Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  In 1921 two royal and imperial heirs – the Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan, the future Shōwa Emperor, and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII – posed next to one another for a photographer. The thrones they stood to inherit could scarcely have been more geographically distant. Yet here they both were, on the steps of Henry Poole & Co., the Savile Row tailor,† more or less identically dressed. The Japanese Prince was in London on a pre-wedding shopping spree. A Henry Poole representative had already sailed all the way to Gibraltar to take his measurements, which were then cabled ahead to London. Henry Poole’s ledger for the year in question shows the enormous order placed in Hirohito’s name: military uniforms, embroidered waistcoats, dinner jackets, morning coats. A typical line in the list reads: ‘A fancy cashmere suit, a blue cloth suit, and a striped flannel suit’.54 Hirohito was far from being the only foreign dignitary in the market for an immaculately tailored English suit. Preserved in Henry Poole’s basement are thousands of suit patterns for clients ranging from the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, to the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Poole’s most devoted customer was Jitendra Narayan, Maharaja of Cooch Behar, whose lifetime purchases of bespoke suits exceeded a thousand. In every case, the aim was the same: to be as well dressed as the perfect English gentleman – and ‘costumes of the world’ be damned. It is revealing that the Japanese word for a suit is sebiro: ‘Savile Row’. Even today the smartest suits in Tokyo are English in design, hence the popularity of the Eikokuya brand, which means literally ‘England Store’. Discerning Anglophiles in Ginza, the West End of Tokyo, still seek out Ichibankan, founded by a tailor who learned his craft in Savile Row.

  The Japanese revolution in dress dated back to the 1870s. In the name of bunmei kaika (‘civilization and enlightenment’) and fukoku-kyōhei (‘rich country, strong army’), the imperial elite of the Meiji era had shed their samurai garb and kimonos in favour of replica European suits and dresses. The inspiration for this makeover came from a two-year tour of the United States and Europe by a delegation led by the Meiji minister Iwakura Tomomi, which had to acknowledge that, after centuries of self-imposed isolation, ‘in many respects our civilization is inferior to theirs’.55 Ever since 1853–4, when their economy had been forcibly reopened to trade by the threatening ‘black ships’ of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the Japanese had struggled to work out what it was that made the West so much richer and stronger than the Rest. Touring the West – a practice so common that it inspired a sugoroku (board game) – only raised more questions. Was it their political system? Their educational institutions? Their culture? Or the way they dressed? Unsure, the Japanese decided to take no chances. They copied everything. From the Prussian-style constitution of 1889 to the adoption of the British gold standard in 1897, Japan’s institutions were refashioned on Western models. The army drilled like Germans; the navy sailed like Britons. An American-style system of state elementary and middle schools was also introduced. The Japanese even started eating beef, hitherto taboo, and some reformers went so far as to propose abandoning Japanese in favour of English.

  The most visible change, however, was in the way the Japanese looked. It began in 1870, with a formal ban on the blackening of teeth and shaving of eyebrows at court. At around the same time, ministers began to cut their hair in the Western style. An imperial decree of 1871 ordered high officials to don yōfuku, the European frock coat worn over a high-collared white shirt; by 1887 it was standard wear for all public servants.56 A year later, on the advice of his reform-minded advisers, the hitherto closeted Meiji Emperor appeared for the first time in public, wearing (according to the Austrian ambassador) ‘a peculiar European uniform, half sailor and half ambassador!’ – a swallow-tailed coat with a great deal of gold braid.57 The armed forces were also required to adopt European uniforms. The new sailor’s outfit was based on that of the Royal Navy, while the army’s was initially French in inspiration, though it later switched to a Prussian look.58 Elite Japanese women also began wearing Western dress in 1884, when they began hosting foreign guests at the newly built Rokumeikan,* though the kimono endured in private. Even children’s clothing was Westernized, with the adoption of Prussian-style uniforms for boys at elite private schools; girls’ uniforms followed in the 1920s (and have not changed much since). No one embraced the new Western look more zealously than Ōkubo Toshimichi, one of the principal architects of the Meiji makeover. Once photographed as a sword-bearing samurai, proudly sitting cross-legged in flowing robes, he now perched stiffly on a chair in smartly cut black tailcoat, his top hat in his hand. When the delegation he led arrived in England in 1872, the Newcastle Daily Chronicle reported that ‘the gentlemen were attired in ordinary morning costume and except for their complexion and the oriental cast of their features, they could scarcely be distinguished from their English companions.’ Seventeen years later, on the day the new Japanese constitution was formally adopted, the Emperor wore the uniform of a European field marshal, his consort a fetching blue and pink evening dress, and the government ministers black military tunics with gold epaulettes.59

