Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  The central principle of Civilization is the subordination of the ruling class to the settled customs of the people and to their will as expressed in the Constitution …4

  Thus Winston Churchill, son of an English aristocrat and an American heiress, in 1938. But where did that peculiarly Anglo-American definition of civilization – of freedom and peace based on the rule of law and constitutional government – spring from? And why did it fail to take root in America south of the Rio Grande?

  Our story begins with two ships. On one, landing in northern Ecuador in 1532, were fewer than 200 Spaniards accompanying the man who already claimed the title ‘Governor of Peru’. Their ambition was to conquer the Inca Empire for the King of Spain and to secure a large share of its reputed wealth of precious metal for themselves. The other ship, the Carolina, reached the New World 138 years later, in 1670, at an island off the coast of what today is South Carolina. Among those on board were servants whose modest ambition was to find a better life than the grinding poverty they had left behind in England.

  The two ships symbolized this tale of two Americas. On one, conquistadors; on the other indentured servants. One group dreamt of instant plunder – of mountains of Mayan gold, there for the taking. The others knew that they had years of toil ahead of them, but also that they would be rewarded with one of the world’s most attractive assets – prime North American land – plus a share in the process of law-making. Real estate plus representation: that was the North American dream.

  Yet at the outset it was not the poor English migrants in the North but the conquistadors in the South who seemed better placed. The Spaniards, after all, had got there first. During the sixteenth century, the work of colonizing the Americas was left almost entirely to the people of the Iberian peninsula. While Englishmen still hankered after conquering Calais, mighty native American empires were being subjugated by Spanish adventurers. In Mexico the bloodthirsty Aztecs were laid low by Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521. And in Peru, just over a decade later, the lofty Andean empire of the Incas was laid low by Francisco Pizarro.

  Pizarro had no illusions about the relationship between the risks and rewards of conquest. It took two expeditions in 1524 and 1526 even to locate the Inca Empire. In the course of the second, when some of his less tenacious brethren were faltering, Pizarro spelt out that relationship by drawing a line in the sand:

  Comrades and friends, there lies the part that represents death, hardship, hunger, nakedness, rains and abandonment; this side represents comfort. Here you return to Panama to be poor; there you may go forward to Peru to be rich. Choose which best becomes you as good Spaniards.5

  His third expedition, which set sail from Panama in 1530, consisted of 180 men, among them a core of brothers and intimates from his home town of Trujillo. By the time they reached the Peruvian Highlands, Pizarro had just sixty horsemen and ninety footsoldiers at his command. The audacity of what they did remains astonishing even after the passage of half a millennium. The population of the empire they intended to subjugate was somewhere between 5 and 10 million.

  On the conquistadors’ side, however, was an invisible ally: the European diseases to which South Americans had no resistance – smallpox, influenza, measles and typhus. At the same time, the Spaniards’ horses, guns and crossbows were weapons far superior to anything in the Inca armoury; they gave the invaders a terrifying extra-terrestrial aspect. And the Incas themselves were divided. Since the death of the Inca Huayna Capac, his sons Atahualpa and Huascar had been battling for the succession, while subject tribes scented a chance to throw off the Inca yoke. The Battle of Cajamarca (14 November 1532) was thus scarcely a battle at all. As Pizarro’s brother Hernando described it, Atahualpa walked into a trap when he accepted the Spaniards’ invitation to dinner:

  When Atahualpa had advanced to the centre of an open space, he stopped, and a Dominican friar, who was with the Governor [Pizarro], came forward to tell him, on the part of the Governor, that he waited for him in his lodging, and that he was sent to speak with him. The friar then told Atahualpa that he was a priest, and that he was sent there to teach the things of the faith if they should desire to be Christians. He showed Atahualpa a book which he carried in his hands [the Bible], and told him that that book contained the things of God. Atahualpa asked for the book, and threw it on the ground, saying: ‘I will not leave this place until you have restored all that you have taken in my land. I know well who you are and what you have come for.’ Then he rose up in his litter and addressed his men, and there were murmurs among them and calls to those who were armed. The friar went to the Governor and reported what was being done and that no time was to be lost. The Governor sent to me; and I had arranged with the captain of the artillery that, when a sign was given, he should discharge his pieces, and that, on hearing the reports, all the troops should come forth at once. This was done, and as the Indians were unarmed they were defeated without danger to any Christian.6

