Category Archives: industry

by | 17 August 2024 · 4:57 pm

Caribbean Demographic Changes, 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 197-199:

European and African populations in the Caribbean grew quickly, almost exclusively through migration rather than natural increase. If the numbers are often vague, two patterns are clear. First, the white population in the islands was predominantly young and male until the late 17th century. Second, the population came to be dominated by enslaved Africans by the end of the century, first on the English islands and then on the French. The population of the French islands was 19% black by 1650 but 36% by 1660 (Boucher 2008, 115). By 1655 the population of Barbados contained some 20,000 Africans and 23,000 Europeans; 18 years later, the slave population outnumbered the European population, 33,184 to 21,309 (Dunn 1973, 87). Enslaved Africans came from a variety of ethnic groups, as did Europeans—especially on the English and Dutch islands.

Although most European migrants traveled as indentured laborers, there were some free migrants as well. Some were ambitious men eager to improve their economic condition: Tom Verney hoped in 1639 that his time in Barbados would “be an engagement for mee for my new lead-life,” promising both prosperity and personal redemption for past failures (Games 1999, 80). Some were men of the cloth. The presence of Caribs on French-occupied islands not only hindered French settlement but also inspired the French to send Catholic missionaries to proselytize. Jews found haven in Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados, and Jamaica. English Catholics, forbidden to practice their faith openly at home and banned from holding public office, inhabited all of the English colonies in the Caribbean. French Huguenots made their way to the islands, too, where many governors tolerated their presence. If for many the 17th-century Caribbean was a place of violence, premature death, and avarice, for others the islands offered relative sanctuary—whether prompted by indifference or acceptance from neighbors—from some of the religious and political violence of the era.

European affairs continued to punctuate Caribbean life in the middle of the 17th century, defining mature colonial settlements just as they had facilitated their creation. Other regions of the Atlantic also began to shape the Caribbean. Trading ties thickened connections to the American mainland, Europe, and Africa. One overpopulated Caribbean colony, Barbados, even spawned a supply colony on the American mainland, Carolina. Africans became a larger presence in the region, dominating some islands and posing strategic challenges and opportunities for residents and invaders. Several regional transitions illustrate these new intersections.

The first transition involved sugar, another commodity of growing popularity in Europe. Tobacco may have sparked interest in Caribbean land in the 1620s, but sugar wrought an even greater frenzy. It took hold gradually in the English and especially the French Caribbean, primarily because sugarcane cultivation and processing required a large capital investment in equipment and labor, one well beyond the reach of most European planters, many of whom also lacked expertise in processing cane. In 1654 came a crucial turning point in the Caribbean, sparked by events outside the region: the Dutch, after nine years of struggle with the Portuguese, finally abandoned Brazil, where they had learned the complicated and costly techniques of sugar cultivation and, more important, of transforming sugar into rum and molasses. As Dutch merchants, planters, and investors dispersed into the Caribbean, they brought those techniques with them. While some English settlers had already begun to experiment with sugar on Barbados, the infusion of Dutch capital contributed to the “sugar revolution,” in which sugar monoculture replaced other crops and enslaved Africans replaced European indentured laborers.

Sugar wrought major environmental transformations wherever it took hold, and those changes assisted the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had crossed the Atlantic from Africa in slaving vessels. As Europeans cleared land for sugarcane, they felled trees, removing bird habitats and facilitating the survival of insects the birds had once consumed. Sugar processing also required clay pots, which stood empty much of the year, collecting rainwater that enabled mosquitoes to flourish. A. aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, and it is no accident that the Caribbean’s first yellow fever epidemic started in Barbados in 1647, in the wake of sugar’s introduction to the island. In that first epidemic, as much as one-third of the island’s population may have died.

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by | 15 August 2024 · 2:20 pm

Spanish Caribbean Havana vs. San Juan

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 185-188:

As large stretches of the Greater Antilles were falling into general decline and had begun to look inward, giving rise to the peculiar creole cultures one associates today with the Hispanophone Caribbean, one city—Havana—was experiencing unparalleled growth and prosperity. In effect, one of the few Spanish Caribbean success stories of the long 17th century was Havana’s conversion into a major maritime outpost, a dynamic, multicultural center where goods and people from distant lands built an emerging mercantile capitalism. With this change, the economic and demographic epicenter of the Spanish Caribbean moved decisively from the old colonial capital of Santo Domingo to western Cuba. Havana’s growth, laggard at best until about 1590, would be unstoppable after that year. Historians have often remarked how, in economic prowess and cultural achievement, western Cuba became more like a continent than an island. By the end of the 18th century, Havana, this capital of “continental Cuba,” was the third most populous city in the Americas and a crucial link connecting the main elements of Spain’s dispersed overseas empire. The demographic and economic growth that fueled its ascent began around the middle of the 16th century and continued in spurts throughout the long 17th century.

