The World

The Houses of Hohenzollern and Roosevelt, Solomon and Manchu

EMPRESS CIXI, QUEEN MIN AND YAT -SEN: THE SUN ALSO RISES

That July, the seventy-year-old Dowager Empress Cixi, retired for five years, was informed by her nephew the Guangxu Emperor that a war was about to start with Japan. Guangxu was rattled: ignorant, insouciant, terrified of thunder (during storms the eunuchs shouted to drown out the sound), the emperor had reversed Cixi’s reforms and neglected her navy while his teenaged Consort Zhen was selling offices to the highest bidders. The Manchu monarchs, ruling 400 millions, regarded the forty million Japanese as racially inferior wojen – dwarves. When the clash came, Guangxu announced, ‘The Dwarves have broken all the laws of nations and exhausted our patience: we command our armies to tear the Dwarves out of their lairs.’ But the Japanese had changed.

Thirty years earlier, in November 1867, the hereditary shogun, whose Tokugawa family had ruled Japan for the three centuries since Tokugawa Ieyasu, handed back power to the emperor. After a short conflict, a new tenno (emperor) declared the Restoration of Imperial Rule, which was to ‘enrich the country, strengthen the military’.

When the teenaged prince, Mutsuhito, succeeded to the throne, he took the name Meiji – Enlightened Rule – and served as figurehead for an elite coterie of reformers who wished to overthrow the old order and forge what was really a new state. The capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo (renamed Tokyo); a young samurai reformer, Ito Hirobumi, drafted a new constitution, a hybrid of those of Germany and Britain, with a premiership and elected assembly, that would serve the ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolable’ emperor of the ‘Sacred Throne established when heavens and earth separated’. The tenno ‘must be reverenced’. Yet ‘knowledge’, stated Ito’s Charter Oath, ‘shall be sought throughout the world so as to invigorate the foundations of imperial rule’. British and German officers arrived to train a new military infused with technical modernity and medieval bushido that, along with the emperor himself, would form the heart of kokutai, a matrix of monarch, Shinto religion and society that would rule until 1945.^*

In twenty years, Japan was transformed into Asia’s most industrialized economy, just as China was disintegrating and so providing an irresistible target for the European empires – both a temptation and a warning to Japan.

Korea would be on the front line in the race between the Europeans and the Japanese to exploit the decline of China. If the Europeans took Korea, it would be ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of the Japan’. Korea, ruled since 1392 by the Joseon family, was traditionally a Chinese vassal. Advised by his charismatic wife, Queen Min, its king Gojong navigated a middle way. Their marriage had been arranged by the king’s domineering father, the daewongun – the prince of the great court – who as regent tried to exclude all foreign influence, a policy that was becoming impossible with expansionist Japan and Russia targeting the Hermit Kingdom.

At first the couple loathed each other and she refused to consummate the marriage on their wedding night, but they grew closer, despite losing their first child. ‘A slim woman with a very elegant figure’, Queen Myeongseong – Min – was scholarly and strikingly beautiful, observed an English visitor. ‘The hair shiny ebony, and the skin transparent and pearly … and she had a sparkling intelligence.’ After the daewongun had ruled for a decade, Gojong came of age and, fortified by Min, retired him. Negotiating with China and Russia, and opening the Hermit Kingdom to modernization, Min resisted Japanese control. But now in April 1894 a peasant rebellion provoked both China and Japan to intervene.

In Tokyo, there was no choice, said Premier Ito Hirobumi, ‘but to go to war’ to keep China out. Emperor Guangxu was ‘surprised by this treachery’, admitting, ‘It’s difficult to reason with the Dwarves’ – who efficiently landed 240,000 Japanese troops in Korea. Japan captured Pyongyang and King Gojong, then smote China on land and sea, its officers comparing the Chinese to ‘dying swine’. In April 1895, at Shimonoseki, Ito forced China to grant Korea ‘independence’ under Japanese influence and cede the prosperous island of Taiwan and the strategic northern city Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) to Japan. Out of nowhere, Japan had grabbed China’s choicest morsels, much to the outrage of Willy.

The kaiser feared a ‘consolidated Asia, the control of China by Japan’, and appealed to St Petersburg, where Alexander III, only forty-nine but an incorrigible boozer who hid banned vodka receptables in his boots, was dying of liver cirrhosis. He was succeeded by his twenty-six-year-old son Nicholas, who sobbed, ‘I’m completely unprepared. What’s going to happen to Russia?’ It is hard to be prepared for power – most democratic leaders have no experience of it when they are elected – and there was no training for the array of gifts necessary to rule as autocrat. He was no colossus like his father, nor a showman like Willy, but his handsome inscrutability, agonizing politeness and uxorious devotion belied his determination to promote Orthodox autocracy and Russian power. In the Japanese victory, Nicky saw the opportunity to do what Romanovs did: expand.

Willy had known Nicky and his half-English, half-German wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, all their lives: they were both cousins of his. Nicky and Alix had met as children and fallen in love as teenagers, but the pious Protestant Alix refused to convert to Orthodoxy – until April 1894, when both attended the wedding of her brother, along with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. After Alix turned down Nicky’s proposal, she consulted Willy, who encouraged her to accept. In the miserable days after Alexander’s death, Nicholas married Alexandra.

Now Nicky embraced his own vision of Asian empire along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Willy sent him a letter with a sketch entitled ‘Against the Yellow Peril’. ‘I’ll certainly do all in my power to keep Europe quiet and guard the rear of Russia,’ Willy wrote to Nicky in April 1895, ‘so nobody shall hamper your action towards the Far East. For that is clearly the great task of the future for Russia to cultivate the Asian Continent and defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow race.’

Nicky, backed by Willy, forced Japan to surrender some of its gains, and bribed China to grant concessions to France and Germany – and Port Arthur to Russia. After consulting Tibetan and Mongolian mystics, the tsar planned to seize Manchuria and Korea, with Queen Min keen for Russian backing in order to escape Japanese dominance. Embittered at losing their Chinese prizes, the Japanese were determined on vengeance, launching Operation Foxhunt. Min was the fox.

At dawn in October 1895, fifty assassins broke into the Gyeongbokgung Palace. They secured the king, then hunted for Min: her femininity provoked their special fury. They found her hiding among her ladies-in-waiting. The women were killed. The ronin gang-raped and slashed the forty-three-year-old queen, slicing off her breasts, then displayed her body to the Russian envoys, before taking her to the woods and burning her remains with kerosene. The king was horrified and heartbroken. In a backlash against the killing, Korean rebels attacked the Japanese. The fight was now on for hegemony in the east.

In Beijing, Emperor Guangxu invited Cixi back into power. ‘We should comprehensively adopt western ways,’ he decided, and create a constitutional monarchy. Yet he and his ministers also feared female power and ordered Cixi’s murder. Instead she swept them aside, beheaded the reformers and imprisoned Guangxu. Manchu misrule now inspired a Cantonese medical student to overthrow the dynasty.

‘We mustn’t miss the opportunity of a lifetime,’ declared Sun Yat-sen, aged twenty-nine, who loathed the Manchus and believed that he should be the revolutionary leader of a free Chinese republic. Son of a tailor and porter, the young Christian doctor helped found the Revive China Society, backed by a Shanghai businessman called Charlie Song, a former Christian preacher, one of whose daughters would one day marry Sun. Their rebellion ended in disaster. Cixi had captured rebels beheaded.

Single-minded, obsessional and politically as remorseless as he was supple, Dr Sun escaped to join his wealthy brother in Hawaii – where another female potentate, a remarkable queen, was fighting for its independence against the other new Pacific power: America.

QUEEN LILI‘UOKALANI AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT: THE ABUNDANCE AND INGENUITY OF AMERICA

A singer-songwriter, a ukele player, an amorous enthusiast and Hawaiian patriot, Lili’uokalani was fifty-five when she succeeded her jovial brother Kala¯kaua as queen, but she had long dominated Hawaii as regent. Lili’uokalani, unhappily married to an American merchant’s son with whom she lived at a pillared mansion Washington Place, was a cousin of the Conqueror’s dynasty, a long-serving courtier to the kings and a rich landowner. She wrote her best song ‘Aloha Oe’, about one of her many affairs.^*

Lili’uokalani was determined to halt American expansion and defeat the American sugar barons. In 1887, their Annexation Club, backed by a settler militia, the Honolulu Rifles, forced Lili’uokalani and her brother to accept the so-called Bayonet Constitution that further weakened the monarchy and granted the vote to all whites but only some Hawaiians – and no Asians.

Yet America, like Japan, was projecting its new naval power across the Pacific. In 1867, it took advantage of its Guano Act^* to annex the Hawaiian island of Midway, while the queen’s brother, King Kala¯kaua, also granted Pearl Harbor to America. Now in Washington, DC, a new assistant secretary of the navy watched, and planned to join the Pacific carve-up.

Teddy Roosevelt, the boy who had watched Lincoln’s cortège from his window, was a weak asthmatic who had been home-schooled. Aspiring to be a scientist, he filled his room at home with stuffed creatures, nicknamed the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History by his siblings. Recovering his health, he learned to box at Harvard, emerging as an eccentric with the maniacal energy that is often the antidote to depression. After the death of his father, this irrepressible, pugnacious dynamo with round spectacles, rasping voice and ‘castanet-like snapping teeth’ entered ‘the arena’: ‘I intended,’ he said, ‘to be one of the governing class.’

