Category Archives: economics

by | 10 April 2023 · 6:16 am

British Military Expansion, 1800s

From Britain at War with the Asante Nation, 1823–1900: “The White Man’s Grave” by Stephen Manning (Pen & Sword Books, 2021), Kindle pp. 16-18:

The truly massive expansion in the British Empire throughout Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) saw British troops (‘The Soldiers of the Queen’) and naval personnel deployed across the world in such diverse countries as Russia, New Zealand, India, Canada, Egypt and South Africa, to name just a few. Such deployments were made to right a perceived wrong, to defeat a European foe, to stop a competing country securing spoils or simply to expand British prestige and power. On many such occasions British troops were placed in direct conflict with indigenous ethnic tribes or nations and the resulting military actions have become an important part of British colonial history, which some view with immense pride and others with shame or even disgust. Whatever personal views are held there is no doubting the immense bravery and fortitude of the British troops and equally these terms can be applied to their foes.

In most of the colonial wars of the Victorian age the British had a significant technology advantage in terms of weaponry over their enemies and this allowed them to achieve some crushing victories such as at the battles of Magdala (9 April 1868) and Omdurman (2 September 1898). Yet, there were occasions when despite this advantage the British were defeated, most famously at the Battle of Isandlwana (22 January 1879). When the British met defeat at the hands of an indigenous enemy such foes became respected and even achieved mythical status. This is certainly true of the British relationship with the Zulu nation, but it also applies to the Maoris of New Zealand, the Dervishes of Sudan and the Sikhs of Northern India. Less well known are the numerous conflicts that the British fought against the Asante nation in what is now modern-day Ghana in West Africa.

Whilst the Zulus did indeed inflict a crushing defeat upon the British at Isandlwana, a minor one at Intombi Drift (12 March 1879) and a more serious reversal as at the Battle of Hlobane (28 March 1879), the Asante nation was a thorn in the side of both British politicians and the military throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, the casualties endured by the British in the various campaigns against the Asantes were comparable to those suffered during conflicts with the Zulus and the Dervishes. The Anglo-Zulu War lasted a mere seven months, although the unsatisfactory political settlement that was imposed by the British resulted in lesser conflicts which extended into the beginning of the twentieth century. By contrast, the Asante nation and the British were in both political and military conflict for over seventy years during the nineteenth century and three major wars resulted in which there were significant military reversals for the British. This volume is split into three separate parts to reflect and illustrate these wars, each of which possessed fascinating moments and challenges which are captured in this work. Whether this is the death of the British Governor, Sir Charles McCarthy, at the Battle of Nsamankow (22 January 1824), Sir Garnet Wolseley’s brilliant planned and orchestrated expedition of 1873–4, or the siege of the British fort at Kumasi in 1900, all offer a rich and engrossing history. Indeed, the 1900 siege tells a tale of bravery, fortitude and ineptitude that can stand alongside other more famous sieges of Victoria’s reign, such as Ladysmith and Peking. One particularly fascinating aspect of these three major wars is how the unsatisfactory settlements reached at the conclusion of each were the lifeblood for further conflicts.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, China, economics, migration, military, nationalism, New Zealand, South Asia, war

by | 5 April 2023 · 5:42 am

Early Chinese Telegraph Codes

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 91-92, 106-108, 110-111, 123-124:

In Morse code, the basic symbols were dots and dashes. The system’s twenty-six combinations of dots and dashes, ranging from one to four symbols, were meant to accommodate the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, with another ten combinations of five symbols each for numbers zero to nine.

To send a message, a telegraph operator pressed an electric switch, in the form of a key: a short tap for a dot and a long one for a dash. The message was converted into an electric current that traveled along the wires and was reverse translated into letters and numbers on the receiving end. The sound of clicking patterns could become so familiar that an experienced telegrapher could tell what word was being coded from its distinct rhythm. Telegraph costs were determined by how long they took to transmit—each dot or space was a single unit, and a dash—three times as long as a dot—was three units. As Morse explained early on, his system was designed to be cost-efficient. The most frequently used letter in English, “e,” was also the least expensive: It was represented by a single dot. The high frequency of “e” holds true for most European languages, from Italian to Dutch. But Morse code clearly favored the American English alphabet. An English letter takes up somewhere between one and thirteen units. To add even a single diacritical mark to the letter “a”—as when making the French “à”—required ten more units. So there was already plenty to disagree about among Roman alphabet users.

The inequities of Morse code were on a different scale for the Chinese. International telegraphy recognized only the Roman alphabet letters and Arabic numerals used by the majority of its members, which meant that Chinese, too, had to be mediated via letters and numbers. Whereas English could be English, and Italian mostly Italian, Chinese had to be something other than itself. Every Chinese character was transmitted as a string of four to six numbers, each of which cost more than a letter. The assigned code for a Chinese character first had to be looked up in a codebook before being converted to the dots and dashes of Morse code. Coding and converting Chinese characters into an ordinary telegram of twenty-five words required at least half an hour, whereas a comparable message in English took only about two minutes. Untold opportunity costs accrued with every telegraph that was delayed when the operator had to pause to check a character against its assigned number in a codebook or had to take extra time to correct an error.