Historian Alejandro de la Fuente and his collaborators (2009) have narrated in great detail the story of Havana’s emergence as the most important of Spain’s Caribbean maritime cities, initially rivaled in importance only by Cartagena [Colombia]. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, Havana emerged as the crossroads of three key trading circuits in the Spanish Atlantic: the transatlantic trade, the intercolonial trade between various ports in the Spanish circum-Caribbean region, and the intracolonial trade connecting various Cuban ports with the island’s principal commercial hub. The first of these trading circuits funneled large amounts of silver from the continental colonies and some American staples such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hides toward Europe in exchange for manufactures, foodstuffs, wine, and enslaved Africans. The second circuit, the intercolonial, grew in importance as Spain’s fleet system of transatlantic navigation (the so-called Carrera de Indias) became more developed. It connected the more marginal ports in the Caribbean, usually bypassed by Spanish ships, with the Atlantic routes. The third circuit, to and from the Cuban interior, linked Havana to the outside world as both supplier and market. Because the forces that made up Cuba’s great maritime city were so far-flung and diverse, and because the people who built the city also hailed from diverse corners of the Atlantic world, referring to Havana as one of the few “Atlantic communities” seems justified.

The three mercantile systems that converged in Havana interconnected with each other in the city’s harbor, a large, deep, well-protected port capable of accommodating dozens of vessels at a time. It was one of the two or three best harbors in the Caribbean and, considering its proximity to the Gulf Stream, easily the best located. During the second half of the 16th century, Havana’s window to the sea would be made virtually impregnable by the construction of three forts (one at each side of the bay’s entrance, and one closer to the main docks) as well as an underwater chain at the harbor’s entrance to interrupt traffic whenever necessary. This defensive complex was highly successful and—as the English corsair Francis Drake found in 1586—could be so formidable that it discouraged even the most daring aggressors from attacking the city.

…

As an Atlantic city, Havana gradually became a Spanish Caribbean anomaly in several ways. First, it became a thriving port that drew strength from Spain’s increasing presence as a precious-metal producer in the European system at a time when other port cities in the region were becoming more inward-looking and less cosmopolitan. It also bred a social order more hierarchical than those of smaller cities: Havana’s elite was ethnically more diverse, economically more dynamic, and in its business orientation more akin to other Atlantic hubs like Seville, Cartagena, and Veracruz. As its prosperity grew, Havana’s elite drew more resources from the agriculturally rich hinterland, from which it obtained goods, including sugar, that later were sold via Atlantic networks. Local fortunes grew enough in the 17th century so that some habanero families purchased titles of nobility and imitated in the Caribbean the lavish lifestyles of the Spanish aristocracy. The habanero elite stood at the pinnacle of a society profoundly stratified by class, status, and race—a socioracial hierarchy that in its well defined and protected social spaces was not quite replicated in any other Spanish Caribbean city.

If, in its vitality amid the relative poverty of the 17th-century Spanish Caribbean, Havana occupied one extreme, San Juan stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. A heavily fortified bastion governed by military men, it was the only port in Puerto Rico authorized to engage in direct trade with the metropole. When contacts with the mother country were frequent, as in the final quarter of the 16th century, this arrangement had worked relatively well. After 1625 or so, however, the monopoly trading system collapsed and Puerto Rico was thrust essentially to the margins of Spain’s Atlantic trading circuits. Between 1651 and 1675, reportedly only nine ships left Seville, the Spanish peninsula’s single designated port for colonial trade, for San Juan. As commercial relations with Spain came to a virtual halt, the colonists in Puerto Rico were forced to rely on contraband. These contacts, illegal but commonplace, drew them into a web of trade relations that was centered in the Danish and British islands to the east and south. Thus, contrary to Havana, the Atlantic port city par excellence, San Juan had become a regional port city where life centered on the contraband relations that thrived at the imperial margins and in proximity to foreign colonies.