At his graduation party, his much older cousin, ‘Squire’ James Roosevelt, met a haughty young woman, Sara Delano, daughter of a rich China trader, whom he married. Soon afterwards she gave birth to a son, Franklin, whose life would be inspired by the career of cousin Teddy. Squire Roosevelt had made his fortune in railways and coal in a booming America personified by the Wizard of Menlo Park, who in later years would record Teddy’s voice and support his politics.

In 1882, Thomas Alva Edison, a half-deaf teachers’ son from Ohio who had started as a telegraphist during the civil war and aged twenty-two registered his first patent, threw a switch in the office of his banker, J. P. Morgan, which started generating electrical power for use in the lighting of fifty-nine homes in Manhattan, launching the utility that became Edison Illuminating Company.

Edison, who patented 1,093 inventions, was a one-man hub of scientific ingenuity at the moment when the technical improvements of the last century really began to improve the daily lives of ordinary people. Ruthlessly competitive and intolerant of any opposition,^* he was registering an average of one patent every four days, playing with his inventions in his crumpled, soiled suit, a vegetarian who lived on milk, sometimes working for seventy-two hours and often sleeping four hours a night. His family took second place. His first wife died of an accidental morphine overdose, after which he married a twenty-year-old. But he neglected his children and was exasperated by his alcoholic huckster sons, whom he refused to employ in his labs.

Edison personified the convergence of scientific invention and practical application that had been missing before. ‘We’ve got to keep working up things of commercial value,’ he said. ‘We can’t be like the old German professor content to spend his whole life studying the fuzz on a bee!’ He created a new environment for thinking creatively: using profits from one of his inventions, a multiplex telegraphic system, he founded a laboratory in Menlo, New Jersey, dreaming up the concept of research and development. ‘I never made a single discovery,’ he said, and joked that ‘Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’

Edison’s electrical company was not based on a sudden discovery. Only recently electricity had been regarded as a form of entertainment, but he was just one of a phalanx of inventers who were experimenting with light bulbs that could illuminate houses and streets, competing with oil lamps.^* Then he worked on the technology to generate and distribute the electricity. He did not get everything right. He insisted that direct current was the safe way to distribute electricity, but he employed a talented young Serb, Nikola Tesla, who left to work for his rival, George Westinghouse, to develop alternating current. Tesla was right. Edison was overtaken by Westinghouse and his bankers merged his businesses with others to create Con Edison and General Electric. But he was also experimenting with recording sounds (the phonograph that launched the music business) and transmitting voices (the carbon telephonic transmitter that became the telephone), the rechargeable battery and the movie camera (the Kinetograph, which created the film industry). He even founded Black Maria, the first movie studio, which made 1,200 silent movies.

Later he toyed with a contraption for speaking to the dead. Perhaps he was joking, but it was only a matter of time before other electrically powered gadgets would radically change life. The refrigerator so improved nutrition that in the next decades the height of the average American increased by 5.1 per cent. Across the world, at almost the same time, in February 1882, a New Zealander pioneered a refrigerator ship that conveyed frozen lamb from Dunedin to London which was edible after ninety-eight days at sea.^* All of these became so ever present that their ubiquity was almost invisible; the skills to live without them were lost. Yet without them, modern life would collapse in a second. These improvements in nutrition coincided with advances in healthcare and agricultural productivity that together unleashed the biggest surge in population in world history.

Light bulbs made kerosene obsolete – just as Rockefeller won control of the US kerosene market. It looked as if Rockefeller would become a synonym for an impoverished businessman who had taken over a worthless industry, but the chief engineer of Edison Illuminating in Detroit had a vision that would change all this, resigning to work on a vehicle that used a gasoline by-product to power the combustion engine of a horseless carriage.

At first motor carriages were so slow that wags would shout, ‘Get a horse!’ Edison had encouraged Henry Ford, a Michigan farmboy who had long tinkered with gasoline-fuelled farm engines to create the self-propelled Ford Quadricycle. Like Edison himself, Ford was far from the only visionary: an engineer in Mannheim, Germany, Carl Benz, had developed a petrol engine in 1885 and designed the Benz motor car. These inventors were male, but in August 1886 Mrs Bertha Benz stole her husband’s contraption with her two sons on board, and drove sixty-five miles, buying gasoline from pharmacies, to visit her mother. It was the first road trip, but Bertha also made driving safer by using a garter to insulate a wire, wielding a hairpin to unblock a pipe and inventing brake pads. Ford took note. At his Ford Motor Company, he developed mass production of affordable automobiles – as did his rival Benz in Mannheim. Edison and Ford – a virulent antisemite and conspiracy theorist – became friends, holding annual motoring expeditions.^*

As new oilfields were discovered in Texas and California, and in Persia, automobiles – followed by buses and trucks – opened the world up and swiftly became so popular that gasoline became essential. And Rockefeller became the richest man in the world – just as Teddy Roosevelt, the politician who would challenge his monopoly, was first elected to the New York State Assembly.

The bumptious, wealthy, toothy Republican attracted the hostility of the Democrats, who planned to humiliate him with a blanket-tossing. ‘By God, if you try anything like that,’ Teddy warned, ‘I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls.’ One day he was called out of a session by a desperate telegram.

Rushing back to his house in Manhattan, he faced a double tragedy: his mother Mittie had died of typhoid; his adored young wife, Alice ‘Sunshine’ Lee, had given birth to a daughter, Alice, and then died of Bright’s Disease. ‘The light,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘has gone out of my life.’ He was close to a breakdown. Dumping his daughter Alice with relatives, he consoled himself in the lawless, thrilling Badlands of the Dakota Territory where the Native Americans had been broken, the buffalo herds hunted to extinction and fortunes could be made in cattle raising and gold mining. There he befriended Quanah Parker, the last of the Comanche chiefs.

A wealthy poseur, Teddy bought the Elkhorn ranch in North Dakota, dressing the part of cowboy – ‘I wear a sombrero, silk neckerchief, fringed buckskin shirt, sealskin chaparajos, alligator-hide boots, and [carry] my pearl-hilted revolver and a beautifully finished Winchester rifle,’ plus a Bowie knife engraved ‘T.R.’. Elkhorn was not far from where Sitting Elk, Lakota leader, now faced the vengeance for Custer’s massacre.

On 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the Seventh Cavalry were disarming a Lakota village when a deaf warrior who couldn’t hear the orders discharged his rifle, seemingly by accident. Mayhem ensued. Soldiers shot the ailing chief Sitting Elk. Afterwards soldier Hugh McGinnis recalled that ‘helpless children and women with babies in their arms had been chased as far as two miles from the original scene of encounter and cut down without mercy by the troopers … The soldiers simply went berserk.’ Three hundred Lakota were killed; twenty-five soldiers died too. ‘I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch,’ remembered Black Elk, a Lakota survivor. ‘A people’s dream died there.’

The US, both liberal democracy and conquest state, had grown by a factor of ten since independence: this was the end of the continental conquest made irresistible by the sheer numbers of settlers. Wrangling his cattle in thirteen-hour days on horseback and hunting down cattle thieves at gunpoint, Roosevelt learned that ‘By acting as if I wasn’t afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.’ He played out an aristocratic version of the frontier, but lower down the social ladder, millions were arriving by steamship, a wave sparked by the assassination of Alexander II.

Rumours spread that the assassins were Jews (though in fact none of them were). In Kyiv, Warsaw and Odessa, and around 200 other places, Jews were attacked by Russian crowds, probably hundreds raped and killed in pogroms (from the Russian pogromit – to destroy). Alexander III hated the Jews and blamed their disloyalty for their persecution, launching new repressive laws, maintained by his son Nicholas II, who shared his bigotry. This drove many Jews in the Russian empire to become Marxist revolutionaries and millions more to emigrate, some to return to Jerusalem, embracing a new Jewish national movement, and even more, during the next twenty years, to go west: 140,000 arrived in Britain but the majority – 2.5 to 4 million – travelled to America.^*

This vast wave of voracious, risk-taking settlers was no longer ‘an act of desperation’ but, writes James Belich, ‘an act of hope’. Some 4.5 million Irish men and women, 3 million Italians, 2 million Poles, 2 million Germans^* and 1.5 million Scandinavians arrived. It was not just the US: altogether during the long nineteenth century, thirty-six million people arrived in Australia and North America, a movement of mainly English-speakers that should be seen alongside the Macedonian, Arab, Mongol and Spanish conquest-migrations.^* Most of these immigrants poured into cities. In 1830 there were fewer than a hundred people in Chicago; in 1890 there were a million; within the same span, Melbourne grew from zero to 378,000. New York had a million people by 1850; by 1900, it had 3.5 million, which had almost doubled by 1930. Over twenty million immigrants arrived in America between 1850 and 1920 – the greatest migration in history, which in a frenzy of righteous destruction and crusading creativity powered the rise of the USA – and a truly interconnected global market. But the new world market presented new risks too. The failure of a reckless British bank, Barings, sparked the first ever global economic crisis that inspired millions to turn to Marxism and anarchism. Starting with the assassination of the French president in 1894, anarchists killed a cavalcade of western leaders. A world depression encouraged what the poet Emma Lazarus in 1883 called ‘your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’ America welcomed families like the Bavarian Drumpfs and the Jewish Wonskolasers.

