The World полностью

Just when it looked as if the profitability of slavery was ebbing, an invention suddenly placed slavery at the centre of American prosperity. In 1793, Eli Whitney, a Savannah schoolteacher, helped create a machine with a more effective system of rollers for clearing the seeds from the cotton. This cotton engine – a gin – helped make cotton planting vastly profitable. Southern planters switched to cotton growing, the cotton sent to New England mills or via New York to British Manchester. In 1793, a total of 500,000 pounds was exported. By 1810, it was 85 million, 20 per cent of US exports. Ten years later it had doubled. Slavery had become essential to the south.

Further west, Astor’s trackers were exploring river and coast in their pursuit of pelts. Astor founded his own Pacific town, Astoria, and dispatched ships to Alaska, then to Hawaii and China to trade pelts for sandalwood, tea, opium and spices. He poured the profits from his American Fur Company into New York property, buying Burr’s estate and much else. By the 1820s, Astor was America’s first millionaire. Surprisingly, his rival in the Pacific trade was neither American nor European but a Hawaiian conqueror.

WIVES OF THE CONQUERORS: KAMEHAMEHA AND NAPOLEON

Far to the west, Kamehameha, king of Hawaii, who resided at his villa in Kailua-Kona with his thirty wives and twenty-five children,^* was completing the conquest of Hawaii, aided by his British gunner John Young, whom he raised to the nobility and married to his niece. While he still ruled as a warrior conqueror, wearing the yellow ahuala cape made up of 250,000 feathers of the (now extinct) mamo bird, leading his armies and personally making human sacrifices, he always appreciated European technology. After trading sandalwood with the Europeans and Americans, he constructed his own fleet of twenty ships to trade with China, America and Russian Alaska – an extraordinary performance that contradicts the traditional narrative of European imperialism. As Kamehameha was at his peak, so was Napoleon.

In September 1808, at Erfurt in Germany, Tsar Alexander, four kings and a glittering entourage of aristocrats and nobles paid court to the hegemon of Europe.

Napoleon believed that ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the others with enough authority to force them to live in harmony’ and that power was France. Britain and the rest of Europe disagreed. Napoleon had already overreached – his brothers lacked grip, Habsburgs and Romanovs were conspiring and Talleyrand, whom he cordially hated as ‘shit in a silk stocking’, was betraying him. ‘It is for you to save Europe,’ Talleyrand told Alexander, ‘to resist Napoleon. The French are civilized – their sovereign is not.’ Alexander despised the Ogre but played his vanity sublimely. ‘I’m happy with Alexander,’ Napoleon told Josephine. ‘Were he a woman, I think I’d take him as my lover.’

In March 1809, Emperor Franz dispatched armies into Germany, Poland and Italy to restore Austrian pride and the balance of power in Europe, but in a series of battles culminating at Wagram, just across the Danube from Vienna, Napoleon defeated Franz’s brother, Archduke Karl. ‘My enemies are defeated, thrashed, in full rout,’ he told Josephine. In Vienna, Beethoven sheltered from Napoleon’s shelling in his brother’s basement with cushions over his ears. Napoleon occupied the capital, imposing stringent terms on the Habsburgs. He also survived an assassination attempt. This, along with close misses in battle, the death of his heir and nephew, Louis’s eldest son, and his own fathering of two illegitimate sons by different paramours, combined to convince him that he must divorce Josephine, now forty-six. As she cried and fainted, he told her, ‘You have children, I have none. You must feel the necessity of strengthening my dynasty.’

Napoleon proposed marriage into the Romanovs – to Alexander’s beloved sister Catherine. Alexander was horrified by the Ogre’s presumption. Catherine was quickly married off, leaving a younger sister Anna. But Napoleon switched from the Romanovs to Europe’s grandest dynasty, the Habsburgs.

‘I pity the poor princess he chooses,’ laughed the eighteen-year-old Maria Ludovica, better known as Marie Louise, pretty, sunny, fair-haired daughter of Emperor Franz – before she knew it was her. When she did, she sighed, ‘I resign myself to Divine Providence.’ The newest dynasty was marrying the oldest. The marriage took place by proxy before the archduchess set off for France. When she arrived at the Compiègne Palace, the couple were mutually impressed, she exclaiming, ‘You are much better-looking than your portrait,’ and he so delighted that he consummated the marriage before the formal celebrations. ‘She liked it so much,’ boasted Napoleon, ‘she asked me to do it again.’

WELLESLEYS, ROTHSCHILDS AND THE WOMAN WHO RIDES UPON THE BEAST