Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

William the Silent (1533–84) was a curious product of Habsburg Europe: a sixteenth-century German prince, he inherited the French princedom of Orange, spoke French and liberated the Dutch, who have called him ever since the ‘Father of our Nation’.

William, whose full title was William I, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, was introduced as a boy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles grew to trust William, charging him with important negotiations and military engagements in the Netherlands. But William, an important member of the Dutch political elite (he held the title of ‘Stadtholder’), was far less enamoured with Charles’s son, Philip II, who became King of Spain in 1556. William disliked Philip’s religious intolerance towards Protestants and his encroachments on the Dutch nobility’s tradition of autonomy.

William’s upbringing as a Lutheran and then a Catholic (he would finally settle on Calvinism in 1573) taught him the importance of freedom of religion. ‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people,’ he once said, ‘and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’ William’s nickname ‘Silent’ is thought to have developed in this context. According to one story, while out hunting, the French king, Henry III, revealed a secret agreement to eradicate Protestant heretics, believing William, who was present but kept silent, to be a party to it.

William’s combination of political reality and idealism prompted him to rebel against the Habsburgs in 1567. He led the Dutch to several military successes culminating in the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and a formal declaration of independence by the renegade Dutch provinces in 1581. But he declined the crown, hoping instead that the French Duke of Anjou would become the monarch. His support of the Frenchman, who left the Netherlands after a short and unhappy stay, made William unpopular with many of his fellow countrymen although he remained the Stadtholder of the two important provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Meanwhile Philip II offered 25,000 crowns for William’s assassination. A French Catholic, Balthasar Gérard, took up the offer and, in a private audience with the prince, shot him in the chest. ‘My God have pity on my soul,’ he is supposed to have cried as he died. ‘My God have pity on this poor people.’

Many Dutch crews were lost without trace.

Van Oldenbarneveldt was the raadpensionaris – the Secretary of State – of the province of Holland. By all accounts a rather imperious character with a stiff and difficult manner, he had a fine legal mind, great vision and indomitable determination. In his view, war brought ‘little glory and great expense’. The provinces needed to be sure they could make money. The way to do that was to form their own company so that they could spread the cost of investment in ships and capital equipment. By pooling resources and sharing profits they would be able to build up the reserves necessary to fund the dangerous business of exploiting the East. They had not only the Spanish and Portuguese to contend with, but the English too. An English East India Company had been founded in 1600. Oldenbarneveldt set about trying to persuade the leaders of the different Dutch provinces to adopt his idea.

The desperate situation in which they found themselves speeded up their willingness to bury their differences and Oldenbarneveldt was able to devise a common plan for their commercial salvation. He then drew up the new company’s statutes and charter, and the Dutch East India Company came into being in Amsterdam in January 1602. It had six chambers, one each in the main ports of the United Provinces. Each of these chambers elected delegates who sat as the company’s directors. There were seventeen of them, the ‘Heeren XVII’ or Seventeen Gentlemen, who had the responsibility of guiding the fortunes of this semi-political, totally commercial and all-powerful corporation. Although the directors reported to the States General of the Dutch Republic, they were given enormous powers. In order to support their monopoly on trade in the Far East they were given the authority to raise armies, start wars, capture territory, build garrisons, negotiate with local chiefs and build their own ships. In the first instance their charter was to run for twenty-one years.

Nothing explains the success of the Dutch East India Company better than the exploits of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. An adventurer in the mould of Francis Drake or Robert Clive, Coen was harsh, clever and brave. Carefully controlled by the diligent burghers of the company for which he worked, he laid the foundations of the Dutch Empire in the East Indies and established its lucrative trading monopoly in Indonesia. He trained as a bookkeeper and sailed on his first voyage to Asia in 1607 where he experienced the rough and dangerous conditions in which the Dutch East India Company’s employees worked. The merchants had nothing but contempt for the sailors who risked their lives to make them rich. They called them ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’ and forced them to sign contracts in which they agreed to reimburse their employers for their food and equipment, amounts that could take as much as a year’s service to pay back. On his first journey, Coen’s commander was killed on the Banda Islands in the Indian Ocean. Coen came to realise that nothing less than conquest would give the Dutch ownership of the valuable territory they wanted and in 1614 sent the Seventeen Gentlemen of the Dutch East India Company a paper setting out his views about how this could be achieved. What was required, he told them, was ‘a grand resolution in our fatherland’ to send ships and men to subdue the area and bring it into the ownership of the company. It is extraordinary to think that a group of merchants sitting in the coastal towns of the Netherlands could simply set about conquering a large part of the world. But that is what they did, and Jan Pieterszoon Coen was their agent in this task.

