Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Professional historians are famously bad prophets, to the point that most refuse to talk about the future at all. The more I have thought about why the West rules, though, the more I have realized that the part-time historian Winston Churchill understood things better than most professionals. “The farther backward you can look,” Churchill insisted, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” Following in this spirit (even if Churchill might not have liked my answers), I will suggest that knowing why the West rules gives us a pretty good sense of how things will turn out in the twenty-first century.

  I am not, of course, the first person to speculate on why the West rules. The question is a good 250 years old. Before the eighteenth century the question rarely came up, because it frankly did not then make much sense. When European intellectuals first started thinking seriously about China, in the seventeenth century, most felt humbled by the East’s antiquity and sophistication; and rightly so, said the few Easterners who paid the West any heed. Some Chinese officials admired Westerners’ ingenious clocks, devilish cannons, and accurate calendars, but they saw little worth emulating in these otherwise unimpressive foreigners. If China’s eighteenth-century emperors had known that French philosophers such as Voltaire were writing poems praising them, they would probably have thought that that was exactly what French philosophers ought to be doing.

  Yet from almost the first moment factories filled England’s skies with smoke, European intellectuals realized that they had a problem. As problems went, it was not a bad one: they appeared to be taking over the world, but did not know why.

  Europe’s revolutionaries, reactionaries, romantics, and realists went into a frenzy of speculation on why the West was taking over, producing a bewildering mass of hunches and theories. The best way to begin asking why the West rules may be by separating these into two broad schools of thought, which I will call the “long-term lock-in” and “short-term accident” theories. Needless to say, not every idea fits neatly into one camp or the other, but this division is still a useful way to focus things.

  The unifying idea behind long-term lock-in theories is that from time immemorial some critical factor made East and West massively and unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West. Long-termers disagree—fiercely—on what that factor was and when it began to operate. Some emphasize material forces, such as climate, topography, or natural resources; others point to less tangible matters, such as culture, politics, or religion. Those who favor material forces tend to see “the long term” as being very long indeed. Some look back fifteen thousand years to the end of the Ice Age; a few go back even further. Those who emphasize culture usually see the long term as being a bit shorter, stretching back just one thousand years to the Middle Ages or two and a half thousand to the age of the Greek thinker Socrates and China’s great sage Confucius. But the one thing long-termers can agree on is that the Britons who shot their way into Shanghai in the 1840s and the Americans who forced Japan’s harbors open a decade later were merely the unconscious agents of a chain of events that had been set in motion millennia earlier. A long-termer would say that by beginning this book with a contrast between Albert-in-Beijing and Looty-in-Balmoral scenarios, I was just being silly. Queen Victoria was always going to win: the result was inevitable. It had been locked in for generations beyond count.

  Between roughly 1750 and 1950 nearly all explanations for why the West ruled were variations on the long-term lock-in theme. The most popular version was that Europeans were simply culturally superior to everyone else. Since the dying days of the Roman Empire most Europeans had identified themselves first and foremost as Christians, tracing their roots back to the New Testament, but in trying to explain why the West was now coming to rule, some eighteenth-century intellectuals imagined an alternative line of descent for themselves. Two and a half thousand years ago, they argued, the ancient Greeks created a unique culture of reason, inventiveness, and freedom. This set Europe on a different (better) trajectory than the rest of the world. The East had its learning too, they conceded, but its traditions were too muddled, too conservative, and too hierarchical to compete with Western thought. Many Europeans concluded that they were conquering everyone else because culture made them do it.

  By 1900 Eastern intellectuals, struggling to come to terms with the West’s economic and military superiority, often bought into this theory, though with a twist. Within twenty years of Commodore Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay a “Civilization and Enlightenment” movement was translating the classics of the French Enlightenment and British liberalism into Japanese and advocating catching up with the West through democracy, industrialism, and the emancipation of women. Some even wanted to make English be the national language. The problem, intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi insisted in the 1870s, was long-term: China had been the source of much of Japan’s culture, and China had gone terribly wrong in the distant past. As a result, Japan was only “semicivilized.” But while the problem was long-term, Fukuzawa argued, it was not locked in. By rejecting China, Japan could become fully civilized.

