Mirrors

  AN OVERPOPULATED COLONY

  No smoke rose from the chimneys. In 1850, after five years of hunger and disease, Ireland’s countryside was depopulated, and slowly the empty houses fell in. The people had marched off either to the cemetery or to the ports of North America.

  Nothing grew in that land, not even potatoes. The only thing growing was the number of crazy people. The Dublin insane asylum, paid for by Jonathan Swift, had ninety inmates when it opened its doors. A century later, it had over three thousand.

  In the middle of the famine, London sent some emergency relief, but after a few months charitable feelings ran out. The empire refused to continue aiding that irksome colony. As the prime minister, Lord John Russell, put it, the ungrateful Irish repaid generosity with rebellion and slander, and that did not sit well with public opinion.

  Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the top official in charge of the Irish crisis, attributed the famine to Divine Providence. Ireland was the most densely populated country in all Europe, and, since man could not prevent overpopulation, God was taking care of it “in all his wisdom, in an unexpected fashion, but with great efficacy.”

  ORIGIN OF FAIRY TALES

  In the first half of the seventeenth century, James I and Charles I, kings of England, Scotland, and Ireland, took a number of measures to protect Britain’s embryonic industry. They outlawed the export of unprocessed wool, required the use of local textiles even in luxury clothing, and closed the doors on a good part of the manufactures coming from France and Holland.

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, the creator of Robinson Crusoe, wrote several essays on economics and trade. In one of his most widely read works, Defoe praised the role of state protectionism in the development of the British textile industry: if it weren’t for those kings, who with their customs barriers and taxes did so much to further the industry, England would have remained a provider of raw wool for foreigners. England’s industrial growth led Defoe to imagine the world of the future as an immense colony dependent on its products.

  Later on, as Defoe’s dream came true, imperial power systematically prevented other countries, by suffocation or cannonade, from following her example.

  “When it got to the top, it kicked away the ladder,” said German economist Friedrich List.

  Then England invented the fairy tale of free trade: nowadays, when poor countries cannot sleep at night, rich countries still tell them that story to put them to sleep.

  A STUBBORN COLONY

  The English government struggled to repel an invasion of fine cotton and silk cloth from India. Starting in 1685, Indian textiles were punished with heavy tariffs. The tariffs kept rising until they became prohibitive, and there were periods when the doors were simply shut.

  But barriers and prohibitions did not manage to dislodge the competition. Half a century after steamships and the British industrial revolution, Indian weavers struggled on, despite their primitive technology. Their high-quality textiles and low prices kept finding customers.

  Not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire finally conquered nearly all of India by blood and by fire, and then obliged the weavers to pay astronomical taxes, was their stubborn competitiveness routed.

  Later on, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the British were kind enough to dress the survivors of that hecatomb. Once India’s looms were all drowned at the bottom of the Thames, Indians became the best customers for Manchester’s textiles.

  At that point, Dhaka, which the legendary Clive of India had compared to London and Manchester, was empty. Four of every five inhabitants had left. Dhaka was still the center of Bengal’s industry, but instead of cloth it produced opium. Clive, its conqueror, died of an overdose, but the poppy fields enjoyed good health in the midst of the ruin of everything else.

  Today Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, a country among the poorest of the poor.

  TAJ MAHAL

  In the seventeenth century, Indian and Chinese workshops produced half of all the world’s manufactures.

  In those days of splendor, Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Yamuna River, a home in death for his favorite wife.

  That woman and her home were alike, in that both changed according to the time of day or night.

  The Taj Mahal was designed by Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, a Persian architect and astrologer known by many other names as well. They say it was built by twenty thousand workers over twenty years, made of white marble, red sand, jade, and turquoise carried from afar by a thousand elephants.

  They say. Who knows? Perhaps that weightless beauty, floating whiteness, was made of air.

  At the end of the year 2000, before an awestruck multitude, India’s most famous magician made it disappear for two minutes.

  P. C. Sorcar Jr. said it was the art of his magic:

  “I made it vanish,” he said.

