Baha'u'llah, the West, and the Birth of Modernity: an Essay on the Awakening of Humanity

Contents Prologue 1 Why Europe?

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2 The Enlightenment

15

3 The French Revolution

29

4 The Industrial Revolution

43

5 Basic Principles and Processes

59

6 Voting Rights, Education and Civil Society

76

7 Dawn of a New Day

98

8 Napoleon III and France

108

9 Kaiser William I and Germany

118

10 The Papacy and Italy

130

11 Francis Joseph and Austria

145

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B A H Á ’ U ’ L L Á H , T H E W E S T , A N D T H E B I RT H O F M O D E R N I T Y

12 Alexander II and Russia

154

13 Victoria and Great Britain

165

14 The United States

174

15 The Great War

195

16 Identity and Social Transformation

211

17 The 21st Century

221

Epilogue

240

Bibliography Notes and References About the Author

247 253 260

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1

Why Europe?

Why Europe?

Why not India? . . . or China? . . . or Africa?

Why were the majority of the epistles that Bahá’u’lláh addressed to kings and rulers directed to sovereigns of countries that He had never visited, who had not participated in persecuting His followers, and who were largely uninformed of the history and tenets of a nascent religion? Why did He take such an active interest in lands and cultures that were apparently so foreign to His immediate surroundings and context? Why did these potentates merit some of His weightiest Tablets? Why did Bahá’u’lláh focus so much attention on Europe, which seemed to be so far off-centre of the unfolding history of His Faith?

Of course, the crowned heads of Europe were not the only ones to be addressed by Bahá’u’lláh, and He did indeed write epistles to Middle Eastern monarchs and ministers of state but in a very different tone from that in which He addressed those of the West. His condemnation of the Sultan of Turkey was in the vein of his oppressive role in persecuting the young Faith, and in his opposition to His own Person. His Tablet to the Shah of Iran recounts the intense and widespread suffering of the innocent followers of the Lord of the Age. These monarchs brought upon themselves the well-earned chastisement that Bahá’u’lláh meted out to them in ample measure.

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So again, why Europe? . . . and why sovereigns with no previous contact with the Faith? For while ‘epoch-making counsels and warnings [were] collectively addressed by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh to the sovereigns of the earth’, these were ‘more particularly directed to the kings of Christendom’.1 It is clear that ‘those mighty ones of the earth who had either so sorely maltreated Him, or deliberately withheld from Him their succor’2 bore a burden of guilt either for sins of commission or omission: ‘Twenty years have passed, O kings!’ He, addressing the kings of Christendom, at the height of His mission, has written, ‘during which We have, each day, tasted the agony of a fresh tribulation. No one of them that were before Us hath endured the things We have endured. Would that ye could perceive it!

They that rose up against Us have put Us to death, have shed Our blood, have plundered Our property, and violated Our honour. Though aware of most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to restrain the tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with your subjects, that your high sense of justice may be fully demonstrated to all mankind?’3

Yet the situation of the sovereigns of Europe was particular, as the visible heads of a continent which had set the cultural, economic and political standards for lands far beyond their own borders.

The 19th century has been called the century of Europe, and by mid-century when Bahá’u’lláh made His epoch-making proclamation to the kings, Europe was well on the way to dominating the world scene. However, the roots of this domination can be found as long as four centuries earlier. Europe had initiated its world-embracing role largely as a group of competing commercial powers seeking hegemony in lucrative trade with 2

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the Far East. The New Testament hints at the delicacies of the East with the frankincense and myrrh that were presented as gifts to the new-born Saviour, but it was the spice trade in particular that motivated European journeys of discovery and conquest. Vigorous commerce in spices was by no means new.

It had functioned by land and sea routes for centuries, and even before the 15th century it was dominated in the Mediterranean by the Venetians. However, with the rise of Islam, and as Turkey and Egypt sought to exact profit from the trade through their territories, European merchants sought other routes free from monopolies of the Muslim States. Motivations for exploration were initially commercial and often led by private concerns with government mandates, but eventually these were supported by military might which grew into political power.

Iberia would take the lead in extending European influence, pushing both to the East and to the West. The drive to the East was led by tiny Portugal, perched on the western extreme of continental Europe and facing the unknown vastness of the Atlantic. Portugal’s explorations in the early to mid-15th century led it gradually down the coast of Africa, establishing trading posts along the way, and eventually rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 to enter the Indian Ocean. This was a landmark in opening the trade with the East, breaking the monopoly of the Ottoman Turks and stimulating competition from other European powers. Still, the Portuguese would dominate the spice trade for the better part of a century through naval power.