He captured Jakarta from the British, which the Seventeen renamed ‘Batavia’. He subdued the Islands of Banda with great savagery – although he proposed the use of ‘justice backed up by force’, force tended to be the main method of achieving his aims – and established a thriving capitalist economy. This was to be the pattern of European colonial expansion for many years to come. Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters. Coen called for higher quality settlers to emigrate to the East Indies rather than the ‘scum’ who normally travelled in Dutch ships. He encouraged Chinese workers to come and help the work of empire-building, and used slaves to swell their numbers. For all this he was rewarded with 23,000 guilders (a considerable amount, given that the daily wage for a skilled worker was about 1 guilder); each of his achievements was carefully itemised, valued and rewarded by the meticulous merchants for whom he worked. He died of dysentery in Batavia during his second tour of duty in 1629.

Native peoples were coerced into conforming to the economic rules of their new masters.

The Dutch East India Company provided much of the wealth of the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth century. At its height it had a presence in Persia, Bengal, Taiwan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. It also expanded beyond Asia into South Africa when, in 1652, it sent a detachment of men to establish a base on the Cape. Its intention was to protect the passage of ships on their way east, rather than to colonise the area, but full settlement inevitably followed from this first expedition. By this time there were 1,700 Dutch ships involved in international trade, more than England and France combined. The accession of William of Orange to the English throne in 1688 began the long process of decline as, bit by bit, power and influence transferred from the Netherlands to Britain, and the Dutch became the junior partners in the alliance. The British East India Company became a serious competitor to the Dutch Company, as did the French Compagnie des Indes founded in 1664. The French were late entrants into the scramble for the riches of the Orient, but highly successful once they recognised the opportunity. Between 1780–84, the Anglo-Dutch alliance was over and the two countries went to war. The result was a disaster for the Netherlands which finally lost its monopoly over East Indies trade.

There is one other sad footnote to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The man who had been its chief architect, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, became a victim of his country’s religious struggles. The majority of the Dutch people were Calvinist, believing in John Calvin’s stern form of Protestantism. This taught that God elected those he wanted to serve with him in heaven: man’s fate was predestined. By following God’s law he might hope to be elected, but there was no guarantee of this. We know from our own time how this sense of being entirely in God’s hands adds strength to a political cause: in seventeenth-century Europe it helped fuel the Dutch revolt against their Spanish masters. Oldenbarneveldt and his followers came to believe in a more moderate approach than that which Calvin decreed, arguing for a greater degree of religious liberty. This brought them into conflict with powerful elements in Dutch society, and when Oldenbarneveldt decided to raise a militia to help protect the peace in his home province of Holland, his enemies pounced. He was already unpopular for supporting a truce with Spain and the Dutch Stadtholder, William the Silent’s son, Prince Maurits, ordered his arrest. In a trial that was a mockery of justice he was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed at the age of seventy-one in 1619. ‘Is this the wages,’ he asked, ‘of the thirty-three years’ service I have given to the country?’

Today we can still look at him in the portrait by Michiel van Miereveld who, like his great contemporaries Rembrandt and Frans Hals, painted the men and women who led the Netherlands in its golden age. He looks towards us, serious, intelligent and sombrely dressed, a white ruff the only splash of brightness in a picture of unbending resolution. He showed his countrymen how the wealth of the world could be theirs for the taking. It was a lesson they learned with enthusiasm.

CHAPTER 6 (#)

The Invention of the Flying Shuttle 1733 (#)

In 1733 John Kay patented an invention called the Flying Shuttle. It transformed the cloth-weaving industry, the first of a train of events that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution.