  In the words of the sixteenth-century Andean chronicler Waman Poma, the Spaniards killed the panic-stricken Indians ‘like ants’.7

  Peru was not conquered in a single battle. There were Inca revolts led by Manco Cápac in 1535 and again, on a much larger scale, between 1536 and 1539. Nor were the Indians slow to adopt European ways of warfare. They proved to be tenacious guerrilla fighters. At the same time, the Spaniards quarrelled enough among themselves to jeopardize their dominance – to the extent that fraternal strife claimed Pizarro’s own life in 1541. It was not until the execution of Túpac Amaru more than thirty years later, in September 1572, that Inca resistance was irreparably broken.

  Among the Spaniards was a young captain from Segovia named Jerónimo de Aliaga. To de Aliaga, Peru was as weird as it was wonderful. He marvelled at the scale and sophistication of Inca architecture, not least the huge northern wall of the Sacsayhuamán fortress at their capital, Cuzco, with its perfectly interlocking 200-ton stones. Much of what the Spaniards later built at Cuzco they erected on top of Inca walls and foundations, recognizing their extraordinary, earthquake-resistant quality.8 Today we can get a better sense of the pre-Conquest grandeur of the Inca achievement at Machu Picchu – the legendary ‘lost city of the Incas’, which seems to float amid the clouds of the Andes, a city the Spaniards never found and so never despoiled and rebuilt. High above the Urubamba River, Machu Picchu was probably constructed in the mid-fifteenth century. Despite its seemingly impractical location, clinging to steep mountainsides more than 8,000 feet above sea-level, it was clearly a self-sufficient settlement, with running spring water and terraces for the cultivation of crops and the grazing of livestock. Wholly unknown to the Western world until 1911, when it was found by the American academic and explorer Hiram Bingham,9 it serves as a warning that no civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible. We still do not know what purpose the city served. Nor do we know exactly when and why the Incas abandoned it. One strong possibility is that epidemic disease arrived there from Hispaniola (the island which is today divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) ahead of the conquistadors, killing the population and leaving Machu Picchu a ghost town.

  The pretext for the initial Spanish assault at Cajamarca was that the Incas refused to convert to Christianity. But it was not God but gold that really interested Pizarro. The captured Atahualpa’s vain attempt to secure his freedom by filling his cell once with gold and twice with silver merely aroused the conquistadors’ appetite for precious metal. The 13,420 pounds of 22-carat gold and 26,000 pounds of pure silver that were duly piled up made every man in the expedition rich at a stroke. But there was more – much more.10 The Spaniards had also found gold in Hispaniola and vast deposits of silver at Zacatecas in Central Mexico. Now they found the cerro rico (‘rich mountain’) at Potosí, a silver mine without equal in the world. Everywhere the Spaniards looked in Peru, it seemed, there was specie. As Pizarro’s chief accountant, Jerónimo de Aliaga was well placed to grasp the full extent of this newfound we
alth. Prior to 1550, gold worth around 10 million pesos was taken from Peru, about half of it plundered, the rest mined.11 Over time, the output of the silver mines rose steadily, from around 50 tonnes a year in the early 1500s to over 900 tonnes by 1780.12 In all, between 1500 and 1800, precious metal worth roughly £109 billion at today’s prices was shipped from the New World to Europe or via the Pacific to Asia, a large part of it from the mines of Peru. Men like de Aliaga became very rich indeed. He was able to build himself a magnificent townhouse in the new Peruvian capital of Lima, with an inner courtyard that stands on the site of an Inca temple. The house has been occupied by his descendants ever since; the present occupant, Gonzalo de Aliaga, is unabashedly proud of his conquistador ancestor.