  Did he make it vanish, or did he return it to the air?

  MUSIC FOR THE HOURS

  Like the Taj Mahal, ragas change depending on when and for whom. For two thousand years, India’s ragas have offered music for the day’s birth and for each step the day takes toward night, and they sound different according to the time of the year and the season of the soul.

  The melodies rest on one note, repeated, and they rise and fall freely, always changing the way the colors of the world change, and the landscape of the spirit.

  No two ragas are alike.

  They are born and die and are reborn every time they are played.

  Ragas do not like to be written down. The experts who tried to define them, codify them, classify them, all failed.

  They are mysterious, like the silence from whence they come.

  HOKUSAI

  Hokusai, the most famous artist in the history of Japan, said his country was a floating world. With laconic elegance, he knew how to see it and how to portray it.

  He was born Kawamura Tokitaro and he died Fujiwara Iitsu. Along the way he changed his name thirty times, for his thirty rebirths in art or in life, and he moved house ninety-three times.

  He never shed his poverty, even though he worked from dawn to dusk and created no less than thirty thousand paintings and etchings.

  About his work, he wrote:

  Of all I drew prior to the age of seventy, there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish, and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. At one hundred, I shall have become truly marvelous.

  He did not live beyond ninety.

  ORIGIN OF MODERN JAPAN

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, threatened by battleships arrayed along its coasts, Japan had agreed to suffer insufferable treaties.

  To counter the humiliations imposed by the Western powers, modern Japan was born.

  A new emperor inaugurated the Meiji era and founded the Japanese state, incarnated in his sacred figure,

  created publicly owned factories in seventy sectors of the industrial economy and provided them with protection,

  hired European technicians to train the Japanese and keep them up to date,

  built a system of public trains and telegraphs,

  nationalized the lands of the feudal lords,

  organized a new army which defeated the samurais and obliged

  them to change professions,

  imposed free and mandatory public education,

  and multiplied the number of shipyards and banks.

  Fukuzawa Yukichi, who founded the most important university of the Meiji era, summed up the government’s approach this way:

  “A country should not fear to defend its freedom against interference even though the whole world is hostile.”

  And thus Japan was able to annul the harmful treaties imposed on it, and the humiliated country became a power capable of humiliating others, as China, Korea, and other neighbors soon found out.

  FREE TR
ADE? NO THANKS

  When the Meiji era was taking its first steps, Ulysses S. Grant, president of the United States, paid the emperor a visit.

  Grant advised him not to fall into the trap laid by British banks, for it is not generosity that leads certain countries to be so enamored of lending money, and he congratulated him on his protectionist policies.

  Before being elected president, Grant had been the general victorious in the war waged by the industrial North against the plantation South, and well he knew that customs barriers had been as much a cause of the war as slavery. It took the South four years and six hundred thousand dead before it realized that the United States had broken its links of colonial servitude with England.

  As president, Grant answered Britain’s relentless pressure by saying:

  “Within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protectionism all that it can offer, we too will adopt free trade.”

  So it will be in 2075 that the most protectionist country in the world will adopt free trade.

  WITH BLOOD, WORDS SINK IN

  While the United States and Japan pursued their independence, another country, Paraguay, was annihilated for doing the same.

  Paraguay was the only country in Latin America that refused to purchase lead life jackets from the merchants and bankers of England. Its three neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, had to tutor it on “the ways of civilized nations,” as the English-language daily Standard of Buenos Aires put it.

  All the combatants ended up in a bad way.

  The student, exterminated.

  The teachers, bankrupt.

  They had claimed Paraguay would get its well-deserved lesson in three months, but the course lasted five years.

  British banks financed the pedagogical mission and charged very dear. By the end, the victorious countries owed twice what they had owed five years previous, and the vanquished country, which had owed not a cent to anyone, was obliged to inaugurate its foreign debt: Paraguay received a loan of a million pounds sterling. The loan was for paying reparations to the winners. The murdered country had to pay the countries that murdered it for the high cost of its murder.

