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

by David S. Landes

  But then the boy went to school, and the mother never had time to see him take part in sports or in school plays because that would have kept her from the loom; and when teachers visited the house, Mother-in-law would tell her to sit away in the back room, because all she knew was how to weave and she would disgrace the boy if she spoke to the teacher. And then the boy graduated and sang with the other children: “Nothing can match the happiness we feel!” This was the first and only time the mother went to the school, in the spring, the yard full of peach blossoms; and ever after the mother would weep when she saw the peach blossoms in flower and remembered the children’s graduation song.

  So the mother wove and the merchant bought and the mother-in-law saved and the textile industry prospered; and the son went off to middle school because that was what his father the police captain in Korea wanted for him. And the mother saw him off and climbed through the gate and put her head on the rail to hear the diminishing hum of the train after it disappeared from sight.

  And still the husband did not return. He would not have the privilege of building the new house. So they went ahead and had it built anyway, and relatives brought gifts, and Mother-in-law smiled and fawned on those who brought many gifts, and the others, even her own children returning her generosity, got nary a word. Her brother-in-law, a rich ox dealer, brought her many things, and while he was at it took the opportunity to tell the old grandmother off: “Old woman, aren’t you dead yet?” You never did much, he told her; it was your daughter-in-law who made the money, bought rice paddies, paid for the house. The old woman laughed and nodded, and the ox dealer exclaimed, “Good thing she’s deaf!” And then the old woman told the whole thing to her granddaughter-in-law the weaver (whom else to talk to?): “Did you hear what he said? It makes me feel bad.” And the granddaughter-in-law consoled her: “Grandma, don’t let it bother you. No one has worked so hard as you. I was able to keep weaving without having to get off the loom only because you wound the thread on the spindles for me. The money from weaving has gone into building the house. You must know that. Don’t feel bad about it.” And she took her grandmother-in-law’s hands in hers and wept. And the old woman said, “What you say makes me feel better.” Soon after, the grandmother died. She looked like a withered tree.

  And then the husband Uichi came back, in gold-striped uniform, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses and upturned mustachios. And he built an annex to the house. And then he began staying away in town—with a woman, rumor had it—and stayed away longer and longer. And the rumor was true. Uichi’s wife was afraid to ask—he was so quick to anger—but in a village community such things cannot be kept secret.

  Nor did Uichi try to hide anything. He had known the woman in Korea. She was Japanese and had been sent to Korea to work as a “hostess.” There a prominent government official had taken her for a mistress, and she had become rich and had made her family rich on his gains. And now she was Uichi’s lady friend, like no one else in the peasant village, with her silk kimonos, a different one for every day, and her silk bed sheets. And Uichi had no patience for his wife and beat her, and his parents made no move to intervene, and his father even took pleasure in his son’s brutality: “Unless a person has that kind of willpower, he cannot go out in the world and get ahead.” And his mother agreed: “That’s how he scared the Koreans. No wonder they were afraid of him. He really can be rough.”

  And then one day Uichi brought his mistress home, with her fancy chests and dressers filled with costly silks. His mother knew of his plans and told her daughter-in-law to clean the new annex. But when she started wiping the new tatami mats, Uichi rushed up to her and kicked her out: “You animal! How dare you step on the tatami with your frostbitten feet!” And when the dazed woman staggered off, calling to her long-gone son, away in China with the army: “Mii! Mii! On what battlefield…?” her mother-in-law drove her off: “Go away, you crazy woman. We have no use for you.” No use: they no longer needed the income from the loom.

  The women of the neighborhood understood: “He won his gold stripes by doing brutal things to the Koreans. He did shady things to get wealthy.” No good would come of this, they said. But when they saw Uichi’s wife, moaning and whimpering in distress, they offered neither company nor sympathy. Toward evening, Uichi’s mistress and her maid arrived from town in a rickshaw. She was wearing pure white silk socks, another product of Japanese looms. All Uichi’s wife could remember after that was the closed door of the annex and the laughter that came from within.

