IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 253

On 8 July 1853 four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay and anchored within sight of the Japanese capital. Perry carried a letter from the president demanding that Japan open ports to foreign trade, and he refused to leave until it had been received. For more than two centuries the Tokugawa shogunate, the military government that had ruled since 1603, had kept the country closed: foreign travel was forbidden, Christianity was banned, and trade with Europe was confined to a few Dutch merchants in Nagasaki harbour. The steam-powered ships made the old policy impossible to sustain.

The shogunate could not resist. Its finances were weak, its army was equipped with muskets that had changed little in two hundred years, and it knew that the fate of China, defeated by Britain in the Opium War a decade earlier, might be its own. In March 1854 it signed the Treaty of Kanagawa, opening two ports to American ships. Similar agreements with Britain, Russia and the Netherlands followed, and a commercial treaty of 1858 fixed import duties at low rates. These unequal treaties placed foreign residents under their own consuls and left Japan unable to set its own tariffs. The terms were widely resented, and criticism of the shogunate began to spread.

Opposition centred on two domains in the south-west, Satsuma and Chōshū, which had long been excluded from power. Radical samurai there adopted the slogan sonnō jōi, 'revere the emperor, expel the barbarians', and demanded war against the foreigners. The experiment went badly: in 1863 a British squadron bombarded Kagoshima, and in 1864 a combined fleet of British, French, Dutch and American ships destroyed the coastal batteries at Shimonoseki. The lesson was drawn quickly, and both domains began to buy modern rifles and warships, send students abroad and reorganise their armies on European lines.

In 1866 the two domains formed a secret alliance. In January 1868 their forces seized the imperial palace in Kyoto and proclaimed the restoration of direct imperial rule in the name of the fifteen-year-old emperor Mutsuhito, who would reign under the title Meiji. The shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, resigned and then resisted, and the Boshin War lasted into the following year, ending with the surrender of Edo in May 1868 and the defeat of a short-lived republic on Hokkaido in June 1869.

The new government had no detailed plan. In April 1868, however, it issued the Charter Oath, five short articles in which the emperor promised that deliberative assemblies would be established, that evil customs of the past would be abandoned and that knowledge would be sought throughout the world. The wording was vague and the promise of debate went unhonoured, but it set a direction. In the autumn the emperor moved to Edo, renamed Tokyo, 'the eastern capital'.

The most radical step was the abolition of the domains. In 1871 the government announced that the han, some 260 of them, would become prefectures administered from the capital. Their lords, who had served briefly as governors of their former domains, were summoned to Tokyo and compensated with government bonds and titles of nobility, and they accepted with surprisingly little resistance. Within a few years the country had a single system of administration and taxation, and loyalty to a local domain had given way to loyalty to the state.

The government also learned from abroad at first hand. In December 1871 an embassy of about fifty officials, led by Iwakura Tomomi, left on a tour of the United States and Europe lasting almost two years. Its members met presidents and monarchs and visited factories, shipyards, schools and prisons. They returned convinced that Japan must industrialise before it could negotiate as an equal, and that the model to follow was less the free trade of Britain than the state-led development of Germany. The government built model factories, sold them to private businessmen and hired foreign engineers who were required to train Japanese replacements.

Other reforms followed in a rush. The Education Order of 1872 announced a national system of schools, and within a generation Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in Asia. In 1873 a land tax based on assessed value replaced payments in rice, giving the state a stable income, and conscription created an army in which commoners served alongside samurai. The samurai lost their stipends, their swords and, in 1876, the right to wear them, and resentment boiled over in 1877 in the Satsuma Rebellion, led by Saigō Takamori, a hero of the Restoration. The new conscript army crushed it at a cost of many thousands of lives on both sides.

In 1889 the emperor promulgated a written constitution, drafted with the help of an adviser who had studied in Germany, which combined a hereditary monarch with an elected lower house. The first national elections were held in 1890, though only men paying substantial tax could vote. The constitution was presented as a gift from the emperor rather than a contract with the people, and the armed forces answered to the emperor rather than to the cabinet, a detail that mattered greatly later.