…

[Septime Auguste] Viguier possessed the confidence and skill set that Great Northern [Telegraph Company (大北電報公司 / 大北电报公司 Dàběi Diànbào Gōngsī)] was looking for. He had already worked on developing a code for Chinese telegraphy years earlier for the French government in support of their failed efforts to interest the Chinese Empire in their telegraph cables. He was well versed in early word-copying machines like the Caselli pantelegraph, a precursor to the modern-day fax machine. When the French project was shelved, Viguier ended up in Shanghai—ripe for the Danes’ recruitment. He was the best candidate but not well-liked. Colleagues immediately noted his preening and boastfulness—the French way, they sneered. Viguier later also had a nasty exchange with the managing director Suenson, and his relationship with the company soured over questions of compensation and credit. Nonetheless, Viguier was able to work quickly enough to build out the Danish professor’s incomplete scheme. By June 1870, he had the first version. In 1872, he delivered the final, standardized telegraphic code table for 6,899 characters in The New Book for the Telegraph (Dianbao xinshu).

…

Viguier came up with a tabular form of twenty rows and ten columns per page. He assigned an arbitrary four-digit code from 0001 to 9999 to each character, with empty spaces left for potentially 3,000 more codes to accommodate customized vocabulary for individual business purposes. Each page contained 200 square spaces for listing 200 characters and their numerical codes. The code only included a relatively small number of characters out of the 45,000 or so that were extant. The mass scaling of telegraphy meant that it was geared toward the common person and the common tongue, so restricting the number of characters was not only efficient but also practical.

…

But Viguier’s telegraphic code did not go unchallenged. Almost immediately, the Chinese tried to outdo and improve upon it. A quiet young Chinese translator who had been part of that diplomatic mission to Europe in 1868, Zhang Deyi, became the first Chinese to do so. Zhang noted the pain of having to send Chinese messages back to the Chinese office in China in “foreign letters” whenever more urgent service was required. He also saw how Western telegrams were more secure, as secret messages were sent in numbers. That inspired Zhang to construct his own Chinese telegraphic codebook by following a similar format.

While the published version of Viguier’s work was an important landmark, Zhang zeroed in on its sloppiness. Viguier’s numbering of characters did not make them terribly easy to use for the Chinese. The continuous numbers did not separate out characters into groups, which was how the Chinese were accustomed to searching for characters in a dictionary. He decided to trim down the format of Viguier’s system and do some reorganization to make its content clearer. Zhang’s own New Method of Telegraphy (Dianxin xinfa) was published two years after Viguier came up with a draft of his telegraphic code in 1873. It reordered the characters so that the numbers were less arbitrary. Zhang used the same 214 radicals, but reselected about 7,000 characters from the Kangxi Dictionary and assigned them numbers from 0001 to 8000.

…

Westerners like Viguier had mapped Chinese onto numbers. Then the Chinese themselves had tried to use numbers to remap the alphabet. They kept bending the stick back and forth. Wang [Jingchun] was increasingly of the mind that one could put the Western alphabet in service of Chinese Romanization more permanently. He turned to Bopomofo, the Chinese phonetic alphabet approved at the 1913 National Language Unification Conference in Beijing, and its idea of an auxiliary phonetic alphabet formed from different styles and parts of Chinese characters. Working from this basis, Wang designed a use for Roman letters that was Latin in name but readapted to signal the three linguistic properties of Chinese characters: the phonetic representation of sound, tone, and the radical.

To indicate sound in his New Phonetic System, Wang mapped the sounds of Bopomofo—represented by symbols ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ, etc.—onto alphabet letters that shared similar starting consonant sounds. So ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ would match the letters “b,” “p,” “m,” and “f.” To show tone, Wang picked five letters to represent the five tones used in traditional and medieval phonology: “B” stands for the level or even tone; “P” marks the second or rising tone; “X” represents the third tone, which falls first then rises; “C” is fourth or falling tone; and “R” denotes the fifth or neutral tone. The last property, the radical, takes up two letters—a consonant and a vowel. Wang used two letters to spell the pronunciation of the radical part of the character only; e.g., tu for 土, li for 力, ko for 口, etc., in a way that was not dissimilar to what Wang Zhao had done with the Mandarin Alphabet. With one letter for sound, another letter for tone, and two more for phoneticizing the radical’s spelling, this system yielded a four-letter code for every character. The Chinese character could then be transmitted via telegraphy without using numbers at all. Wang’s idea took after other Romanization systems of the time, which were developed not for telegraphy per se, but to address the broader question of literacy. He borrowed from that conversation, run by linguists and ethnographers, to design a solution for what he had seen in the diplomatic arena.