  So she set the house on fire—and Japanese houses burn fast and brightly. None of the woman’s chests and dressers and silk kimonos could be saved. And how much paper money gone with them? Then Uichi’s wife slid down into the deep well to disappear from the world, but they found and revived her. She was tried for arson, aggravated by the fact that the fire violated the blackout; one had to be prepared for nonexistent Chinese bombers. She was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, reduced to eight by extenuating circumstances.

  No one came to see her in prison. She sat there huddled against the cold and the wind and comforted herself with songs about rhubarb shoots pushing through the snow—the same shoots she once picked for her own mother when she was a little child and her mother in her illness got comfort from them. Her son Mii wrote her only once: a family that brutalizes its women does not make men of virtue and gratitude. It was a prison mate, Yamashiro, who heard her out and preserved her story. The orphan mother and wife was then fifty years old.

  Of course, cottage outwork was the old; the mill and factory were the new. The leading sector of Japan’s industrial revolution was textiles, silk and cotton above all, and there one had to create a new workforce. As in Britain, these early mill hands were often women. One difference divided the two experiences: whereas in Britain early factory labor included many children, beginning with the ill-famed parish apprentices, this was less true of Japan, which instituted compulsory education soon after the Restoration. Children were in principle not available for factory work. I say “in principle” because reality often differed. As in Britain, we have in Japan much evidence of deliberate lying about age; also less than perfect school attendance.11 The parents needed the money, and schooling was not free.

  In fairness, one should note that so poor was farm life, so hard the work, that life in the mills could be attractive by comparison. The water was cold on the farm and came from the bottom of a well; it was both hot and cold in the mill dormitory and came out of a faucet. The food was plain, coarse, and spare on the farm, fit for pigs more than humans; the mill provided rice three times a day—foreign rice no doubt, not the traditional sticky rice that Japanese are said to prefer. But just as other nations seem to like these other species, poor Japanese factory girls also found them tasty, nourishing, and habit-forming—as the Japanese would no doubt find today if they opened their home market to rice from abroad.

  The wages in these mills were a pittance: it took years for a girl to save enough after deductions for food and lodging to pay the debt incurred by her father when he accepted the advance. (Lodging was often a pallet between the machines or a cot in a crowded dormitory that gave each sleeper the space of a tatami, that is, three by six feet—casket room.) A survey of sixty-two cotton plants in 1898 showed average monthly pay for women as 4.05 yen, as against 6.83 for men—4.67 yen for both sexes taken together. Even Indian workers made more, indeed almost double: wages equivalent to 8.07 to 9.18 yen a month in a sample of seven major textile plants.12

  The heart of the story lay not so much in the low wages, however, as in the marginal product: Japanese labor worked well. It has been argued that low wages in newly industrializing and preindustrial countries reflect low productivity, but this does not seem to have been true for Japan. As long as the farm sector released hands to industry, factory enterprise had the best of both worlds: labor cheap and yet industrious, committed to task, to group, to family. One woman recalled:

  From morning, while it was still
dark, we worked in the lamplit factory till ten at night. After work we hardly had the strength to stand on our feet. When we worked late into the night, they occasionally gave us a yam [to eat]. We then had to do our washing, fix our hair, and so on. By then it would be 11 o’clock. There was no heat even in the winter, and so we had to sleep huddled together. Several of the girls ran back to Hida. I was told that girls who went to work before my time had a harder time. We were not paid the first year. In the second year I got 35 yen, and the following year, 50 yen…. The life of a woman is really awful.13

  The quotation tells much of the story: low pay, poor living conditions, the commitment to personal cleanliness, the gradual improvement. To which should be added unhealthful working conditions: humidification (to prevent static electricity), air filled with lint (hence a high rate of tuberculosis), a deafening din. Balzac, writing of business morals and the character of enterprise, put it well: no child comes into the world without dirty diapers. No industrial nation, either. Some young women ran away; chasers and catchers brought them back to punishment and humiliation before resuming work. Others made good their escape but came back anyway—because their family made them go back, or because they missed the poor creature comforts of the factory.