Drumpf and the Wonskolasers were rough but just legal. When Teddy Roosevelt returned to ‘the arena’ in New York, he confronted the power both of immigrant criminals and of rich plutocrats. After losing a lot of capital and making some back with a bestseller, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, he married a childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow, with whom he had five sons. He then persuaded President Benjamin Harrison to appoint him to the Civil Service Commission in New York. In 1894, the pugnacious Roosevelt became NYC police commissioner, relishing raids on vice dens and clashes with city bosses. But after befriending the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, he also tried to improve the appalling conditions of the immigrants. ‘For two years,’ recalled Riis, ‘we were brothers in [Mafia-ridden] Mulberry Street.’ Thousands of immigrants were pouring into New York, first the Irish, then Italians, Germans, Jews. By 1901, New York was the biggest port on earth, but the hardscrabble fostered another quintessential American culture that is usually left out of world history: crime.

Not long after Roosevelt began patrolling Little Italy, a good-looking and flashy teenager, whose parents had just arrived from Sicily where his father had toiled in a sulphur mine, threatened a tiny, frail Jewish boy if he did not pay protection money of ten cents a week. The Jewish boy, who had just arrived from Grodno in the Russian empire, refused. Impressed, the Sicilian, Salvatore Lucania, invited the Jew, Meier Suchowlan´ski, to join his Five Points Gang. Lucania now called himself Lucky Luciano; Suchowlan´ski shortened his name to Meyer Lansky, and together they formed a partnership with Lansky’s violent, dapper friend, Benjamin Siegel, a psychotic killer with bright-blue eyes nicknamed Bugsy, who was already running a protection racket on Lafayette.

They were tiny street players, but Luciano knew that Sicily had a long history of criminal societies, developed among peasants, who, denied justice by aristocrats and kings, enforced their own rules, and created their own rituals that were pastiches of Catholicism, though the name Mafia may have originated from the Christian subjects of the Arab emirate who, claiming to be ma‘afı¯ or exempted, refused to pay the jizyah tax. In Roosevelt’s New York, Italian crime was ruled by Giuseppe ‘Clutchhand’ Morello, a ruffian from Corleone, who defeated the Neapolitan Camorra, stuffing his victims in barrels, but he was arrested and jailed, ultimately making way for the man who invented the US Mafia: Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria. For now the three boys, Luciano, Lansky and Siegel, made money in pimping, theft and protection, but ultimately the three would organize national crime in America, corrupt politics in New York City and Cuba, and create the casino and entertainment industry in Las Vegas.

Patrolling this underworld while publicizing his exploits in the New York press brought Roosevelt to the attention of the new president, William McKinley, who in 1897 appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt was influenced by a book by an American officer called Alfred Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Nothing so demonstrated the benefits of naval power as what was happening in Hawaii.

In 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani tried to overturn the power of American sugar barons by rewriting Hawaii’s constitution, a move that provoked a Committee of Public Safety led by Sanford Dole, a descendant of American missionaries, to order the Honolulu Rifles to attack the palace. Charles Wilson, the royal marshal, an American loyalist in command of the 500 Royal Guards, defended the queen. The Committee appealed to the US consul, who called in the Marines. Watching them from the balcony as they set up two cannon and two Gatlings, Lili‘uokalani agreed to negotiate but refused to abdicate. Dole was declared president; but President Cleveland denounced ‘the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by US forces’ and ordered the queen’s restoration if she amnestied the rebels. But she refused.

In January 1895, guns for a counter-coup were found at Lili‘uokalani’s Washington Place. She was arrested, tried and sentenced to five years’ hard labour. Dole threatened to execute her supporters unless she abdicated. ‘For myself, I’d have chosen death,’ she said, but she signed. President McKinley had promised ‘no wars of conquest’, but ‘We can’t let those islands go to Japan.’^* Congress annexed the islands, while Roosevelt saw the next opportunity in the rebellion of one of the last Spanish colonies, Cuba: its 350,000 slaves had been freed only ten years earlier, and the Spanish were brutally repressing rebels whom many Americans supported – even more when their leader, the poet-philosopher José Martí, was killed in battle. McKinley and Roosevelt sent a battleship, the Maine, to Cuba, where on 15 February 1898 it exploded in Havana harbour, killing 266 officers and men. ‘If that wasn’t wrong,’ Roosevelt remarked to his sister, ‘I’d rather welcome a foreign war.’

ROOSEVELT AND THE ROUGH RIDERS

A Spanish war would be ‘taking one more step toward the complete freeing of America from European dominion’, Roosevelt said, and would also benefit ‘our people by giving them something to think of which is not material gain’. He guided McKinley into the war, aided by the war-hungry newspapers of Willie Hearst, son of the gold mogul. Using his chain of newspapers from the San Francisco Examiner to the New York Journal, Hearst pursued readers (at his apogee, thirty million of them) with brash headlines, emotive stories and lurid gossip. Now his ‘yellow’ journalism stoked a Spanish war as Roosevelt formed his own regiment, the 1st Volunteer Cavalry, which he called the Rough Riders, a mix of east coast aristocrats, real cowboys and Texas Rangers.

In July 1898, landing in Cuba and advancing against the Spanish at San Juan Ridge, Colonel Roosevelt, riding his horse Little Texas, gave the order to charge, riding ahead as eighty-nine of his men were killed. Roosevelt shot a Spaniard: ‘I made a vow to kill at least one,’ he said. ‘Look at all those Spanish dead.’ Hearst promoted his exploits in that ‘crowded hour’ in the liberation of Cuba, while across the Pacific, Roosevelt’s fleet routed the Spanish in Manila Bay, then seized the Philippines. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the US, but the Filipinos, under national leader Emilio Aguinaldo, declared independence. Promising what he called ‘benevolent assimilation’ – a new euphemism for imperial conquest – for ‘the greatest good of the governed’, McKinley unleashed a colonial war, deploying waterboarding torture, killing and camps, to crush Filipino resistance. Some 200,000 were killed. Roosevelt, now McKinley’s vice-president, had helped make America a naval and Pacific power. He was not the only one obsessed with the navy.

Kaiser Wilhelm too had read Mahan, telling his mother, ‘Nelson is for me “the Master” and I shape my naval ideas and plans from his.’ Frustrated by his failure to win over Britain, he launched his Weltpolitik – power policy: ‘I have learnt most of my military principles I adopt and follow from Napoleon,’ he informed Vicky. If it wanted to conduct Weltpolitik along these lines, Germany had to equal British naval power. To pursue this Flottenpolitik, Willy recruited his friend Fritz Krupp to build nineteen battleships, eight armoured cruisers, twelve large cruisers and thirty light cruisers.

In autumn 1898, he extended his Weltpolitik to the east, setting off with a large entourage (including eighty maids and servants), a new wardrobe of arabesque uniforms (boots, whips and veils feature prominently) to visit the sultan, Abdulhamid II, who had removed a short-lived liberal constitution to restore Ottoman autocracy over an empire that had lost most of its European provinces. Tiny, vigilant and neurotic, his beard reddened with henna, Abdulhamid was a skilled carpenter, pianist, operatic composer and champagne-quaffing fan of Sherlock Holmes novels and French theatre, and a technical modernizer. Now he presented himself as caliph, encouraging Islamic nationalism to unite his restless Arab and Turkish subjects. He murdered reformers, using a secret police based on his Russian neighbours’, and was an adept player of ethnic politics. Infuriated by Russian championing of Armenians and Bulgarians, Abdulhamid repressed a revolt by the Kurds, a Sunni mountain people spread across Ottoman Iraq and Syria, then armed Kurds in new Hamidiye regiments and unleashed them against Christians. He carefully watched the new Arab clubs that discussed the awakening of an Arab nation, hoping to project Ottoman power by building new railways to Baghdad and into Arabia.

There, two families, the Hashemites and the Saudis, rivals for three centuries, appeased Abdulhamid but deplored his power. Both would produce kings of many kingdoms; both rule into the twenty-first century. A Hashemite and a Saudi would remake the Arab world.

ABDULAZIZ – THE RETURN OF THE SAUDIS

In Mecca, the Hashemite amir, Ali Awn al-Rafiq, promoted by the sultan, was one of a family descended from Muhammad that had governed the holy city since Saladin – except between 1803 and 1818 when another family, the Saudis, had expelled them.

Knowing Hashemite prestige, Abdulhamid had noticed that the amir’s nephew Hussein was plotting against the amir and summoned him to Istanbul, where the secret police reported his meetings with his relatives, describing him as a ‘wilful recalcitrant person whose views on the rare occasions he consented to express them revealed a dangerous capacity for original thinking’. The sultan warned him to be careful but appointed him to the Council of State. Hussein, at home in the small oases of Arabia, the desert encampments (where he hunted with falcon and studied the fauna) and the coffee houses on the Bosphoros, was diminutive and obstinate, courtly, shrewd and aware of his lineage. He awaited his opportunity.

Across the peninsula in Kuwait, another extraordinary prince, Abdulaziz ibn Saud – known in the west as Ibn Saud – planned to regain his lost patrimony. Brought up in a world of conspiracy and chaos, his family, in partnership with the Wahhabi sect of Salafist purists, had already won and lost two kingdoms. In 1890, when he was fifteen, Abdulaziz had seen his father driven out of Riyadh by a rival, losing everything; but the refugees were granted asylum by their friends, the al-Sabah, once brigands in Iraq until, driven out by the Ottomans, they had seized Kuwait. These tiny Gulf fiefdoms, once controlled by Iran, were allied with the British viceroy of India, who cared little what happened within Arabia. Abdulaziz, aquiline, strapping and six foot four, an expert cameleteer and sharpshooter, was brought up partly by his aunt. ‘She loved me even more than her own children,’ he recalled. ‘When we were alone she told of the great things I’d do: “You must revive the glory of the House of Saud,” she told me again and again, her words like a caress.’