  The Spaniards appeared to be laying the foundation for an entirely new and spectacular civilization, to be run from a few splendid cities by a tiny, wealthy Spanish-born elite. And those cities grew rapidly. Mexico City had 100,000 inhabitants in 1692, at a time when Boston had barely 6,000. Twenty-five Spanish American universities were founded, like the one at Santo Domingo, which predates Harvard by nearly a century.13 The sciences of cartography and metallurgy flourished.14 The Spaniards learned to enjoy at least some of the staples of Meso-American cuisine: chillies, peanuts, potatoes and turkeys (all later adopted by North Americans).15 Hundreds of lavishly adorned churches were built, and some of the most imposing cathedrals in the world, like the magnificent one at Cuzco designed by the architect Francisco Becerra and completed in 1669 by the Flemish Jesuit Juan Bautista Egidiano. Franciscans as well as Jesuits flocked to South America in their thousands to convert what remained of the indigenous population. But while the Church was influential, ultimate power resided with the Spanish Crown. And, crucially, the Crown owned all the land. The story of property-ownership in North America would be altogether different.

  LAND OF THE FREE

  In 1670 a penniless young English couple stepped off the first ship to land on the shores of South Carolina, after a harrowing transatlantic journey. Like her travelling companion Abraham Smith, Millicent How had signed herself into service with a standard deed of indenture made in September 1669:

  Know all men that I Millicent How of London Spinster the day of the date hereof doe firmely by these pnts [points] bind and oblige my selfe as a faithfull & obedient Servant in all things whatsoever, to serve and dwell with Capt. Joseph West of the sd City of London Merchant, in the plantation, or province of Carolina.16

  Between 65 and 80 per cent of all the Britons who came to the Chesapeake in the course of the seventeenth century did so on this basis.17 That was by no means exceptional. Fully three-quarters of all European migrants to British America over the entire colonial period came as indentured servants.18

  This was a very different migration from the one experienced by Jerónimo de Aliaga. The Spaniards had literally found mountains of silver in Mexico and Peru. All there seemed to be on the shores of Carolina was a bone-yard of bleached tree-trunks. This was no El Dorado. Instead, settlers in North America had to plant corn to eat and tobacco to trade.19 For many years Britain’s American colonies remained a patchwork of farms and villages, with a few towns and virtually no true cities. And here the natives, though less numerous, were not so easily subjugated. Even in 1670 you could still have been forgiven for thinking that Jerónimo de Aliaga’s America was the land of the future, while Millicent How’s was destined to remain an obscure Ruritania.

  What if it had been the other way round? What if de Aliaga had ended up in a Spanish Carolina and How and Smith had ended up in a British Peru? ‘If [England’s] Henry VII had been willing to sponsor Columbus’s first voyage,’ the historian J. H. Elliott once half-playfully reflected,

  and if an expeditionary force of [Englishmen] had conquered Mexico for Henry VIII, it is possible to imagine a … massive increase in the wealth of the English crown as growing quantities of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of a coherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and their subjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in the national life, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financed by the silver of America.20

  In other words, it is not at all self-evident that the British colonies would have turned out as they did if they had been established in South rather than North America.

