The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes

  The Chinese built a few astronomical water clocks in the Tang and Sung eras—complicated and artful pieces that may have kept excellent time in the short run, before they started clogging. (Owing to sediment, water clocks keep a poor rate over time.) These monumental machines were imperial projects, done and reserved for the emperor and his astrologers. The Chinese treated time and knowledge of time as a confidential aspect of sovereignty, not to be shared with the people. This monopoly touched both daily and year-round time. In the cities, drums and other noisemakers signaled the hours (equal to two of our hours), and everywhere the imperial calendar defined the seasons and their activities. Nor was this calendar a uniform, objectively determinable datum. Each emperor in turn had his own calendar, placed his own seal on the passage of time. Private calendrical calculation would have been pointless.

  These interval hour signals in large cities were no substitute for continuing knowledge and awareness. In particular, the noises were not numerical signifiers. The hours had names rather than numbers, and that in itself testifies to the absence of a temporal calculus. Without a basis in popular consumption, without a clock trade, Chinese horology regressed and stagnated. It never got beyond water clocks, and by the time China came to know the Western mechanical clock, it was badly placed to understand and copy it. Not for want of interest: the Chinese imperial court and wealthy elites were wild about these machines; but because they were reluctant to acknowledge European technological superiority, they sought to trivialize them as toys. Big mistake.

  Islam might also have sought to possess and copy the clock, if only to fix prayers. And as in China, Muslim horologers made water clocks well in advance of anything known in Europe. Such was the legendary clock that Haroun-al-Raschid sent as a gift to Charlemagne around the year 800: no one at the Frankish court could do much with it, and it disappeared to ignorance and neglect. Like the Chinese, the Muslims were much taken with Western clocks and watches, doing their best to acquire them by purchase or tribute. But they never used them to create a public sense of time other than as a call to prayer. We have the testimony here of Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, in a letter of 1560: “…if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution.”7 Sacrilege.

  4. Printing. Printing was invented in China (which also invented paper) in the ninth century and found general use by the tenth. This achievement is the more impressive in that the Chinese language, which is written in ideographs (no alphabet), does not lend itself easily to movable type. That explains why Chinese printing consisted primarily of full-page block impressions; also why so much of the old Chinese texts consists of drawings. If one is going to cut a block, it is easier to draw than to carve a multitude of characters. Also, ideographic writing works against literacy: one may learn the characters as a child, but if one does not keep using them, one forgets how to read. Pictures helped.

  Block printing limits the range and diffusion of publication. It is well suited to the spread of classic and sacred texts, Buddhist mantras, and the like, but it increases the cost and risk of publishing newer work and tends to small printings. Some Chinese printers did use movable type, but given the character of the written language and the investment required, the technique never caught on as in the West. Indeed, like other Chinese inventions, it may well have been abandoned for a time, to be reintroduced later.8

  In general, for all that printing did for the preservation and diffusion of knowledge in China, it never “exploded” as in Europe. Much publication depended on government initiative, and the Confucian mandarinate discouraged dissent and new ideas. Even evidence of the falsity of conventional knowledge could be dismissed as appearance.9 As a result, intellectual activity segmented along personal and regional lines, and scientific achievement shows surprising discontinuities. “The great mathematician Chu Shih-chieh, trained in the northern school, migrated south to Yang-chou, where his books were printed but he could find no disciples. In consequence, the more sophisticated of his achievements became incomprehensible to following generations. But the basic scientific texts were common property everywhere.”10 Basic texts, a kind of canonical writ, are not enough; worse, they may even chill thought.

  Europe came to printing centuries after China. It should not be thought, however, that printing made the book and invented reading. On the contrary, the interest in the written word grew rapidly in the Middle Ages, especially after bureaucracy and the rise of towns increased demand for records and documents. Government rests on paper. Much of this verbiage, moreover, was written in the vernacular, shattering the hieratic monopoly of a dead but sacred tongue (Latin) and opening the way to wider readership and a literature of dissent.

  As a result, scribes could not keep up with demand. All manner of arrangements were conceived to increase reading material. Manuscripts were prepared and bound in separable fascicles; that divided the labor of writing while enabling several people to read the book at the same time. And as in China, block printing came in before movable type, yielding flysheets more than books and once again copiously illustrated. So when Gutenberg published his Bible in 1452-55, the first Western book printed by movable type (and arguably the most beautiful book ever printed), he brought the new technique to a society that had already vastly increased its output of writing and was fairly panting after it. Within the next half century, printing spread from the Rhineland throughout western Europe. The estimated output of incunabula (books published before 1501) came to millions—2 million in Italy alone.

  In spite of printing’s manifest advantages, it was not accepted everywhere. The Muslim countries long remained opposed, largely on religious grounds: the idea of a printed Koran was unacceptable. Jews and Christians had presses in Istanbul but not Muslims. The same in India: not until the early nineteenth century was the first press installed. In Europe, on the other hand, no one could put a lid on the new technology. Political authority was too fragmented. The Church had tried to curb vernacular translations of sacred writ and to forbid dissemination of both canonical and noncanonical texts. Now it was overwhelmed. The demons of heresy were out long before Luther, and printing made it impossible to get them back in the box.

