by Peter Watson
This is fine as far as it goes (though Spain, for one, was less coherent than Braudel implies, with a very mixed population, of Arabs, Berbers, Mozarabs and Jews). However, all that has really been ‘explained’ is why, at some stage, Europe should have taken off. Braudel’s central argument was that geography governed raw materials, the creation of cities (the markets) and trade routes. There was, in other words, a certain geographical inevitability about the way civilisations developed, which made Europe, rather than Asia, Africa or America, the cradle of both science and capitalism. But something more is needed. We still have to explain why the acceleration happened when it did. By no means everyone accepts that the rise of Europe was inevitable.
Not everyone accepts that change took place between 1050 and 1200 either. In his book Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce, AD 300–900 (2001), Michael McCormick, of Harvard, argues that Europe was on the move from as early as the late eighth century, and that change was fully underway by 1100, which meant that the advance of the continent was three times as long as is usually thought, ‘and three times as difficult’.4 He points out that the real low point, in western Europe at least, was 700, when there was a drastic reduction in all commercial activity, when the international trade in spices collapsed, when papyrus stopped reaching Frankland, when fewer palimpsests were produced.5 He records that when the Venerable Bede died in 735 he gave away his pepper and incense on his deathbed. Four generations later, however, the pepper trade had increased to the point where it was no longer a once-in-a-lifetime gift. In the Carolingian empire, coinage was far more widespread and sophisticated than has hitherto been thought, he says, and he discovered fifty-four Arab coins at forty-two locations in the empire between the seventh and tenth centuries.6 He argues there was a rise in ship-owning in the mid-ninth century, that he discovered accounts of nearly seven hundred people making long, arduous journeys at this time. There was enough traffic on the Danube in the ninth century for it to boast both pirates and toll collectors.7 By the early tenth century, there were thriving markets in the Rhineland and in Paris and at the latter, at St Denis, the merchants came from Spain and Provence and dealt in goods from as far away as Iraq.8 He pointsoutthatacrucialeventwastheconversiontoChristianityoftheHungariankingdom, around AD 1000, which reopened the overland route to Constantinople.9
McCormick’s argument is persuasive (his book is 1,100 pages long and packed with detail). However, he seems to have identified a period of gestation, in which Europe was, as it were, getting itself together. Arabs who, like Mas‘udi, travelled in Urufa (as shown by their coins) didn’t appear to note yet that the continent was changing. It undoubtedly was, but the great leap forward had yet to occur.
The second type of explanation for the acceleration after the tenth century is economic, and falls into two parts. The economic/cultural situation in the ‘Old World’ has been described in detail by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, in Before European Hegemony.10 She writes: ‘The second half of the thirteenth century was a remarkable moment in world history. Never before had so many regions of the Old World come into contact with one another–albeit still only superficially. The apogee of this cycle came between the end of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth, by which time even Europe and China had established direct, if limited, contact with each other.’11 This economic world, she says, is not only fascinating in itself but, because it contained no single overriding power, it provided an important contrast to the world system that grew out of it: the one Europe reshaped to its own ends and dominated for so long.
Her argument is that in terms of time, the century between AD 1250 and 1350 constituted a fulcrum or critical ‘turning-point’ in world history, and in terms of space, the Middle East heartland region, linking the eastern Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean, constituted a geographical fulcrum on which West and East were then roughly balanced. The thesis of her book was, contra Braudel, that there was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favour the West rather than the East. She noted that there were eight basic trading systems but that these collapsed into three main ones–the European, the Middle Eastern and the Asian. All of them had several features in common: the invention of money and credit; mechanisms for pooling capital and distributing risk; merchants with independent wealth. Therefore, while conceding that between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries Europe did overtake the Orient, she concludes that there was nothing ‘special’ about Europe; instead the Orient was ‘temporarily in disarray’. She says there was progressive fragmentation of the overland trade routes that had been unified by Genghis Khan, that the depredations of Tamerlane around 1400 had a much worse effect on Asia than the Crusades ever did, and that the Black Death, ‘which spread from China all the way to Europe in the mid-century between 1348 and 1351, decimated most of the cities along the great sea route of world trade, disturbing customary behaviour, changing the terms of exchange because of differential demographic losses, and creating a fluidity in world conditions that facilitated radical transformations, benefiting some and harming others.’12 This could be seen in Europe, she says, where England, previously part of the periphery, began to play a more central role after the plague, since her ‘die-off’ rate was lower than on the continent. And it was the galleys of the Italian city-states that, by the end of the thirteenth century, had opened the north Atlantic to traffic, delivering the coup de grâce to a world system that had existed for centuries. This led to the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Atlantic route to the Indies, much of which had been known to Arab and Chinese traders for centuries. The Arab and Indian vessels, however, proved no match for the Portuguese men-of-war that appeared in their waters in the early 1500s.
