Economy

 

The First World War was a war like no other before-Why?

 

1.      When the war began in August 1914, many governments thought it would be over by Christmas. It lasted more than four years.

2.      The First World War was a war like no other before. The fighting involved the worlds leading industrial nations

3.      This war was thus the first modern industrial war. It saw the use of machine guns, tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, etc. on a massive scale.

4.      The scale of death and destruction 9 million dead and 20 million injured was unthinkable before the industrial age, without the use of industrial arms.

5.      Most of the killed and maimed were men of working age. These deaths and injuries reduced the able-bodied men.

Post-war economic recovery proved difficult in Britain –Why?

1.      After the war Britain found it difficult to recapture its earlier position of dominance in  the Indian market, and to compete with Japan internationally.

2.      The war had led to an economic boom, that is, to a large increase in demand, production and employment.

3.      When the war boom ended, production contracted and unemployment increased.

4.      In 1921 one in every five British workers was out of work. Indeed, anxiety and uncertainty about work became an enduring part of the post-war scenario.

5.      Before the war, eastern Europe was a major supplier of wheat in the world market. When this supply was disrupted during the war, wheat production in Canada, America and Australia expanded dramatically.

6.      But once the war was over, production in eastern Europe revived and created a glut in wheat output. Grain prices fell, rural incomes declined, and farmers fell deeper into debt.

 

Post-war economic recovery was quicker in USA–Why?

1.      One important feature of the US economy of the 1920s was mass production.

2.      . A well-known pioneer of mass production was the car manufacturer Henry Ford. He adapted the assembly line of a Chicago slaughter house  to his new car plant in Detroit.

3.      He realised that the assembly line  method would allow a faster and cheaper way of producing vehicles. The assembly line forced workers to repeat a single task mechanically and continuously such as fitting a particular part to the car  at a pace dictated by the conveyor belt.

4.      Standing in front of a conveyor belt no worker could afford to delay the motions, take a break, or even have a friendly word with a workmate.

5.      As a result, HENRY  FORD`s cars came off the assembly line at three-minute intervals, a speed much faster than that achieved by previous methods. The T- Model Ford was the world`s first mass-produced car.

Problems

1.      At first workers at the Ford factory were unable to cope with the stress of working on assembly lines in which they could not control the pace of work.

2.      So they quit in large numbers. In desperation Ford doubled the daily wage to $5 in January 1914.

3.      At the same time he banned trade unions from operating in his plants.

4.      Henry Ford recovered the high wage by repeatedly speeding up the production line and forcing workers to work ever harder.

5.      Fordist industrial practices soon spread in the US. They were also widely copied in Europe in the 1920s.

Impacts of mass Production:

1.      Mass production lowered costs and prices of engineered goods.

2.      Thanks to higher wages, more workers could now afford to purchase durable consumer goods such as cars.

3.      Car production in the US rose from 2 million in 1919 to more than 5 million in 1929.

4.      Similarly, there was a spurt in the purchase of refrigerators, washing machines, radios, gramophone players, all through a system of  hire purchase on credit repaid in weekly or monthly installments.( EMI)

5.      Large investments in housing and household goods seemed to create a cycle of higher employment and incomes, rising consumption demand, more investment, and yet more employment and incomes.

 

The Great Economic Depression ( Causes)

The depression was caused by a combination of several factors.

1.      First: agricultural overproduction remained a problem. This was made worse by falling agricultural prices. This worsened the glut in the market, pushing down prices even further. Farm produce rotted for a lack of buyers.

2.      Second: in the mid-1920s, many countries financed their investments through loans from the US. US overseas lenders panicked at the first sign of trouble.

3.      The withdrawal of US loans affected much of the rest of the world, though in different ways.

4.      In Europe it led to the failure of some major banks and the collapse of currencies such as the British pound sterling.

5.       The US attempt to protect its economy in the depression by doubling import duties also dealt another severe blow to world trade.

The US was most severely affected by the  economic depression-How?

1.       The US was an industrial country most severely affected by the depression. With the fall in prices and the prospect of a depression, US banks had also slashed domestic lending and called back loans.