The results were rapid: by 1900 Japan had railways, steamships, textile mills, a central bank and a constitution, and it had defeated China in 1894–95 and Russia in 1904–05, an outcome that astonished European observers and encouraged anti-colonial movements elsewhere in Asia. The same decades brought censorship, police surveillance and repeated peasant protests. Meiji died in 1912, leaving a country quite unlike the one Perry's ships had found.

The first coins were not made of gold or silver, but of electrum, a natural alloy of the two metals. They appear in Lydia, in what is now western Turkey, in the second half of the seventh century BC. The earliest are small lumps of electrum stamped with a rough punch on one side and a lion's head on the other. The stamp was not a portrait of a king; it was a guarantee. By marking the metal, the Lydian authorities promised that its weight and purity were what they claimed. Under Croesus, in the sixth century BC, the kingdom issued coins of nearly pure gold and nearly pure silver.

Every ancient coin was made by hand, and the process changed little over a thousand years. A blank piece of metal, the flan, was cast or cut to the right weight and heated to soften it. The mint worker placed the flan on a bronze die fixed in a block or anvil, which carried one of the designs. A second die, the punch, was set on top of the flan, and its upper end was struck with a hammer. One blow was usually enough. Because the punch took the full force of the hammer, it wore out faster than the lower die, and because the flan was hot and the blow violent, coins were rarely round.

The Roman state turned coining into an industry. By the first century AD, denarii and gold aurei were struck in huge quantities at mints in Rome, Lyon, Alexandria and Antioch. The army needed coins to pay the soldiers and the provinces needed them to pay taxes, so minting followed the legions and the treasury. From the third century, and especially after Diocletian's reforms around 294, coins carried marks identifying the mint and often the workshop within it, and these marks let numismatists assign a coin to a city, or even to a team of workers.

After the western empire ended, coinage contracted sharply, and for centuries the only coin most people saw was a small silver penny. In England the silver penny appeared in the late eighth century, in the reign of Offa of Mercia. These pennies were 'hammered': the flan was cut from a strip of silver, trimmed to weight and struck in the old way. Because the edge was neither raised nor marked, silver could be shaved from it, a practice known as clipping. In England clipping came to be treated as treason. Later pennies carried an inner circle of beads or a cross reaching the edge, so that a clipped coin was obvious.

Rulers also tampered with the metal itself. The simplest way to make more money from the same silver was to mix it with copper while leaving the face value of the coin unchanged. The Roman denarius, almost pure silver under Augustus, contained only a small fraction of silver by the late third century. The most notorious English case is the Great Debasement of Henry VIII in the 1540s, when the silver content of the coinage was reduced again and again; the coins grew so poor that the king's portrait took on a reddish tinge from the copper beneath. Debasement pleased princes in the short term and damaged them in the long.

Mechanical solutions appeared in the sixteenth century. The screw press, which squeezed a die onto a coin under steady pressure rather than hitting it with a hammer, was in use in France from the 1550s. It produced a round, evenly struck coin with a raised rim, which could be marked — milled — with lettering or graining. A milled edge made clipping immediately visible. Elizabeth I's mint experimented with the new machines, employing a French engraver, Eloy Mestrelle, but the moneyers who struck coins by hand resisted a change that threatened their livelihood, and the hammer survived. Only in 1662 did the Royal Mint adopt the screw press, with equipment supplied by a French engineer, Peter Blondeau, and begin to issue milled silver coins with inscribed edges.

By the 1690s the English silver coinage was in ruins. Hammered coins had been clipped so heavily that a pound of silver coin weighed far less than it should. In 1696 the government began a complete recoinage, and Isaac Newton, then a professor at Cambridge, was appointed Warden of the Mint, an office he took seriously enough to move to London. Old coins were brought in, weighed and replaced with milled ones, and within three years the task was largely complete. As Warden, Newton also hunted counterfeiters; as Master, he fixed the value of the gold guinea at twenty-one shillings in 1717, a rate that lasted until 1816.

Coins are also the historian's most abundant source for the ancient economy. Hoards — pots of coins buried for safekeeping and never recovered — give a dated snapshot of what was in circulation at one moment: the latest coin in a hoard dates the burial, and the mixture of issues shows which pieces were still in use. Die studies work differently. Because every die was cut by hand and each coin bears its marks, scholars can sort the surviving coins by die, count how many were struck from each, and estimate from the number of dies how many were originally made. The method has shown that cities such as Athens struck millions of coins.