  Chinese intellectuals, by contrast, had no one to reject but themselves. In the 1860s a “Self-Strengthening” movement argued that Chinese traditions remained fundamentally sound; China just needed to build a few steamships and buy some foreign guns. This, it turned out, was mistaken. In 1895 a modernized Japanese army surprised a Chinese fortress with a daring march, seized its foreign-made guns, and turned them on China’s steamships. The problem clearly went deeper than having the right weapons. By 1900 Chinese intellectuals were following the Japanese lead, translating Western books on evolution and economics. Like Fukuzawa, they concluded that Western rule was long-term but not locked in; by rejecting its own past China could catch up too.

  But some Western long-termers thought there was simply nothing the East could do. Culture made the West best, they claimed, but was not the ultimate explanation for Western rule, because culture itself had material causes. Some believed that the East was too hot or too diseased for people to develop a culture as innovative as the West’s; or perhaps there were just too many bodies in the East—consuming all the surplus, keeping living standards low, and preventing anything like the liberal, forward-looking Western society from emerging.

  Long-term lock-in theories come in every political coloring, but Karl Marx’s version has been the most important and influential. In the very days that British troops were liberating Looty, Marx—then writing a China column for the New York Daily Tribune—suggested that politics was the real factor that had locked in Western rule. For thousands of years, he claimed, Oriental states had been so centralized and so powerful that they had basically stopped the flow of history. Europe progressed from antiquity through feudalism to capitalism, and proletarian revolutions were about to usher in communism, but the East was sealed in the amber of despotism and could not share in the progressive Western trajectory. When history did not turn out exactly as Marx had predicted, later Communists (especially Lenin and his followers) improved on his theories by claiming that a revolutionary vanguard might shock the East out of its ancient slumber. But that would only happen, Leninists insisted, if they could shatter the old, fossilized society—at whatever cost. This long-term lock-in theory is not the only reason why Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and the Kims of North Korea unleashed such horrors on their people, but it bears a heavy burden of responsibility.

  Right through the twentieth century a complicated dance went on in the West as historians uncovered facts that did not seem to fit the long-term lock-in stories, and long-termers adjusted their theories to accommodate them. For instance, no one now disputes that when Europe’s great age of maritime discovery was just beginning, Chinese navigation was far more advanced and Chinese sailors already knew the coasts of India, Arabia, East Africa, and perhaps Australia.* When the eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed from Nanjing for Sri Lanka in 1405 he led nearly three hundred vessels. There were tankers carrying drink
ing water and huge “Treasure Ships” with advanced rudders, watertight compartments, and elaborate signaling devices. Among his 27,000 sailors were 180 doctors and pharmacists. By contrast, when Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz in 1492, he led just ninety men in three ships. His biggest hull displaced barely one-thirtieth as much water as Zheng’s; at eighty-five feet long it was shorter than Zheng’s mainmast, and barely twice as long as his rudder. Columbus had no freshwater tankers and no real doctors. Zheng had magnetic compasses and knew enough about the Indian Ocean to fill a twenty-one-foot-long sea chart; Columbus rarely knew where he was, let alone where he was going.

  This might give pause to anyone assuming that Western dominance was locked in in the distant past, but several important books have argued that Zheng He does, after all, fit into long-term lock-in theories: we just need more sophisticated versions. For example, in his magnificent book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economist David Landes renews the idea that disease and demography always gave Europe a decisive edge over China, but adds a new twist by suggesting that dense population favored centralized government in China and reduced rulers’ incentives to exploit Zheng’s voyages. Because they had no rivals, most Chinese emperors worried more about how trade might enrich undesirable groups like merchants than they did about getting more riches for themselves; and because the state was so powerful, they could stamp out this alarming practice. In the 1430s they banned oceanic voyages, and in the 1470s perhaps destroyed Zheng’s records, ending the great age of Chinese exploration.

