Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Of more practical use were the three armies of French and Norman knights, backed by Genoese merchants, which converged on Jerusalem in 1099. Their timing was impeccable: the Seljuks were too busy fighting one another to offer much resistance, and after heart-stopping feats of bravado the crusaders breached the holy city’s walls. For twelve hours they plundered and killed on a scale that shocked even the Normans among them, burning Jews alive and chopping Muslims into pieces (though at least, a Jewish woman observed, the Christians did not follow the Turkish practice of raping their victims first). Finally, at dusk, the conquerors splashed through ankle-deep gore to thank God at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  Yet spectacular though it was, this direct assault on the core never seriously threatened Islam. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was steadily rolled back until in 1187 the Muslims recaptured the city. More crusades followed, most failing dismally; in 1204 the fourth, unable to afford ships, ended up renting itself out as muscle to Venetian financiers and sacking not Jerusalem but Constantinople. Neither the crusading movement nor the Byzantine Empire recovered from this disgrace.

  The West was changing shape under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The Muslim lands remained the core, but as social development stagnated in southwest Asia, Islam’s center of gravity shifted toward the Mediterranean, and even within the Mediterranean there were winners and losers. Egypt became the jewel in the Muslim crown; Byzantium, Rome’s last relic, went into terminal decline; and the rude, backward northwest fringe expanded fastest of all.

  DARK SATANIC MILLS

  Matters could scarcely have been more different in the Eastern core. The Tang Empire had dissolved in 907, but already by 960 China had been reunited. Taizu, the first emperor of the new Song dynasty, was a tough soldier, but saw that the growth of economic and cultural ties between China’s regions across the last few centuries had made much of the elite feel that China should be one empire. Given the right terms, he reckoned, they would join him rather than fight him. When force was required he readily used it, but unlike earlier efforts to unite either core, most states submitted peacefully and most accepted Song rule.

  Taizu also understood that army commanders had brought down most previous dynasties, so he simply got rid of them. Inviting the generals who had put him on the throne to a feast, he “dissolved the militarists’ power with a cup of wine,” as the official history put it. Publicly toasting the generals for having reached retirement (which was news to the generals), he dismissed them. Rather surprisingly, Taizu got away with this bloodless coup, and from then on when he mobilized the army he usually led it himself.

  Shifting from military to civilian government was a brilliant way to tap into the broad desire for peace and unity. Its one drawback was that China did still have enemies, particularly two seminomadic groups, the Khitans and Tanguts, which had built up empires beyond China’s northern frontier (Figure 7.9). These could not be dissolved with wine, and after losing an army and almost having an emperor captured, the Song fell back on the old policy of buying peace with gifts.

  Up to a point, this worked, and neither the Khitans nor the Tanguts overran the Eastern core like the Seljuks did in the West. Its downside was that the Song, like earlier dynasties, were soon bankrupting themselves paying for gifts and garrisons that did not really keep the peace. By the 1040s they were supporting a million-man army and buying thousands of suits of armor and millions of arrowheads each month—not at all what Taizu had intended.

  Some generals hoped that wonder weapons could save China from sliding back into the old standoff with the steppes. Daoist alchemists had discovered a crude kind of gunpowder around 850 (ironically while looking for elixirs of eternal life); by 950, paintings show people squirting burning powder on one another from bamboo tubes; and in 1044 a military handbook described a “fire drug,” packed in paper or bamboo and thrown by catapult. Gunpowder’s bark, however, was still worse than its bite, and while it frightened horses it rarely hurt anyone—yet.

  Figure 7.9. The antimilitarist empire: the division of China around 1000 among the Song, Khitan, and Tangut states. China’s main coalfields are marked with dots.

  In the absence of technological breakthroughs, the Song military simply needed more money. Help came from unlikely directions. One was China’s intellectuals. After An Lushan’s revolt tipped the country into chaos in 755, many scholars had questioned the enthusiasm for all things foreign, which, as they saw it, had given China nothing but Turkic generals and disorder. The whole five-century period since the fall of the Han started to strike many disillusioned gentry as a barbarous interlude that had corrupted Chinese traditions. Chief among the corrosive alien imports, they argued, was Buddhism.

  In 819 the learned gentleman Han Yu sent a “Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha” to the emperor to express his horror at the mass hysteria that broke out when a monastery relocated one of the (many) bones said to be the Buddha’s. “Buddhism,” Han insisted, “is no more than a cult of barbarian peoples.” Back in the days when Buddhism had seduced China, he argued, “officials, being of small worth and knowledge, were unable fully to comprehend the ways of the ancient kings and the exigencies of past and present, and so could not implement the wisdom of the emperor and rescue the age from corruption.” Now, however, scholarship was superior. Intellectuals were learning to think, paint, and above all write like the ancients, thereby recapturing antique virtue and saving the nation. “Prose writing must serve as the vehicle for the Way,” urged Han, who designed a new writing style to reproduce the crispness and high moral tone of antiquity.

  The backlash against Buddhism was controversial but convenient. Buddhist monasteries had accumulated enormous wealth, and when Emperor Wuzong cracked down on Buddhism in the 840s—defrocking monks, closing monasteries, plundering treasures—fiscal pressures may have moved him more than scholarly fulminations. The official persecution made opinions such as Han’s respectable. Millions of Buddhists remained, but millions more Chinese, filled with doubts about this imported religion, were energized by the possibility that answers to the Buddha’s great questions—What is the real me? How do I fit into the universe?—lay hidden in plain sight in their own Confucian classics.