The phrase 'the Dark Ages' is usually traced to Petrarch, the fourteenth-century Italian poet and scholar who complained that the centuries since the fall of Rome had been a time of darkness. What Petrarch meant was a darkness of letters: an age, as he saw it, that had produced no Virgil and no Cicero, in which even the great works of antiquity survived only in rare and neglected copies. The complaint was taken up by later writers of the Renaissance, who used the idea of a benighted interval to flatter their own. In the seventeenth century the German scholar Christoph Cellarius fixed the familiar division of European history into ancient, medieval and modern, and the centuries in between acquired a name — the Middle Ages — that described their position rather than their character.

For a long time 'dark' carried this literary meaning. An age without books is dark because we cannot see into it, and the word was used by scholars to describe a shortage of evidence as much as a shortage of achievement. In the nineteenth century, however, the phrase became popular in a different sense, as a label for the whole of the early medieval period in western Europe, and it came to imply violence, superstition and stagnation. It is this second meaning that historians now spend so much time arguing about.

The case for decline is not a fantasy. Archaeology shows that in much of the western Roman world the hallmarks of a complex economy faded within a few generations of the last emperor: pottery ceased to be made in the fine, standardised wares that had been traded across provinces; coin disappeared from ordinary exchanges; stone buildings gave way to timber; and the population of Rome itself fell from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. Bryan Ward-Perkins, in a short book published in 2005, argued that these changes amounted to the collapse of a civilisation and that for ordinary people the experience was one of genuine hardship and danger.

Others see something quite different. In 1971 the historian Peter Brown published The World of Late Antiquity, which presented the same centuries not as a collapse but as a transformation. On this view, the empire did not fall so much as dissolve into successor kingdoms that preserved Roman law, Roman Christianity and much of Roman administration; the eastern empire survived for another thousand years; and the new religion of Islam, from the seventh century, created a civilisation that was anything but dark. Brown's approach, often called Late Antiquity, has been enormously influential, and it shifted attention from what was lost to what continued.

Both pictures are true, in different places. The evidence for continuity is strongest in the eastern Mediterranean, in Italy and in the Church, and weakest in Britain, where villas, towns and coinage vanished with unusual completeness. A peasant in Syria or Egypt in 700 might have noticed little change; a peasant in what is now Yorkshire lived in a world that had lost almost everything his great-grandparents had taken for granted. A single label cannot cover both.

Nor is the period empty of achievement. Medieval farmers and craftsmen developed the heavy plough, the horse collar and three-field rotation; engineers built watermills and, by the late thirteenth century, mechanical clocks; glassmakers in northern Italy produced the first spectacles; and the great cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries required organisation and technical skill on a scale that the ancient world would have admired. The first universities were founded in Bologna, Paris and Oxford, and scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon worked within a network of schools and libraries that stretched from Spain to Sicily. All this was achieved with a population, and a tax base, far smaller than that of Rome.

'Dark' has also been used for other periods, and here it is more defensible. Historians of the Aegean describe the centuries after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, around 1200 BC, as a dark age, because the system of writing known as Linear B disappeared and the archaeological record becomes much thinner. In that case the darkness is real and specific: it is the darkness of the evidence, not a judgement on the people.

Why, then, does the phrase survive? Partly because it is useful shorthand in popular culture, where 'medieval' is still a term of abuse for anything cruel or irrational. Partly because it is convenient for anyone who wishes to present the modern world as an escape from superstition. And partly because the period's own sources are indeed thin: the centuries after 500 in western Europe produced few historians of the first rank. A label that reflects the state of our evidence, however, is not the same as a description of the people who lived under it.

My own view is that 'the Dark Ages' should be retired as a name for a period, while the reality of decline in particular regions should not be. The phrase began as a comment on Latin prose and ended as a caricature of a thousand years. Historians can say what they mean: 'the early Middle Ages', 'post-Roman Britain', 'the centuries of contraction'. Precision of this kind is not pedantry. The words we use shape the questions we ask, and a label that answers them in advance is a poor tool for understanding.