In the early 1840s a young German called Friedrich Engels was despatched to Manchester to work in a family business. His father hoped that the experience would relieve him of his radical tendencies, but it had the opposite effect. In 1845, Engels published a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which has survived ever since as one of the great classic texts of socialist theory. In it he argued that the Industrial Revolution had transformed the lives of the English working classes. The workers’ pre-industrial condition, he wrote, was ‘not worthy of human beings’: labourers could barely read or write and existed in a state of docile obedience to the so-called superior classes. ‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest; for their looms and gardens; and knew nothing of the mighty movement, which beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.’ They were woken from their submissive torpor, Engels argued, by the invention by James Hargreaves of the Spinning Jenny in 1764; this was the year that Engels took as the moment the Industrial Revolution began. Though it is true that large-scale industrialisation in Britain did not begin until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the process really started much earlier – in 1733, when John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle.

Britain led the way in the Industrial Revolution and its history is essentially the history of Britain from the last years of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It was a revolution because it transformed everything. It changed people’s lives – where they lived, how they worked and how they were organised. It changed the status of the nation, catapulting Britain into a great power that dominated world trade. Most importantly, it changed attitudes, ultimately creating a working class that demanded proper involvement in the affairs of the state in return for its role as an essential engine of prosperity. Britain today is a country that, aside from London, is built around its great industrial cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast and Glasgow. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this structure was very different. The main provincial centres were York, Exeter, Bristol (because of its importance as a port), Norwich and Newcastle. When the Industrial Revolution got under way, most of these places, all ancient cathedral cities and big market towns with a long history of being at the centre of their communities, began to lose their influence as factories and the jobs that went with them grew up elsewhere. Many new towns grew tenfold during the course of the eighteenth century. Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1701 which grew to 84,000 by 1801; Liverpool increased from 6,000 to 78,000 in the same period; and Birmingham from 7,000 to 74,000. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population growth had accelerated even more: Liverpool’s stood at 443,000, Manchester at 338,000 and Birmingham at 296,000. York had only 40,000 people, Exeter and Norwich less than that. Between 1750 and 1850 the axis of regional life in Britain swung and settled in a completely new position.

This great cycle of change was unique in Europe. In other countries, particularly France, the German states and Belgium, industrialisation followed the British lead and there was expansion and rapid growth. But it did not have the same effect of disrupting the influence of those countries’ traditional urban centres. In Britain this experience was intensified by the realisation that steam power could be used for transport as well as manufacturing and the age of the railways began. From the 1840s new railway companies sprouted up all over the place. Like the emergence of the internet in our own time, the railway network became the epitome of achievement, a vital ingredient in a modern, aspiring society. The big difference was that railways, like the pulsating new towns they connected, required civil engineering on an enormous scale. Bridges, embankments, sidings and warehouses littered the countryside, while in the towns splendid new stations were built alongside other gothic monuments of civic self-confidence – town halls, libraries, museums and churches. The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom. But like all booms it eventually went into decline, leaving behind the people it had lured into its success and the buildings that accompanied its astonishing growth. It took barely two generations for a vision of the future to be seen, built, celebrated and lost. Today Britain’s ‘industrial heritage’ is a central part of what the nation is. The memorials of the Industrial Revolution are a formidable reminder of lost wealth, almost as precious as the thing itself.

The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom.

One of the finest of those memorials is Manchester Town Hall. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse (whose other masterpiece is the Natural History Museum, London), the Town Hall is decorated with murals by Ford Madox Brown, a painter who enjoyed depicting moral and historical scenes. The Manchester murals tell the story of the city’s history through some of its most-celebrated events. One of these is the occasion in 1753, legend has it, when machine-breakers raided John Kay’s home to try to destroy his invention, forcing him to run for his life.

John Kay came from near Bury in Lancashire where he worked as a reed maker. Reeds are combs used to hold apart the crosswise threads (or ‘weft’) in a weaving loom. Until John Kay came up with his invention of the Flying Shuttle weavers used their hands to pass a shuttle containing the crosswise threads across the downward thread (or ‘warp’) on their looms. Building up pieces of cloth in this way was time-consuming. Weavers always had to change the position of their hands, and two or more of them were needed to make pieces of cloth bigger than the span of an individual’s arms. There was also a lack of consistency. The quality of each piece of cloth depended entirely on the skill of its weaver. Kay simplified the whole process by automating the movement of the shuttle. He put it on wheels and mounted it on the edge of the loom’s comb, allowing it to run quickly in a completely straight line between two spring-loaded boxes at either end. In this way a single weaver could make pieces of cloth to any size required by giving the shuttle a quick flick with a piece of string attached to a stick that sent the mechanism flying back and forth across the loom. Suddenly one weaver could make much more cloth than he could before and build it up on his own to any size required. The productivity of the weaving industry was dramatically increased.