When he was twenty-six, Abdulaziz, wielding scimitar and Martini–Henry rifle, led a series of attacks into Nadj. In one raid, he and six men raided Riyadh where he murdered the governor and took the fortress. Abdulhamid sent troops to expel Abdulaziz, who was wounded but did not give up: he raided again, this time killing his rival and taking Nadj: the Saudis were back but Abdulhamid had plans to control Arabia with Willy’s help.

In October 1898, the manic kaiser arrived in Constantinople bursting with ideas to discuss with Abdulhamid: the building of his railways, the training of his army – and Zionism. Back home, Wilhelm had been approached by a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, who had observed the rise of antisemitism – a word for anti-Jewish racism coined only in 1880 – not just in Russia but in Paris and Vienna, and concluded that the Jews would never be safe in Europe. ‘The idea I’ve developed’ – he called it Zionism – ‘is a very old one: the restoration of the Jewish State.’ Judaea had been ruled by Jews for the millennium before Christ’s birth; Jews everywhere had revered Jerusalem and Judaea since the fall of Simon Bar Kochba in 135 and had dreamed of return. A small, impoverished Jewish community, often persecuted and limited in rights, had long lived in Jerusalem and Ottoman Palestine. Between the 1560s and 1860s, Jerusalem was neglected and pillaged, a monumental but half-empty walled village, prey for local Turkish despots, home to a few thousand Arabs and a few hundred Jews until the conquest of Mehmed Ali and Ottoman reforms had reignited the reverence of British and European powers, who rebuilt the city with churches and hostels. The Romanovs sent thousands of Russian pilgrims annually – yet it was their antisemitic measures within their empire that also attracted Russian Jews to Jerusalem. Arabs and Jews moved into the city. In 1860, Moses Montefiore built the first Jewish borough outside the walls, just as the Husseinis, Arab grandees, built the first Arab settlement. In 1883, Edmond de Rothschild, youngest son of James, helped Russian immigrants found a Jewish town, Rishon LeZion, and by the 1890s there was a slight Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Herzl, imagining an aristocratic Jewish republic led by the Rothschilds, turned to Europe’s most civilized, modern state, Germany, and through an introduction to Phili Eulenburg reached Willy.

Willy and Phili were rabid Jew-haters. ‘I’m very much in favour of the Mauschels [a pejorative for Jews] going to Palestine,’ responded Wilhelm. ‘The sooner they clear off there the better.’ But when he mentioned this to Abdulhamid, busy promoting his caliphal credentials in the Arab world, he brusquely dismissed it. Next Willy proceeded to Jerusalem, where he opened a hulking German church, mocked impoverished Jews as ‘greasy and squalid, cringing and abject … Shylocks by the score’ – and received Herzl, telling him his idea was ‘a healthy one’. But as for funding, he sneered, ‘Well, you have plenty of money!’^* In Damascus, Willy declared himself ‘protector of all Muslims’, backing the Ottomans and stealing a march on the British, who had overextended themselves in Africa.

At first the British had seemed unstoppable, thanks to an invincible new piece of killing technology. On 25 October 1893, British paramilitaries, controlled by the diamond mogul Cecil Rhodes, deployed a new weapon – Maxim’s machine gun – against charging Matabele warriors for the first time.

RHODES, THE MAXIM GUN AND LOBENGULA

Rhodes did not expect to live long. Like Clive and Lugard, he was a clergyman’s son, this time from suburban Hertfordshire, who had a weak heart and chronic asthma. He craved adventure; his family believed South African heat would save his life, and as a teenager he set himself up in the rough Kimberley mining camp. There, he outplayed competitors and amalgamated claims, then won Rothschild backing to turn his De Beers company into the dominant diamond producer. Unmarried and awkward with women, manipulated by a female grifter who almost broke him, he was probably gay and was devoted to his secretary, Neville Pickering. But his passion was the British empire and its extension along a planned railway line from the Cape to Cairo, African peoples dominated by the white race. ‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world,’ as he wrote in his will, ‘and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’

In 1886, the stakes rose when gold was discovered in Transvaal, the Afrikaner republic, which was soon overwhelmed by British gold seekers, the uitlanders. In 1890, Rhodes, now thirty-seven, was elected premier of the Cape, and moved to limit African rights. ‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise,’ he said. ‘We must adopt a system of despotism.’ Then, chartering a paramilitary British South African Company, he pushed British power into Transvaal and northwards into the African kingdom of Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, son of the founder Mzilikazi, ex-general of Shaka, who had conquered the kingdom during the 1820s. Commander of 20,000 warriors, husband of twenty wives, ruler since 1868, Lobengula had successfully limited British infiltration, but Rhodes and his paramilitaries, organized by his irrepressible henchman Leander Jameson, a gun-toting doctor,^* provoked war. Lobengula mobilized. At Shangani, 6,000 fighters, armed with Martini–Henrys and spears, attacked Rhodes’s posse, who had a singular advantage: the Maxim.

Arriving in England in 1882 from the United States, after losing the electric bulb war to Edison, Maxim had met an American who advised, ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.’

At Shangani, five Maxims killed 1,500 Matabele in minutes, ‘like mowing grass’; a week later, they killed another 2,500. ‘The shooting,’ said Rhodes, ‘must have been excellent.’ The public was impressed with British technology. ‘Whatever happens,’ wrote Hilaire Belloc, ‘we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.’ But the trouble with new technology is that competitors can buy it too, and soon the British would be on the receiving end. His prestige shattered, Lobengula was poisoned, the kingdom’s destruction aided by a shrewd neighbouring Tswana king, Khama the Great. British settlers poured in, naming the territory Rhodesia, but when Rhodes turned to break Khama, he was outwitted. Khama, a Christian convert, travelled to London and appealed to the government, which shamed by Rhodes’s predations, allowed the king to keep Bechuanaland (Botswana).^* ‘It’s humiliating,’ grumbled Rhodes, ‘to be utterly beaten by these n*****s.’

In December 1895, Rhodes orchestrated an invasion of Transvaal, backing Dr Jameson and 600 mercenaries, who were easily shot down by Afrikaner farmers. The prime minister Lord Salisbury was incensed. Rhodes resigned as Cape premier. Jameson took the blame.^* Kaiser Wilhelm ordered German troops to intervene against Britain but was restrained by his ministers.

Weeks after the Jameson raid, an African monarch proved the limits of European conquest. On 1 March 1896, at the valley of Adawa, 14,000 Italian troops attacked the Ethiopian army.

MENELIK AND EMPRESS TAYTU: AFRICAN VICTORY

Like Germany, Italy was a touchy new country, desperate to catch up with the Anglo-French. Its premier Francesco Crispi, an authoritarian nationalist and dramatic populist known as the Loner who had fought with Garibaldi, was an aggressive imperialist. ‘Crispi wants to occupy everywhere,’ joked the king Umberto, ‘even China and Japan,’ adding, ‘Crispi’s a pig but the essential pig.’ Close to Bismarck, with whom Italy was allied, Crispi seized Massawa, a territory he named Eritrea (from the Latin term for the Red Sea, Mare Erythraeum), but when he planned to expand into Ethiopia, he encountered the most talented African leader of the imperial age: Menelik II.

He was the young prince who had been a prisoner and son-in-law of the capricious Emperor Tewodros. After Tewodros’s suicide, he mourned the emperor but submitted to Emperor Yohannes, who installed him as king of Showa. For seventeen years he was married to an untameable noblewoman, Princess Befana, who promoted her sons by previous marriages and repeatedly tried to overthrow him. After their divorce, he grieved for her: ‘You ask me to look at these women with the same eyes that once gazed upon Befana?’ Third time lucky, he married Taytu Betul, a potentate from Gojjam and Gondar in the north who had been married three times before and could field her own regiment.

In 1889, after Emperor Yohannes had been killed by the Mahdists, Menelik, claiming direct male descent from Solomon and Sheba, finally became emperor. A mix of regal grandeur and accessible geniality, he ‘showed great intelligence’ and ‘boyish curiosity’, especially about western weaponry: ‘very friendly’, noted an Italian visitor, ‘a fanatic for weapons’. Fast-talking and laconic, he answered all petitioners with ‘Yes maybe.’ Having trained his troops to use French, British and Russian artillery and rifles, some captured, some purchased, he expanded from the Amhara region in the centre, in ten years of conquest, incorporating Tigray and other northern provinces, but also smiting the southern kingdom of Kaffa and others, massacring enemies and enslaving thousands. Headquartered in a new capital, Addis Ababa, founded by his wife, Menelik created an Ethiopian empire which endured, with notable interludes, until the 1970s. Those wars and the introduction of Italian cattle brought rinderpest and a famine that may have been Africa’s worst ever, killing ten million people.

Menelik was happy to leave Eritrea to the Italians, but now Crispi ordered the annexation of Ethiopia, trying to trick Menelik. ‘This country is mine,’ he declared, ‘and no other nation can have it.’ Crispi boasted that Italy would rout the African ‘barbarians’ and bring the emperor to Rome ‘in a cage’.

