War: What is it good for? (33 page)

This demographic disaster left the invaders largely free to do what they wanted, which included looting the Aztecs and Incas, digging up the world's biggest deposit of silver at Potosí in the Andes, and importing African slaves to replace the lost Native labor. Savage struggles with Native Americans went on for centuries, but the biggest threat the Spaniards faced came not from indigenous resistance but from other Europeans who, by 1600, were trying to muscle in on their business.

These newcomers—mostly English, Dutch, and French—faced an uphill struggle. A few optimists thought there were more Aztec and Inca Empires waiting to be robbed and threw their lives away hunting for El Dorado, but most assumed that the Spaniards had already stolen everything worth stealing. (One report concluded that New Mexico contained nothing but “naked people, false bits of coral, and four pebbles.”) The only ways to get rich, it seemed, were by hunting for new veins of precious metal (“the most disadvantageous lottery in the world,” in Adam Smith's words) or plundering the ships carrying silver back to Spain.

That was certainly what the English thought. Walter Raleigh set up a pirate lair on Roanoke Island in 1585, but the colonists vanished without a trace. The gentlemen who settled at Jamestown in 1607 pinned their hopes on finding gold and jewels, but soon they too were disappointed and starving. Cut marks on the bones of a fourteen-year-old girl excavated in a garbage pit suggest that in the winter of 1609–10 they were reduced to eating corpses. But in 1612 the emaciated survivors made a great discovery: tobacco thrived in their swampy, malarial new home. Its leaves were not as sweet as the version Spaniards grew on Cuba, but it was cheap, and Englishmen were glad to buy it.

By then, French settlers in Quebec and Dutch in Manhattan were finding equally strong European markets for American fur, and the religious refugees who fled England for Massachusetts in the 1620s were happily selling timber for ships' masts to their former persecutors. By the 1650s, Puritans were also exporting food to the Caribbean, where plantation owners were turning over every scrap of land to sugar, a wonder drug that sold even better than tobacco. Commodities moved from west to east, and people—a “white plague,” the historian Niall Ferguson calls them—flooded in the other direction.

Outside America, however, Europe's war on the world at first went
less well, because the balance between distance, disease, demography, diplomacy, and firepower was less favorable. In West Africa, the source of slaves for American mines and plantations, Europeans again had overwhelming military dominance but consistently lost the war of microbes, thanks to yellow fever and malaria. Only where the disease environment was unusually favorable, as around Cape Town, did Europeans really have things their own way. After landing here in 1652, Dutch settlers pushed the local Khoekhoe farmers back fifty miles, and a smallpox epidemic in 1713 virtually ended native resistance.

But that was an exception. Usually, Europeans made little headway unless they got lucky diplomatic breaks. In southeast Africa, for example, Portuguese traders began moving up the Zambezi River in 1531, but the kingdom of Mutapa (one of the successors to Great Zimbabwe, which had declined in the 1440s) kept them at arm's length. Only around 1600, when a rebellion unnerved the Mutapan king, did that change. Fearing for his throne, the king invited in Portuguese soldiers and missionaries, and by the time he died in 1627, these advisers had such influence that they could handpick his successor.

As late as 1700, Europeans mostly had to content themselves with tiny toeholds along the coast, where merchants built forts and negotiated what deals they could with local communities. “You have three things we want,” one African chief is supposed to have told a European trader: “powder, musket, and shot. And we have three things you want: men, women, and children.” On this basis, between 1500 and 1800, Europeans bought something like twelve million people from warring African chiefs for shipment across the Atlantic.

Europe's position in Asia was initially even weaker. Disease gave Europeans no advantage: Eurasia's disease pools had largely merged since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, producing a balance that if anything worked against Europeans, who remained vulnerable to malaria in the tropics.

