‘But when Napoleon began his advance, they (the Molokan heretic peasants) believed that he was that lion of the valley of Jehoshaphat, who, as their old hymns tell, is destined to overthrow the false Tsar and to restore the throne of the true White Tsar. And so the Molokans of Tambov province chose a deputation among themselves, which was to go to meet him and greet him, dressed in white raiment.’

                    Haxthausen, Studien ueber . . . Russland

As against this, Islam was continuing that silent, piecemeal, and irreversible expansion unbacked by organized missionary endeavour or forcible conversion which is so characteristic of that religion. It expanded both eastwards, in Indonesia and North-western China, and westwards from the Sudan towards Senegal and, to a much smaller extent, from the shores of the Indian Ocean inland. When traditional societies change something so fundamental as their religion, it is clear that they must be facing major new problems. The Moslem traders, who virtually monopolized the commerce of inner Africa with the outside world and multiplied with it, helped to bring Islam to the notice of new peoples. The slave trade, which broke down communal life, made it attractive, for Islam is a powerful means of reintegrating social structures. At the same time the Mohammedan religion appealed to the semi-feudal and military societies of the Sudan, and its sense of independence, militancy, and superiority made it a useful counterweight to slavery. Moslem Negroes made bad slaves: the Haussa (and other Sudanese) who had been imported into Bahia (Brazil) revolted nine times between 1807 and the great rising of 1835 until, in effect, they were mostly killed or deported back to Africa. The slavers learned to avoid imports from these areas, which had only recently been opened to the trade.

While the element of resistance to the whites was clearly very small in African Islam (where there were as yet hardly any), it was by tradition crucial in South-east Asia. There Islam—once again pioneered by traders—had long advanced against local cults and the declining Hinduism of the spice islands, largely as a means of more effective resistance against the Portuguese and the Dutch, as ‘a kind of pre-nationalism,’ though also as a popular counterweight to the Hinduized princes As these princes increasingly turned into narrowly circumscribed dependents or agents of the Dutch, Islam sunk its roots more deeply into the population. In turn, the Dutch learned that the Indonesian princes could, by allying with the religious teachers, unleash a general popular rising, as in the Java War of the Prince of Djogjakarta (1825—1830). They were consequently time and again driven back to a policy of close alliance with the local rulers, or indirect rule. Meanwhile the growth of trade and shipping forged closer links between South-east Asian Muslim and Mecca, served to increase the number of pilgrims, to make Indonesian Islam more orthodox, and even to open it to the militant and revivalist influence of Arabian Wahhabism.

Within Islam the movements of reform and revival, which in this period gave the religion much of its penetrative power, can also be seen as reflecting the impact of European expansion and the crisis of the old Mohammedan societies (notably of the Turkish and Persian empires) and perhaps also of the growing crisis of the Chinese empire. The puritanical Wahhabites had arisen in Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1814 they had conquered Arabia and were ready to conquer Syria, until halted by the combined force of the Westernizing Mohammed Ali of Egypt and Western arms, though their teachings spread eastwards into Persia, Afghanistan and India. Inspired by Wahhabism an Algerian holy man, Sidi Mohammed ben Ali el Senussi, developed a similar movement which from the 1840s spread from Tripoli into the Sahara desert. In Algeria Abd-el-Kader, in the Caucasus Shamyl, developed religio-political movements of resistance to the French and Russians respectively (see chapter 7) and anticipated a pan-Islamism which sought not merely a return to the original purity of the Prophet but also to absorb Western innovations. In Persia an even more obviously nationalist and revolutionary heterodoxy, the Bab movement of Ali Mohammed, arose in the 1840s. It tended, among other things, to return to certain ancient practices of Persian Zoroastrianism and demanded the unveiling of women.

The ferment and expansion of Islam was such that, in terms of purely religious history, we can perhaps best describe the period from 1789 to 1848 as that of a world Islamic revival. No equivalent mass movements developed in any other non-Christian religion, though by the end of the period we are on the verge of a great Chinese Taiping rebellion, which has many characteristics of such a one. Small religious reform movements of the evolués were founded in British India, notably Ram Mohan Roy’s (1772—1833) Brahmo Samaj. In the United States the defeated Indian tribes began to develop religio-social prophetic movements of resistance to the whites, such as that which inspired the war of the largest recorded confederation of the Plains Indians under Tecumseh in the first decade of the century, and Handsome Lake’s religion (1799), designed to preserve the Iroquois way of life against disruption by white American society. It is to the credit of Thomas Jefferson, a man of rare enlightenment, that he gave this prophet, who adopted some Christian and especially Quaker elements, his official blessing. However, the direct contact between an advanced capitalist civilization and animist peoples was still too rare to produce many of those prophetic and millennial movements which have become so typical of the twentieth century.

IDEOLOGY: SECULAR

[Mr. Bentham] turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner. He has no great fondness for poetry, and can hardly extract a moral out of Shakespeare. His house is warmed and lighted by steam. He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent. He has a great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and trees, and is for ever referring everything to Utility.

                    W. Hazlitt, The spirit of the Age (1825)

No doubt these triumphs had their dark side, though these were not so readily to be summarized in statistical tables. How was one to find quantitative expression for the fact, which few would today deny, that the Industrial Revolution created the ugliest world in which man has ever lived, as the grim and stinking, fog-bound back streets of Manchester already testified? Or, by uprooting men and women in unprecedented numbers and depriving them of the certainties of the ages, probably the unhappiest world? Nevertheless we can forgive the champions of progress in the 1840’s their confidence and their determination ‘that commerce may go freely forth, leading civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better.’ ‘Sir,’ said Lord Palmerston, continuing this rosy statement in the blackest of years, 1842, ‘this is the dispensation of Providence.’ Nobody could deny that there was poverty of the most shocking kind. Many held that it was even increasing and deepening. And yet, by the all-time criteria which measured the triumphs of industry and science, could even the gloomiest of rational observers maintain that in material terms it was worse than at any time in the past, or even than in unindustrialized countries in the present? He could not. It was sufficiently bitter accusation that the material prosperity of the labouring poor was often no better than in the dark past, and sometimes worse than in periods within living memory. The champions of progress attempted to fend it off with the argument that this was due not to the operations of the new bourgeois society, but on the contrary to the obstacles which the old feudalism, monarchy, and aristocracy still placed in the way of perfect free enterprise. The new socialists, on the contrary, held that it was due to the very operations of that system. But both agreed that these were growing-pains. The ones held that they would be overcome within the framework of capitalism, the others that they were not likely to be, but both rightly believed that human life faced a prospect of material improvement to equal the advance in man’s control over the forces of nature.