During the year the Far Outliers spent in China in 1987-88, we had occasion to send a telegram to fellow teachers who were spending winter holidays in their hometown of Jingdezhen, famous for its pottery. They had written most of the text of the telegram and all we had to do was add the day and time when our train would arrive. So before we boarded the train for Jingdezhen, I handed the text of the telegram to a clerk at the telegraph office who proceeded to rewrite the message in a series of 4 digits for each Chinese character. It was very short and she had probably memorized some of the most frequent codes for ‘arrive’, ‘depart’, and dates and times, but it still looked like a tedious chore.

This interesting chapter includes a very misleading table, shown below. It shows American Morse code (also called Railroad Morse) that was standardized in 1844 and used by American railroads as late as the 1970s. Also called Morse landline code, its variable spacing and variable lengths did not travel well through undersea cables. Central Europeans used a modified code, the Hamburg alphabet, that evolved into the International Morse Code standardized in 1865. Working in the 1870s, Viguier and Zhang almost certainly used the international standard, the one where ‘SOS’ is rendered by the familiar dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit.

Erroneous Morse Code

 

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by | 4 April 2023 · 6:28 am

First Chinese Typewriter Designs

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 64-69:

Zhou’s breakthrough was figuring out how to correlate the physical act of selecting and retrieving a character in a tray with the mechanical motion of preparing a character, etched onto a cylinder, to be inked and printed. The result was a single coordination of mechanical motions, optimally economized and completed by a human operator. In his article for The Chinese Students’ Monthly, Zhou documented the details of his typewriter and the technical challenges he had to overcome. He had known, of course, that he was not the first. There was Sheffield’s machine and an earlier Japanese prototype, both of which he acknowledged as having arrived at similar ideas independent of his endeavor. It was a respectful nod to those who came before him.

Just as he was preparing to publish his article, though, an unexpected challenger nearly derailed Zhou’s debut. Qi Xuan was a fellow Chinese student studying engineering at New York University. Unbeknownst to Zhou, Qi had been on a parallel track. Relying on a different set of principles for building his own Chinese typewriting machine, he figured out how to do what Zhou, Sheffield, and others thought was impossible: arrange the characters by parts.

…

In place of Zhou’s character grid, the keyboard of Qi’s machine had only three keys—a back spacer, a forward spacer, and one that selected the character. But Qi’s machine also relied on cylinders of type (two cylinders instead of Zhou’s four). The upper cylinder, with characters inscribed on paper, served as a guide. The lower cylinder, with corresponding characters engraved on a copper surface, made the actual impression. An operator would use a hand wheel to rotate the machine’s upper cylinder until the correct row appeared in a viewfinder on the front of the machine. Then three keys would be used to select the correct character from the row and lock the cylinders in position, aligning the corresponding character cast on the lower cylinder and stamping it on the page.

Though they looked very different, the underlying design and mechanisms of Zhou’s and Qi’s machines were very similar. And Qi’s handled 4,200 actual Chinese characters, just 200 more than Zhou’s core lexicon. Qi’s machine, however, was different in one very important respect: he had broken with the prevailing commitment to reproduce whole, complete characters. Of his 4,200 individual Chinese characters, 1,720 were in the form of character components, radicals, and their possible variant positions in a square space, which allowed his machine to generate, in theory, more versions out of the same parts. In three steps, using these keys, the operator could purportedly produce 50,000 combinations.

Operating his machine, Qi explained, was closer to spelling an English word than producing a Chinese character. If you treat radicals like groups of letters, you can play with different combinations the way you would in a word game. Let’s say you have three English words—“exist,” “expect,” and “submit.” You can generate more words by mixing and matching their parts to form new words like “sum,” “suspect,” “subsist,” “bit,” “mist,” “its,” and “sex.” Unlike modern English words, which have equal spacing for each letter and line up in a neat row, components and radicals can move around from character to character. In print they can occupy different quadrants of the square space that each character fills, which means their position, and consequently their size, can change. For example, the character for “fire,” 火, fills an entire square space when standing alone, but it becomes thinner when it is a radical put on the left of the character “braise,” shao 燒. In turn, it changes form altogether—into four flames—when placed at the bottom of the character for “hot,” re 熱. Qi accounted for possible variant positions like these by giving them separate engravings on the cylinders. Consequently, there are at least three options for “fire” to be combined with other components and thereby form a greater number of characters.

Qi challenged the idea that characters had to be individual, stand-alone units. He thought of them as more modular, like alphabet-based words, things that could be recycled to compose different characters. And once he started tinkering, some of the Kangxi radicals did not sit well with him. He took more liberties and slipped in a few radicals he had devised that he thought worked better. A bigger shift than Zhou’s was creeping in. Others would also start to ask whether exclusively using radicals for character classification still made sense.

…

For different reasons, Sheffield and Zhou both concluded that characters were the way they were for good reasons and preserving them was of the utmost importance. Qi’s scheme “looked well on the face of it,” Zhou cautioned, “but they forgot, that the same ‘radical’ in different characters differ [sic] not only in size but also in shape, and, furthermore, they occupy different positions in a character.” He named one example, the square-shaped radical meaning “mouth” 口, which shows up in the characters for “ancient” 古 and “cry” 哭 but in each its size and location are quite different. Consequently, one cannot use the same square for “mouth” in both cases, as they were designed to fit into different configurations. If the different sizes of 口 were forced together, they would create absurd-looking characters with overlapping strokes in all the wrong places.