The vast distances separating Europe and Asia—eight thousand miles from Lisbon to Calicut, then another two thousand on to Malacca, and two thousand more to Guangzhou—were also hard to overcome. Dutch sailors found a shortcut in 1611 (trimming two thousand miles off the coastal route that the Portuguese had found to Southeast Asia by picking up the Westerlies near the Cape of Good Hope, taking them almost as far as Australia, and then cutting north), but even in 1620 a mere 20,000 or so Europeans faced nearly 200 million Asians around the Indian Ocean and another 100 million in China.

Asians could not stop European ships from coming, but until well into the seventeenth century they did not really want to. The sultan of Gujarat's view that “wars by sea are the affairs of merchants, and of no concern to the prestige of kings” was not far wrong. Portuguese carracks could pose existential threats to little city-states like Malacca, but to Turkey, Persia, India, China, and Japan they were more annoying than dangerous. Europeans were in the same category as pirates: both kinds of parasites might reduce imperial revenues by killing people in coastal towns, but so long as they stayed within limits, it was cheaper to ignore them than to fight them. There could even be advantages to courting them, particularly if an emperor needed to buy guns.

A two-speed economy took shape in the Indian Ocean. The great empires continued to dominate their own enormous internal markets, but Europeans inserted themselves around their edges and, so long as the empires ignored them, fought each other for shares of the rich international trade.

The fighting did not go well for Portugal. Ever since da Gama's day, the crown had kept traders on a short leash, and the kinds of commercial cartels that set up East India Companies in London (1600), Amsterdam (1602), and Paris (1674) barely existed in Lisbon. In principle, and often in practice, these private East India Companies carried all the costs of doing business in the Indian Ocean. The governor-general of the Dutch East India Company spelled it out in a letter to his directors in 1614: “Trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of your own weapons, and those weapons must be wielded with the profits gained by the trade. So trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.”

The overburdened Portuguese government simply could not compete with this business model. By the 1650s, the Dutch had relieved it of its bases at Malacca and around Sri Lanka, and with the Portuguese effectively out of the picture, the Dutch turned on the English. “The trade of the world is too little for us two,” an English seaman explained; “therefore one of us must down.” Between 1652 and 1674, the two countries' fleets perfected the new line-ahead tactics in a string of grinding wars. Thanks in no small part to Pepys's labors at the Admiralty, England gradually came out on top, but by then France had emerged as a new rival.

Despite all the drama of these wars, though, the sultans, shahs, and emperors in Istanbul, Isfahan, Delhi, and Beijing paid little attention. One set of Europeans might replace another, but the larger balance of power
was set in stone. As late as 1690, the Mughal Empire could slap down the English East India Company almost without effort when it felt that the interlopers were pushing a little too hard in Bengal. Half the men in an English invasion force died of disease that year, and the company had to swallow a humiliating peace.

The lesson seemed clear: Europeans had the edge on the battlefield, but unless they could combine that with an edge in the war of germs, it availed them little. Distance, disease, and demography made the Asian empires invulnerable. The most that Europeans could hope for was to fight over the crumbs that fell from their tables.

But then everything changed. Sooner or later, bad luck, bad blood, or bad judgment catches up with every empire, and in 1707 it was the Mughals' turn. After ruling India for almost half a century, the great Aurangzeb finally died. The occupant of the Peacock Throne had spent his last years falling out first with his own son and then with the rajas, nawabs, and minor sultans who did the actual work of running the subcontinent for him. At his passing, his former agents grabbed the opportunity to opt out of the Mughal organization. Law and order collapsed and violence spiked. It was every man for himself.

By 1720, local grandees were intriguing and fighting against each other, against their nominal overlords in distant Delhi, and against their own unhappy subjects. Players in this game of thrones ran up huge debts to finance their moves. “I am falling at [my creditors'] feet, till I have rubbed the skin from my forehead,” one complained in the 1730s. Needless to say, the various East India Companies were only too happy to exploit this diplomatic opening by lending to the would-be nawabs—especially when they handed the money straight back to the companies to hire European troops.