  What if New England had been in Mexico and New Spain in Massachusetts? If it is possible to imagine England, rather than Castile, seduced into absolutism by the silver of the Peruvian mines, is it equally possible to imagine Castile, rather than England, planting the seeds of republican virtue at higher latitudes? Might the cortes – the nearest thing early-modern Spain had to a parliament – have built up enough power to establish the first constitutional monarchy in Western Europe? And might the Estados Unidos have emerged from a crisis of Hispanic rather than British imperial authority, speaking Spanish from its very inception? Such a role reversal is not so implausible. The United Provinces, after all, emerged from the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule. Perhaps it was mere contingency – the absence or presence of New World gold and silver – that sent England along the high road to parliamentarism and Spain down the primrose path to absolutism. With an additional source of revenue outside the control of parliament, Charles I might have maintained his ‘Personal Rule’ and avoided the fateful confrontation that produced the British Civil War. His Puritan opponents in the House of Commons were elderly men by 1640. A few more years would have seen their challenge fade.21 Nor was there any certainty that Britain would be steered a second time away from absolutism by the Dutch invasion and coup that installed William of Orange as king.22 The chain of events that led from the financial travails of James I to the deposition of James II might easily have been broken on many occasions. No narrative is more tendentious than the Whig interpretation of English history, with its assumption that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a divinely ordained compromise between monarch and legislature. Even after 1688 the dominance of the Whig aristocrats who were the real beneficiaries of the Stuarts’ ouster was still periodically vulnerable to Jacobite counter-coups, which enjoyed considerable support on the Celtic periphery.

  The crux of the matter is the relative importance in the historical process of, on the one hand, initial resource endowments in the colonized territories of the New World and, on the other hand, the institutional blueprints the colonizers brought with them from Europe. If initial conditions were determining, then it did not much matter if Englishmen or Spaniards turned up in Peru; the result would have been much the same, because Englishmen would have been just as tempted to plunder the Incas and just as likely to succumb to the ‘resource curse’ of cheap gold and silver.23 Presumably, too, Spanish settlers might have been more innovative had they found themselves goldless in the Chesapeake Bay. But if you believe that the key variable was the institutions the settlers brought with them, then quite different alternatives suggest themselves.

  British colonization generally produced better economic results than Spanish or Portuguese, wherever it was tried. There is no perfect test for this proposition, since no two colonies were exactly alike, but Arizona is richer than Mexico and Hong Kong is richer than Manila. So perhaps British colonization of Mexico and Peru would have had better long-run results than Spanish, ultimately producing some kind of United States of Central and South America. And perhaps Spanish colonization of North America would have left that region both relatively impoverished and divided into quarrelsome republics: multiple nation-states like Colombia rather than a single District of Columbia as the seat of a federal government, and undying enmity between Wisconsin and Minnesota, rather than between Colombia and Venezuela.

  England was already different from Spain in 1670, long before the advent of industrialization. Violence as measured by the homicide rate had been declining steadily since the 1300s. With the Glorious Revolution of 16
88, an era of intermittent civil war had come to an end, though hard battles remained to be fought to impose order on the Celtic periphery, especially Northern Scotland and Southern Ireland. Beginning in around 1640, the English birth rate rose steadily from around twenty-six per 1,000 to a peak of forty per 1,000 in the early 1800s. Yet the Malthusian trap did not close, as it had in the past and continued to do elsewhere. Real wages moved upwards. Rents trended downwards. And literacy rose markedly.24 A crucial change was the availability of an exit option for those willing to risk a transatlantic voyage. As early as the 1640s net emigration exceeded 100,000, and it ranged between 30,000 and 70,000 in every decade until the 1790s.25 Those who feared that these adventurous types were being lost to the land of their birth failed to see the reciprocal benefits of transatlantic migration as trade between the American colonies and Europe flourished. The exported labour was simply more productive in land-rich, labour-poor America. The emigrants’ departure also indirectly benefited their more risk-averse kinsmen who stayed behind by raising slightly the price of their work.

  Those, like Millicent How and Abraham Smith, who left England for America after around 1670 took little with them. Even the price of their passage was paid by, in effect, a mortgage on their future labour. But they carried in their minds a number of ideas that had profound implications for the American future. The first was the idea of property rights* as they had evolved in the common law courts (and the Court of Chancery) since the twelfth century.26 The second idea was that of militant Protestantism (though it is important not to forget that Quakers, Catholics and Jews also played their part in settling the eastern seaboard).27 The third idea was that taxation depended for its legitimacy on parliamentary approval; the Crown was granted ‘supply’ in return for consenting to the redress of grievances through legislation. These had been the core issues of Britain’s Civil War.