Still, this poor, underpopulated city on the eastern edges of the Spanish empire, surrounded by impressive walls and guarded by a massive fort (San Felipe del Morro) at the entrance to the bay, was racially stratified and hierarchical in ways reminiscent of Havana, although it was less residentially and socially segregated. Whites (whether rich or poor), free people of African descent, and enslaved persons cohabited in many of the barrios into which the city’s small footprint was divided. San Juan’s landholding and commercial elites were clearly poorer than those of Havana or even Santo Domingo, although many foreign observers remarked on their aristocratic aspirations and claims to racial purity.

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by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

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by | 5 August 2024 · 6:07 am

The Gangster Boss of Chongqing

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 181-182:

“He had a gun,” said Mr. Wu, a key witness in the investigation of Chen Kunzhi. “He put it to my head and made me sign a contract.”

After Wu had borrowed ten million yuan from Chen and couldn’t repay it, Chen had locked Wu up in a hotel for twenty days, then seized the company’s official seal and used it to sign a collusive auction contract with COFCO, a large state-owned enterprise in China. Mr. Wu said he had been in hiding for the two years since the incident. He warned me that interviewing Chen would put everyone in danger. “He would have killed me. I don’t know if CCTV can handle this.”

The judge who’d overseen the land auction also refused to show his face on camera, fearing for his safety. When more companies had tried to bid, some men had stopped them from entering the auction site and dragged them away. The judge brought in six police officers, but Chen Kunzhi countered with six times as many, and each one had a knife. These gangsters called the judge’s superiors in front of him to put on the pressure. “You’re just a minor figure,” they told him. “Who do you think you are?”

In a last-ditch attempt to save his integrity, the judge called off the auction. But his superiors demanded that he start it again ten days later. When he acquiesced, it was the same situation as before: the other companies set to participate in the bidding didn’t show up, because they were afraid of the “complications.” The only two companies that took part in the auction were Chen’s company and COFCO. After four bids, the land was finally sold to COFCO for 37.1 million yuan. A year later COFCO announced it would offer the land up for 140 million.

I wanted to interview Chen myself. But my boss knew it would be dangerous. He asked me and each member of my team to use disposable phone cards to avoid being followed in retaliation. He said, “If you don’t interview Chen, will the story still stand?”

“The basic evidence is already there,” our producer, Jian Feng, said. “Then the interview might not be necessary. We have to think about security first,” the boss said.

I worried that security would be the least of our problems. If the interview went poorly, the whole show might be endangered. Chen Kunzhi was not a traditional street thug. He’d been a police officer for fifteen years, and after being removed from the force for assault, he’d started running a casino. After escaping a homicide charge, he went into the loan shark business. As China’s urbanization continued to speed up, Chongqing’s real estate industry was desperate for capital, financing some 90 percent of its expansion with funds borrowed from loan sharks. Chen Kunzhi had already made over a million yuan in profits, according to Mr. Wu.

Unlike any gangsters I had interviewed before, Chen was one of those men who controlled the economic lifeline of the city through the underground economy, armed with ties to the entire judicial system, which allowed him to escape justice despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking.

My fear was that once I interviewed Chen, the huge forces behind him would stop the episode from airing. It would be like a cigarette dropped into a toilet—a soft hiss and the flame would go out, only to be flushed away, worthless. So we decided to leave without the interview.

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by | 13 May 2024 · 5:38 am

Chinese in Colonial Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 21-25:

Two major factors converged to cause an upsurge in Chinese migration to Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century. A push factor was the political upheavals in China, which led to its people seeking better conditions overseas. A pull factor was French colonization and the policy of the colonial government to recruit Chinese labour for Vietnam.

After the Treaty of Nanking in AD 1842 forced the Manchu court in Beijing to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five treaty ports to Western powers, it was no longer possible for the Chinese authority to control the movement of their nationals in and out of the country. At that time, the Chinese Government had officially banned travelling beyond the shores of China. Thus China became an increasingly stable source of manpower for labour-hungry Western colonies in Southeast Asia and Latin America. By AD 1860, articles within the Treaty of Peking signed between China and both Britain and France literally compelled the Manchu authorities to recognize the right of Chinese workers to seek a livelihood abroad under contracts they themselves could freely enter into. Dovetailing with this relaxation of laws on emigration was the political turmoil of the times which contributed to the urge to leave. During AD 1850-61 there was a large-scale uprising in the form of the Taiping Revolution. Added to that were the intermittent wars fought with Western powers. The majority of migrants in this exodus were the usual land-deprived peasants and impoverished city dwellers. But there was also a sizeable number of small and middle-scale business­ men, intellectuals, and military personnel.