Zhou’s design eventually won out.

Japanese modernizers had a much easier time adapting katakana for use in typewriters, semaphore, and telegraphy.

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by | 17 March 2023 · 9:59 am

Early Ottoman Rule in the Balkans

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 302-305:

There had been a good deal of peaceful interchange as well as fighting between Byzantium and the Ottomans in the decades preceding 1453; and not a little intermarriage. Mehmet’s own ancestors included Byzantine Christians. Besides he entertained considerable respect for some aspects of the Byzantine tradition; he was invited to think of himself as ‘Emperor of the Romans’, like the Byzantine Emperors of old, and came to believe that he could unite all Christendom under his rule. More immediately he used certain Byzantine institutions as models for the system he set up to run his Empire. Thus the Byzantine fief seems to have been the inspiration of the sipahi system; Byzantine offices, taxes and even ceremonials became bases for Ottoman administrative and court practices, and certain posts, particularly those involving foreign affairs, became almost a monopoly of Greeks. This is not to suggest, however, that much about the new regime was not alien and burdensome.

The Ottoman state was run by a system of slavery, even though the Sultan’s slaves constituted an administrative and military elite. Furthermore, the Turks took an irregular levy of children (devshirme) from their subject Christian population and made Muslims of them, even though they also trained them for their service and set them on ladders of opportunity which enabled them to reach the highest offices of state. Furthermore, Christians were made to feel their inferiority. They were forbidden to wear green or to paint their houses in bright colours, forbidden to ride horseback in the presence of Muslims, and restricted in the number and the height of their churches. On the other hand there was freedom of worship; non-Muslims were not obliged to do military service; and they were largely subject to their own justice within their own religious millets, of which by far the largest was the Orthodox, administered by the Patriarchate of Constantinople whose latest incumbent was invested in office by the Sultan himself. The Great Church was largely in captivity, but it retained most of its autonomy. The monasteries of Mount Athos were not disturbed, and the Turks did not distract the monk Gabriel of Rila from his life’s work, a vast compilation of the sayings of St John Chrysostomos.

The Ottoman Turks also breathed new life into decrepit Byzantine cities and above all into Constantinople which they called Istanbul. Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Jews were brought from all over the Empire and settled there. Hence the population which had shrunk to about 10,000 in the immediate aftermath of its fall increased by as much as tenfold within thirty years. Most came voluntarily recognising opportunity or responding to concessions, though some were forcibly resettled; and huge building and rebuilding projects were soon under way. Water supplies, sewage disposal, street-paving and street furniture were soon renewed or supplied for the first time; ruined structures were rebuilt, others restored and new palaces, fountains, public baths and hospitals erected. Also a great bazaar – for the Ottomans had long recognized the importance of commerce.

In the Balkan countryside Ottoman domination replaced uncertainty and periodic anarchy with an orderly system that did not at first always unduly disturb existing social relationships. Local lords who submitted to the sultan were generally left in possession of their estates in fief provided they served the Ottomans as loyal vassals. They were encouraged to convert to Islam and embrace Ottoman culture, of course, but pressures to do so tended to be applied gradually over a period of two or three generations, by which time many had gravitated naturally to the ways of the new elite. Lower down the scale peasants could gain privileges such as certain tax exemptions by serving as military auxiliaries or local police; most monasteries that had not earned the Sultan’s displeasure continued in the possession of most of their estates; and the populations of some regions, notably the heretical Bogomils of Bosnia, positively welcomed the Turks.

In two other respects the Ottoman system can be regarded as superior to some others in the Europe of the time. It was unequivocal about the ultimate ownership of property belonging to the state, eliminating powerful lordships, bases of individual power which could be exercised capriciously; and it did not permit the military class to become too numerous. Christian servicemen surplus to requirements were reduced in status and lost their privileges. This was not the case in Poland and Hungary, where, as we have seen, a swollen nobility and the virtually unrestricted power of lords were to be conducive to great harm. Furthermore the Turks provided security for the great majority of the Balkan population to live in tranquility in accordance with a familiar culture. By uprooting and changing Byzantine institutions, it has been said to have decapitated Byzantine high culture. On the other hand, as we have seen, Byzantine civilization had made some impression on the Turks themselves; and its cultural legacies, to both Eastern and Western Europe, were particularly rich.

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by | 15 March 2023 · 9:05 am

Heyday of Heyduks, c. 1600

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 269-271:

This malaise was associated with the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’, the resumption of war between the Habsburgs and the Turks (1593–1606), and a severe economic recession. At the same time there was a great welling-up of social discontents and political upheavals. The entire frontier zone from Ukraine to the Adriatic was affected by the troubles as well as Russia and the Ottoman Balkans; and there were reverberations in Poland and for the Habsburgs. The crisis was the confluence of many streams and was expressed in many forms, but one of its most frightening manifestations were the bands of undisciplined and ruthless soldiery who plagued both sides of the frontier in Hungary.