  There were those who were repelled by this aping of Western modes; indeed some Western cartoonists portrayed the Westernized Japanese precisely as apes.60 The element of self-abasement disgusted Japanese traditionalists too. On 14 May 1878, as he made his way to a meeting of the Council of State at the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, Ōkubo was attacked and brutally murdered by seven samurai, the death blow delivered to his throat with such force that the sword remained stuck in the ground below.61 Ōmura Masujirō, whose reforms Westernized Japan’s army, was another Meiji-era victim of traditionalist assassins, who posed a recurrent threat to pro-Western ministers until the 1930s. Yet there was no turning back. Attached though the Japanese remained to the samurai code of bushido, most accepted Ōkubo’s argument that Westernization was indispensable if Japan was to achieve parity with the European and American empires, beginning with equal treatment in trade treaties and international law generally.62 In the words of one Western observer who knew the country well, the Japanese motive was perfectly rational:

  Their great ambition is to be treated as men, as gentlemen, and as the equal[s] of Occidentals. In their antiquated garb they knew that they or their country would never be taken seriously. Very soon we saw a change of dress, not only among soldiers and Samurai but [also] among all the government officers and even in the Mikado itself … This revolution in clothes helped powerfully in the recognition by the whole world of Japan as an equal in the brotherhood of nations.63

  The Japanese had understood what a potent agent of development Western clothes were. For this was much more than just an outward makeover. It was part of a pivotal breakthrough in world history as Japan became the first non-Western society to experience the transformative power of the Industrial Revolution.

  The spread of the new dress code coincided with the rapid growth of the Japanese textile industry. Between 1907 and 1924 the number of cotton mills in Japan doubled from 118 to 232, the number of spindles more than trebled and the number of looms rose sevenfold.64 By 1900 textile factories employed 63 per cent of all Japan’s factory workers.65 Ten years later Japan was Asia’s sole net exporter of thread, yarn and cloth; indeed, its exports exceeded those of Germany, France and Italy. Japanese textile workers were by far the most productive in Asia. From 1907 to 1924 the Japanese cotton industry increased output per worker by 80 per cent – despite the fact that, as is clear from Adachi Ginkō’s 1887 picture of Ladies Sewing, the workforce was overwhelmingly young women, with an average age of just seventeen.66 For firms like Kanegafuchi, the years down to the Depression were boom years, with profits in excess of 44 per cent of capital.67 By not merely wearing Western clothes but also making them, Japan had ended the West’s monopoly on modern manufacturing.

  As in the West, one industrial breakthrough was followed by another. The first British-designed Japanese railway was built between Tokyo and Yokohama in the early 1870s. Soon,
beginning with the Ginza district of Tokyo, the country’s distinctive cities began to acquire telegraph wires, street lamps, iron bridges and brick walls in place of paper ones. Four business conglomerates – the zaibatsu – emerged as the dominant players in the economy: Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda. Swiftly, under British instruction, the Japanese moved from buying steam locomotives to building them.* By 1929 Platt Brothers of Oldham – for the better part of a century the leading manufacturers of textile machinery – were paying a royalty to the Japanese inventors of the automatic Toyoda loom.68

