Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  Romance is not the only form of love we have to consider: there is also the affection and support of neighbours and friends. In this respect, it is community integration that has altered most over the centuries. To begin with, most people lived in the countryside in small, self-sufficient groups; they had to be supportive of their members in order to function. Town-dwellers similarly depended on being recognised and respected in their communities. Many urban codes included the ultimate sanction that townsmen who repeatedly broke a by-law were to be banished. This was a far more serious punishment than it would be in modern times, as it entailed a man losing his friends and supporters – all the people who would vouch for him in court, protect him on the streets and lend him food or money. Such a dependency on the community prevailed even when cities began to grow larger in the late Middle Ages; where you were from was an important part of your identity, whether that place was a huge city or a small village. In the sixteenth century, with the Reformation and the growth of travel, it began to break down in the cities but remained strong in the smaller towns and the country. However, the advent of the railways in the nineteenth century dealt a huge blow to community integration everywhere. Large towns and cities could not provide the same bonds of support and collective reassurance that small towns and villages once offered their inhabitants. More often than not, the residents of a street in a large town or city had not grown up together, and recent proximity could not replace the trust and fellow feeling of lifelong familiarity. People began to live further and further apart from their families and friends. In the mid nineteenth century, they began to emigrate in ever larger numbers. Thus the nineteenth and twentieth centuries again feature as the ones that saw the most change, due to the destruction of supportive communities and the creation of alienating conurbations. A deciding factor in respect of which of the two saw the most change is the degree of urbanisation. In most Western countries, more people lived in the country than in a town or city before 1900 – only England and Holland saw more than 50 per cent urbanisation at an earlier date. Therefore with regard to the Western world as a whole, it seems that the twentieth century saw more change than the nineteenth.

  As with previous elements in our scale of need, it is necessary to select the third, fourth and fifth centuries of greatest change. I would suggest that the sixteenth century should be placed third, because of the growth of travel and the religious divisions that split communities. The Black Death puts the fourteenth century in fourth place, on account of the deaths of so many people and the disintegration of many settlements, which proved unsustainable after depopulation. The twelfth century should be fifth, I think, because of the growth in numbers, community security and collaborative efforts to clear the land.

  PERSONAL ENRICHMENT

  Obviously there were wealthy people in every century in the past, to the extent that most centuries saw a greater disparity of wealth than the twentieth; but there can be no doubt that the twentieth century witnessed the greatest change in the disposable income of the population as a whole. Angus Maddison’s study of the world economy estimated per capita GDP for western Europe as follows:

  Country 1500 1600 1700 1820 1913 1998

  UK 714 974 1,250 1,707 4,921 18,714

  France 727 841 986 1,230 3,485 19,558

  Italy 1,100 1,100 1,100 1,117 2,564 17,759

  Germany 676 777 894 1,058 3,648 17,799

  All western Europe 774 894 1,024 1,232 3,473 17,921

  GDP per capita (1990 international dollars)12

  As the table shows, people’s purchasing power in the twentieth century increased by more than 400 per cent. The second largest increase in general wealth occurred in the nineteenth century. For the centuries before 1800 it is less easy to discern, as Maddison simply assumed standard levels of increase (15 per cent per century in many cases). However, more recent studies by economic historians give an indication of the changes in the period 1300–1800, as shown below. The fact that the increase in per capita GDP in the first half of the nineteenth century exceeded any previous century’s growth confirms that it should take second place. Third on this scale would be the eighteenth or the fourteenth century. However, in the sixteenth century, the average per capita GDP across three of the six countries – England, Italy and Germany – fell by 20 per cent – more than it rose in either the fourteenth or the eighteenth; the figures for Spain and especially for Holland skew the picture. The thirteenth-century shift to a market economy is also important, even though it is unmeasurable. Given the number of markets and fairs that were founded, and the fact that this development underpins the entire shift to a money-based economy, it seems that the thirteenth century should be placed third on qualitative grounds. The sixteenth then would be fourth due to the massive decrease in the per capita wealth of several countries, with the principal exception of Holland. The fourteenth century should be prioritised over the eighteenth because the changes outside England in the latter were small or negligible, whereas the per capita wealth of the peasantry after the Black Death increased across the whole of Europe.