  The biologist and geographer Jared Diamond makes a similar case in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. His main goal is to explain why it was societies within the band of latitude that runs from China to the Mediterranean Sea that developed the first civilizations, but he also suggests that Europe rather than China came to dominate the modern world because Europe’s peninsulas made it easy for small kingdoms to hold out against would-be conquerors, favoring political fragmentation, while China’s rounder coastline favored centralized rulers over petty princes. The resulting political unity allowed fifteenth-century Chinese emperors to ban voyages like Zheng’s.

  In fragmented Europe, by contrast, monarch after monarch could reject Columbus’s crazy proposal, but he could always find someone else to ask. We might speculate that if Zheng had had as many options as Columbus, Hernán Cortés might have met a Chinese governor in Mexico in 1519, not the doomed Montezuma. But according to long-term lock-in theories, vast impersonal forces such as disease, demography, and geography ruled that possibility out.

  Lately, though, Zheng’s voyages and plenty of other facts have started striking some people as just too awkward to fit into long-term models at all. Already in 1905 Japan showed that Eastern nations could give Europeans a run for their money on the battlefield, defeating the Russian Empire. In 1942 Japan almost swept the Western powers out of the Pacific altogether, then, bouncing back from a shattering defeat in 1945, changed direction to become an economic giant. Since 1978 China, as we all know, has moved along a similar path. In 2006 China beat out the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and even in the darkest days of the 2008–2009 financial crisis, China’s economy kept growing at rates that Western governments would envy in the best of years. Maybe we need to throw out the old question and ask a new one: not why the West rules, but whether the West rules. If the answer is no, then long-term lock-in theories that seek ancient explanations for a Western rule that does not actually exist seem rather pointless.

  One result of these uncertainties has been that some Western historians have developed a whole new theory explaining why the West used to rule but is now ceasing to do so. I call this the short-term accident model. Short-term arguments tend to be more complicated than long-term ones, and there are fierce disagreements within this camp. But there is one thing short-termers do all agree on: pretty much everything long-termers say is wrong. The West has not been locked into global dominance since the distant past; only after 1800 CE, on the eve of the Opium War, did the West pull temporarily ahead of the East, and even that was largely accidental. The Albert-in-Beijing scenario is anything but silly. It could easily have happened.

  LUCKING OUT

  Orange County in California is better known for conservative politics, manicured palm trees, and long-time resident John Wayne (the local airport is named after him, despite his dislike of planes flying over the golf course) than for radical scholarship, but in the 1990s it became the epicenter of short-term accident theories of global history. Two historians (Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz) and a sociologist (Wang Feng) at the University of California’s Irvine campus* wrote landmark books arguing that whatever we look at—ecology or family structures, technology and industry or finance and institutions, standards of living or consumer tastes—the similarities between East and West vastly outweighed the differences as late as the nineteenth century.

  If they are right, it suddenly becomes much harder to explain why Looty came to London rather than Albert heading east. Some short-termers, like the maverick economist Andre Gunder Frank (who wrote more than thirty books on everything from prehistory to Latin American finance), argue that the East was actually better placed to have an industrial revolution than the West until accidents intervened. Europe, Frank concluded, was simply “a distant marginal peninsula” in a “Sinocentric world order.” Desperate to get access to the markets of Asia, where the real wealth was, Europeans a thousand years ago tried to batter their way through the Middle East in the Crusades. When this did not work some, like Columbus, tried sailing west to reach Cathay.