‘An enemy has crossed the sea,’ declared Menelik, ‘burrowing under our territories like a mole … I negotiated with these people,’ but ‘Enough! I’ll repel the invader.’ The Italian general Oreste Baratieri underestimated Menelik, who quickly defeated one Italian unit and then, mustering a huge army, marched north, riding on a scarlet saddle, clad in white robes and sheltering under a golden parasol. Crispi reprimanded Baratieri for being defeated by African ‘monkeys’: ‘This is military phthisis, not a war … We’re ready for any sacrifice whatever the cost to save the honour of the army and the prestige of the monarchy.’ Baratieri with his 20,000 men, including his Eritrean allies, attempted a surprise assault on the heights at Adowa, sending three brigades up mountain paths in darkness and hoping to draw Menelik into battle. Commanding from a mountain top with Empress Taytu, the emperor defeated each Italian brigade separately. Suddenly Empress Taytu jumped up. ‘Courage!’ she said. ‘Victory is ours! Strike!’ She sent in her men and Menelik followed with 25,000 reserves, killing 43 per cent of the Italians and three out of five generals, an African triumph unprecedented in colonial history. Crispi fell from power. Menelik continued his conquests as he played the Europeans against each other. He now backed construction of a railway from Addis to the French port of Djibouti, granting the franchise to his powerful Guadeloupian doctor, Vitale.^* As the Italians dreamed of ‘the vengeance of Adowa’, in neighbouring Sudan the British were avenging General Gordon.

On 2 September 1898, at Omdurman, outside Khartoum in Sudan, a young cavalryman with his regiment, the 2nd Lancers, prepared to charge the khalifal army, an intimidating force of 50,000 spearmen and cavalry, waving banners, wearing jibbahs and chainmail. Earlier he had scanned the enemy ranks through his binoculars. ‘Never shall I see such a sight again,’ wrote the twenty-three-year-old Winston Churchill, a brash, bumptious Old Harrovian journalist, descendant of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and son of a maverick politician Lord Randolph, who had died of syphilis.

Herbert Kitchener, sirdar of the Egyptian army, did not want Churchill there, but his mother, Jenny Jerome, glamorous daughter of an American Gilded Age speculator, and lover of the prince of Wales and many others, pulled strings – and Churchill joined Kitchener’s 25,000 Anglo-Egyptian troops.

Ice-cold, solitary and obsessional, Kitchener, six foot two, blond, with pewter eyes (and a cast in one of them) and a face like a mask, was a self-made Anglo-Irish officer, a celibate, probably a repressed homosexual, who combined steely acumen, vindictive ambition and porcelain collecting. Now this meticulous operation would win him the nickname the Sudan Machine. When the British Lancers charged, Churchill rode with them.

GANDHI, CHURCHILL AND THE SUDAN MACHINE

‘The event seemed to pass in absolute silence,’ remembered Churchill of one of the last cavalry charges. ‘The yells of the enemy, the shouts of the soldiers, the firing of many shots, the clashing of sword and spear were … unregistered by the brain.’ As he fought, ‘Men, clinging to their saddles, lurched helplessly about, covered with blood from perhaps a dozen wounds. Horses, streaming from tremendous gashes, limped and staggered …’ When the Mahdists charged, the Maxim guns scythed through them, before the troops advanced shouting, ‘Remember Gordon!’

‘Well, we have given them a damn good dusting,’ said the Machine, killing the enemy wounded. Churchill thought the British were ‘disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded’. Twelve thousand Sudanese lay dead. As a witness observed, ‘It was not a battle but an execution … The bodies weren’t in heaps – bodies hardly ever are; but they [were] spread evenly over acres and acres.’ There were just forty-eight British dead. Churchill was further ‘scandalized’ by Kitchener’s ‘desecration of the Mahdi’s Tomb and the barbarous manner in which he had carried off the Mahdi’s head in a kerosene can as a trophy’, planning to use it as his inkstand. Although an outcry forced him to bury it, Kitchener was raised to the peerage, the khalifa defeated and killed.

South Sudan was the last corner of Africa unclaimed by Europeans. Kitchener learned that a French captain and 120 Senegalese Tirailleurs, travelling all the way from Brazzaville, had reached the village of Fashoda in a bid to secure a French transcontinental empire. Kitchener sailed down the Nile and faced off the French as his subaltern Churchill rushed down to South Africa, where Britain would be humiliated by very different enemies.

In October 1899, as British uitlanders demanded voting rights within the Afrikaner republics, the latter’s commandos, expert fighters armed with their own Maxim machine guns, launched pre-emptive attacks on British towns, besieging Kimberley and Ladysmith and defeating cumbersome British forces. Rhodes helped defend Kimberley. Churchill, covering the war for a newspaper, was captured but managed to escape, his adventures making his name. Meanwhile, in a very different milieu, an Indian lawyer worked as a stretcher-bearer for the British at the battle outside Ladysmith. Mohandas Gandhi, middle-class son of the chief minister of a small fiefdom in Rajasthan, had been called to the Bar in London, but in 1893, when he was twenty-three, he was invited to take a case in South Africa. He moved to Durban, where, dapper in starched collar, trimmed moustache and suit, he would spend twenty-one years, representing Indians’ rights. While Churchill returned to London as a hero of empire and was elected to Parliament, Gandhi developed his concept of non-violent protest, satyagraha (truth force), which he would later apply to the cause of Indian independence.

As inept British forces floundered, Salisbury sent in the Sudan Machine. In December 1899, Kitchener arrived to break the Afrikaners, burning their farms, ‘concentrating’ their families in new camps, in which around 26,000 children and women died of disease, and finally capturing their capitals and defeating their armies.^* Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas were delighted by the near humiliation of Queen Victoria’s empire – just as the crisis of that other empress, Cixi, gave them a chance to gobble up more of China.

TWO ANCIENT EMPRESSES: CIXI AND VICTORIA

‘I’ve often thought I’m the cleverest woman that ever lived,’ Empress Cixi said later, but she admitted she was about to make ‘the only serious mistake I made in my life’. Unable to kill her loathed nephew the Guangxu Emperor, who still reigned while under house arrest, she turned on his Consort Zhen, exposing her corruption and forcing her to watch the torturing of her eunuchs. But the national humiliation of the war against Japan sparked a new rebellion led by a Society of Righteous Harmonious Fists, who practised martial arts in the belief that they made them invulnerable to European bullets. Aiming to ‘exterminate the foreigners’, these so-called Boxers, 250,000 pike-wielding peasants in red bandannas, advanced on Beijing to expel the Europeans. As westerners sheltered in their legations, many Chinese and Manchu paladins sympathized and cooperated with the Boxers. ‘The Boxers were sent by heaven,’ said Cixi, ‘to rid China of hated foreigners.’

As Cixi herself wavered, the eight great powers, led by a German general, intervened to save their subjects. ‘Should you encounter the enemy, give no quarter, take no prisoners,’ the kaiser told his troops. ‘Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves … may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.’ Even Eulenburg was privately worried about Willy, because he ‘is no longer in control of himself when seized by rage. I regard the situation as highly dangerous.’

Cixi backed the Boxers: ‘Perhaps their magic isn’t reliable but can’t we rely on the hearts and minds of the people?’ She declared war on the eight greatest nations on earth, even though ‘China is weak’, arguing that ‘If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I’d have no face to meet our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?’ As the eight nations fought their way into Beijing, Cixi, accompanied by the Guangxu Emperor, fled northwards, saying to her imprisoned enemy Consort Zhen, ‘You’re young and pretty, likely to be raped by the foreign soldiers. I trust you know what you should do’ – she meant suicide. But instead she had Zhen thrown down a well. Fleeing to Xi’an, at times sobbing as she suffered cold and hunger, she sued for peace – and returned to the Forbidden City.

Far away in London, the other empress was sinking. In January 1901, Victoria’s doctor sent a secret telegram from her palace at Osborne, Isle of Wight, to Kaiser Wilhelm: ‘Disquieting symptoms have developed.’ Willy had always craved Victoria’s love – ‘People have no inkling how much I love the Queen, how intimately she’s linked to my memories’ – and now confessed his fear that ‘she’s hopelessly ill … without my being able to see her again’. He rushed to London where Bertie tried to divert him, but Victoria’s condition deteriorated, so uncle and nephew hurried to Osborne. When the blind, semi-conscious queen awoke, her children didn’t mention that Willy was there. He was hurt, but finally the doctor led him to the sickbed on his own, after which she whispered, ‘The emperor’s very kind.’ Willy knelt next to the bed, supporting her with his right arm, ‘his eyes immovably fixed on his grandmother’. The kaiser and Bertie, now King-Emperor Edward VII, lifted the tiny queen into her coffin.

‘Although I’ve heard much about Queen Victoria,’ reflected Cixi, ‘I don’t think her life was half so interesting and eventful as mine … She had nothing to say about policy. Now look at me. I have 400 million dependent on my judgement.’ Cixi ordered elections for an assembly and reforms banning foot-binding and death by a thousand cuts, while founding schools for girls and awarding scholarships for girls to study abroad. Among the scholarship girls were Qingling and Meiling Song, the daughters of the Christian businessman Charlie Song, who now set off for Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Song’s secret ally, Sun Yat-sen, tried to launch further revolutions – which again failed. Sun waited in Japan.