  Country 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1850

  England (GB after 1700) 727 1,096 1,153 1,077 1,509 2,125 2,718

  Holland (Netherlands 1850) 1,195 1,454 2,662 2,105 2,408 2,371

  Belgium 929 1,073 1,264 1,497 1,841

  Italy 1,644 1,726 1,644 1,302 1,398 1,333 1,350

  Spain 1,295 1,382 1,230 1,205 1,487

  Germany 1,332 894 1,068 1,140 1,428

  Average (mean) 1,186 1,339 1,301 1,398 1,429 1,618 1,866

  Change 13% -3% 7% 2% 13% 15%

  GDP per capita (1990 international dollars)13

  Not all forms of enrichment take the form of money. The beauty of Italian Renaissance art and early-nineteenth-century music were responses to a demand for fine art and romantic orchestration; both therefore can be said to fulfil a need. However, we cannot assume that one century needed another century’s cultural values. Besides, as Maslow’s hierarchy makes clear, such elevated needs only have significance for people whose other, more pressing requirements have been met. Our modern desire for cultural enrichment is greater than ever because fewer of us are hungry, cold, in danger or seriously ill than ever before. But it should go without saying that that greater need is only satisfied by more of us having more disposable income to pay artists, writers, musicians and film-makers. If society did not have the surpluses to feed its artists, there would not be any art. Thus the quantitative assessment of changes in real income is the best way of measuring all forms of enrichment – cultural as well as financial – across the centuries, without having to make subjective judgements about the aesthetic value of, say, Donatello compared to Dali.

  COMMUNITY ENRICHMENT

  People’s ability to enrich their communities underwent a transformation over the millennium. In the eleventh century only aristocrats could afford to give to their community as only they had disposable assets, such as manors and mills, to donate to the Church or to hospitals who looked after the poor. Likewise, they alone had the wealth and land to build bridges or to grant their tenants the right to gather firewood freely from their woodlands. By the thirteenth century merchants were also among the benefactors of society; by the sixteenth it was predominantly the taxpayer who supported both the community and the nation state. And so it has been ever since. In the modern period a massive amount of money was given to the community through income tax, indirect taxes such as value added tax and capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and local taxes. There can be no doubt that the twentieth and nineteenth centuries saw the greatest changes in the ability to enrich the community as benefits were given to the needy that had hardly existed previously, such as unemployment benefit, old-age pensions and disability support. The levels of tax paid today dwarf those demanded in the Middle Ages and early-modern period. Thus the ability to enrich the community is largely dependent on the growth in GDP, and the changes to be noted in this section are more or less the same as those we encountered in the
context of personal enrichment. It seems unnecessary to discuss them again here.

  SUMMING UP

  As far as society’s most essential needs go, and using the closest quantitative assessment available, the results are undoubtedly in favour of the modern world.

  Need Measurement 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th

  Physiological needs Population growth 19th 20th 18th 12th 13th

  War A measure of casualties relative to population, supplemented with qualitative assessment 20th 17th 11th 16th 14th

  Law and order Homicide rate, supplemented with qualitative assessment 16th 17th 15th 18th 12th

  Health Life expectancy at birth, supplemented with qualitative assessment 20th 19th 14th 17th 16th

  Ideology Qualitative 16th 19th 18th 20th 17th

  Community support Qualitative 20th 19th 16th 14th 12th

  Personal enrichment Partly qualitative assessment, supplemented with per capita GDP & number of markets founded 20th 19th 13th 16th 14th

  Community enrichment As above 20th 19th 13th 16th 14th

  By all the needs that I have defined as important, the twentieth century emerges first in five out of the eight categories. In fact, if you chart these changes with a points system – five points for a prime position, four for a second, three for a third – there is an unmistakable pattern. According to our scale of needs, the twentieth century saw the most change. Although I have no doubt that the Black Death was by far the most traumatic single event that humanity has ever experienced, our adaptability meant that we managed to restore most practical aspects of our lives within a relatively short time. In the twentieth century that same adaptability moved us further and further from our ancestors as we willingly embraced alternative patterns of behaviour. Therefore it looks as though I have to eat humble pie and admit that the TV presenter in December 1999 was right and I was wrong. Having said this, I maintain that I was not wrong to doubt her, for her opinion was based on an unqualified assumption about the relationship between technology and social change. Moreover, as I hope most readers will realise by now, it is not the answer itself that matters. It is what we have found out in the consideration of the question that is important. Breaking down the overarching concept of change into smaller facets has allowed us to glimpse the dynamics of long-term human development. We can see that not all change is technological: it includes language, individualism, philosophy, religious division, secularisation, geographical discovery, social reform and the weather. In fact, the fundamental innovations before 1800 were based on very few technological innovations. But since the mid nineteenth century we have been practically living on another planet. Our lives and livelihoods now depend on the economy, not on the land, and therein lies a world of difference.

  Aspects of change described in this book related to the scale of needs

  The end of history?

  People living in the West today would appear to have met practically all their needs. While the least wealthy 10 per cent will no doubt argue that this is not true for them, it goes without saying that there will always be a poorest tenth of the population, who will feel disadvantaged. However, their relative poverty today looks hugely privileged next to that of the poorest 10 per cent in 1900. The injustices and inequalities that remain today are the by-products of the systems by which we have satisfied the requirements of the majority of the population. But what next? If so many social factors followed these civilisation curves to an apogee by 2000, will the twentieth century remain the one that saw the greatest change?