But these were anxious days for the companies too. On the upside, companies that backed the right men could become kingmakers, perhaps even winning rights to administer and tax the lands around their coastal enclaves, but the downside was that all the fighting disrupted the trade that kept the companies going, threatening them with ruin. Tight-lipped men in tricorn hats slipped back and forth between European forts and rajas' palaces, betraying and being betrayed in turn in a murky world of shifting politics.

“The princes became independent,” observed the British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, “but their independence led to their ruin.”
Few if any of the companies' men were actually seeking to ruin the princes, yet this was precisely what happened in the Carnatic region of southern India. Here things were even messier than usual, because the intriguing nawabs and sultans had the option of dealing not just with the British (based in Madras) but also with the French (in Pondicherry) and of playing the two East India Companies against each other. In 1744, when news arrived that Britain and France were again at war in Europe, both companies decided to put boots on the ground in the Carnatic, which promptly blew up in a multi-cornered conflict.

This Anglo-French confrontation added another wrinkle—Europe's ongoing revolution in military affairs—to the diplomatic opportunities presented by the Mughal meltdown. Had India fallen apart in the 1640s, Europeans might not have been strong enough to capitalize on it, but by the 1740s their professional armies were unstoppable. These forces were tiny, rarely more than three thousand men, and most troops were in fact local recruits rather than Europeans, but when it came to a fight, the well-armed, well-trained, highly disciplined company men consistently routed native armies ten times their size (even when the Indians brought along armored elephants). The Europeans were like a “wall which vomited fire and flame,” a survivor of one battle said.

The Carnatic War raised the stakes for the companies. Whoever came out on top in the Anglo-French fighting would dispose of the entire Carnatic, not just its coastal trade, but it also became clear as the war dragged on that the costs for the companies would be enormous. Both companies had gone to India to make money, so commercial logic demanded a negotiated end to the war. In 1754 the French company began looking for an exit strategy. But the British did not.

For 150 years, Europe's great powers had fought over trade and colonies so they could make money to fund their wars at home. Britain had done better than anyone at this, becoming, one writer claimed in 1718, “the most considerable of any nation in the world [because of] the vastness and expansiveness of our trade.” Yet if this were true, some Britons asked, did it not imply that conventional wisdom was wrong? Instead of trade in India being a means, contributing to the end of winning wars in Europe, perhaps wars in Europe should be the means, and winning more trade in India should be the end.

Really profound shifts in strategic thinking typically only come along every century or two, but one was now under way in London. Amid intense
debate, a loose alliance of commercial interests dragged Britain in fits and starts toward a new business model, in which fighting in Europe was solely a way to distract France so that Britain could snap up its colonies and trade without interference.

The British government lent money and men to France's other enemies in Europe, while the British East India Company stayed the course in the Carnatic and bestowed the throne on its chosen nawab. The company then extorted massive kickbacks from him, seized his tax revenues, and swamped his economy with its agents. Money rolled in, and when a new, pro-French nawab in Bengal—the richest part of India—started making trouble in 1756, the company leaped at the chance to repeat its Carnatic strategy.

But the nawab struck first. He swept down on the company's base in Calcutta and on the pitchy, stifling night of June 20–21 crammed over a hundred prisoners into a cell made for eight. By dawn, half had suffocated or died from heatstroke. The company dispatched Robert Clive—an unlikable but undeniably daring hero of the Carnatic War—to avenge the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Clive did not just toss the nawab out of Calcutta; he also joined a Bengali uprising against him and, adding the company's men to the rebels, took on an army twenty times the size of his own. The resulting battle at Plassey was slightly farcical. The nawab's gunners accidentally blew up some of their own artillery, which stampeded the elephants dragging the guns. The rest of the nawab's army then ran away when the nawab's key ally—who also happened to be the company's pick as the next nawab—changed sides. The company now took over tax collection in Bengal, and Clive helped himself to a reward of £160,000 (as I write, the equivalent of about $400 million) from its treasury.