  5. Gunpowder. Europeans probably got this from the Chinese in the early fourteenth, possibly the late thirteenth century. The Chinese knew gunpowder by the eleventh century and used it at first as an incendiary device, both in fireworks and in war, often in the form of tubed flame lances. Its use as a propellant came later, starting with inefficient bombards and arrow launchers and moving on to cannon (late thirteenth century). The efficiency and rationality of some of these devices may be inferred from their names: “the eight-sided magical awe-inspiring wind-and-fire cannon” or the “nine-arrows, heart-penetrating, magically-poisonous fire-thunderer.”11 They were apparently valued as much for their noise as for their killing power. The pragmatic mind finds this metaphorical, rhetorical vision of technology disconcerting.

  The Chinese continued to rely on incendiaries rather than explosives, perhaps because of their superior numbers, perhaps because fighting against nomadic adversaries did not call for siege warfare.* Military treatises of the sixteenth century describe hundreds of variations: “sky-flying tubes,” apparently descended from the fire lances of five hundred years earlier, used to spray gunpowder and flaming bits of paper on the enemy’s sails; “gunpowder buckets” and “fire bricks”—grenades of powder and paper soaked in poison; other devices packed with chemicals and human excrement, intended to frighten, blind, and presumably disgust the enemy; finally, more lethal grenades filled with metal pellets and explosives.12 Some of these were thrown; others shot from bows. One wonders at this delight in variety, as though war were a display of recipes.

  The Chinese used gunpowder in powder form, as the name indicates, and got a weak reaction precisely because the fine-grain mass slowed ignition. The Europeans,
on the other hand, learned in the sixteenth century to “corn” their powder, making it in the form of small kernels or pebbles. They got more rapid ignition, and by mixing the ingredients more thoroughly, a more complete and powerful explosion. With that, one could concentrate on range and weight of projectile; no messing around with noise and smell and visual effects.

  This focus on delivery, when combined with experience in bell founding (bell metal was convertible into gun metal, and the techniques of casting were interchangeable), gave Europe the world’s best cannon and military supremacy.13

  As these cases make clear, other societies were falling behind Europe even before the opening of the world (fifteenth century on) and the great confrontation.* Why this should have been so is an important historical question—one learns as much from failure as from success. One cannot look here at every non-European society or civilization, but two deserve a moment’s scrutiny.

  The first, Islam, initially absorbed and developed the knowledge and ways of conquered peoples. By our period (roughly 1000 to 1500), Muslim rule went from the western end of the Mediterranean to the Indies. Before this, from about 750 to 1100, Islamic science and technology far surpassed those of Europe, which needed to recover its heritage and did so to some extent through contacts with Muslims in such frontier areas as Spain. Islam was Europe’s teacher.

  Then something went wrong. Islamic science, denounced as heresy by religious zealots, bent under theological pressures for spiritual conformity. (For thinkers and searchers, this could be a matter of life and death.) For militant Islam, the truth had already been revealed. What led back to the truth was useful and permissible; all the rest was error and deceit.14 The historian Ibn Khaldn, conservative in religious matters, was nonetheless dismayed by Muslim hostility to learning:

  When the Muslims conquered Persia (637-642) and came upon an indescribably large number of books and scientific papers, Sa’d bin Abi Waqqas wrote to Umar bin al-Khattab asking him for permission to take them and distribute them as booty among the Muslims. On that occasion, Umar wrote him: “Throw them in the water. If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance. If it is error, God has protected us against it.”15

  Remember here that Islam does not, as Christianity does, separate the religious from the secular. The two constitute an integrated whole. The ideal state would be a theocracy; and in the absence of such fulfillment, a good ruler leaves matters of the spirit and mind (in the widest sense) to the doctors of the faith. This can be hard on scientists.

  As for technology, Islam knew areas of change and advance: one thinks of the adoption of paper; or the introduction and diffusion of new crops such as coffee and sugar; or the Ottoman Turkish readiness to learn the use (but not the making) of cannon and clocks. But most of this came from outside and continued to depend on outside support. Native springs of invention seem to have dried up. Even in the golden age (750-1100), speculation disconnected from practice: “For nearly five hundred years the world’s greatest scientists wrote in Arabic, yet a flourishing science contributed nothing to the slow advance of technology in Islam.”16

  The one civilization that might have surpassed the European achievement was China. At least that is what the record seems to show. Witness the long list of Chinese inventions: the wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the rigid horse collar (to prevent choking), the compass, paper, printing, gunpowder, porcelain. And yet in matters of science and technology, China remains a mystery—and this in spite of a monumental effort by the late Joseph Needham and others to collect the facts and clarify the issues. The specialists tell us, for example, that Chinese industry long anticipated European: in textiles, where the Chinese had a water-driven machine for spinning hemp in the twelfth century, some five hundred years before the England of the Industrial Revolution knew water frames and mules;17 or in iron manufacture, where the Chinese early learned to use coal and coke in blast furnaces for smelting iron (or so we are told) and were turning out as many as 125,000 tons of pig iron by the later eleventh century—a figure reached by Britain seven hundred years later.18

  The mystery lies in China’s failure to realize its potential. One generally assumes that knowledge and know-how are cumulative; surely a superior technique, once known, will replace older methods. But Chinese industrial history offers examples of technological oblivion and regression. We saw that horology went backward. Similarly, the machine to spin hemp was never adapted to the manufacture of cotton, and cotton spinning was never mechanized. And coal/coke smelting was allowed to fall into disuse, along with the iron industry as a whole. Why?