The Turks had long used a variety of paramilitary forces (armartolos, derbentsy, akinji, vojnuki, etc.) as auxiliary troops, frontier raiders, mountain-pass guards and the like; as we have seen, the Hapsburgs had followed suit; and the Cossacks constitute a parallel in Ukraine and southern Russia. Such troops usually received some pay and also rations or plots of land, but by no means always. There was an Ottoman category known as deli, young men noted for their dare-devilry who would take part in campaigns and sieges for no reward whatsoever, except the opportunity to share in any plundering. Another such type of predatory soldiery was known as haramia. These had an equivalent on the other side of the frontier in the unpaid heyduks and uskoks (venturini) attached to the ‘official’ groups of heyduks and uskoks employed by the Habsburgs to garrison frontier forts and stations, and the unregistered Cossacks of the Ukraine who were to play such a prominent role in the Khmelnytsky rising of 1648.

Evidence from a wide variety of sources suggests that the numbers of such freelance warriors increased sharply in the later sixteenth century, despite a general increase in the numbers employed not only by governments but in the private armies of noblemen, like the Wisniowieckis in Lithuania, the Bathorys in Transylvania or the Frankopans in Croatia.

This increase in the soldiery, both freelance and employed, and the tumults they promoted were linked to the endemic warfare of the frontier, which created both a demand for such troops and, by disrupting the economy of entire districts, a supply of them from among the ranks of the homeless and indigent. But the phenomenon was also related to the huge increase in the population of the Balkans and to the imposition of serfdom. The demographic explosion which doubled the population of Balkan cities also fed migration northwards and eastwards across the frontier, mostly, it seems, through the gap of Timisoara.

The subsequent economic difficulties and the onset of disorders no doubt increased the flow. In any case the numbers of heyduks called ‘Racz’ registered in Eastern Hungary (and there were units in which nearly two-thirds of the men bore that name) points to a sizeable migration northwards from the Balkans, for racz in Magyar (rat in Romanian) means ‘Serb’. Their names also indicate that, although most were or became linguistic Hungarians, some heyduks had originated in Slovakia (toth), Romania (vlach, olah) and Ukraine (kozak, rusnak) as well as in Hungary and the Balkans. And there were Hungarian, Romanian and Tatar names among the Zaporozh’e Cossacks, though most had migrated from Belorussia, Ukraine and Russia. Circumstances suggest that a proportion of these were peasants escaping serfdom, and this was also the case with the recently enserfed Szekels whose support for Michael ‘the Brave’ when he invaded Transylvania regained them their freedom as frontier servicemen.

As late as the 1580s heyduks are reported in groups of up to a few hundred, or, occasionally, of a thousand; but by the turn of the century no fewer than 8,000 unpaid heyduks were reported to be serving Michael ‘the Brave’, Prince of Wallachia, alone. The growth of the phenomenon is suggested by the extremity of their behaviour as well as increasing numbers. Compared with them, Elizabethan England’s problem with sturdy beggars pales into insignificance. In some areas heyduks claimed to be Calvinist, yet they would kill Calvinist priests without compunction; and the Transylvanian Saxons have left matter-of-fact, but eloquent testimony in their memoirs and diaries to the heartless bestiality of the heyduks.

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by | 14 March 2023 · 6:28 am

Eastern Europe After Mohacz

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 250-252:

The political consequences of the battle of Mohacz were also considerable. Louis II had died childless; and the Habsburgs of Austria, long-sighted dynastic politicians and shrewd diplomatists, became the leading contenders for the thrones of both Hungary and Bohemia, and soon gained both. But in Hungary there was strong backing for a local candidate, John Zapolyai, and he, too, was crowned king. This political division weakened resistance to the Turks, who by the end of 1541 had occupied the southern and central parts of the country, including the capital Buda; and gained suzerainty over the east, which became a largely autonomous principality, Transylvania.

The death of Louis had ended one Eastern European dynasty. Two others failed to survive the sixteenth century. The last Jagiellonian King of Poland-Lithuania died in 1572; the last of Russia’s ancient Riurikid dynasty in 1591. In both instances political hiatus encouraged tumults, though, as we have seen, the long-term outcomes were quite dissimilar. While Russia returned to dynastic rule, Poland abandoned it. In this respect she came to resemble the smaller polities in the region, the Danubian Principalities, self-governing tributaries to the Turk, which also lacked dynastic rule: The instability of their domestic politics is suggested by the fact that, in the course of one century Wallachia had twenty-four, and Moldavia no fewer than forty, changes of ruling prince, or hospodar.

These religious and political changes were obvious to contemporaries. But there were other shifts, no less profound in their effects, which were much less noticeable at the time, or recognized only in retrospect.