Cixi had survived, but Tsar Nicholas kept his armies in Manchuria and accelerated his infiltration of Korea.^* The Japanese regarded both Manchuria and Korea as theirs. The two sides started to negotiate. Nicholas could have struck a deal, taking Manchuria, ceding Korea, but instead, deluded by his visions of Asian empire and divine mission, he mocked Japanese challenges to Russia, insisting, ‘There will be no war,’ because ‘those macaques’ could never defeat Russians.

Nicky’s reign had so far been a limited success. His economy was booming, his Baku oilfields were producing half the world’s oil, but the workers pouring into the cities to work in the new factories and refineries^* lived in appalling conditions and began embracing Marxist revolution. The tsar’s refusal to countenance any reform left the opposition no choice but to embrace revolution. His policy of promoting Orthodox Russians to rally support for the Romanovs alienated half his subjects: Catholic Poles, Protestant Finns, Jews, Armenians and Georgians.

In 1901, a young Georgian started to work at the Rothschild oil refinery in Batumi, secretly organizing strikes and sabotage: his name was Josef Djugashvili, son of a drunken, abusive cobbler and a devoted, pious mother who, determined that he should become a bishop, would do anything to get him into the Tiflis seminary where the use of Georgian was banned: the boys were beaten for speaking it. There, like thousands of other young people, Josef Djugashvili embraced a different faith – Marxism. He joined the Social Democratic Party, drawn to one of its leaders, Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin, a cultured, well-off nobleman ferociously dedicated to revolution, who adapted Marx to fit Russia, creating a tiny vanguard to exercise a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ backed by terror. Djugashvili hero-worshipped Lenin: ‘my mountain eagle’. Later he adopted the name Stalin.

Nicky’s interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve suggested that ‘What this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.’^* Many politicians wish for a ‘short, victorious war’, but few are granted. Nicholas was sure that he was close to securing Manchuria and Korea.

The crisis was watched from Washington, DC, by a new president. In September 1901, speaking in Buffalo, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist. Vice-President Roosevelt, holidaying in Vermont, visited the recovering McKinley in hospital, then returned to the Adirondacks. Then suddenly McKinley deteriorated. Roosevelt was president.

DU BOIS, WASHINGTON AND ROOSEVELT

This bumptious show-off was a new sort of president, revelling in the plenitude and spectacle of growing American power, presenting the presidency as a guide to the nation, lecturing from his ‘bully pulpit’ with the moral confidence possessed only by those of inherited grandeur.

He ruled through his intimates, known as the Tennis Cabinet. Meanwhile, the family became celebrities, widely photographed. Teddy insisted on family games and hikes, on which they chanted, ‘Over, under, through but never around!’ His bear hunting even spawned a toy: the Teddy Bear. But he struggled to control his wild, vivacious eldest daughter Alice, who danced late, smoked, flirted and wore a snake around her neck. He tried to channel her exuberance by sending her on a trip to China and Japan, during which she met Empress Cixi but caused further scandal by flirting with a congressman, Nicholas Longworth. Even though she later married Longworth, Roosevelt was exasperated.

Alice grumbled that her father ‘wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening’, while he exclaimed, ‘I can do one of two things: I can be president … or I can control Alice. I can’t possibly do both.’

Roosevelt turned on the overmighty trusts, the first president to believe that the state had to limit the power of monopolies. ‘Of all forms of tyranny,’ said Teddy, ‘the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.’ He rightly believed that it was the state’s duty to limit the plutocracy. ‘Like all Americans I like big things,’ he said, ‘big prairies … wheatfields, railways, factories, steamboats. But … no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their morals.’ The president, assisted by his attorney-general Charlie Bonaparte,^* struck at Rockefeller, forcing the break-up of Standard Oil, along with banks, railways and tobacco trusts.

Yet Roosevelt’s most enduring achievement was a giant step forward in public health that saved millions of lives not just in America. Pharmacies still sold a selection of semi-poisonous snake-oil potions as medicines, many of them containing generous portions of arsenic, cocaine, heroin. In 1906, encouraged by socialist activists and doctors, Roosevelt created a national agency to enforce standards of medicine and food, work which demonstrated that scientific discoveries were essential in the saving of lives, yet useless without the leaders, organizers and activists who could actually deliver the improvements to the people. In 1863, a French scientist, Louis Pasteur, experimenting in his Lille laboratory, had discovered the bacterium that caused wine to spoil. When he expanded his experiments to milk, he found it could be made safe by heating – a revolutionary discovery. Yet it took forty years for pasteurization to save lives.

For decades, thousands of children had died after being poisoned by ‘swill milk’, produced by cows which had been fed the waste created by distilling grain to make whisky. Poisonous milk went on killing until Nathan Straus, Jewish owner of Macy’s department stores, started to pasteurize milk and sell it cheaply to the poor. Roosevelt backed Straus and ordered an investigation that led to the endorsement of pasteurization. It was a similar story with other life-saving discoveries.^* But he was less bold in taking on racism.

Soon after becoming president, Roosevelt invited the black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner with his family in the White House – the first such occasion. Washington, born a slave, head of Tuskegee College in Alabama, backed by white millionaires, was a revered moderate who had proposed the Atlanta Compromise that southern black people should leave politics to whites in return for education and legal equality, acquiescing in Jim Crow. He supported a cohort of black businessmen, led by Ottawa W. Gurley, son of Alabama slaves, who moved to Greenwood, a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to build what Washington called ‘Negro Wall Street’. Gurley built the Gurley Hotel, developed property and became the first black millionaire. But he was an exception: the Jim Crow laws still imposed segregation and removed the black right to vote across the south.

The invitation to Washington outraged southerners. The White House, fulminated James Vardaman, soon to be Mississippi governor, was now ‘so saturated with the odor of the n***** that the rats have taken refuge in the stable’. Roosevelt trod timidly. ‘The very fact,’ he admitted, ‘I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him made me ashamed of myself,’ but he did not repeat it.

Washington’s compromise was attacked by his ex-supporter, the visionary polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, who had then studied in Berlin. In his twenties Du Bois had investigated the high death rates from TB of poor African-Americans in Philadelphia, revealing that their mortality – people of colour were likely to die fifteen years earlier than white people – was thanks to the way they were directed to live in the least sanitary districts.

Publishing his Souls of Black Folk, a sociological study of the African-American experience, he denounced Washington as ‘the great accommodator’ and, at Niagara, launched a counter-attack, campaigning against not just the Jim Crow laws but also what he later called the invisible ‘color-line’, the ‘veil’ that African-Americans felt they had to wear and the ‘double-consciousness’ they were forced to adopt.^* Yet the lynchings continued, and when whites in Brownsville, Texas, framed black soldiers, Roosevelt unjustly dismissed 167 of them.

He was braver abroad. ‘I’ve always been fond of the West African proverb,’ he said. ‘“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”’ He took control of the building of the Panama Canal, and saw an opportunity in the crisis between Russia and Japan.

On 8 February 1904, the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo Heihachiro launched a surprise attack on the Russian naval base at Port Arthur, besieging the city, as other Japanese forces seized Korea and then attacked Russian troops in Manchuria. The Japanese had been facilitated by their ally Britain, so suspicious of Russian threats to India that British forces were mustering to invade Tibet.^* Initially, Marquess Ito, who had been premier four times, had supported a compromise with Russia and travelled to Petersburg to negotiate, but the tsar’s feckless arrogance convinced the genro – grandees who had become oligarchs – to go to war. A young Japanese prince, Hirohito, watched the drama. His grandfather, Meiji the Great, now fifty-one, was far from a warm paterfamilias for Hirohito and his brother Chichibu, receiving them in military uniform standing to attention. ‘Never did I experience the warm unqualified love an ordinary grandfather gives his grandchildren,’ declared Chichibu.

‘There will be no war,’ repeated Nicholas. He was at the theatre when he learned he was wrong. He rushed troops along the Trans-Siberian, but they arrived far too slowly and their command was chaotic, while the Japanese were well organized. Port Arthur surrendered after a siege, Admiral Togo routed the Russian fleet in the Yellow Sea, and the Russians were defeated at Mukden. The quick war to avoid revolution caused one: by spring 1905, the tsar had lost control of Poland, the Caucasus and the Baltics. Soon after the exciting birth of an heir, Alexei, Nicholas desperately ordered his Baltic Fleet to embark on a global voyage through the English Channel, around Africa, across the Indian Ocean to defeat the Japanese. Instead in May at Tsushima the Japanese annihilated it, sinking eight Russian battleships, killing 5,000 sailors. Even though the Russian army was unbroken and only approaching full strength in Manchuria, Nicholas’s reputation and Romanov prestige sank with his ships.

Roosevelt offered to mediate. In August 1905, he welcomed Russian and Japanese delegates but found the negotiations tortuous. ‘The more I see of the tsar, the kaiser and the mikado,’ said Roosevelt, ‘the better I am content with democracy.’ He had initially leaned towards the underdog Japanese, but he gradually grasped that Japan was a coming threat. Nicholas was forced to give up Port Arthur, evacuate Manchuria and recognize Japanese control of Korea. The peace deal ‘is a mighty good thing for Russia and for Japan’, exulted Roosevelt, ‘and for me!’

On St Patrick’s Day 1905, he attended the wedding of his niece, Eleanor, to their ambitious cousin, Franklin Roosevelt. ‘Well, Franklin,’ said the president, ‘there’s nothing like keeping it in the family.’