  The point was, farm life and work were harder, at least physically. And then family loyalties ruled: the poor young women who worked in the silk filatures and cotton mills around Lake Suwa (today a center of electronics manufacture) saved desperately to give something to their parents and walked home through deep snow along treacherous mountain tracks, roped together against falling into bottomless gorges. Years later, when interviewed about these terrible years, many of them remembered only the good aspects. This is a natural survival reaction—we want to forget the pain; we want to “accentuate the positive.” “Haec olim memenisse iuvabit,” said Aeneas to his desperate, discouraged comrades: some day you’ll be happy to remember these things.

  The men did better. Their wages were higher; their bargaining power greater. Japan was no different in this respect from European industrializers—a little worse perhaps, at least in the beginning. Factory workers, indeed industrial workers in general, were seen as a lower breed, like the burakumin outcasts, and indeed many of them were probably burakumin themselves.* They stood apart: “low class,” “inferior,” “base,” “the defeated,” “the stragglers.” Mothers scared their children with the factory worker as bogeyman and exhorted them to do well in school for fear of falling into this slough of lowliness.

  The workers fought back for status and dignity—not rights so much as dignity. “Don’t despise a miner,” went their slogan; “coal is not grown in a grain field.”14 (And when one could not get Japanese to work in the mines, especially when fighting wars, one could always conscript Koreans and Chinese. It is no accident that, so often in history, miners are slaves. With Japan’s defeat in 1945, these slaves just walked off the job, and coal production, Japan’s primary source of energy, fell from 3-4 million tons a month to 1 million. Needless to say, one could no longer get Japanese to do the work. They were used to better and they were free. Japan, like other advanced industrial countries, eventually solved the problem by turning to oil.)*

  Along with government initiatives and a collective commitment to modernization, this work ethic and these personal values made possible the so-called Japanese economic miracle. It was as though an entire population subscribed to bygone samurai values—the banalization of bushido. It would be a mistake of course to see this belief system as universal, but any serious understanding of Japanese performance must build on this phenomenon of culturally determined human capital. It was the national persona that generated a harvest of ingenious adaptations of Western technologies, that made much of little, that drew extraordinary output from people who, in other societies, would have resorted to massive sabotage and exit. Those who wonder at the resistance opposed by Japanese armed forces in the closing months of World War II and ascribe it to fanaticism or suicidal impulse are missing the point. This is a society whose sense of duty and collective obligation, in all realms, sets it apart from the individualism cultivated in the West. Individualism was an enormous advantage in the pursuit of economic wealth in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, not only in Europe but, as we have seen, in Tokugawa Japan. But once the Japanese saw the path they wanted to follow, their collective values proved a fabulous asset. (And a gross temptation.)

  A common mistake of would-be scientific history is to assume that today’s virtues must also be tomorrow’s and that a given factor, if positive once, must always pay. History doesn’t work that way. The requirements of start-up and breakthrough economies are not the same as those of front-runners and cruisers. Japanese success lay in the successful fight against petrification and nostalgia under Tokugawa and the pursuit of a national effort under Meiji and successors. Different strategies in different circumstances.

  24

  History Gone Wrong?

  Arab male pride is very strong, and also very fragile.

  —JAN GOODMAN, Price of Honor

  No one can understand the economic performance of Muslim nations without attending to the experience of Islam as faith and culture. Islam, which means submission (to God), is one of the great world religions. Born in the desert like its two monotheistic predecessors, Judaism and Christianity, Islam proved uncommonly inspiring, carrying with it a small group of nomadic fighters to wide and rapid dominion. Within a century of the Prophet Muhammad’s flight (Hegira) from Mecca to Medina (622, year 1 of the Muslim era), the mostly Arab warriors of the new faith crumpled the nations and empires of the Middle East and swept westward past Gibraltar to the Atlantic and through Spain into central France. Then, after a digestive respite, new armies pushed eastward into India and beyond. By the time Europeans entered the Indian Ocean by sea (1498), Islam had planted itself in parts of China and the Philippines, down the east coast of Africa, in southeastern Europe into the Danube basin, and along the trade routes of central Asia. Only in Spain and Portugal had a reconquista regained lands once Muslim and reversed a seemingly predestined course of conquest.