At the time Kay was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.

Kay went on to invent several other pieces of equipment that were used to improve the efficiency of the textile industry, but he does not appear to have made any money out of any of them. He seems to have been a rather difficult and quarrelsome individual. He tried to charge hefty royalties for his Flying Shuttle, but manufacturers either refused to pay or simply copied his invention. Kay went to France to try his luck there, but ran up against the same problems as he had at home. His genius for invention does not seem to have transferred to the world of business and his death in France in about 1780 went unrecorded. Only time has given him his place in history. While he lived he was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.

His ideas, and many of those that followed, such as Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny, helped create the Industrial Revolution – described by the historian E. J. Hobsbawm as ‘the most important event in world history’. Britain was perfectly placed to lead it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, at the same time as industrialisation began to increase, large parts of its agricultural land fell into the hands of only a few landlords. The Enclosure Acts created a system of large estates farmed by tenants or smallholders who no longer owned the land themselves. The peasant class, like the one in France that played an important part in the French Revolution of 1789, did not exist in Britain. Farming had succumbed to the power of the market. The country was a nation of traders – or ‘shopkeepers’ in Napoleon’s famously dismissive phrase – where labour moved comparatively freely to support each new commercial opportunity. The textile industry provided many of these. The Industrial Revolution was built on the colossal expansion of the manufacture of cotton, as Britain became its biggest exporter throughout the world. The mill became a symbol of both prosperity and despair, the scene of many famous Victorian novels about life in Britain in the nineteenth century. Coketown in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is typical. It had, he tells us, ‘a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye’, and in the mills where ‘the hands’ worked long, cramped and unhealthy hours, ‘the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’. Dickens, writing ten years after Engels published his book about the working classes, echoed his concern for the state of Britain’s labouring poor, although he probably would not have agreed with Engels’s observation that the result of its exploitation had to be ‘a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794 (the year of the Great Terror), will prove to have been child’s play’.

That revolution eventually happened, but in Russia, not Britain. The country managed to absorb the surge in population and prosperity that the long cycle of industrialisation created. By the second half of the nineteenth century, many British writers and thinkers had come to realise that it had resulted in an unequal distribution of wealth that needed reform. The economic historian and passionate social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, whose book The Industrial Revolution was highly influential when it came out in 1884, set the tone when, talking about the working classes in a lecture in London, said, addressing them directly:

We – the middle classes, I mean not merely the very rich – we have neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity, and instead of sympathy we have offered you hard and unreal advice … You have – I say it clearly and advisedly – you have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously but if you will forgive us, nay whether you will or not, we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.

Such highly emotional and deeply felt calls for a change helped alleviate the social distress that accompanied the nation’s riches. The Victorian Age was often harsh and hypocritical, but it was fuelled by a determination for improvement as well.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s commercial supremacy around the world was beginning to face strong competition as other European countries began to catch up. After the end of the First World War in 1918, although Britain still called itself an empire, its problems were predominately national rather than global. But the Industrial Revolution continued, and is still continuing. New forms of energy – oil, gas and nuclear – have replaced steam. In our own time, the microchip has transformed our whole world of technology. If this sprawling, never-ending march of mechanisation can be said to have a beginning, it can be found as well as anywhere in John Kay’s simple invention which, as the bulky memorial to him in his home town of Bury observes, ‘quadrupled human power in weaving and placed England in the front rank as the best market in the world for textile manufactures’. Unveiled in 1908, the thirty-four-feet high monument is testament to the pride Bury feels for its famous son who died in France, though no one knows quite when, and is buried, though no one knows where.

CHAPTER 7 (#)

The Foundation of Oil City, Pennsylvania 1859 (#)

In 1859 the world’s first commercially successful oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The world discovered a commodity that would become one of the most valuable it had ever known.