France colonized six provinces of southern Vietnam (Nam Ky), which constituted Cochinchina, in AD 1867 and established protectorates in cen­tral and northern Vietnam by AD 1884. The two protectorates were named Annam and Tonkin, respectively. From the start, the French colonial admin­istration took measures to regulate Chinese immigration with a mixture of control and encouragement. In AD 1874 a special Immigration Bureau was established in Saigon which allowed Chinese immigrants into the country but only if they belonged to dialect groups already existing in the country and if the groups would provide sponsorship for their own kind.  The Bureau was very active, and as early as AD 1897 it had a department that could arbitrarily decide on the suitability of a Chinese immigrant for work; this aroused such an angry protest from the Chinese community that the administration was forced to close it down. After this, streams of Chinese immigrants could cross freely into Vietnam, and they congregated mainly in big cities.

The French colonial administration allowed the Chinese to deal freely in rice, opium, and alcohol. Other legal rights included the right to own land, to travel without restriction within the Indochinese Federation, to establish commercial organizations, to return to China for a visit, and to transfer their wealth out of the country. Such favourable conditions continued to attract Chinese migrants as in the days of the Nguyen dynasty. Within a ten-year span, the number of Chinese in Cochinchina shot up from 44,000 in 1873 to 56,000 in 1889, concentrating mainly in big cities. Cholon in the year 1889 had a population of nearly 16,000 Chinese; Saigon, over 7,000; and Gia Dinh, nearly 3,000. In Tonkin and Annam, the Chinese migrants also gathered in Haiphong, Hanoi, Danang, and the Quang Ninh province, which bordered China. The Chines here were involved mostly in commerce and service.

Chinese immigrants during the period of late nineteenth and early twen­tieth centuries also consisted of labourers contracted by the French to work in Vietnam. They were sent to excavate mines, specifically in Quang Ninh province, to build the railway linking Vietnam to the southern provinces of China or to tap rubber in plantations. By the 1920s, Chinese workers accounted for 7 per cent of the total number of miners and 17 per cent of the total number of industrial workers in Vietnam. The influx of Chinese labourers contributed not only to the country’s manpower but also to the emergence of a working class in Vietnam.

This rapid influx of Chinese migrants continued up till the middle of the twentieth century. Data published during the period AD 1912-22 give their number as 158,000. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly 600,000 arrived from China. Another set of data estimates the number to be 1.2 million between 1923 and 1951, which was a record at any given period of time during the whole history of Chinese emigration. But the traffic was prone to ebb and flow. The figures were high in the years 1925-30, 1936-38, and 1946-48, correlating with the security situation in China. China was ex­periencing civil wars during the periods 1924-27 and 1946-49. The years 1936-38 saw the beginnings of Japanese military encroachment on China. Going by official statistics, the figure for the Chinese population in Vietnam in the years just before the French left in 1954 would range from 600,000 to 750,000. Variations of this figure for different years are shown in Table 1, estimated to be 2 per cent of Vietnam’s population.

The distribution of population also shows Chinese preference for urban centres and the southern part of the country. Before 1945, some 90 per cent of the Chinese community were residing in Cochinchina, where they made up 7 per cent of the population. The proportions of Chinese in Tonkin and Annam were minimal, 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively. Table 2 illustrates the urban characteristic of the Chinese population in Vietnam.

In 1952 the Chinese population in Saigon-Cholon constituted about 34 per cent of the total population of the city. Their proportions in Hanoi and Haiphong were 4 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. Besides these three big cities, the Chinese were also found in sizeable numbers in other cities of the South. As mentioned earlier, the border province of Quang Ning in the North also had concentrations of Chinese, as in Cam Pha, Ti  Yen, Quang Ha, and Mong Cai. With towns where large numbers of Chinese reside, they would also gather in particular quarters or streets. For example, in Sai­gon, they are to be found in districts 5, 6, 10, and 11. District 5 is Cholon, where before 1975, 80 per cent of the residents were Chinese. In Hanoi, they were gathered at the Hang Buom and Ma May quarters.