  This explosion of passion and commitment was the most important feature of Eurasian history in what we may call the middle centuries—the thousand years from the fall of the western Roman empire (traditionally dated 476) to the overseas expansion of Christian Europe. In this sense, it anticipates the potency of the later European imperial sweep, which would go even wider and deeper, imposing its calendar on the world and turning “anno Domini” into “Common Era.”

  The critical difference between the two rushes of power is the place of technology. The first—the Muslim—rested on old ways but new men, on the fighting zeal of fast-moving, horse-mounted warriors who were convinced that God and history were on their side. These men simply overpowered the salaried minions and indifferent subjects of despotic empires, pausing only for an occasional digestion of conquest and booty. The second—the European push—was based on superior firepower and moved by profit: loot yes, but above all, continuing, sustainable profit. (When I was a student, we learned about the three G’s: God, Gold, and Glory. They all mattered, but the greatest of all was Gold, because gold paid the bills, armed the fleets, lured and consoled the flesh.)

  The European rush was potentially stronger, because of its material basis. The Europeans at their peak could defeat anybody. Their only serious adversaries were other Europeans. But the Muslim rush was at once more uncompromising and more insatiable. The combination of prowess and faith held apocalyptic implications in both directions—in its triumphs and in its disappointments.

  European expansion (imperialism) was not apocalyptic. It was at bottom an expression of power. As a response to a calculus of disparity and opportunity, it was cost-conscious, hence opportunistic in both directions. Oh yes, souls mattered to the Europeans, more to some countries than to others—so to Catholics more than to Protestants. (We saw this with the Dutch in Asia.) But rare
ly did souls count enough to get in the way of profit and loss. Prestige also mattered, but again prestige, like everything, had its price. That’s why European empires dissolved as and when they did. When the European powers met colonial resistance and the cost of staying rose, they packed up and got out (India is the prime example), often at heavy cost to newly free native peoples.*

  Not so for Islam. The Muslim warrior was doing God’s work, and his defeat was a setback for humanity. So when, beginning in the eleventh century in Spain and the Levant, Christian knights came to push the faithful back and to occupy lands once part of the House of Islam, Muslims saw this as the triumph of evil. And when, in the eastern Mediterranean, Muslim armies drove the crusaders into the sea, this was not simply victory, but God’s victory, the restoration of order and a redress of history. The expulsion of the Christian crusader kingdoms of the Levant became a kind of paradigm, a metaphor for all time. When, almost a millennium later, Saddam Hussein of Iraq seized Kuwait and took on the coalition of Western powers and their Muslim toadies, he did so in the name and memory of Saladin, the Kurdish chief who took Jerusalem back from the infidel.*

  From that peak moment (1187), the course of Islam was mostly downhill. Not that the religion languished. It continued to make gains, especially among populations of animistic belief. The message of Islam is simple; the act of conversion also. Of the great monotheistic faiths, it makes the least demands on the new adherent, at least in the beginning.† But insofar as Islam links faith to power and dominion, as it does, the loss of might relative to infidel societies became a source of profound despair or active anguish. For a long time, the problem of decline was concealed by the sustained autonomy of Muslim states, the diversion of European power to other parts of the world, the instances of local triumph (in particular the territorial gains of the Ottoman Turks), the apparent imperviousness of Islam. But from the seventeenth century on, no one who looked around could be blind to the shifting balance of world power. Islam had become an economic and intellectual backwater. History had gone awry.