IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 248

On the last day of 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a group of London merchants, giving them a monopoly of English trade with all lands to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. The new body was called the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, and its founders had one immediate aim: to win a share of the spice trade that had made Portugal and the Netherlands rich. English merchants had watched enviously as Dutch ships returned from the East Indies laden with pepper, nutmeg and cloves.

The first voyages were dangerous and expensive. Each fleet was financed separately by subscription, and investors accepted that a ship might never return. Early settlements, known as factories, were established not to manufacture goods but to store and trade them, and the Company's servants negotiated with local rulers for permission to build them. The English concentrated at first on the Indonesian archipelago, but the Dutch were far stronger there, and in 1623 a group of English merchants was executed at Amboyna, in what is now Indonesia, after accusations of conspiracy. The Company turned instead towards India, where its first factory was set up at Surat, on the west coast, in the second decade of the seventeenth century.

Indian cotton cloth proved more profitable than spices. Light, washable and cheap, calicoes became fashionable in England, where they alarmed wool merchants and were at times banned. The Company also shipped indigo, saltpetre for gunpowder and, increasingly, tea. Its three principal settlements grew into fortified towns. Madras, where Fort St George was begun in 1639, and Calcutta, founded around 1690, belonged to the Company; Bombay came to the English crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza and was leased to the Company seven years later.

In London the Company was run by a governor and a court of directors chosen by its stockholders, and it raised capital by selling shares; in this respect it was one of the first great joint-stock corporations. Its monopoly, defended as a reward for risk, was unpopular. Rival merchants complained that a handful of men controlled a trade that ought to be open to all, and in the 1690s they obtained a charter for a second company. The competition damaged both, however, and in 1709 the two were merged.

Everything changed in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Company had always maintained a small armed force to protect its warehouses, but as the Mughal empire weakened and Britain and France fought for influence in southern India, that force became an army. In June 1757, at Plassey, a Company force led by Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, and in 1765 the Mughal emperor granted the Company the diwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. A trading corporation had become a territorial power.

The consequences were immense. Company officials returned to Britain with fortunes, and 'nabobs', as they were mockingly called, became figures of suspicion in London society. Much of the wealth came not from trade but from taxation. In 1770 a famine killed a large part of the population of Bengal; historians still disagree about how far the Company's revenue demands were responsible, and estimates of the dead vary widely. Parliament, alarmed by reports of corruption and by the Company's financial difficulties, passed the Regulating Act of 1773, which placed its political activities under government supervision, and Pitt's India Act of 1784 went further.

The China trade deserves particular notice. Tea had been a luxury in 1660; by the early nineteenth century it was drunk in households of every class, and it had to be paid for in silver. To reduce that outflow, the Company encouraged the sale of opium grown in Bengal to Chinese merchants, despite a Chinese ban, and the resulting conflict became the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842. The Company also intruded into American politics: the tea thrown into Boston harbour in 1773 came from its warehouses, and the monopoly that Parliament granted it in the same year enraged colonial merchants.

The Company's commercial privileges were meanwhile being dismantled. The Charter Act of 1813 ended its exclusive right to trade with India, except in tea and in the China trade, and the Act of 1833 abolished its commercial functions altogether. What remained was an administration of tax collectors, judges and soldiers, with an army of Indian sepoys commanded by British officers that by the 1850s was considerably larger than the British Army itself. Long before then, the directors in London had ceased to manage trade and spent much of their time on appointments, pensions and disputes with the government.

In May 1857, sepoys at Meerut rose against their officers, and rebellion spread across northern India. The Company's forces, reinforced from Britain, suppressed it within about a year, but the rising destroyed confidence in the Company's rule. Under the Government of India Act of 1858, its territories and its army passed to the Crown, and India was governed directly from London through a secretary of state. The Company survived as a legal entity, chiefly to pay dividends to its remaining shareholders, until it was finally wound up in 1874.