Remnants of its trading empire persisted into the 20th century with its colonies of Goa in India, Macau in China, East Timor, as well as its African colonies, Angola, Mozambique, GuineaBissau and Cabo Verde. It extended its influence to the western hemisphere when its ships strayed from their standard routes and landed in what is modern-day Brazil in 1500.

The Dutch were the second power to expand aggressively 3

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into the spice trade of the Indian Ocean, establishing a far-flung commercial network of trading enclaves that virtually encircled the globe in the early 1600s. Becoming a world power in the first half of the 17th century, the Dutch had a significant presence in the Caribbean and northern South America (in modern Suriname), in Brazil, in Africa in South Africa, Ghana and Angola, in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), among other sites, eventually displacing the Portuguese in southern Asia and elsewhere.

The participation of the Dutch in the Indian Ocean spice trade through their East India Company led them to establish a power base in Java from which they exercised control over the far-flung islands that would become Indonesia, and which they would dominate well into the 20th century.

In the same period the British initiated their commercial forays into the East with the establishment of their own East India Company in 1600. It grew gradually as a commercial enterprise throughout the 17th century, and in the 18th century Britain came to dominate in India, excluding the French who were its main competitor. James Cook’s explorations in the late 1700s led to the establishment of several British colonies on the Australian continent, with this influence expanding in the Pacific region in the 19th century. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe motivated a more aggressive role in other parts of the world, as the British consolidated their place in India and took Cape Town from the Dutch, eventually to be a beachhead for the British conquest of southern Africa. China was likewise submitted to the commercial interests of the Europeans, powerless to resist their superior military might.

European domination of the western hemisphere paralleled the process in the East and led to colonial domination even more rapidly. As the Portuguese monopolized the Indian Ocean trade, Spain set its face westward in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, hoping to bypass the Portuguese-dominated route 4

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around the cape of Africa. The ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Columbus was an effort to find a direct westerly route to the spice-rich East. The Spanish would exercise power only gradually after the voyages of Columbus, first in Mexico with the conquest of the Aztecs, and later with the brutal and treacherous subjugation of the Incan Empire by the Pizarro brothers.

Soon the Spanish would be extracting huge quantities of silver to finance projects on the home front in Europe. Spain would gradually dominate the interior of an area much larger than all of Europe, from California to Tierra del Fuego.

Just as Portugal’s success attracted other trading enterprises in the East, Spain’s experience stimulated a rush among European powers to establish beachheads in the ‘New World’. As in the East, competition among European powers intensified during the 17th century. In spite of repeated early attempts, the French presence was only consolidated in this period, and Great Britain established itself in the North American continent in 1607 in Jamestown, fully a century later than the Spanish, while the Dutch established a colony in upstate New York in 1614, famously purchasing Manhattan in 1626 from the natives for a few pounds of trinkets. The eastern seaboard of North America lacked the mineral wealth that the Spanish possessions enjoyed but here the wealth lay in abundant furs, timber and farmland. France became the great competitor in the forests of Canada and in the future United States. Competition was especially intense in the Caribbean islands, where sugar production dominated the economy and which would become an important component of European wealth. Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands all maintained a colonial presence in the Caribbean, and short of open warfare, piracy became a sort of guerrilla conflict on the open seas.

Thus, by the time Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed His Faith to the crowned heads, Europe had subjected the ancient civilizations of 5

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the East to its military might in service to commercial interests, soon to be transformed into imperial or colonial dominion. In the West where the European powers had conquered and subjugated empires and diverse peoples from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, those vast lands would be lost to the descendants of those conquerors who had enriched Europe. By that time European culture, language and political systems were firmly established.

Only the interior of Africa remained to come under the dominion of Europe, and that would soon occur in the late 19th century.

However, by the mid-18th century, the major European powers on a world level had been reduced to two or three, while others had stagnated and simply sought to maintain the status quo. Spain had been in decline for many decades but still maintained a vast colonial empire, most of which would be lost during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Portugal maintained its colonial presence in Brazil and scattered outposts but was in no position to challenge other players. The Dutch were holding on with ups and downs but would soon suffer severe reverses in the Napoleonic Wars. Russia’s international presence was largely on its borders or in far-off Alaska, while Prussia (the future core of a pan-German State) was scarcely on the ascendant in central Europe under the Hohenzollern king Frederick the Great. Austria had never had a truly world presence except through its extended Hapsburg dynasty, but was maintaining its extensive empire of eastern Europe and the Balkans, dominating a plethora of ethnic groups, facing off against the Ottoman Empire, and with influence in Italy. After nearly three centuries of intense international competition, two major players now competed for hegemony in the western hemisphere and in the East in India: Great Britain and France. Indeed, much of the history of the late 18th century would evolve around the competition between these two superpowers, and of these two, Britain would emerge the stronger.

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