2.       Farms could not sell their harvests, households were ruined, and businesses collapsed.

3.       Faced with falling  incomes, many households in the US could not repay what they had borrowed, and were forced to give up their homes, cars and other consumer durables.

4.       Ultimately, the US banking system itself collapsed. Unable to recover investments, collect loans and repay depositors, thousands of banks went bankrupt and were forced to close.

India and the Great Economic Depression

1.       India had become an exporter of agricultural goods and importer of manufactures. The depression immediately affected Indian trade.

2.      Peasants and farmers suffered more than urban dwellers. Though agricultural prices fell sharply, the colonial government refused to reduce revenue demands.

3.      Peasants producing for the world market were the worst hit. Across India, peasants indebtedness increased.

4.      They used up their savings, mortgaged lands, and sold whatever jewellery and precious metals they had to meet their expenses.

5.      In these depression years, India became an exporter of precious metals, notably gold. The depression proved less grim for urban India.

Second World War

1.      It was fought between the Axis powers and the Allies . It was a war waged for six years on many fronts, in many places, over land, on sea, in the air.

2.      At least 60 million people are believed to have been killed and Millions more were injured.

3.      Unlike in earlier wars, most of these deaths took place outside the battlefields. Many more civilians than soldiers died.

4.      Vast parts of Europe and Asia were devastated, and several cities were destroyed by aerial bombardment or relentless artillery attacks.

5.      The war caused an immense amount of economic devastation and social disruption.

 

Reconstruction promised to be long and difficult.

 

Two crucial influences shaped post-war reconstruction.

1.     The first was the US`s emergence as the dominant economic, political and military power in the Western world.

2.     The second was the dominance of the Soviet Union. It had made huge sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany, and transformed itself from a backward agricultural country into a world power .

 

Economists and politicians drew two key lessons from inter-war economic experiences- what are they?

 

1.        First, an industrial society based on mass production cannot be sustained without mass consumption. But to ensure mass consumption, there was a need for high and stable incomes.

 

2.        The second lesson related to a country`s economic links with the outside world. The goal of full employment could only be achieved if governments had power to control flows of goods, capital and labour

 

Bretton Woods Institutions (Agreement)

1.      The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held in July 1944 at Bretton Woods  Hotel in New Hampshire, USA.

2.      The Bretton Woods conference established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to deal with external surpluses and deficits of its member nations.

3.      The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (popularly known as the World Bank) was set up to finance post- war reconstruction.

4.      The IMF and the World Bank are referred to as the Bretton Woods institutions or sometimes the Bretton Woods twins.

5.      The post-war international economic system is also often described as the Bretton Woods system.

6.      The Bretton Woods system was based on fixed exchange rates. In this system, national currencies, for example the Indian rupee, were pegged to the dollar at a FIXED EXCHANGE rate.

7.      In 1950s the Bretton Woods institutions began to shift their attention towards developing countries and began to give loans to them.

8.      At the same time, most developing countries did not benefit from IMF and WORLD BANK.

9.      Therefore they organised themselves as the Group of 77 (or G-77) to demand a new international economic order (NIEO).

10.  By the NIEO they meant a system that would give them real control over their natural resources, more development assistance, fairer prices for raw materials, and better access for their manufactured goods in developed countries` markets.

End of Bretton Woods and the Beginning of ‘Globalisation’

1. Earlier, developing countries take loans from international institutions But now they were forced to borrow loans from Western commercial banks and private lending institutions. This led to periodic debt crises in the developing world,

From the late 1970s MNCs also began to shift production operations  to low-wage Asian countries.

1.      The relocation of industry to low-wage countries stimulated world trade and capital flows.

2.      In the last two decades the world`s economic geography has been transformed as countries such as India, China and Brazil have undergone rapid economic transformation

3.      Wages were relatively low in countries like China.

4.      Asia became attractive destinations for investment by foreign MNCs competing to capture world markets.

5.      TVs, mobile phones, and toys we see in the shops seem to be made in China? This is because of the low-cost structure of the Chinese economy, most importantly its low wages.