Its legacy is still argued over. The Company created a framework of law and administration, supported schools teaching in English, and commissioned surveys that mapped large parts of the subcontinent. Critics emphasise the drain of wealth to Britain and the damage done to Indian textile producers, though economic historians disagree about how severe that damage was and how quickly Indian industries recovered. The corporation itself was dissolved more than a century ago, yet its archives remain one of the richest sources for the history of South Asia and of British commerce.

Shortly before half past nine on the morning of 1 November 1755, the ground beneath Lisbon began to shake. It was All Saints' Day, and churches across the Portuguese capital were crowded for mass. Witnesses described three separate shocks lasting in all several minutes, followed by a cloud of dust so thick that survivors could not see their own hands. Modern estimates put the earthquake's magnitude at somewhere between 8.5 and 9, with its centre beneath the Atlantic a few hundred kilometres south-west of the coast.

Lisbon in 1755 was one of the largest cities in Europe, with a population of perhaps 200,000, and it was growing rich on gold and diamonds from Brazil. Its prosperity had been poured into churches, convents and palaces, and much of the housing in the lower town was built tall and close together. Foreign visitors admired the city's wealth; they were less impressed by its narrow streets and by the crowds who lived in them.

The destruction came in three stages. The shaking brought down churches, houses and the royal palace on the riverfront; then candles lit for the feast toppled and set light to the rubble, and the fires burned for days. About forty minutes after the first shock a tsunami swept up the Tagus, drowning hundreds of people who had fled to the waterfront or to sandbanks in the river to escape the flames. The palace library, which held some 70,000 volumes, was destroyed, as was an opera house that had opened only months earlier.

The royal family was at Belém, a few kilometres from the centre, and escaped unhurt. Direction of the recovery fell to the king's chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later known as the Marquis of Pombal, a man of unusual energy and ambition. Estimates of the death toll have always varied, from perhaps 10,000 to more than 60,000; many historians regard a figure of about 30,000 as plausible. The shock was felt in Morocco, where it destroyed buildings and killed many people, and across much of Europe.

Pombal's first response, according to an often-repeated account, was to order that the dead be buried and the living fed. His second was to gather information. A questionnaire was sent to parish priests across the country asking how long the shaking had lasted, how many shocks there had been, what had happened to buildings and how the sea had behaved. Historians of science regard this as one of the earliest systematic attempts by a government to record the effects of a natural disaster, and its answers were used to decide how the city should be rebuilt.

The rebuilding of the lower town, the Baixa, was planned on a grid, with wide straight streets intended to limit the spread of fire and to allow trapped people to escape. The new buildings were among the first in Europe to be designed with earthquakes in mind. Behind their uniform stone facades they carried an internal wooden frame that was meant to flex rather than snap, and walls between neighbouring properties were built high enough to stop flames jumping from roof to roof. Full-size wooden models were assembled and troops were marched over them to test whether the structure would hold.

The question that preoccupied European thinkers was what had caused the disaster. Many churchmen, including the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, treated it as a divine punishment for sin, and sermons on the subject were printed across Protestant Europe. Others looked for physical causes. In 1756 the philosopher Immanuel Kant published essays arguing that earthquakes were produced by the movement of gases in vast caverns beneath the earth, and in 1760 the clergyman and scientist John Michell presented the Royal Society with a paper describing earthquakes as waves travelling through the Earth's interior. Some historians of science see Michell's paper as a foundation of seismology.

The earthquake also altered the course of philosophy. Voltaire, horrified by reports from Portugal, wrote a poem in 1756 attacking the comfortable view, popular at the time, that everything in the world happens for the best, and he returned to the theme in Candide three years later. Jean-Jacques Rousseau replied that the scale of the suffering owed something to human arrangements: the victims had crowded into tall houses in a city where they chose to live, and nature had not built Lisbon.

Evidence of the event was not confined to Portugal. The waves crossed the Atlantic and were noticed in the Caribbean and on the coast of Brazil; they reached Cornwall, where the sea rose sharply in Mount's Bay. Ships' logs and letters from correspondents in many countries record the timing of the waves, and these records are still used by scientists studying how tsunamis travel.

