Hi. Welcome back.

Make yourself comfortable.

Now let's see how the Commercial

Revolution and the Military Revolution played

out in two important, pivotal places in world history in the late 1700s:

India and North America. Let's set the scene in the

struggle for India in the 1750s and 1760s. The East India Company

has their man and their outpost in Bengal. Their man is Robert Clive.

Here's Bengal, right over here. Let's take a closer look at this map.

The key trading post is called Calcutta. Now an enormous city.

By the 1750s, the British realm in which they can trade

is here in Bengal, here, here in Madras, and here

at the city they've helped found called Bombay.

Today's Mumbai.

Clive is creating huge opportunities for some Bengalis,

who can ship things that they are producing

to an enormous market back in England and beyond.

And Clive is able to give them some things

they value like silver, like guns and military advice.

He creates partnerships

that extend his power and the power of the East India Company

and finally collides with the power of key Indian princes.

Those princes are also seeking trade opportunities and

military advice from Britainï¿½s European rival, the French.

So, when the two sides clash, at Plassey here in 1757,

it's the British East India company, its British forces, Indian partners,

Bengali partners, against the forces of the local

prince, who also has guns, has French allies.

But, it turns out that Clive's folks have money that

help bribe some of the people on the other side.

And Clive's forces are more disciplined.

They stand their ground. The other side dissolves.

Clive wins what turns out to be an enormous victory.

And following up on their gains in the 1760s, what ends up happening is this.

The British become one of several

important powers on the Indian sub-continent.

By the 1760s, the British control

these areas here.

You can see most of the subcontinent is held by others.

The old Mughal imperial capital here in Delhi still has an

emperor to whom many of these princelings give at least ceremonial homage.

But the British have an enormous foothold.

Bengal itself becomes a major territory in Asia, in

which the British East India Company is the dominate ruler.

That's a historic development.

By the way, it's already evident by the 1750s

that the military revolution, and the distinct advantage

Europeans have in that revolution, is making them

valued allies and advisors, for training and other

things, to a number of these Indian princes.

Here are two contrasting perspectives on Clive's triumph.

In this one, by a British artist, the Indian

princes are clearly deferential to the British conqueror.

Who, although he looks like a government official, is just

an official of the East India Company, with its government monopoly.

In this work of art, by an Indian artist, at the court

of the emperor in Delhi, you can see that the British resident,

this man right here, is just one among

the many nobles who are paying homage at court.

So imagine then, the new situation that the British

government finds itself facing in London in the 1760s.

They now have a substantial domain in India, in Bengal and elsewhere.

What are they to do?

Do they leave this domain mainly in the hands of a private company?

Do they bring it under firmer government control?

The way the British government ends up answering those questions,

later in the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s,

that will end up determining the future of their

enterprise in India, but that's really a subject for later.

The point for now though is they have gained place, and their immediate

solution is the state accepts responsibility as a key power in India.

Britain appoints a Governor-General

who will take charge of the different company controlled domains.

They assign more of their military power to support this effort.

We'll see more about how that unfolded later on.

But the other critical development in the 1750s and the

1760s was a battle going on for dominance in North America.

Again to set the scene, British

settlements from the Atlantic Coast penetrating inland.

French settlements, smaller settlements, along the St. Lawrence

Seaway, the lakes with French forts, the French setting up their forts.

Both sides launching probes to extend the limits of their claims.

The

British with forts here and here and here.

The French building forts of their own, as you can see here.

A direct confrontation between the forces occurs here, now

the site of a national park in the United States.

And actually the American surveying party is

led by a colonel in the Virginia militia.

A young George Washington.

He encounters a French party,

led by a man named

Jumonville.

Washington and his Indian allies encounter the French, and one of Washington's

Indian comrades proceeds to split the

French officer's head open with a tomahawk.

That sets off a conflict in 1754 that will reverberate around North America and

quickly cross the Atlantic and become part of a war in Europe as well.

Indeed, the battle between the French and British and their Indian allies at Plassey

in 1757, was also part of this global

struggle, finally resolved by a peace treaty in 1763.

The British and French battles in North America had been touch and go.

Finally, the British achieved a decisive victory

here, just outside the French capital of Quebec.

In the battle on the Plains of Abraham.

This Romantic painting, by a British American named Benjamin West,

romantically commemorates the occasion of the victory with the

British General Wolfe dying at the moment of his triumph.

You can see his aides gathered around him, and the Indian ally pensively looking on.

If we take a close-up, let me show you one

of the secrets of the British success in that battle.

It's out here, in the Saint Lawrence. You see all those war ships?

The British

navy's ability to land an expeditionary army at this point is a key, of course,

in allowing them to achieve this triumph for the eventual control of the continent.

Here are the results, then, of the Seven Years' War in 1763.

The French and Spanish used to surround the British position in North America.

On the west and even here from the south.

After 1763, the French give up their position on

the North America mainland.

The claim of this large area turned over to New Spain.

The British lay claim to all this remaining territory.

The French are off the North American mainland.

For now, anyway.

Here's a contemporary map that has the value of showing

you how the British themselves perceived their gains at the time.

You see the settlements along the coast here,

you see the emptiness of the rest of the continent,

from the mapmaker and the British government's point of view.

What the British did too, is they drew what they called a proclamation

line, in order to limit settlement along this line you see right here.

By keeping the settlement on this side of

the Appalachian Mountain and Allegheny Mountain ridge line,

they keep the colonists from getting into wars in ï¿½Lands Reserved for the Indiansï¿½; and

that would minimize the need for the British Army to manage all those problems.

With this war, the fiscal-military state we've been

talking about really makes itself felt in North America.

The

British crown is empowered by a powerful army, enriched by its trade monopolies.

And it seeks to tighten those trade monopolies on

North America and get the colonists to help pay

for the costs of the military that has to

be stationed in North America to protect these gains.

At that point, this becomes a problem for the colonists, too.

They felt they'd been allowed to manage, more or less, their own affairs.

And now think about it. They've got

land restrictions imposed by the crown, like that proclamation line.

They've got trade restrictions getting much tighter in order

to enrich the crown's monopolies. They have

taxes to pay for British army.

Increasingly evident on their shores. As they think about

those problems, some issues of governance arise.

So, just take a moment and think about the ground we've covered this week.

We talked about a great divide between the traditional and the modern.

We posed some big questions as to how that happened.

Then we took a stab at answering

those questions by looking at variations, including variations

between Eurasia and the rest of the world, and the Europeans and the rest of Eurasia.

We sought some explanations in a Commercial Revolution

thatï¿½s especially fueled by the way Europeans have

to relate to the new worlds they now inhabit.

And we looked at a Military Revolution related to that,

that ends up giving the Europeans a bit of an extra advantage in their encounters.

Then we saw how the Commercial Revolution and the Military

Revolution played out in two key parts of the world.

In India and in

North America.

It sets the stage for some huge developments,

including in the realm of ideas, that we're going to talk more about next week.

I'll see you then.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

The Fates of India and North America

现代世界，第一部分：1760 年到 1910 年的全球史

与讲师见面