  The tariffs that protected Paraguay’s industry disappeared;

  the state companies, public lands, steel mills, one of the first railroads

  in South America, all disappeared;

  the national archive, incinerated with its three centuries of history,

  disappeared;

  and people disappeared.

  Argentina’s president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an educated educator, declared in 1870:

  “The war is over. Not a single Paraguayan over ten years old is left alive.”

  And he celebrated:

  “It was necessary to purge the earth of all that human excrescence.”

  TRADITIONAL DRESS

  South America was the market that always said yes.

  Here, everything from England was welcome.

  Brazil bought ice skates. Bolivia, bowler hats that now form the traditional dress of indigenous women. And in Argentina and Uruguay the traditional garb of gauchos was made in Britain for the Turkish army. At the close of the Crimean War, English merchants sent the thousands upon thousands of leftover baggy pants to the River Plate, and they became the gauchos’ bombachas.

  A decade later, England dressed the Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan troops in the very same Turkish uniforms to carry out its errand to exterminate Paraguay.

  HERE LAY PARAGUAY

  The Empire of Brazil was inhabited by a million and a half slaves and a handful of dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts, and barons.

  To achieve the liberation of Paraguay, this slave state placed in charge of its troops Count d’Eu, grandson of the king of France and husband of the next in line to the throne of Brazil.

  In his portraits, receding chin, nose held high, breast thick with medals, the Field Marshal of Victory was unable to hide the disgust he felt for this unpleasant matter of war.

  He knew enough to always remain a prudent distance from the battlefield, where his heroic soldiers faced ferocious Paraguayan children wearing false beards and armed with sticks. And from afar he pulled off his greatest feat: when the town of Piribebuy refused to surrender, he had his troops shut the windows and doors of the hospital filled with the wounded, and burn it down with everyone inside.

  He was at war for a little over a year, and upon his return confessed:

  “The Paraguayan War evoked in me an invincible repugnance for any prolonged effort.”

  ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

  Amid so much death, birth survived.

  Guaraní, the original language of Paraguay, survived, and with it the certainty that words are sacred.

  The oldest of traditions has it that on this earth the red cicada sang, the grasshopper sang, the partridge sang, and then the cedar sang: from the soul of the cedar burst forth the song which in Guaraní called the first Paraguayans into being.

  They did not yet exist.

  They were born from the word that named them.

  ORIGIN OF FREEDOM OF OPPRESSION

  Opium was outlawed in China.

  British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

  The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

  William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.

  In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists, including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion, exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.

  The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.

  OUR LADY OF THE SEAS, NARCO QUEEN

  The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire. But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.

  Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China’s closed doors. On board the ships of the Royal Navy, Christ’s missionaries joined the warriors of free trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black Africans, now filled with poison.

  In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:

  “Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.”

  HERE LAY CHINA

  Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of waging war.

  Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. “Barbarians” was what they called the English and the few Europeans they met.

  And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy soldiers in formation with a single shell.

  In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the leftovers.

  The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty’s power, was in reality many palaces, more than two hundred residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens, not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything: furniture and drapes, jade
sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold clocks, diamond bracelets . . . All that survived was the library, plus a telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China seventy years before.

  Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.

  LOOTIE

  Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the imperial palace, arrived in Beijing on a litter carried by eight scarlet-liveried porters and escorted by four hundred horsemen. This Lord Elgin, son of the Lord Elgin who sold the sculptures of the Parthenon to the British Museum, donated to that same museum the entire palace library, which had been saved from the looting and fire for that very reason. And soon in another palace, Buckingham, Queen Victoria was presented with the gold and jade scepter of the vanquished king, as well as the first Pekinese in Europe. The little dog was also part of the booty. They named it “Lootie.”

  China was obliged to pay an immense sum in reparations to its executioners, since incorporating it into the community of civilized nations had turned out to be so expensive. Quickly, China became the principal market for opium and the largest customer for Lancashire cloth.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chinese workshops produced one-third of all the world’s manufactures. At the end of the nineteenth century, they produced 6 percent.