  No other Asian country embraced the Western way of life with the same enthusiasm as the Japanese. As India emerged from under British rule, by contrast, there was a conscious effort on the part of nationalists to retain Indian modes of dress, from Gandhi’s loincloth to Nehru’s collarless jackets and later Indira Gandhi’s saris. This symbolic rejection of Western norms was understandable. British protectionism and productivity had devastated India’s traditional hand-produced textile industry. Unlike the Japanese, however, the Indians were slow to adopt and exploit the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Here is one of the many puzzles of nineteenth-century history. The British did not seek to monopolize their new technology; on the contrary, they spread it throughout their empire. The Indians were introduced to the textile mill, the steam engine and the railway long before the Japanese. By the early 1900s, textile equipment was no more expensive in Asia than in continental Europe. Nor was coal. Wage costs were 16 per cent of those in England. Asian factory hours were not restricted by law as British factory hours were. Raw cotton was much closer to hand than in England. Yet industrial development failed to take off in India or, for that matter, in China (where labour costs were even lower).69 The explanation is that, cheap though labour was in India and China, the advantage was wiped out by dismally low productivity. An American worker was, on average, six to ten times more productive than an Indian using exactly the same equipment.70 British and American experts offered various explanations for this, ranging from inherent racial inferiority to chronic absenteeism and idling. ‘Everywhere it was apparent that there was little or poor supervision, and an entire lack of discipline,’ lamented one American visitor to a Bombay mill. ‘Empty spindles and loose reels or bobbins rolled about underfoot, waste and spool boxes were piled in heaps, while the basket boys, and even some of the older millhands, gathered in groups chewing bhang and chunam. Overseers, Mahrattas mostly, strolled indolently about.’71 A modern explanation might be the abysmal working conditions: the usual poor ventilation and excessive hours combined with temperatures and diseases unknown in Lancashire or Lowell.72 What was harder to explain was why one Asian country – Japan – was making such rapid gains in productivity that by the later 1930s it had forced 15 per cent of Bombay textile mills to close down altogether.

  British clothes were, of course, about more than economic modernity. Nowhere were the subtle gradations of the British class system more clearly expressed than in carefully tailored cloth. This was a world in which you naturally judged a man’s social status by the cut of his suit. Unfortunately for Hirohito, and for the Japanese in general, it was a world in which it was no less natural to judge a person’s worth by the colour of his skin and the set of his features.

  While Hirohito returned to Japan with his bespoke Western suits, the future King Edward VIII went to a fancy-dress ball with his chum Major Edward Dudley ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. They were both dressed as ‘Japanese coolies’. As far as they were concerned, such costumes were just as absurd as the Japanese dressing up in Western clothes. Indeed, in a letter to his mistress, Edward referred to Hirohito as a ‘prize monkey’ and observed that the Japanese people ‘breed like rabbits’. The Japan in which Hirohito grew to adulthood was a country that both admired the West for its modernity and resented it for its arrogance. To be treated as an equal, it seemed, Japan would have to acquire the ultimate Western accessory: an empire. It did not take long. In 1895 Japan’s European-style navy comprehensively defeated the ineptly led Chinese Beiyang Fleet at Weihaiwei. In Japanese illustrations of the time, the victors appear almost entirely European (even facially); the vanquished Chinese, with their outsized sleeves and pigtails, are dressed for defeat.73 But this was merely the beginning. Disappointed that they had been forced to settle for cash reparations rather than territory as the spoils of war, the Japanese began to realize that their European role models might be reluctant to grant them equal imperial status. As the Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru put it candidly:

  We have to establish a new European-style Empire on the Eastern Sea … How can we impress upon the minds of our thirty-eight million people this daring spirit and attitude of independence and self-government? In my opinion, the only course is to have them clash with Europeans, so that they will personally feel inconvenienced, realize their disadvantage, and absorb an awareness of Western vigorousness … I consider that the way to do this is to provide for truly free intercourse between Japanese and foreigners … Only thus can our Empire achieve a position equal to that of the Western countries with respect to treaties. Only thus can our Empire be independent, prosperous, and powerful.74

  The first clash with Westerners duly came in 1904 with the Russo-Japanese War over Manchuria. Japan’s decisive victory at sea and on land sent a signal to the world: there was nothing divinely ordained about Western predominance. With the right institutions and technology – not to mention the right clothes – an Asian empire could defeat a European one. An economic forecaster in 1910 might already have projected that Japan would overtake even Britain itself before the end of the century, which indeed it did; in 1980 Japanese per-capita GDP exceeded British for the first time. Regrettably, the line from 1910 to 1980 was anything but straight.