In the late 1850s a former railway conductor called Edwin Drake turned up in the small community of Titusville, Pennsylvania in the United States. He had been sent there by a speculator who wanted him to see if oil could be extracted from the rocks in the area. Local farmers had complained for years that oil seepage polluted their wells. If its source could be located and extracted it could turn out to be a lucrative business opportunity. The speculator, James Townsend, had seen a report from a Yale University chemistry professor which said that oil, once refined, could be used for lighting, lubrication and other purposes. Townsend seems to have liked running his investments on a shoestring. The story goes that he only hired Drake because as a former employee he had a free pass on the railway.

Drake used his steam engine to drill for six days a week.

For the best part of a year Drake experimented with ways of trying to get to the oil, including using the money from his backer and his associates to buy a steam engine to bore down into the rock. They decided against giving him any more advances once he had spent the equivalent of $2,000 without any results – so Drake pressed on with funding the exploration from his own savings. Throughout the summer of 1859 he used his steam engine to drill for six days a week. When water flooded his borehole he drove down an iron pipe to protect his drill. On 27th August, at a depth of nearly seventy feet, he found what he had been looking for. Oil bubbled up to meet him: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.

Oil bubbled up to meet him [Drake]: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.

The Pennsylvania oil well was the first successful commercial enterprise, but drilling for oil had already begun on the other side of the world. Russian engineers had started sinking wells ten years earlier on the Aspheron Peninsula near Baku in Azerbaijan. In 1846 they reported to the Tsar that they had been successful, but development thereafter was rather slow. Imperial permission for drilling more wells was not given until more than twenty years later when Azerbaijan began to grow into a huge oil-producing area. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was competing with the United States as the world’s biggest producer of oil: in 1900 it was producing 11.5 million tons a year compared to America’s 9.1 million, but after the Bolshevik Revolution, oil production was diverted to domestic needs. The market, and the money that went with it, was left to America.

As is often the way with these things, no money found its way into Edwin Drake’s pocket. He eventually retired with a pension of $1,500 a year. Others, however, became fabulously wealthy as they learned how to own and distribute the vast reserves of oil that lay beneath the American continent. In the same year that Drake found oil in Pennsylvania, two young ambitious businessmen, John D. Rockefeller and an Englishman called Maurice Clark, opened a wholesale trading business a hundred miles away from Titusville in Cleveland, Ohio. Four years later, with the American Civil War still in full force, oil had turned the region into a fuming and disreputable place, thick with oil leaks, bars and brothels, known locally as ‘Sodden Gomorrah’. Rockefeller, a stern Baptist and anti-slavery campaigner, stayed out of the war for fear of losing his business. ‘Those vast stores of oil were the gifts of the great Creator,’ he said later, without adding that he was determined to turn the Lord’s benevolence to his own advantage. He set up an oil-refining business with Clark and several other associates, and on 14th February 1865, exactly two months before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated following the defeat of the Confederate Army, bought out his partners for $72,500. ‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘the day that determined my career.’ Within four years, helped by an economy that had started to grow again in a country at peace at last, Rockefeller was running the world’s biggest oil-refining business, producing ten percent of its output. At the age of thirty he changed his company’s name to Standard Oil.

Oil became a vital ingredient in national survival.

Rockefeller was not the only entrepreneur to recognise the value of oil. In 1864, a young Scotsman called Andrew Carnegie who had made money by building sleeping cars for first-class travel on the railways, invested $40,000 in a Pennsylvania oil well. The huge profits he made provided him with the foundation of a business empire on a similar scale to Rockefeller’s. Carnegie eventually made most of his money from iron and steel, though it was oil that set him on the road to enormous wealth. Rockefeller always stuck with oil, first forming a cartel with the railroad companies to control distribution and, when public protest forced that to disband, simply buying out his rivals. By the end of the nineteenth century, Standard Oil was the biggest private business corporation the world had ever seen. In 1911, the United States Supreme Court ruled that its existence contravened anti-trust legislation and ordered that it be broken up. Standard Oil metamorphosed into household names such as Mobil, Exxon, Amoco and Chevron. John D. Rockefeller, no longer an active corporate executive but still a major shareholder with holdings in all of these new companies, became even richer.