Europe’s centre of economic gravity had been moving from the Mediterranean to the countries bordering on the North Atlantic; from the basin of the River Po to that of the Rhine (where it has remained); and from the emporia of Istanbul and Venice to that of Amsterdam. Furthermore, a surge in the population of Western Europe, and in particular of its cities, was stimulating a sharply increasing demand, and hence higher prices, for imported foodstuffs which Eastern Europe was able to supply. This was to have marked social as well as economic effects, especially on those regions with access to the Baltic, not least in encouraging the rise of serfdom.

At the same time the importation of silver from the Americas was promoting a sharp increase in the money supply and hence serious inflation. This was to throw the finely-tuned mechanisms of the Ottoman state out of kilter and prove a major factor in its subsequent decline. And there was one change perceived by very few, if at all, the indirect effects of which were felt by almost everyone. This was ‘the little ice age’, a slight but insidious drop in the average temperature beginning late in the sixteenth century. By restricting the latitude and height at which agriculture was viable this precipitated famines, population movements and the great disorders which were to overtake most of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, turning the frontier lands especially into a crucible of violence.

And there was a plethora of other factors which intervened at various points with varying intensity to influence the course things took. Linguistic differences, for example, sometimes fed into religious and political struggles; and social classes sometimes gained or lost constitutional rights according to the religion they embraced at a particular moment. Low population density in Poland-Lithuania contributed to the enserfment of the peasant; yet high population density in the Ottoman Empire contributed to the disruption of that state. Sometimes the effects seem paradoxical. The Turkish presence, so often assumed to be a wholly negative influence, slowed down and even reversed the process of enserfment in Hungary for a time. The Baltic grain boom had helped to promoted serfdom, yet the end of the boom around the turn of the century served not to remove serfdom, but to entrench it. And though Protestantism is often associated with the origins of modern science Copernicus was a priest whom Polish Protestants rejected, while the patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler was a Habsburg. The interactions of circumstances and catalysts that shaped Eastern Europe in the period from 1526 to 1648 far exceeded in complexity the most complicated transmutation process in any alchemists’ laboratory.

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by | 10 March 2023 · 9:08 am

Rough Road to Greek Nationhood

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 206-208:

It was difficult for Bulgarians to think in terms of liberation other than through the church, which was dominated by Greeks, so that Bulgarian national feeling emerged almost as much in reaction to the Greeks as to the Turks.

The Greeks themselves present a different case, for they included important mercantile and administrative classes. These elements formed a cultural community of sorts, but they were distanced from the common people, who had also built up a tradition of self-defence, especially in the mountain areas and some of the islands. The Greek elite was also widely dispersed geographically. Their trading network ramified throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral, while the Phanariotes staffed much of the Ottoman diplomatic service and bureaucratic machine besides ruling the Romanian principalities (often corruptly, but sometimes in the spirit of enlightened despotism). The Greek elite constituted fertile ground both for conspiracy and manipulation by foreign powers.

The Greek diaspora extended to Paris, and beyond; and French agents had been active in the Greek world since the later 1790s. Revolutionary notions were to grip members of the merchant class (though not the more substantial of them), some Orthodox clergy (though few bishops), and even an occasional potentate in the Ottoman service. But it was on Russian, not French soil, that the Greek revolution got off the ground. In 1814 expatriate Greeks formed a friendly society (Philiki Etairia) in Odessa. Like others founded earlier in Paris and Vienna its aims were cultural; unlike them, however, it aimed to liberate ‘the motherland’.

In 1821 it mounted an attempt to do so, launching an invasion of the Danubian Principalities. But Vladimirescu’s followers provided none of the support they had hoped for, and the Turks soon mopped them up. The conspirators succeeded, however, in sparking an insurgency in the Peleponnese and some of the islands. Though the Russians withdrew their ambassador from Istanbul, and Metternich opined (quite rightly as it happened) that Greece was merely a geographical expression, the Powers supported neither side. Then the Turks executed the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, even though he had roundly denounced the rebellion – and the idealists of Europe rallied to the cause of Greek independence. The volunteers (including Byron), the money, and, not least the publicity which they supplied contributed greatly to the success of the cause. Albeit indirectly, they also helped to ensure that the emergent state of Greece would adopt a Western-type constitution highly unsuitable for a society that was largely traditional and innocent of Western values. Events were to demonstrate that although the seeds of Western democratic ideas were to germinate in Eastern Europe, unlike the rampant bean-stalk of nationalism, the plants that grew out of them would be weak and spindly.

Greece’s first head of state, Capodistrias, understood the problem. He was an authoritarian in the mould of the enlightened despots. He set out to build sound administrative and educational systems, to improve communications and the economy. He also favoured land reform. Anticipating Stolypin, he regarded a free and prosperous peasantry as the foundation of a stable society. Traditional interest groups, whom he held in contempt, and idealists starry-eyed with Western ways, all hated him. In 1831 he was assassinated. When the ensuing anarchy finally subsided, independent Greece found herself (thanks to an agreement between Russia, France, and Britain) with a sizeable Western loan, a Bavarian King [Otto] and a small Bavarian army.