  That failed too, because America was in the way, but in Frank’s opinion Columbus’s blunder marked the beginning of the change in Europe’s place in the world system. In the sixteenth century China’s economy was booming but faced constant silver shortages. America was full of silver; so Europeans responded to China’s needs by getting Native Americans to claw a good 150,000 tons of precious metal out of the mountains of Peru and Mexico. A third of it ended up in China. Silver, savagery, and slavery bought the West “a third-class seat on the Asian economic train,” as Frank put it, but still more needed to happen before the West could “displace Asians from the locomotive.”

  Frank thought that the rise of the West ultimately owed less to European initiative than to a “decline of the East” after 1750. This began, he believed, when the silver supply started shrinking. This set off political crises in Asia but provided a bracing stimulus in Europe, where, as they ran out of silver to export, Europeans mechanized their industries to make goods other than silver competitive in Asian markets. Population growth after 1750 also had different results at each end of Eurasia, Frank argued, polarizing wealth, feeding political crises, and discouraging innovation in China but providing cheaper labor for new factories in Britain. As the East fell apart the West had the industrial revolution that should, by rights, have happened in China; but because it happened in Britain, the West inherited the world.

  Other short-termers, though, disagree. The sociologist Jack Goldstone (who taught for some years at the University of California’s Davis campus and coined the term “California School” to describe the short-term theorists) has argued that East and West were roughly equally well (or poorly) placed until 1600, each ruled by great agrarian empires with sophisticated priesthoods guarding ancient traditions. Everywhere from England to China, plagues, wars, and the overthrow of dynasties brought these societies to the brink of collapse in the seventeenth century, but whereas most of the empires recovered and re-imposed strictly orthodox thought, northwest Europe’s Protestants rejected Catholic traditions.

  It was that act of defiance, Goldstone suggests, that sent the West down the path toward an industrial revolution. Freed from the fetters of archaic ideologies, European scientists laid bare the workings of nature so effectively that British entrepreneurs, sharing in this pragmatic can-do culture, learned to put coal and steam to work. By 1800 the West had pulled decisive
ly ahead of the rest.

  None of this was locked in, Goldstone argues, and in fact a few accidents could have changed the world completely. For instance, at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 a Catholic musket ball ripped through the shoulder of the coat worn by William of Orange, the Protestant pretender to England’s throne. “It’s well it came no nearer,” William is supposed to have said; well indeed, says Goldstone, speculating that if the shot had hit a few inches lower England would have remained Catholic, France would have dominated Europe, and the industrial revolution might not have happened.

  Kenneth Pomeranz at Irvine goes further still. As he sees it, the fact that there was an industrial revolution at all was a gigantic fluke. Around 1750, he argues, East and West were both heading for ecological catastrophe. Population had grown faster than technology and people had already done nearly everything possible in the way of extending and intensifying agriculture, moving goods around, and reorganizing themselves. They were about to hit the limits of what was possible with their technology, and there was every reason to expect global recession and declining population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Yet the last two hundred years have seen more economic growth than all earlier history put together. The reason, Pomeranz explains in his important book The Great Divergence, is that western Europe, and above all Britain, just got lucky. Like Frank, Pomeranz sees the West’s luck beginning with the accidental discovery of the Americas, creating a trading system that provided incentives to industrialize production; but unlike Frank, he suggests that as late as 1800 Europe’s luck could still have failed. It would have taken a lot of space, Pomeranz points out, to grow enough trees to feed Britain’s crude early steam engines with wood—more space, in fact, than crowded western Europe had. But a second stroke of luck intervened: Britain, alone in all the world, had conveniently located coalfields as well as rapidly mechanizing industries. By 1840 Britons were applying coal-powered machines to every walk of life, including iron warships that could shoot their way up the Yangzi River. Britain would have needed to burn another 15 million acres of woodland each year—acres that did not exist—to match the energy now coming from coal. The fossil-fuel revolution had begun, ecological catastrophe had been averted (or at least postponed into the twenty-first century), and the West suddenly, against all odds, ruled the globe. There had been no long-term lock in. It was all just a recent, freakish accident.