With the division of the country into two halves in 1954, complete in­tegrated statistics were not available for the whole of Vietnam. The South became the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) while the North was the Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and it was not till 1976 that they were united under the name of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). By Tsai Maw Kuey’s data, the Chinese population in the ROV in 1968 reached 1,035,000. The French magazine Le Monde puts it at 1,200,000 in the ROV and 208,000 in the DRV in 1970. Wu Yuan-Li and Wu Chun-Hsi’s figures are 2 million for the South and 175,000 for the North at the collapse of the ROV. According to official figures for 1976, the year of reunification, the Chinese population in Vietnam was 1,236,000, which was about 2.6 per cent of the total population. Summing up these various estimates, it can be concluded that the Chinese population in Vietnam in the middle of the 1970s was around 1,500,000, of which 85 per cent lived in the South. The Chinese community made up 3 per cent of the total population of Vietnam.

The problems of estimating the Chinese population in Vietnam contin­ued after 1975 because of large-scale population movement caused by political changes. When the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975, some 150,000 people left the country, among whom were high-ranking government and military officials of the old regime as well as Chinese businessmen. Shortly after, beginning in 1978, another exodus of Chinese residents took place, with 230,000 leaving for China and another 220,000 leaving for Southeast Asia by boat. This was the result of the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade in the newly liberated South and tense relations with China. The latter arose because of differences over Cambodia, and Beijing exploited the issue of the Chinese community in Vietnam to complicate matters. From a population of 1,236,000, the ethnic Chinese population shrank to 935,000 on 1 October 1979. By the time of the cen­sus in April 1989, the Chinese population had increased to 961,702 but its proportion of the total population had dropped to 1.5 percent. The distribution of this community across Vietnam is given in Table 3. In some areas, the proportion of ethnic Chinese had dropped very significantly. For example, before 1978, ethnic Chinese residents in Quang Ninh province numbered about 160,000, or 22 per cent, of the provincial population. This was about 60-80 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population in North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Quang Ninh’s ethnic Chinese population dropped to 5,000, or 0.6 per cent, of the provincial population.

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by | 8 April 2024 · 5:15 am

Russo-German Rearmament, 1926

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 417-419:

The year ended dramatically with another domestic political crisis, revolving once again around the activities of the Reichswehr. It began on 3 December, when the Manchester Guardian published an article by its Berlin correspondent, Frederick Voigt, on the clandestine connection between the Reichswehr and the Soviet government, headlined ‘Cargoes of Munitions from Russia to Germany’. The article gave details of an agreement between the Junkers Company and the Soviet government to build factories for the manufacture of military aircraft. Details of this plan fell into the hands of Voigt, who also discovered plans for the building of chemical plants in the Soviet Union that would manufacture poison gas for both countries. Voigt further revealed that a Soviet cargo ship loaded with ammunition and weapons had sunk in the Baltic, en-route to Germany. A second article by Voigt, published on 6 December, with the headline ‘Berlin Military Transactions’, gave details about the building of a Junkers plant in Moscow, which was intended to manufacture 100 aeroplanes for German use. It was clear Seeckt had sanctioned these plans, and officers of the Reichswehr had travelled to Russia on false passports to disguise their identities.

On 9 December, the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts printed these startling revelations, under the headline: ‘Soviet Grenades for German Guns’. The Social Democrats were given further damaging information about German secret rearmament: in the harbour of Stettin, local stevedores had observed freighters bringing in artillery shells from Russia for delivery to the Reichswehr. These workers admitted they were given extra money in return for a promise of secrecy. On 16 December, Philipp Scheidemann, a prominent Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, used parliamentary exemption from prosecution to deliver a devastating speech outlining details of the Russo-German secret rearmament, during which he called for the resignation of Otto Gessler, the Defence Minister. Right-wing nationalists called Scheidemann ‘a traitor’ and walked out of the debating chamber. Of course, the allegations made by Scheidemann were not new, but the effect of revealing them in a Reichstag debate raised the political temperature to boiling point.

The Social Democrats called on the Chancellor, Wilhelm Marx, to immediately remove Gessler as the Defence Minister and reform the Reichswehr. Failure to act would compel them to withdraw their support from the government. On 17 December, the day after Scheidemann’s incendiary speech, the Social Democrats tabled a vote of no confidence against the Marx government, which was carried by a vote of 249 to 171, with the DNVP surprisingly voting for the motion because they were determined to join the next government.