Her point is that the world system in place by the thirteenth century was relatively stable, and truly cosmopolitan: different religious systems co-existed–Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism; and business practices were equally sophisticated the world over–‘The organisation of textile production in Kanchipuram was not unlike that in Flanders, the state built boats for trade in both Venice and China, trading centres–like Cairo, Zaytun and Troyes–grew in much the same way, and at a similar rate in the centuries up to the thirteenth.’13 For Janet Abu-Lughod, what happened in the thirteenth century was that a world trading system that had been stable for some time became unravelled, leaving the Western systems, centring on Bruges, Troyes, Genoa and Venice, relatively unscathed, while destroying those centres further east, at Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Samarkand, Hormuz, Cambay, Calicut, Malacca and mainland China.14 Abu-Lughod argues that, in general, historians have failed to ‘begin the story early enough’ and have therefore given a truncated and distorted causal explanation for the rise of the West. In fact, she says, the time between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries marked the transition, and geopolitical factors within the rest of the world system created an opportunity without which Europe’s rise would have been unlikely.
For Abu-Lughod, it was thus important that ‘the rise of the west’ was preceded by ‘the fall of the east’. When the Mongols, severely weakened by the Black Death, ‘lost’ China in 1386, the world now forfeited the key link that had connected the overland route, terminating at Peking (Beijing), with the sea routes through the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, terminating at the ports of south-east China. The repercussions of this disjunction at the eastern end of the world system were felt throughout the trading world.15 In particular, it favoured Genoa at the expense of Venice. Venice was, with Genoa, the gateway of this world system into Europe. But Genoa also had a more ready alternative–the Atlantic. And as the Atlantic opened up, ships plying that route were able to take advantage of the disarray in the East. This geographic reorientation displaced the centre of world gravity in a decisive manner.
The theory of Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of early Chinese science, is quite different. He begins by reminding us of the incredible number of inventions which
came out of the East before AD 1000, many of which were described in the preceding chapter. Needham was of the opinion that, in the earlier centuries, Europe had been a much more unstable continent than China, socially, politically and culturally speaking, and that this had kept the region backward. It was poor in precious metals and its layout–a series of peninsulas and archipelagos (Iberia, Italy, Greece)–had made it more nationalistic, because there were many natural boundaries. In addition to this, he says, the alphabet system of writing, precisely because it was so flexible, exacerbated the problem by making it relatively easy for different tribes and groups to evolve mutually incomprehensible languages (in contrast to China which had a unifying script). All this kept Europe embroiled in repeated conflict, and therefore backward.16
But then came two inventions, both out of China. First was the stirrup, which, by adding immeasurably to the power of the knightly class, helped create feudalism. And second gunpowder, which helped destroy feudalism, at least in Europe, because it reduced the power of the knightly class. As feudalism decayed in the West, according to Needham, it gave rise to a mercantile class, which was closely associated with the rise of science. In China, however, this didn’t happen. As a far more stable continent, with a more entrenched and unified imperial history, and despite the many inventions to its credit, feudalism there was replaced with ‘bureaucratic feudalism’, or a ‘mandarinate’, a scholar-elite class highly suitable to a large country, heavily centralised under an emperor, where mandarin bureaucrats could administer steady progress. The unfortunate side to all this, however, was that under such a system the mercantile class was down-graded–the merchants were the lowest of the four ranks of society, after scholars, farmers and artisans. As well as stifling creativity, this arrangement meant that the city-state never developed in China: cities there were dominated instead by the representative of the emperor, which meant there were no mayors, no guilds, no councillors. Instead of being places of upward mobility, Chinese cities were ruled from the top down. As a result, and despite that long list of inventions, China never developed modern business methods or modern science. For Needham this was, in the end, fatal.17
Whether or not the city-state ever developed in China, the rest of Needham’s argument has been both discredited and supported by more recent scholarship (entire conferences have been held on the ‘Needham factor’). There are first the doubts over the utility of feudalism as a concept, not simply because the term was a later invention but because the idea of a nexus of land/law/fealty does not really match the medieval experience. The power of the lord over the peasants did not come from horses, and stirrups, but from the wider socio-political system that divided the world into three orders (those who pray, those who fight, those who work) and supported a legal system that upheld the power of the few over the many. Moreover, this system only came into existence about the year 1000 and so it makes no sense to talk of ‘feudalism’ in the early Middle Ages. And what finally made the lords’ power over the peasants crumble had little to do with the fate of the knights–it was much more to do with the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century, when widespread plague and famine reduced the number of peasants, stimulating more demand for their labour, giving them more in wages and a greater freedom of movement, thus ending ‘serfdom’.
