Chapter 1: America

Nationalism was another idea that took hold of Europe. An early supporter was German scholar Johann Gottfried von Herder, who argued in 1772 that shared language, culture and history bonds groups of people together. This built on the liberal idea that government should represent the will of the people, known as popular sovereignty. It encouraged people who believed that they shared a common identity to try and form their own nation state. Nationalism supported an alternative to large European empires that commonly ruled several different ethnic groups. The tension between the philosophies of conservatism, liberalism and nationalism would reshape the map of Europe during the 19th century.

Travel and the visual arts

With its emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge, the Enlightenment encouraged the collection of artefacts and the recording of experiences. It became a rite of passage for young nobles to go on a Grand Tour of European cities to view great works of art. The excavation of ancient ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum from the 1740s onwards encouraged the popularity of neoclassicism as a style of architecture across Europe. In 1753 Sir Hans Sloane founded the British Museum with his personal collection of over 71 000 objects from his travels. This inspired the public to engage with art and artefacts they had never seen before. With the growth of global imperialism, museums across Europe started to amass a wealth of objects that were bought, gifted or stolen from cultures around the world.

The meaning of ‘freedom’

Most Enlightenment thinkers were from the upper and middle classes, and many reforms they suggested did not seek to help the poorest in society. Also, despite the efforts of female writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft (see Unit 7, Chapter 4), women were generally excluded from conversations on equality. Furthermore, to legitimise the expansion of their empires, Europeans emphasised racial differences as a hierarchy of intellectual and moral superiority. Many of the Enlightenment philosophers even personally profi ted from investing in slave ships or plantations while writing about ‘freedom’. Therefore, Enlightenment ideas did not generally challenge hierarchies of class, gender and race, and often reinforced them.

Coffeehouses and salons

Coffeehouses were popular places for the educated classes to meet and debate their ideas, but women were generally banned from coffeehouses. Therefore, many upper-class women hosted their own literary salons at home. One of the most famous British salons in the 1750s was Elizabeth Montagu’s Blue Stocking Society.

Check your understanding

1. What happened during the Enlightenment? 2. What is the social contract? 3. What do the terms conservatism, liberalism and nationalism mean? 4. How did the Grand Tour change European cities? 5. Why might the ideas of conservatism, liberalism and nationalism cause political tension?

Unit 10: Global imperialism French North Africa

Since 1516, the city of Algiers had been ruled by the Ottomanallied Barbary corsairs. However, with Ottoman rule weakening, France took its chance to extend its colonial empire into Africa in the 19th century.

The Barbary corsairs were semi-independent rulers within the Ottoman Empire. For centuries, they had been a constant threat to the coastlines of European nations, with their pirate ships conducting raids on port towns and shipping routes. Outside of the city, Berber and Arab tribes spread through the desert landscape of the interior. They either owned subsistence farms or traded goods via camel caravans.

European powers had long wanted to capture Algiers. In the early 1800s, France found a pretext for invasion: the Barbary ruler Hussein Dey caused outrage in 1827 when he struck the French consul Pierre Deval with a fl y whisk (a type of fl y swatter) after a disagreement over debts. The French navy blockaded the port of Algiers, so Hussein Dey fi red canons at French ships. In response, the French government amassed 600 ships with 34 000 troops to sail to Algiers in 1830, hoping a military victory abroad would ease rising class confl icts at home. After an intense three-week campaign, Hussein Dey surrendered and sent Ottoman soldiers back to Turkey in exchange for being allowed to keep his own personal wealth. When French troops entered the city, looting and massacres began. The French soon argued that to protect Algiers, they would have to extend their military control over adjacent provinces. Over the following decades, more territory was added to consolidate French Algeria. French protectorates were established in Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1912. Within these protectorates, the previous ruling classes remained in power as fi gureheads, but French colonial authorities effectively controlled their decisions.

The Battle of Staouéli between France and Ottomanruled Algiers, June 1830

Divide and rule

The French colonial authorities incited ethnic tensions between Arab and Berber tribes to prevent them from allying against the French, a policy known as ‘divide and rule’. Despite living peacefully together for the last 1000 years, French colonists portrayed the Arabs as violent invaders who had conquered the Berbers and imposed Islamic customs. This was done to encourage Berbers to join the French army as auxiliaries known as zouaves. Simultaneously, the French kept Arab provincial governors known as qaids intact to maintain order and collect taxes for the French government.

French soliders and zouaves