The third Marx cabinet resigned on 18 December, but agreed to Hindenburg’s request to stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new government was formed. For the third year running, Germans celebrated Christmas with another government crisis. Once again, it would not be resolved until the New Year.

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by | 27 March 2024 · 2:27 pm

Revolts Left, Right, and Rhenish, 1923

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 289-291:

The Munich Beer Hall Putsch is the most notorious event in the early history of Hitler and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP). It was hurriedly planned, bungled in execution, and resulted in humiliating failure. Because of what came later it has been elevated to the status of a monumental event, when in fact what occurred was a small, localised revolt, confined to Munich, which lasted a few hours. It failed because Hitler had allowed his party to become a purely paramilitary organisation involved in an ill-defined conspiracy with disparate Bavarian right-wing politicians. Hitler, who had never been brought into the heart of Kahr’s conspiracy, had whipped up his own supporters into a frenzy only to find that he had already been deserted by his supposed co-conspirators before he ever arrived at the Bürgerbräukeller.

Gustav Stresemann gave a speech on 11 November 1923 in which he reflected on the recent events in Munich, admitting that ‘Germany is now confronted with the demand for a dictatorship’, but he stressed that anyone thinking a dictatorship would improve matters was making a ‘great mistake’. The recent attempt by Hitler to bring about a dictatorship via a beer hall in Munich would have brought no help to the German people. Stresemann was most ‘deeply shaken’ by the involvement of Ludendorff in Hitler’s attempted coup. Stresemann thought a ‘destructive force’ such as Hitler’s movement represented could never have provided competent government for Germany, even if he had succeeded.

At the same time as the left-wing revolt in central Germany and the right-wing struggle in Bavaria were going on, a much more dangerous threat to the territorial unity of the Weimar Republic had erupted in the Rhineland. In the occupied area, separatist associations and parties flourished, primarily under the patronage of the French occupying authorities. The Reich government was powerless to intervene, as it was prohibited from using the Reichswehr in the demilitarised Rhineland under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

The leading figure in the Rhineland separatist movement was Hans Dorten, the wealthy owner of a porcelain company, who created the Rhenish People’s Union (Volksvereinigung), which demanded a Rhenish republic as an autonomous state within the Reich, but his opponents suspected his real aim was an independent Rhenish republic. In the occupied Ruhr the separatist movement also flourished, with various groups sprouting up, including the Rhenish Republic People’s Party and the Rhenish Independence League. Separatists armed themselves, held demonstrations, occupied town halls, and called for the foundation of an autonomous Rhenish republic. Some of their supporters even advocated the full integration of the Rhineland into France. After the end of passive resistance, separatist demonstrations broke out in several Rhineland cities. On 21 October, separatists led by Leo Deckers captured the City Hall in Aachen, and proclaimed a Free and Independent Rhenish Republic. This so-called Rhenish Republic was based in three areas: North (Lower Rhine), South (Upper and Middle Rhine) and the Ruhr, but it received little support from the local population.

The French gave the impression in many places they supported the separatists. The military authorities thought a Rhineland buffer state would offer additional security from a future German invasion, and there is no doubt the French provided arms and offered military security for separatist demonstrations. This was especially true in the Bavarian Palatinate, where the French General Georges de Metz, was in command. He encouraged the local state parliament to proclaim the Palatinate’s independence on 24 October. On 26 October, Paul Tirard, the French High Commissioner, announced the separatists were also in effective control of Koblenz, but it had been recaptured with French military support.

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by | 25 March 2024 · 5:28 am

Weimar Inflation, 1921–22

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 218-219, 238, 242:

The Weimar Republic would have undoubtedly been helped by having a stable economy, but instead it was fragile, with a rate of growth well below that of its major competitors. German growth from 1913 to 1929 was 0.3 per cent, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK and 2.2 per cent in the USA. The state of the German budget in 1921 made grim reading. The accumulated government debt was over 400 billion marks. The government had to also bear the cost of food and wage subsidies to deal with rising inflation. The Weimar government refused to cut expenditure or to raise taxes to deal with the deficit. This kept people in jobs. Unemployment in 1921 was at a record low of 0.9 per cent.