FRANKLIN, ELEANOR AND HIROHITO

They were an unexpected couple. Eleanor had endured a miserable childhood, half abandoned in the madhouse of a drunk, demented uncle. Her father Elliott, the president’s brother, was a violent alcoholic who called her Little Nell; her mother, who had died young, called her Granny, while the president’s wife just said, ‘Poor little soul, she’s very plain.’

It was only when Eleanor studied in London that she discovered herself. Home-schooled then educated at Groton and Harvard, Franklin was the opposite, genial and urbane, athletic and exuberant with a leonine head and dazzling smile but very precious and spoilt. He had grown up a Little Lord Fauntleroy, adored by his father – Squire James who died in 1900 – and his forceful mother Sara, who gave him absolute confidence. But his mother loathed Eleanor, who in turn worried, ‘I’ll never be able to hold him. He’s too attractive.’ Although she thought sex ‘an ordeal to be endured’, six children followed. Franklin’s choice of bride partly reflected his hero-worship of Teddy: he too dreamed of being president.

Teddy rashly promised that he would follow Washingtonian tradition and not run for a third term, so when he left the White House in 1908 he was just fifty – and set off to hunt big game and travel in Latin America. It was a decision that he would bitterly regret, and that his cousin Franklin would cheerfully avoid. It was Franklin who would cope with the aggressive Japan created by its Russian victory.

Young Hirohito was tutored by the war heroes General Nogi and Admiral Togo. In 1907, Meiji signed General Military Ordinance No. 1 granting the military ‘the authority to act independently of the cabinet’ while laying down that the guiding rule of policy would be ‘the rights and interests we planted in Manchuria and Korea’.^* In 1912 when Meiji died and his sickly son succeeded, Hirohito’s tutor Nogi and his wife bowed to portraits of the tenno, then she stabbed herself in the neck and he disembowelled himself. Ritual suicide, until recently regarded as medieval, was again fashionable in Japan’s new war cult.

In October 1905, the rolling revolution forced Tsar Nicholas to concede a constitution. His adored heir Alexei turned out to have haemophilia, making his early death likely, a secret that Nicholas and Alexandra struggled to bear. Their pain was eased by a mystical Siberian, Grigori Rasputin, whose peasant simplicity, religious conviction and tsarist devotion restored their confidence. While determined to claw back autocracy to hand over to his son, besieged in his palaces as terrorism and chaos stalked the empire, Nicholas had retained the loyalty of his army. Now, he presided over a bloody reconquest of his own empire, and his gleeful rival, Wilhelm, saw a chance to force the tsar into a world-changing alliance.

Relishing the eclipse of Russia, Willy invited Nicky to meet on their yachts in the Baltic. Still advised by Phili, Willy was at his zenith, appointing Eulenburg’s insinuating protégé, Bernhard von Bülow, as chancellor. ‘Since I have Bülow,’ Willy told Phili, whom he raised to prince and ambassador in Vienna, ‘I can sleep peacefully.’ Bülow was not nicknamed the Eel for nothing, flirting with Phili as much as he flattered Willy.^*

After a rebellion by Herero, Nama and San peoples in South West Africa, Willy encouraged his commander, Lothar von Trotha, to pursue genocide. ‘I believe the nation should be eliminated,’ said Trotha. The exact numbers are unknown, but from October 1904 as many as 60,000 men, women and children were slaughtered, a decision approved by Alfred von Schlieffen, the elderly chief of staff. ‘Racial war,’ Schlieffen said, ‘once commenced, can only be ended by annihilation or the complete enslavement of one party.’ But he was also working on a plan for a European war.

On their yachts in the Baltic, Willy bamboozled the tsar into an alliance that contradicted Russia’s French alliance. Afterwards, Nicky was forced to cancel it. Willy’s aggressive fleet building – he planned a home fleet of sixty battleships by 1918 – backfired, provoking Britain into intensifying the construction of its Dreadnought battleships and moving towards France, just six years after the two countries had almost gone to war over Fashoda. In 1904, that urbane Francophile Edward VII encouraged an entente cordiale, soon militarized with secret clauses aimed at Germany.

Schlieffen believed the only way Germany could win a European war was to smash France, possibly crashing through neutral Belgium, while holding off Russia. Schlieffen’s plan became even more essential and yet risky when in August 1907 Britain and Russia signed an alliance, ending a half-century of central Asian rivalry. Willy’s failures had achieved the envelopment of Germany.

Yet there was no need for war. The German economy, driven by steel and chemicals, was set to overtake Britain and dominate Europe.^* It was only in Wilhelm’s strutting court that men oscillated bewilderingly between war fever and enervation, fearful of challenges from other nations and races – most urgently the Slavic Russians. In the great republic of America, Teddy Roosevelt believed that ‘No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war’ – that was how great statesmen were made. In Vienna, Constantinople and St Petersburg, leaders were convinced that only war could reinvigorate senescent dynasties; in Belgrade, Athens and Sofia, thrusting new nations were convinced war would deliver new empires; even in the democracies, men trained jovially in military brigades for a coming conflict. When it came it would destroy the dynasties it was designed to save and, out of blood, dynamite and mud, remould the family, in power, at work and at home.

In Berlin the crisis of masculinity was exacerbated by scandals at the apex of the kaiser’s macho war machine.

* Centuries of almost Habsburgian intermarriage had led to high infant mortality, spinal deformities and mandibular prognathism, though Meiji concealed his jaw under a beard. Meiji’s wife was childless, but of the fifteen children conceived with his concubines ten died young and his crown prince, Yoshihito (later Emperor Taisho), was an invalid. Yet Taisho married and fathered a healthy family, starting in 1901 with the birth of a son, Prince Miji, later known as Hirohito.

* ‘Farewell to thee, farewell to thee, / The charming one who dwells in the shaded bowers, / One fond embrace, / Ere I depart, / Until we meet again.’

* Guano was, for a short time, a valuable commodity: it was bird and bat excrement, used as fertilizer but also to manufacture gunpowder. Found on the coasts of Peru and Bolivia and on Pacific islands, it was in such great demand that wars were fought, fortunes made and lands annexed for it. The 1856 Guano Act allowed America to annex any islands where guano was found. In 1879, Chile defeated Bolivia and Peru, seizing Bolivia’s coastline, in the Guano War – the world’s only faecal conflict – just before new chemical methods of producing fertilizer and gunpowder made the droppings worthless.

* A new biography accuses him of murdering one of his competitors.

* Edison’s success drove one rival into a different business: killing. His rival in creating the light bulb was Hiram Maxim from Maine, a sufferer from bronchitis whose first invention was a puffer but whose installation of light bulbs in a building was just ahead of Edison. Yet Edison beat Maxim, registering his own patent and going public. Leaving America, Maxim settled in Britain and started to work on another invention, a machine that would revolutionize warfare: the machine gun. Edison later said, ‘I’m proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.’ Yet both were simply improving on the work of others.

* These electrical goods – telephones, fridges, radios – needed to be made in a substance that was light, mouldable, cheap and insulated from electric currents. It did not exist until 1907, when a Belgian physicist, Leo Baekeland, who had already made a fortune creating the first photographic paper, experimented with combinations of phenol and formaldehyde to create Bakelite, the first of what he called plastics from the Greek for mouldable – plastikos. Baekeland took out a patent and made another fortune with his General Bakelite Company. It turned out that plastics could also be used for packaging and preserving food and for holding water in bottles – and that they lasted almost for ever. This was the start of the Age of Plastics that became a curse on the world: since the 1950s it is estimated a billion tons of plastics have been dumped, destroying the environment, killing animals and penetrating to the bottom of the seas – and even into human bloodstreams.

* Another mechanical development changed daily life: in 1880, a sixteen-year-old Virginian schoolboy, James Bonsack, attracted by a prize offered by tobacco growers, left school and invented a machine that could roll 200 cigarettes a minute. He granted a monopoly to a North Carolinian cigarette maker, James Duke, who, forming British American Tobacco, launched a marketing campaign that made cigarettes fashionable: by the mid-twentieth century, much of the world was hooked on cigarettes (80 per cent of British males, 40 per cent of females) which caused lung cancer to increase twentyfold, a connection only fully proven in the 1950s. Heath warnings were only put on US cigarette packets in 1965 – the first country to do so. Even today, tobacco kills nine million annually.

* In 1888, a typical Jewish immigrant, Benjamin Wonskolaser, a Jewish cobbler from Romanov Poland, arrived with his sons, moving between London, Ontario and Youngstown, Ohio, and making a living by mending shoes, selling pots and pans, running a grocery store and bicycle shop before opening a bowling alley. This would lead to their opening a theatre in New Castle, Pennsylvania, funded by pawning a horse; the theatre became a cinema that tempted them into the movie business. Benjamin changed his name to Warner; his sons Szmuel, Hirsz and Aaron changed their names to Sam, Harry and Albert, and, joined by their brother Jack, a ‘song and dance man’, would become the kings of the Hollywood film business.

* A typical Bavarian immigrant, Friedrich Drumpf, first worked as a barber in Manhattan, then, like Roosevelt, headed west, establishing the Poodle-Dog, a brothel-cum-milk-’n’-booze bar (‘Rooms for Ladies’) in Seattle, before following the latest gold rush to Monte Cristo in Washington State and then Klondike in Canada, where his Arctic Hotel offered gold-dust scales and rooms by the hour, expanding to the White Horse Hotel that served 3,000 meals a day. Drumpf returned to Kallstadt to marry a tinker’s daughter, Elizabeth Christ, whom he brought to the Bronx, where in 1905 his son Fred, Donald Trump’s father, was born.