Yet the evidence has limits. Seismometers did not exist in 1755, so there is no instrumental record of the earthquake itself. Its magnitude is inferred from written descriptions of the damage, gathered into maps that show how strongly the ground shook at different distances, and from comparisons with better-recorded earthquakes of a similar type. The position of the epicentre has been debated for decades, and the number of shocks, the depth of the rupture and the height of the waves are still argued over. What no one disputes is the effect on the city: the Lisbon that visitors see today was largely designed in the years after 1755.

Historians are now asked to comment on almost everything. A statue is pulled down, a border is disputed, a government announces a review of the school curriculum, and within hours a historian is invited to explain the background. Some accept gladly and become familiar voices; others refuse on principle, arguing that scholarship and advocacy should be kept apart. The question is not a new one, but it has become sharper as public argument has grown louder and academic funding more insecure.

The case for engagement is easy to state. Universities are paid for, in large part, by the public, and with that money comes an obligation to explain what scholars know to the people who funded the work. Historians also possess knowledge that matters: how nations were made, what happened in former colonies, why a treaty was signed or a frontier drawn. To stay silent when such matters are discussed is not neutrality but a choice that favours whoever is already speaking, and Howard Zinn spent a career saying so. Zinn's own work, a history of the United States told from the standpoint of the poor and the excluded, was an outright rejection of the ideal of the impartial scholar.

The case for detachment is equally serious. The authority of a historian's judgment rests on the belief that it is not merely an opinion. If historians campaign alongside politicians, their conclusions will be read as the conclusions of partisans, and the trust that makes their work useful will be spent. That trust, moreover, belongs to the whole profession rather than to any individual: a scholar who misrepresents the evidence in a good cause damages every colleague who later needs to be believed. Geoffrey Elton put this case in its strongest form, insisting that history is a discipline with its own standards of proof, and that the historian who sets out to serve a present-day cause has given up the very thing that makes the study of the past worth listening to.

Behind these arguments lies an older dispute about how the past should be studied at all. Herbert Butterfield, writing in 1931, attacked what he called the whig interpretation of history: the habit of reading the past as a march towards the present and of praising or condemning earlier centuries by the standards of one's own. The temptation to do exactly this is strongest when a historian takes a public position, because the public wants a verdict, not a qualification.

Yet detachment has its own history of misuse. Richard Evans, defending the idea of historical truth against those who reduce it to politics, has also insisted that scholars must state what the evidence supports even when the conclusion is unwelcome in public debate. His evidence in the libel case brought by a writer who denied the Holocaust was a practical demonstration of the point: the record was defended not by declaring a political allegiance but by producing documents, dates and figures that anyone could check.

The sharpest contribution came from Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist who never hid his commitments. Hobsbawm argued that historians should be candid about the standpoint from which they write instead of claiming a neutrality no one can achieve. That seems to me right as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Acknowledging a standpoint is not the same as allowing it to decide what the evidence shows; the first is honesty, the second is corruption.

Comparisons with other professions are often drawn and rarely helpful. A doctor who campaigns for cleaner air speaks with the authority of a training in physiology, and an engineer who warns of a collapsing bridge can be shown to be right or wrong by measurement. Historical expertise is of a different kind. It concerns interpretation, probability and the weighing of incomplete sources, and it rarely delivers the single answer that a campaigner needs. That is why the most dangerous form of public history treats the past as a stock of ammunition: a quotation selected to win an argument today, with the surrounding evidence quietly discarded.

My own view is that historians should take sides, and often, but that the manner matters more than the fact. When the evidence bears on a public question, they should say what it shows and how confidently; when it does not settle the question, they should say that too, rather than borrowing the authority of their subject for a conclusion it cannot support. The proper test of a historian's intervention is not whether the feelings behind it are admirable but whether an opponent could examine the argument and answer it.

The alternative is worse. A profession that speaks only to itself, and treats public argument as beneath its dignity, will find that decisions are made without it and that the past is invoked by people with no respect for evidence. The greater danger, in my view, lies not in taking sides but in claiming neutrality while pursuing a political aim.