  RAGTIME TO RICHES

  The First World War, as we have seen, was a struggle between empires whose motives and methods had been honed overseas. It toppled four dynasties and shattered their empires. The American President Woodrow Wilson – the first of four Democratic holders of the office to embroil their country in a major overseas war – sought to recast the conflict as a war for national self-determination, a view that was never likely to be endorsed by the British and French empires, whose flagging war effort had been salvaged by American money and men. Czechs, Estonians, Georgians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Slovaks and Ukrainians were not the only ones who scented freedom; so did Arabs and Bengalis, to say nothing of the Catholic Irish. Aside from the Irish one, not one of the nation-states that emerged in the wake of the war retained meaningful independence by the end of 1939 (except possibly Hungary). The Mazzinian map of Europe appeared and then vanished like a flash in the pan.

  The alternative post-war vision of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, potentially expanding right across Eurasia. This gained its traction from the exceptional economic circumstances of the war. Because all governments financed the fighting to some degree by issuing short-term debt and exchanging it for cash at their central banks – printing money, in short – inflation gathered momentum during the war. Because so many men were under arms, labour shortages empowered the workers on the Home Front to push for higher wages. By 1917 hundreds of thousands of workers were involved in strikes in France, Germany and Russia. First Spanish influenza then Russian Bolshevism swept the world. As in 1848 urban order broke down, only this time the contagion spread as far as Buenos Aires and Bengal, Seattle and Shanghai. Yet the proletarian revolution failed everywhere but in the Russian Empire, which was reassembled by the Bolsheviks in the wake of a brutal civil war. No other socialist leaders were as ruthless as Lenin in adopting ‘democratic centralism’ (which was the opposite of democratic), rejecting parliamentarism and engaging in terrorism against opponents. Some of what the Bolsheviks did (the nationalization of banks, the confiscation of land) was straight out of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. Some of what they did (‘the greatest ferocity and savagery of suppression … seas of blood
’)75 owed more to Robespierre. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ – which in fact meant the dictatorship of the Bolshevik leadership – was Lenin’s original contribution. This was even worse than the resurrection of Bazarov, the nihilist in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1856). It was what his estranged friend Fyodor Dostoevsky had warned Russia about in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment (1866) – the murderer Raskolnikov’s nightmare of a ‘terrible, unprecedented and unparalleled plague’ from Asia:

  Those infected were seized immediately and went mad. Yet people never considered themselves so clever and unhesitatingly right as these infected ones considered themselves. Never had they considered their decrees, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions and their beliefs more firmly based. Whole settlements, whole cities and nations, were infected and went mad … People killed each other with senseless rage … soldiers flung themselves upon each other, slashed and stabbed, ate and devoured each other.

  To the east there was almost no stopping the Bolshevik epidemic. To the west it could not get over the Vistula, nor south of the Caucasus, thanks to a gifted trio of political entrepreneurs who devised that synthesis of nationalism and socialism which was the true manifestation of the Zeitgeist: Józef Piłsudski in Poland, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Benito Mussolini in Italy. The defeat of the Red Army outside Warsaw (August 1920), the expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks (September 1922) and the fascist March on Rome (October 1922) marked the advent of a new era – and a new look.

  With the exception of Mussolini, who wore a three-piece suit with a winged collar and spats, most of those who participated in the publicity stunt that was the March on Rome were in makeshift uniforms composed of black shirts, jodhpurs and knee-high leather riding boots. The idea was that the manly, martial virtues of the Great War would now be carried over into peacetime, beginning with a smaller war fought in the streets and fields against the left. Uniformity was the order of the day – but a uniformity of dress without the tedious discipline of a real army. Even the famous March was more of a stroll, as the many press photographs make clear. It had been the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi who had first used red-coloured shirts as the basis for a political movement. By the 1920s dyed tops were mandatory on the right; the Italian fascists opted for black while, as we have seen, the German National Socialist Sturmabteilung adopted colonial brown.