  It would seem that none of the conventional explanations tells us in convincing fashion why technical progress was absent in the Chinese economy during a period that was, on the whole, one of prosperity and expansion. Almost every element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the industrial revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China. There had even been a revolution in the relations between social classes, at least in the countryside; but this had had no important effect on the techniques of production. Only Galilean-Newtonian science was missing; but in the short run this was not important. Had the Chinese possessed, or developed, the seventeenth-century European mania for tinkering and improving, they could easily have made an efficient spinning machine out of the primitive model described by Wang Chen…. A steam engine would have been more difficult; but it should not have posed insuperable difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting piston flame-throwers in the Sung dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried. In most fields, agriculture being the chief exception, Chinese technology stopped progressing well before the point at which a lack of scientific knowledge had become a serious obstacle.19

  Why indeed? Sinologists have put forward several partial explanations. The most persuasive are of a piece:

  • The absence of a free market and institutionalized property rights. The Chinese state was always interfering with private enterprise—taking over lucrative activities, prohibiting others, manipulating prices, exacting bribes, curtailing private enrichment. A favorite target was maritime trade, which the Heavenly Kingdom saw as a diversion from imperial concerns, as a divisive force and source of income inequality, worse yet, as an invitation to exit. Matters reached a climax under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when the state attempted to prohibit all trade overseas. Such interdictions led to evasion and smuggling, and smuggling brought corruption (protection money), confiscations, violence, and punishment. Bad government strangled initiative, increased the cost of transactions, diverted talent from commerce and industry.

  • The larger values of the society. A leading sociological historian (historical sociologist) sees gender relations as a major obstacle: the quasi-confinement of women to the home made it impossible, for example, to exploit textile machinery profitably in a factory setting. Here China differed sharply from Europe or Japan, where women had free access to public space and were often expected to work outside the home to accumulate a dowry or contribute resources to the family.20

  • The great Hungarian-German-French sinologist, Etienne Balazs, would stress the larger context. He sees China’s abortive technology as part of a larger pattern of totalitarian control. He does not explain this by hydraulic centralism, but he does recognize the absence of freedom, the weight of custom, consensus, what passed for higher wisdom. His analysis is worth repeating:

  …if one understands by totalitarianism the complete hold of the State and its executive organs and functionaries over all the activities of social life, without exception, Chinese society was highly totalitarian…. No private initiative, no expression of public life that can escape official control. There is to begin with a whole array of state monopolies, which comprise the great consumption staples: salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade. There is a monopoly of education, jealously guarded. There is practically a monopoly of letters (I was about to say, of the press): anything written unofficially, that
escapes the censorship, has little hope of reaching the public. But the reach of the Moloch-State, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, goes much farther. There are clothing regulations, a regulation of public and private construction (dimensions of houses); the colors one wears, the music one hears, the festivals—all are regulated. There are rules for birth and rules for death; the providential State watches minutely over every step of its subjects, from cradle to grave. It is a regime of paper work and harassment [paperasseries et tracasseries], endless paper work and endless harassment.

  The ingenuity and inventiveness of the Chinese, which have given so much to mankind—silk, tea, porcelain, paper, printing, and more—would no doubt have enriched China further and probably brought it to the threshold of modern industry, had it not been for this stifling state control. It is the State that kills technological progress in China. Not only in the sense that it nips in the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’Etat. The atmosphere of routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation suspect, any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, is unfavorable to the spirit of free inquiry.21

  In short, no one was trying. Why try?

  Whatever the mix of factors, the result was a weird pattern of isolated initiatives and sisyphean discontinuities—up, up, up, and then down again—almost as though the society were held down by a silk ceiling. The result, if not the aim, was change-in-immobility; or maybe immobility-in-change. Innovation was allowed to go (was able to go) so far and no farther.

  The Europeans knew much less of these interferences. Instead, they entered during these centuries into an exciting world of innovation and emulation that challenged vested interests and rattled the forces of conservatism. Changes were cumulative; novelty spread fast. A new sense of progress replaced an older, effete reverence for authority. This intoxicating sense of freedom touched (infected) all domains. These were years of heresies in the Church, of popular initiatives that, we can see now, anticipated the rupture of the Reformation; of new forms of expression and collective action that challenged the older art forms, questioned social structures, and posed a threat to other polities; of new ways of doing and making things that made newness a virtue and a source of delight; of Utopias that fantasized better futures rather than recalled paradises lost.