At the same time, other historians have underlined the fact that there was indeed a difference between Western and Eastern scholarship. The ideas and research of Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, about the differences in structure between early Chinese and early Greek science, were covered in an earlier chapter (page 128). More recently, Toby Huff has claimed that an important difference between Occident and Orient in this context is that in China and the Islamic world a student’s competence was judged by the state or the master. Neither of these systems fostered independent thought. Huff calculated that, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe, China and the Islamic world had roughly the same number of scholars, but that in the East they never achieved a corporate identity; therefore in the Islamic world and in China scholarship never acquired the independent power that it was to achieve in Europe.18 One reason it did develop in the West, he says, is because of the rediscovery of Justinian’s code, the Corpus iuris civilis (see pages 203–204 above), towards the end of the eleventh century. This reintroduced the concept of a legal system, a new science of law, which led to the idea of shared knowledge, which could be discussed and argued over. The idea of corporate knowledge, Huff says, lay behind the idea of the universities as conceived in Europe but not in China or the Islamic world.19 This meant there was no organised scepticism in the East. He shows for example that Arab astronomers knew what Kepler knew but because they had no concept of the Corpus astronomicum, a general body of astronomical work, which belonged to all and could be disputed, they never developed a Copernican view of a heliocentric universe.20
A somewhat different economic interpretation returns to Braudel’s point that Europe is relatively small. In The Rise of the Western World, Douglas North and Robert Thomas argue that in the High Middle Ages, the years between 1000 and 1300, Europe was transformed ‘from a vast wilderness into a well-colonised region’. There was a marked population increase which meant that, in effect, Europe was the first region in the history of the world to be ‘full’ with people. This was aided by the layout of its main rivers–the Danube, Rhine and the Rhône/Saône–which led deep into the heartland. Together, these factors had a number of consequences, not the least of which was to begin a change from the old feudal structure, and to give more and more people an interest in property, in owning land.21 It was this wider ownership of land which would, before too long, lead to a rise in specialisation (at first in the growing of crops, then in the services to support such specialisation), then to the rise in trade, the spread of markets, and the development of a money economy, so necessary if surplus wealth were to be created, which were the circumstances from which true capitalism developed.22
As part of the evidence in support of their argument, North and Thomas note that a new system of agriculture was introduced in these years in Europe, namely the change from the two-field system to the three-field system. Under the two-field system all arable land had been ploughed but only half of it planted to crops, the other half being left fallow to recuperate its fertility. The three-field system now divided the arable land of the manor into three parts. Typically, one field was ploughed and planted to wheat during the autumn, the second ploughed and planted in the spring to oats, barley, or legumes, such as peas or beans, and the remainder was ploughed and left fallow. The next year the crops were rotated. This led to a massive 50 per cent rise in yield, at the same time as spreading agricultural labour throughout the year, and reducing the chance of famine through crop failure.23 This period also saw a change from oxen to horse as the beasts of harness, the latter being 50 to 90 per cent more biologically efficient.
In turn, the eleventh century saw a rise in the use of watermills. This idea had begun outside Europe but its introduction spread rapidly in the new climate, despite the high capital expenditure that was required: in 1086, the Domesday Book recorded 5,624 mills for 3,000 communities in England. There is no reason to believe that England was technologically more advanced than the rest of Europe, though watermills naturally tended to multiply there because there were a lot of rivers in a small area. Hence wool and cloth manufacture became a major feature of England and Flanders.
These twin developments, of significantly more people having a stake in the land, and the idea that there was no more to go around, had two psychological effects, say North and Thomas. It helped make people more individualistic: because he or she now had a stake in something, a person’s identity was no longer defined only by his or her membership of a congregation, or as the serf of a lord of the manor; and it introduced (or reintroduced) the idea of efficiency, because resources could now be seen to be limited. Allied to the increased specialisation that was developing, and the burgeoning markets (of
fering tempting goods from far away), this was a profound social-psychological revolution which, in time, would lead to the Renaissance.
This too is an idea which has suffered from recent scholarship, which emphasises that there was always a large proportion–say, 40–50 per cent–of the population which was not serfs (in the sense of being ‘unfree’) and who already owned their own land. Carlo M. Cipolla, the Italian economic historian, further argues that there was no shortage of land in Europe, quite the opposite in fact: there was plenty. He notes that Europe may have differed from the East in having a larger proportion of the population who were unmarried, which helped avoid the breakup of estates and reduced the number of large families, both factors which helped ameliorate poverty. Cipolla also supports the arguments of Michael McCormick in showing a steady growth of technology: the watermill from the sixth century; the plough from the seventh; the crop rotation system from the eighth; the horseshoe and the neck harness from the ninth. In the same way the use of the mill proliferated to other uses, from beer-making in 861, through tanning in 1138, paper-milling in 1276, to the blast furnace in 1384.24 All this argues for a steady take-off of Europe rather than anything sudden. Cipolla agrees with North and Thomas that there were new business techniques from the eleventh century, especially a change from the hoarding of savings (deflationary) to the investment of ‘capital’, in particular the contratto di commenda.25 This was in effect a contract for one party to lend capital to another party, to finance foreign trade, the capital to be repaid, with interest, out of profits. Cipolla also notes that there was a growing demand for money (coins) from the tenth century on, and provides maps of the many mints sanctioned at that time. He notes that the terms ‘banks’ and ‘bankers’ make their first appearance in the twelfth century. Gold coinages appeared in Venice, Genoa and Florence between 1252 and 1284 and quickly became standards of value.26 Whether these are causes or symptoms of change isn’t clear.
