* Irish famine also rearranged British politics. In 1845, a blight in Ireland destroyed the potatoes that had been, since the crop was imported from America, the staple diet of an impoverished Catholic peasantry toiling under British Protestant landlords who refused to repeal the Corn Laws that protected their grain prices. But as the famine intensified and as a million Irish people died, the Tory prime minister, Peel, joined with Gladstone and other Whigs to repeal the laws. Peel was opposed by his own party, led by an unlikely figure to represent the Tories – a novelist and dandy, born Jewish of Moroccan origins, called Benjamin Disraeli. Out of the crisis emerged the Liberals led by Palmerston and the Conservatives, soon led by Disraeli.
* A similar process was taking place in another continental settler nation, Australia. Here the conquest was easier; on the one hand, the indigenous peoples were much less organized, their resistance much less fierce, and there were no other rival European powers present. On the other hand, the settlers were less divided, untainted by slavery but deploying no less injustice, violence and bigotry. British settlers and outlaws, inspired by vast spaces and an adventurous spirit, expanded aggressively. In 1851 the discovery of gold attracted an influx of immigrants who demanded representation. In 1854, the revolt of gold miners at Ballarat, Victoria, was crushed, with twenty-seven miners killed, but it was followed by the granting of limited self-rule and universal male suffrage, with an innovation – the ‘Australian’ secret ballot, later copied throughout the world. A generation of outlaws called the Bushrangers roamed over the vast territories. Captain Thunderbolt – Fred Ward – personified the type. A labourer turned cattle rustler, Ward was arrested and sent to Cockatoo Bay, whence he escaped. During the 1860s, he launched a spree of heists, and was chased by government troopers. Admired by many as the ‘gentleman bushranger’, the bushy-bearded Thunderbolt defied capture until 1870 when, aged thirty-five, he was hunted down and shot.
* In 1819, when Kamehameha the Conqueror died, his dissipated son, Liholiho, Kamehameha II, had neglected his father’s fleet and spent a fortune on an American luxury yacht which he named
* Although he had been raised by American missionaries, Kamehameha IV loathed them – and American racism. He and his brother Lot had travelled to meet President Taylor in Washington and Queen Victoria in London. On the train to New York, ‘the conductor … took me for somebody’s servant just because I had a darker skin. Confounded fool – the first time I’ve ever received such treatment. In England an African can … sit alongside Queen Victoria’ but Americans, though they ‘talk and think a great deal about their liberty, were often remiss with strangers.’
ACT SIXTEEN
1.1 BILLION
Bonapartes and Manchus, Habsburgs and Comanche
REVOLUTIONS AND MASS POLITICS: LOUIS NAPOLEON AND LOLA MONTEZ
‘I have a firm seat on the horse,’ insisted Louis Philippe, who now suppressed dissent and resisted British-style reforms: only 1 per cent (240,000 voters) of the French population could vote for the Assembly as workers toiled in drear factories and the bourgeois craved the freedoms granted in Britain, which now had a million voters. Louis Philippe tried to distract the French with Bonapartist
In January 1848, riots started in Palermo and then spread to Paris, where on 22 February crowds took to the streets. The following day, soldiers killed fifty-two protesters. Crowds of socialist workers and liberal bourgeois soon commanded the streets and besieged Louis Philippe in the palace. The king abdicated in favour of his grandson, and after a full day of riots he escaped in a cab in disguise. His fall marked the end of the Capet family, which had ruled France – with a few minor intervals – since 922.
The radical poet Alphonse de Lamartine declared a Second Republic, which enfranchised all nine million adult males (granting universal male suffrage before Britain or America), created National Workshops to employ workers, and finally, on 27 April, fifteen years after Britain, abolished slavery by compensating the slave masters.*
The news was relayed by a new medium, the telegraph, that accelerated world events: revolution spread through Europe. As the ex-king Louis Philippe sailed for Dover under the name ‘Mister Smith’, Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the conqueror’s forty-year-old nephew, son of his brother King Louis, sailed for Calais.