In response to rising prices, the German government simply printed money, which only served to push prices up still further. The rising cost of living was already causing industrial unrest in the Ruhr, in the autumn of 1921, and led to bread riots. There were also severe shortages of food in shops. Prices of basic goods rocketed by 40 per cent in the last three months of 1921. Inflation was worst for those on fixed incomes, as it was gradually wiping out their savings and reducing their real spending power. This affected even previously affluent pensioners and those with investments, usually people in solid salaried middle-class occupations such as academics, civil servants, and lawyers. War widows, disabled war veterans and those on welfare on fixed benefits also suffered greatly from the rise in the cost of living.

It would be wrong, however, to think that inflation was bad for everyone. Industrial workers, supported by strong unions, saw their working hours decrease, but their wages increase, often in line with inflation. Big industry also did very well, with industrial production increasing by 20 per cent in 1921–22. The rich industrialists – among them Hugo Stinnes, the richest of them all – grew much richer during the era of high inflation and spent their money on material assets, especially property and new machinery. They also had access to foreign currency loans at low interest rates, and because of inflation interest payments on these were reducing week by week.

…

Meanwhile, Germany’s reparations payment difficulties continued. During July, prices inside Germany rose by 50 per cent, which was then accepted as the beginning of the hyperinflation period. A litre of milk had cost 7 marks in April 1922, but rose to 16 marks in August, and then to 26 marks by mid-September. The prices of other basic goods rose in a comparable manner. The German government response to rising inflation was to continue printing money, with the number of marks in circulation rising from 35 billion in 1919 to 200 billion in 1922.

Hyperinflation led in turn to a dizzying fall in the value of the German mark, which the Reichsbank, lacking gold and foreign currency reserves, was powerless to stop. On 29 July, the mark hit a new low of 650 to 1 US$. The German government claimed this fall in the value of German currency was linked to the demand by the Allies for cash reparations payments. State and local authorities began to issue money tokens called Notgeld [’emergency money’] to replace payments in worthless paper marks.

…

On 14 August [1922], the Conference on Reparations ended without any agreement on Germany’s request for a further payment holiday. On the next day, the German government once more defaulted on its reparations payments, claiming it could not afford to pay. The downward tumble of the mark continued. On 24 August, it plummeted to a new all-time low of US$2,000 to 1 mark [sic; should be 2000 marks to 1 US$!], or 9,000 to the British pound. On 31 August, the Allied Reparations Commission decided to grant Germany an exceptional six-month moratorium on reparations payments.

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by | 23 March 2024 · 5:46 am

Second Weimar Election, 1920

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 178-180:

The National Assembly held its last session on 21 May 1920. Few mourned its passing. An election campaign to elect the new Reichstag now followed. Elections did not take place in Schleswig-Holstein, Upper Silesia and East and West Prussia, owing to scheduled referenda due to take place in those areas. The 42 sitting parliamentary members for those areas retained their seats until elections took place.

The Reichstag elections of 6 June, with a voter turnout of 79.2 per cent, proved disastrous for the SPD-led Weimar Coalition, which lost its previous huge overall majority. The most serious reverse was suffered by the SPD itself, which polled 21.9 per cent, securing only 103 seats. The SPD remained the largest party, but had lost 62 seats, dropping from 37.9 per cent of the vote at the last election, from 11.51 to 6.17 million votes. Even heavier losses were suffered by the SPD’s partners in government, the liberal DDP, led by Carl Petersen, which polled 2.3 million votes, down from 5.6 million at the previous election, with the number of the party’s seats dropping from 75 to 39 and its percentage of votes falling from 18.6 to 8.3 per cent. This marked the beginning of a decline for middle-class liberalism from which it never really recovered. The third party in the Weimar Coalition, Zentrum, led by Karl Trimborn, also fared badly, with its seats falling from 91 to 64, its votes reducing from 5.9 to 3.84 million and its voter percentage moving downward to 13.6 from 19.7 per cent.

By contrast, the two anti-Republican parties: the DVP, led by Gustav Stresemann, and the DNVP, led by Oskar Hergt, both made gains. The DVP increased its seats from 19 to 65, its vote percentage from 4.4 to 13.9 per cent, with its popular vote going up from 1.34 to 3.91 million. The number of votes for the DNVP also rose, from 3.12 to 4.24 million, its number of seats increasing from 44 to 71 and its poll share up from 10.3 to 15.1 per cent. It was now the strongest middle-class party in Germany.