  This question has much in common with that posed by the historian Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Ever since the Enlightenment, various historians, economists and philosophers have postulated that one day society will have progressed to a point from which it can go no further. Eventually everyone will accept the best all-round form of society, whether that be a liberal democracy or a socialist state, and the political development of the world will slow down and stop. That progression – from hunter-gatherer to the final state of society, which Fukuyama believes will be liberal democracy – has been called Universal History. As Fukuyama says, there will still be ‘history’ in the form of events when Universal History reaches its final conclusion. Wars will still break out. Diseases and inventions will continue to plague and benefit mankind. But these will be no more than ripples in a calm sea. Politically the world will have arrived at the ideal and unchanging state. Everyone will be fed, educated and looked after with regard to their health. Ideologically there will be no need for anyone to oppose the government under which they thrive. Fukuyama thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 indicated that Western liberalism was the political paradigm that would prove enduring, and wrote The End of History to support that thesis.

  With so many civilisation curves indicating the culmination of so many beneficial changes, it is reasonable to conclude that the latter part of this book (if not the whole of it) supports the concept of the ‘end of history’. We have charted the path to an egalitarian, liberal democracy that more or less corresponds with the political model that Fukuyama thought would become accepted everywhere. How could any future century see more change than that? Once you’re there, you’re there. But while such a conclusion is reasonable, it is incorrect. Like Fukuyama and every renowned political economist before 1945 – with the notable exception of Malthus – we have considered just one side of the vast economic exchange that underpins humanity’s existence: we have only considered the demand side. That is to say we have examined what we want: what our needs are, how we might make ourselves and our nations wealthy, how we might distribute our riches, and how we might satisfy ourselves. But every economic exchange also consists of a supply side. Fukuyama – like Hegel, Marx and other, less important protagonists of Universal History – neglects this side of the exchange between mankind and our environment.

  The ‘supply side’ of this relationship is the availability of resources, from such basic things as water, land, air and sunlight to timber, coal, metal ores, oil and natural gas. In the past it was taken for granted that sufficient land and natural resources existed, and the only question to be debated was who controlled them. However, when the photograph Earthrise was published in 1968, it revealed in a beautifully simple way how small the Earth is and how limited our resources are. As it happened, there was no immediate threat to the high living of the sixties, and the pessimism did not take hold. The fleeting attention of the world moved on to other things. Only a few earnest souls tried to alert political leaders to the impending over-exploitation of the world’s resources. Most people in positions of responsibility decided that worrying about such things was premature, distracting and a low priority while there was the important task of encouraging business, international competition and, above all, economic growth.

  It should be obvious to all that endless growth of manufacturing and food production on a planet of limited size is impossible. Some optimistic economists argue, however, that unending economic growth is possible, despite our limited resources. This is because economic growth is measured by Gross Domestic Product: everlasting increases in GDP are theoretically possible due to the potentially endless recycling of resources, with value added at each stage. These optimistic economists often cite copper as an example. If the copper in old electrical goods is recycled into the newest technological devices, its value is increased and it adds to the growth of the economy. When the new electrics become old and fail, they too are recycled into a better, value-added product and the growth cycle continues, without the need for more copper. However, most of the resources on which the world depends do not fit this model. As shown in the volumetric approach to history discussed at the start of the chapter on the nineteenth century, in Europe, over half of the last thousand years of human life was experienced in the last two centuries. This means that per capita consumption of mineral resources has been far higher over that time than before 1800. If we were to draw a pie chart showing
the last thousand years of metal consumption, it would indicate that virtually all of it was consumed after that date. And with regard to the everlasting-growth optimists’ favourite example, more than 95 per cent of all the copper ever mined – since the start of the Bronze Age – was used in the twentieth century.14 Almost all the oil produced over the last millennium was drilled, pumped and burnt in the twentieth century. As for coal, the amounts consumed in the twentieth century far outweigh the quantities burnt in the nineteenth century, and consumption levels before 1800 were negligible by comparison. Even the use of iron is largely a modern phenomenon. Currently annual steel consumption in Europe is about 400–450 kilograms per capita, and almost double that in some highly industrialised manufacturing countries. Before 1800, it probably would not have exceeded 10 kilograms. On this basis 95 per cent of iron has been used since the Industrial Revolution. The world’s iron supplies are plentiful, but to produce steel you need coal – between 0.15 and 0.77 tons of it per ton of steel, depending on your method.15 And although steel and copper can be recycled, coal cannot. Nor can natural gas. Nor can oil. Thus, with an even bigger population emerging from all this consumption of the world’s resources, the argument that we can achieve unending economic growth by recycling copper and steel is wholly unrealistic.

  The demand side of mankind’s exchange with the Earth and the supply side are thus in agreement. The twentieth century was not only when we satisfied more of our needs than ever before but also when we exploited Earth’s non-renewable resources at an unprecedented rate. It was therefore unlike any previous period. In socio-economic terms, we were living on a newly discovered planet.