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by | 8 March 2023 · 6:45 am

Eastern Europe’s Urban Growth, 1900s

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:

Between 1860 and 1900 the population of Eastern Europe almost doubled. Between 1900 and 1914 it increased by at least another 20 per cent to a figure well in excess of 250 million. This was a far higher growth rate than in any Western country, and it has never been adequately explained. In so far as the statistics exclude migration abroad, the situation was worse than it might seem. Mass emigration had gathered pace since 1880. By 1914 nearly 4 million had left Austria-Hungary; the rate of migration from the Russian Empire approached 100,000 a year. But the migration rates from the poorest areas were the lowest (higher for Austria-Hungary than Russia, higher from Russian Poland than the rest of the Russian Empire, and lowest from Romania). However encouraging a development the population explosion might seem to chauvinistic nationalists, it brought rising despair in the countryside (where almost 60 per cent of Austria’s subjects lived, 70 per cent of Hungary’s and over 80 per cent over the remainder of the region). The despair at having to feed more mouths from the same small trough turned to anger in massive peasant disturbances in Russia in 1905–6 and a bloody Romanian uprising of 1907. But the problems of the countryside were also transferred to the cities.

The population growth in most of the major cities exceeded that for the region as a whole because of urban migration. Between 1880 and 1910 the population of Prague rose by almost 40 per cent to nearly a quarter of a million; that of Budapest doubled to reach almost 900,000; those of St Petersburg and Moscow more than doubled (to 2 and 1.5 million respectively), and that of Warsaw more than tripled (to 856,000). But the most alarming increase occurred in Vienna which changed, within the span of a single generation, from a pleasant, orderly, German-speaking city of fewer than 750,000 souls to a polyglot maelstrom of over two million. The city, whose ancient walls had recently been dismantled to make way for the elegant Ringstrasse with its modern palaces and pleasant parks where bands played Strauss waltzes, was suddenly overwhelmed by a new kind of invasion.

It was an irony of this age of nationalism that by 1910 no less than 8 per cent of all Czechs should reside in Vienna (5 per cent of all Slovaks had settled in Budapest by that time). And not only Czechs, but Serbs, Romanians, Slovenes and Ukrainians had flooded in to the new tenements and slums. The city had come to resemble a Tower of Babel, and the indigenous Viennese felt overwhelmed; their culture, their very identity seemed threatened. The popular mood, formerly easy-going, became ugly.

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by | 7 March 2023 · 6:53 am

Eastern Europe’s Failures in 1848

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 134-137:

At the beginning of March 1848, as news of a revolution in Paris seeped in about a week after the event, crowds took to the streets of Vienna, and before long the entire Empire, from Bohemia to northern Italy, was in turmoil. In the months that followed there were uprisings in Prague, Lemberg [Lviv] and several other cities besides Vienna; Hungary and Venice declared themselves independent; the imperial army was driven out of Lombardy by local insurgents supported by invading forces from Piedmont, and Vienna itself had to be abandoned to the revolutionaries. Within the imperial administration there were six changes of government; two ministers were lynched; another went mad; and the Emperor abdicated. Yet by the autumn of 1849 the old order had been resurrected and the cause of revolution seemed utterly lost. What had the revolutionaries stood for? Why did they lose? And what influence did the events have both on the Empire itself and on the rest of Eastern Europe?

The Revolutions of 1848 are commonly represented as nationalist, and so to a great extent they were. Yet the call for ‘freedom’ as if it were a single entity embraced a variety of aims. Middle-class liberals wanted the abolition of censorship, freedom of speech and assembly, and a judicial system that dispensed justice openly; radicals demanded the replacement of monarchical government by a democracy based on wide suffrage; peasants, and all progressives, wanted the abolition of serfdom; workers protested against unemployment and for more pay. After the first, heady, stages, even more interests forced themselves to the surface. Tenants struck against high rents; artisans took to the streets because new, cheap, factory-produced goods were already threatening their livelihoods; students saw an opportunity for activism, and in Prague there were anti-Jewish riots. Among the educated strata, some, like the great Hungarian landowner Szechenyi, wanted change on the lines of the British model, with economic development as the motor of social and political change. However, the slogans of the French Revolution and of the Romantic movement tended to predominate, and in particular calls for national self-expression.

The demands for national freedom, however, also took different forms. Some were founded on constitutional precedents, such as the ancient powers of the Hungarian Diet or of the Bohemian Estates, which had been sapped or overborne by imperial power. Others were based on what appeared to their proponents to be the self-evident claims of a common language and the national community which it created. And there were further divisions both within the various nationalist camps and between them. Frantisek Palacky, promoter of the Czech national revival, thought in terms of a union of all the Slav peoples of the Empire, predicated on the view that, for all the myriad differences of dialect, they all spoke the same beautiful language.

This, however, was unacceptable, among others, to the Polish nationalists, who, roused by emigres returning from France, wished to resurrect the ancient Polish Republic which had been wiped off the map only half a century before. Furthermore, the claims of one nationalist group encouraged others to assert themselves. Romanians, Serbs, Croats and Slovaks did not take kindly to the prospect of inclusion in a state dominated by Hungarians. The Ruthenes (Ukrainians) resented the Polish claims to domination in Galicia. German Bohemians feared the Czechs and some Austrians were attracted by the idea of a greater Germany.