The party furthest to the Left contesting the election, the USPD, led by Arthur Crispien, made the biggest gains, with a large segment of the industrial working class transferring their allegiance from the SPD to the USPD. The party’s seats increased in number, from 33 to 83 seats, with its percentage vote increasing, from 7.6 to 17.6 per cent, and its total vote share up from 2.32 to 4.91 million. The USPD was now the second most popular party in Germany. Many working-class voters were clearly outraged by the harsh treatment of left-wing radicals during the recent Ruhr Uprising. The KPD decided to contest the election, but fared badly, only polling 589,454 votes, or 2.09 per cent, and securing four seats.

The new Weimar Republic had clearly disappointed German voters. President Ebert, following the tradition of giving the strongest party the first chance to form a government, asked Hermann Müller, the incumbent SPD Chancellor, to form a new coalition. On 8 June, Müller tried half-heartedly to convince the USPD to join a new coalition, but party leader Arthur Crispien decided he would only take his party into a government if the Independents were the largest party, as part of a purely socialist coalition. As Müller did not want to form a coalition involving the DVP, on 12 June, he declined the opportunity to continue trying to form a government.

Ebert finally turned to Constantin Fehrenbach, one of the leaders of Zentrum, and widely respected as the speaker of the National Assembly, to form a minority government, after the Social Democrats had refused to join his government. The SPD now played the bizarre role of being crucial in keeping governments in power, but mostly deciding not to participate in them. The Fehrenbach cabinet was based on three parties: Zentrum, the DDP and, for the first time, the centre-right DVP led by Gustav Stresemann. The DDP had only agreed to join a coalition with the DVP, provided that party promised it would accept the Weimar Constitution, which its leader Stresemann duly did.

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by | 18 March 2024 · 5:20 am

Germany’s Territorial Losses at Versailles

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 118-120:

It is, of course, an established tradition of war that the loser pays the costs of defeat, but the terms of the proposed Versailles Treaty were severe, to say the least. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, something which had been a French aim during the war. German territory west of the Rhine was to be occupied by Allied troops for at least 15 years to ensure German compliance to the treaty – if Germany did comply, the occupation of Cologne would end after five years, Koblenz after ten years and Mainz after 15 years. The left bank of the Rhine and the right bank to a depth of 31 miles were to be permanently demilitarised. In this region no German arms or soldiers could be stationed. The aim of these clauses was to stop another unprovoked German invasion of Belgium and France.

The Saar, a rich coal mining region, would be governed for 15 years by a commission of the League of Nations. In that time, the Saar coal mines would be given to France, as compensation for the German destruction of French coal mines during the war. At the end of the 15-year period, the people of the Saar would decide, in a referendum, whether they wished to remain under League control, to unite with France or return to Germany. If the people chose the latter option, Germany would be allowed to buy back the mines from France. Belgium received Moresnet, Eupen and Malmédy, but the local populations there would be allowed a referendum to confirm or reject this change. A referendum was also offered to determine the fate of North Schleswig, which voted in favour of being transferred to Denmark.

Germany suffered even greater territorial losses in Eastern Europe. The newly constituted state of Poland included the industrially rich area of Upper Silesia, along with Posen and West Prussia – the latter including the so-called Polish Corridor, which controversially separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Poland was also given extensive trading rights in Danzig (Gdansk), which was now designated a Free City under League of Nations authority. Danzig was Poland’s natural seaport, but ethnically it was a German city and would remain a source of unrest between Germany and Poland during the inter-war years. In addition, the German port of Memel was detached from the Reich, but was not formally awarded to Lithuania until 1923.

German territorial losses under the Treaty as a whole amounted to 13 per cent of its European lands, together with six million of its people. If Germany had been allowed to unite with Austria, it would have lessened the blow of these European territorial losses. Both countries were favourable to the union, but no referendum was offered. The Allies decided instead to prohibit the union with Austria (Anschluss).

Germany’s European losses were paralleled by the sacrifices it was forced to make elsewhere. All overseas colonies under German control were redistributed under mandates issued by the League of Nations, but it was stipulated these mandates must not simply serve the interests of their guardians. When the German delegation protested the loss of its colonies, the Allies pointed out the native inhabitants of the German colonies were strongly opposed to being returned to German control.

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