Oil was not the ‘driving’ energy of the world when Rockefeller’s huge corporation was broken up. Its main use was for lighting and lubrication –Vaseline was one of Standard Oil’s most successful products – and although valuable it was not seen as an essential part of a nation’s strategic needs. Coal was the fuel that drove the steam engines that kept manufacturing and transport on the move. But as the First World War developed and the motor car and the diesel engine came into use, oil became not just a commodity that made money, but a vital ingredient in national survival. It was Britain, a country without any oil of its own, that first recognised the importance of securing and maintaining oil supplies.

In May 1908, a British engineer called George Reynolds was looking for oil in Iran. Rather like Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania nearly fifty years before, he had been sent there by an English millionaire, William Knox D’Arcy, who had bought the country’s oil concession from the Shah. Armed with his pipe, pet dog and pith helmet, and sustaining his work force with supplies of cider and library books, Reynolds was one of those indefatigable Englishmen who never chooses to give up. Money was running out, conditions were becoming intolerable and he was about to be called home, when he found what he was looking for. His employers founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which, by 1912, had built the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf.

In 1914 the British government, prompted by Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty was determined to modernise the Royal Navy by moving it into oil-fuelled technology, secretly took a majority share in the company. Oil now lubricated the national interest. In 1951 the republican government of Iran nationalised the country’s oilfields, but fearing that it might align with the Communist East rather than the West, in 1953 the United States sanctioned the CIA to support a military coup that returned the Shah to the throne. Oil had also been discovered in Saudi Arabia, in 1938, and then in other parts of the Middle East. After the Second World War republican regimes that were hostile to Western interests came to power in countries such as Egypt and Libya. To defend their interests, America and Britain threw their support behind the old established kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The West’s crucial dependence on oil has kept it closely involved in the politics of the Middle East ever since.

The enormous wealth created by the discovery of oil became an important issue for the two men who had first gained most profit from it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were probably the two richest men the world has ever known. As businessmen they were ruthless, sometimes prepared to bribe or threaten to get their way: the expanding world of American commerce was a cruder place than it is today. At the same time a greater awareness of the responsibilities of wealth was beginning to appear. In 1894, the US journalist and progressive reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who attacked Standard Oil for its business practices, published a book called Wealth Against Commonwealth in which he observed: ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.’ In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.’

The names of Rockefeller and Carnegie live on through the philanthropic trusts their money endowed, permanent reminders of the wealth generated by oil and steel. In Azerbaijan, where the oilfields once competed with and might have overtaken their American counterparts, they remember another philanthropist. Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the son of a shoemaker, went drilling for oil on rented land near Baku. In a repetition of what happened in other parts of the world, his partners gave up and sold him their shares. In 1873 he struck oil and became one of the richest men in Imperial Russia. He could neither read nor write, but used his money to build schools and theatres and to help pay for the pipeline that still brings water to the city of Baku from the Caucasus Mountains a hundred miles away. When the Red Army reached the city in 1920, Taghiyev’s house was seized. He was allowed to live the last four years of his life in his summer cottage not far away, but his second wife was not so fortunate. She died in poverty on the streets of Baku in 1938. The Bolsheviks turned his splendid residence into the Azerbaijan National History Museum, which is what it still is today. The fortunes of the world’s first oil tycoons were very different. In capitalist America their wealth was their greatest protector: in Bolshevik Russia it destroyed them.

CHAPTER 8 (#)

The Treaty of Versailles 1919 (#)

The Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War of 1914–18 to an end. Its terms had the effect of making a defeated Germany feel impoverished and resentful. In trying to build a world of peace it laid down foundations that would lead to another war.

In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting of the First World War. Barely a month later, on 10th December, 75,000 soldiers of the German army marched back into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, a socialist politician who was the new Chancellor of the nation. ‘Welcome to the German Republic,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome home. You should march home with your heads held high. Never have men achieved greater things.’ Warming to his theme, he continued: ‘Your sacrifices have been unparalleled. No enemy has conquered you.’ With those words the mood of the new Germany was born. It was an undefeated country that had either been sold out by conspirators in its own ranks or was suffering from difficulties imposed by the punitive terms of an unfair treaty. The Kaiser’s Fatherland was not just a memory. It still existed. It could rise again.

The Kaiser’s Fatherland still existed … it could rise again.