* Anglo-American history is filled with piously monumental moments – Magna Carta, Mayflower, Glorious Revolution, Declaration of Independence. But it was all about population and migration: between 1790 and 1930, global English-speakers multiplied sixteen-fold from 12 to 200 million, not including the 400 million colonial subjects. Britain dominated the world not just by industrialization and conquest, but by migration and breeding. ‘The remarkable explosion of the nineteenth century,’ writes James Belich,‘put the Anglophones on top of the world.’

* Japan did consider occupying the islands. In 1917 Lili‘uokalani died aged seventy-nine. Pearl Harbor was only fully developed as a naval base in 1931.

* ‘The energy, creativity and efficiency of the tribe of Sem,’ wrote the kaiser, ‘would be diverted to worthier goals than sucking dry Christians, and many Social Democrats would clear off East.’ But he added, ‘Given the immense, extremely dangerous power which International Jewish Capital represents, it would be of huge advantage to Germany.’ Antisemitism already contained a contradictory duality: poor Jews in Polish shtetls and Jerusalem’s Old City were despised for their alien faith and filthy poverty, Rothschilds and ‘International Jewish Capital’ for their mystical power.

* Jameson combined a colonial career with his medical one, treating not just Rhodes but also King Lobengula and President Kruger of Transvaal.

* Khama’s grandson Seretse would be the first president of a new country, Botswana; his great-grandson would be president in the twenty-first century.

* Later Jameson was rehabilitated and elected Cape premier; he went on to receive a baronetcy. Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘If …’ about his optimism in the face of adversity.

* Menelik’s planned successor had been his cousin, Ras (duke) Makonnen Wolde Mikael, a grandson of a king of Showa, his top commander at Adowa, but he died first, leaving a son, Tafari Makonnen, later Emperor Haile Selassie. When the emperor had a stroke in 1904, his wife Taytu ruled for him and on his death vainly attempted to stop the succession of his grandson, Lij Iyasu.

* Just after the war, Rhodes died, aged forty-eight, leaving North and South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe) named after himself. Buried with the salute of Ndebele warriors in today’s Zimbabwe, he left his fortune to educate Rhodes scholars at Oxford.

* It was what a Russian leader did. Since the Romanovs had come to power in 1613, Russia had expanded an average 55 square miles a day, 20,000 a year, from 2 million square miles to 8.6, which, with only a few setbacks in 1856 and 1878, made it one of the most successful conquest machines in world history.

* In 1873 a successful gunmaker named Ludwig Nobel, son of a Swedish inventor who had made his fortune in Russia and brother of Alfred who had invented nitroglycerine dynamite first for mining then for war, arrived from St Petersburg and bought a refinery in Baku. Nobel invented the first oil tanker, appropriately called the Zoroaster, to transport this ‘black gold’. The Nobels soon had competition: Alphonse de Rothschild of Paris invested in a railway to get the oil to the Black Sea port of Batumi, where he built an oil refinery.

* Plehve’s nationalist agitations contributed to a new spasm of anti-Jewish pogroms, starting on Easter Day 1903 in Kishinev (Moldova), which encouraged more Jews to emigrate. Plehve was assassinated, but among those leaving fast was a Jewish dentist, Max Jaffe, and his son Henry, who left Vilnius, buying tickets for New York. A few days later, they landed in Ireland. When they grumbled, it turned out they had bought tickets for New Cork. They settled in Limerick in a neighbourhood known as Little Jerusalem until January 1903, when a local priest, Father Creagh, incited local peasants to attack the Jews, most of whom left for England. Henry Jaffe was a grandfather of this author.

* Crookbuster Charlie, who founded the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI), was the grandson of King Jérôme and great-nephew of Emperor Napoleon.

* In 1882, a German professor in Berlin, Robert Koch, had discovered that tuberculosis, one of the biggest killer diseases, was caused by a bacterium, often passed to humans in milk. Koch was building on Pasteur’s work. Koch also discovered the bacterium that causes cholera. Germ theory changed the world – since, along with the development of anaesthesia and anti-septis and sterilized equipment, it enabled the development of invasive surgery for the first time. Yet it was widely questioned. It was a young Jewish Russian microbiologist, Waldemar Haffkine, born Vladmir Chavkin in Berdiansk, trained in Odessa, who was the first to create and use vaccines against cholera and the plague. When the pogroms started in 1881, Haffkine, aged twenty-one, helped defend Jews in Odessa but was wounded and arrested, before being released with the help of his professor. Escaping antisemitism and joining the Pasteur Institute, he tested his vaccines on himself. Frequent epidemics in India led him to start his programmes there. In 1896 Bombay suffered a bubonic outbreak, spread from Chinese ports in an outbreak exacerbated by the Taiping Rebellion via Hong Kong, where Alexandre Yersin finally discovered the plague organism. The plague killed over ten million Indians as the British tried to control it. Haffkine ultimately vaccinated millions of people and helped wipe out these diseases. In 1902, a contaminated vial led to nineteen deaths, which prompted accusations of misconduct in an atmosphere of antisemitism and he was dismissed. But the accusations were disproven and he returned to work in India. His Haffkine Institute is Mumbai’s main bacteriology research centre and he appeared on Indian stamps. Yet pasteurization was not fully accepted in the US until 1915, while the anti-TB Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine was not used until 1921 – forty years after Koch’s discovery.

* Du Bois invented the idea of ‘white supremacy’, proposing that the word coloured rather than black be used to describe ‘dark-skinned people everywhere’, and later he expanded his campaign to support black women.

* Nicky’s obsession with a Russian empire in east Asia alarmed the British viceroy of India, George Curzon, an unusual Etonian grandee who had travelled through Iran and central Asia. Just before the Japanese attacked Russia, Curzon dispatched a punitive expedition, 3,000 mainly Sikh and Pathan troops under Colonel Francis Younghusband, to secure Tibet against Romanov interference. On 31 March 1904, Tibetan troops, armed only with muskets, blocked the invasion, at which Younghusband open fire with his Maxims: ‘I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire, though the general’s order was to make as big a bag as possible,’ recalled the commander of the Maxims. ‘I hope I shall never again have to shoot down men walking away.’ As the ruling Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia, Younghusband took Lhasa. Tibet agreed to become a British protectorate. Yet it was unnecessary. The Japanese war ended Russian ambitions in east Asia.

* In 1910 Japan annexed Korea altogether, declaring ‘enlightened administration’ while suppressing the rising resistance. Many Koreans escaped Japanese oppression by crossing the border into China’s northern province of Manchuria. Among them were a couple of Korean Presbyterians, Kim Hyong-jik and Kang Pan-sok, with their eight-year-old son, Kim Song-ju, who would in his teens join an anti-imperialist organization and later converted to Communism using the name Kim Il-sung. His grandson still rules North Korea into the 2020s.

* In 1901, Phili introduced Willy to a racist disciple of Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, son-in-law of Wagner, who preached racial superiority: ‘If we don’t decide to think resolutely’ about ‘our utterly Jew-ridden artistic life, our Germanic species will be lost’.

* Germany was especially advanced in chemicals, now linked to medicine and agriculture. In 1897, a single German chemist, working at a dye-manufacturing company, Bayer, in Elberfeld, created two of the essential drugs of modern life: that August, Felix Hoffman, twenty-nine, synthesized an ancient pain-killing tonic, salicin, extracted from willow tree bark, to produce aspirin, the antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, analgesic drug that enriched Bayer and conquered the world. He also synthesized diamorphine to create a less addictive version of morphine, which he called heroin after heroisch – ‘heroic’ – for its euphoric effects. (Heroin was marketed as a cough mixture until after the First World War and was only banned in the USA in 1924.) In 1907, Paul Erlich, a German-Jewish associate of Koch, seeking what he called a ‘magic bullet’ that killed a bacterium but not other cells, discovered that synthetic compounds could cure first sleeping sickness and then syphilis; he teamed up with the chemical conglomerate Hoechst to mass-produce the first synthetic antibiotics. In 1908, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber created ammonium nitrate to replace natural nitrates such as guano for use as fertilizers. The chemical magnate Carl Bosch developed the Haber–Bosch process to manufacture a substance that helped intensify modern farming and enable it to feed billions. This truly was an intense agro-revolution that improved nutrition and, combined with better healthcare, cleaner water, vaccination, electricity, refrigeration and petrol engines, powered an exponential rise in population. It is believed food production increased eighteen-fold, mostly after 1900. In 1800 there were 900 million on earth; by 1900, there were 1.65 billion – and it went on rising: in 2022, there were 8 billion. The growth in cities, particularly those in the English-speaking world, was remarkable. In 1890, London and New York were the two clear million-peopled cities, though Chicago was close behind. By 1920, there were twenty million-plus mega-cities; fifty-one by 1940; and 226 by 1985.

It is estimated that the Haber–Bosch process helps generate a third of global food production, which in turn feeds around three billion people. Yet these same life-giving chemicals were also essential for killing. The fertilizers were used in manufacturing explosives; Haber developed chlorine used as a weapon in the First World War; Bosch went on to head the BASF chemicals group and in 1925 founded IG Farben, a new conglomerate that also merged with Mayer and which later manufactured Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder Jews during the Holocaust. Such are the multiple possibilities of science.