The fast-declining sense of equality and fraternity among the revolutionaries themselves, a growing popular reaction to their extremism, and the discipline of the imperial army all helped the government to reassert its authority. The promise made on 25 April 1848 to provide a democratic constitution for Austria, and the subsequent undertaking, in response to public demand, to widen the franchise, assuaged the feelings of many democrats; the emancipation of the peasants of Bohemia and Moravia in March, and those of Galicia and the Bukovina later the same year, bought off much social discontent; and the authorities experienced little difficulty in encouraging the Croats, Serbs and Slovaks to attack the Hungarian rebels who had cavalierly rejected their modest claims to linguistic autonomy. For the rest it was a matter of suppression. On 7 June the insurrectionaries in Prague were crushed; Vienna was recaptured at the end of October, and a rising in Lemberg put down two days later. General Windischgraetz was the imperial hero of the hour. Only the Italians and Hungarians held out. The crushing defeat inflicted by General Radetzky on the invading Piedmontese at Novara in March 1849 spelt doom to the revolution in the Italian provinces, though the resurrected ‘republic’ of Venice survived until August. The Hungarian rebellion lasted only a few days longer.

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by | 6 March 2023 · 6:07 am

Eastern Europe’s Peasant Problem

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 112-114:

The root of the problem was the gross overpopulation of the Eastern European countryside. Industry and crafts employed only a third of all workers even in comparatively well-developed Czechoslovakia and Austria; in Hungary they accounted for a fifth, in Poland for a seventh, and in Romania and Yugoslavia for a mere tenth of the working population. The great majority lived in the countryside and depended on an inefficient agriculture. The picture presented a stark contrast to that of Western Europe and North America. Speedy industrialization and emigration suggested themselves as potential solutions to the problem. But industrialization was restricted by the limited funds available for investment and the high cost of borrowing, while the escape valve of emigration had been shut off. Successive Immigration Acts in the United States not only imposed very severe restrictions but discriminated against Eastern Europeans; and Canada and Britain had also imposed much more severe immigration restrictions than before.

Two other factors aggravated the peasant problem. Universal conscription during the war had put most able-bodied peasants into uniform, increased their expectation of land as a reward for their patriotism, and taught them how to fight for it. Secondly, as Bethlen realized, the youthfulness of the population was a force for change. Apart from Austria, where the age structure had been distorted by the influx of retired officials from the successor states which refused to pay their pensions, over half of Eastern Europe’s population was under thirty, and in Poland and the Balkan countries the proportion was even higher. Given these circumstances virtually every government in the region felt impelled to concede the peasants’ demand for land reform.

In Hungary it was no more than a symbolic gesture: about 700,000 peasant families were granted an average of two acres apiece, while three million remained landless. In Czechoslovakia reform was a way of expropriating the alien elite rather than of benefitting the peasants. As a result of the measures enacted immediately after independence, citizens of ‘enemy states’ were dispossessed without compensation, but fewer than three million acres were eventually transferred in small plots to the peasants. In Poland, an inadequate reform was finally passed in 1925, in the teeth of opposition from landed interests, and by 1938 about six and a half million acres had been transferred to landless peasants and others with tiny holdings.

In Yugoslavia 200,000 peasants gained an average of four acres apiece, though many more benefited from the abolition of share-cropping rents which had been common in the south of the country. In Romania, by contrast, the 1921 reform, introduced by the Averescu government, expropriated seventeen million acres and had transferred almost ten million of them to nearly a million and a half peasant families by 1929. Even then over half a million families remained landless in Romania. Austria had no serious peasant problem; nor did Bulgaria. But elsewhere the inadequacy of land reform in the period of democracy helped lay the foundations for the victory of the Communists, who promised radical reform, after 1944.

But even in countries where there were no great estates or a substantial industrial sector a peasant problem remained. By 1937 Bulgaria and Greece were each reckoned to have surplus rural populations of a million or more; Czechoslovakia had a surplus of some two millions; Romania three and Poland between five and seven. The average size of peasant holdings over the region as a whole was about half those in Germany and France. In short they were too small, and too undercapitalized, to be efficient or even viable by international standards. Swiss peasants invested more than twice as much in their farms as their counterparts in Czechoslovakia, more than three times as much as the Polish peasants, and ten times as much as the Romanians.

The consequences were predictable. In Hungary, for example, land under wheat yielded half as much as in Denmark, the Dutch farmer raised three times as many cattle and four times as many pigs as his counterpart in Poland, while the Danish farmer raised four times as many cattle and twenty times as many pigs as the Romanian. Such were the differences between capitalized efficiency and undercapitalized inefficiency. In the United States a farmer produced enough to feed six families; in Western Europe enough for four; while the Eastern European peasant produced only enough for his own family, plus a marketable surplus of about half as much again – barely enough for such taxed necessities as salt, matches and paraffin.

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