  A “Neo-Confucian” movement swept through the gentry, and in China’s hour of need, with the Khitans and Tanguts pressing in, the empire’s finest minds emulated Confucius by stepping forward to advise the ruler. Forget about rebirth and immortality, they insisted; the here-and-now is everything, and fulfillment comes from action in the world. “The true scholar,” one concluded, “should be the first to worry about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures.”

  The Neo-Confucians turned classical studies into a program for perfecting society. Men who had the philological and artistic skills to understand ancient culture properly, they claimed, could use antiquity’s virtue to save the modern world. Ouyang Xiu, for instance, who had stumbled across Han Yu’s writings as a boy, invented his own “ancient prose” style, made a name as a poet, historian, and collector of two-thousand-year-old bronzes, then rose high in the imperial service, championing fiscal and military reforms.

  Dozens of equally talented men offered their help to the state, but the most remarkable was Wang Anshi, a leading antiquarian, great prose stylist, and prime minister. Wang’s many enemies (who included Ouyang) called him abrasive and repulsively dirty, and in the end drove him into exile and disgrace, but his radical New Policies—an eleventh-century version of the New Deal and Reaganomics rolled into one—brought some real relief. Wang slashed taxes but raised revenues by making collection fairer. He funded massive public works and stimulated growth with “green shoots loans,” lending capital to farmers and small merchants. He balanced the budget by shifting from expensive professional soldiers toward cheaper militias. When conservative administrators objected, he found new administrators. He put economics, geography, and law on the civil service exams, established new schools to teach them,
and raised salaries for those who made it through.

  Extraordinary as the Neo-Confucians’ achievements were, though, they paled into insignificance compared with a second development going on at the same time, an economic explosion to rival ancient Rome’s. The Medieval Warm Period was a boon almost everywhere in China: lake sediments, the chemistry of stalagmites, and textual records all suggest that the semiarid north got more rain, just what its farmers wanted, while the wet south got less, which suited that region’s farmers too. China’s population grew to perhaps 100 million by 1100.

  By 1100 all thirty-seven of the types of rice mentioned in the sixth-century Essential Methods of the Common People had been replaced by even higher-yielding varieties, and farmers regularly squeezed three crops out of their irrigated and manured fields each year by alternating rice with wheat. An expanding network of roads—often finished in stone within cities and sometimes in brick even in the countryside—made it easier to get crops to harbors, and water transport was improving even more dramatically. Chinese shipwrights copied the best features of Persian, Arab, and Southeast Asian vessels, building large oceangoing junks with watertight compartments, four or even six masts, and crews up to a thousand strong. Shipping costs tumbled and merchants organized for large-scale trade. According to a twelfth-century writer,

  The rivers and lakes are linked together so that by means of them one can go everywhere. When a boat leaves its home port, there are no obstacles to its planning a journey of ten thousand li [roughly three thousand miles]. Every year the common people use for trading all the grain that is surplus to their requirements for seed and food. Large merchants gather what the lesser households have. Little boats become the dependents of the greater vessels and engage in joint operations, going back and forth selling grain to clear a solid profit.

  Almost as important as the actual boats were shipping brokers, middlemen who bought and warehoused cargoes, made loans, and turned ships around quickly. All this, though, took cash, and as the economy grew the government struggled to mint enough bronze coins. Heroic efforts to find new copper sources (and less-heroic ones to debase coins with lead) pushed output up from 300 million coins in 983 to 1.83 billion in 1007, but demand still outran supply.

  Greed and laziness saved the day. In the ninth century, when the tea trade started booming and state supervision of commerce declined, dealers from Sichuan began setting up offices in Chang’an where they could exchange the coins they received for their tea for “flying money,” paper bills of credit. When they returned to Sichuan the dealers could convert these bills back into cash at the company’s head office. Given that a pocketful of flying money was worth forty pocketfuls of bronze coins, the advantages were obvious, and soon merchants were using the bills as cash in their own right. They had invented fiduciary money, tokens whose value depended on trust rather than their metal content. In 1024 the state took the logical next step, printing paper banknotes, and was soon issuing more money in notes than in coin.*

  As paper money and credit penetrated the countryside, making buying and selling easier, more peasants grew whatever did best on their land, sold it for cash, then bought whatever they could not produce so easily. A Buddhist monk described stumbling across one of their little markets in a remote village:

  The morning sun not yet risen from the lake,

  Bramble thickets seem for a moment like gates of pine.

  Aged trees steep the precipitous cliffs in gloom;

  The apes’ desolate calls float down.

  The path turns, and a valley opens

  With a village in the distance barely visible.

  Along the track, shouting and laughing,

  Come farmhands overtaking and overtaken in turn

  Off to match wits a few hours at the market.

  The lodges and stores are countless as the clouds.

  They bring linen fabrics and paper-mulberry paper,

  Or drive pullets and sucking-pigs ahead of them.

  Brushes and dustpans are piled this way and that—

  Too many domestic trifles to list them all.

  An elderly man controls the busy trafficking,

  And everyone respects his slightest indications.

  Meticulously careful, he compares

  The yardsticks one by one,

  And turns them over slowly in his hands.

  Urban markets were of course far grander and could draw on half a continent of suppliers. Southeast Asian traders linked the port of Quanzhou to the Indonesian Spice Islands and the riches of the Indian Ocean, and imports made their way from there to every town in the empire. To pay for them, family workshops turned out silks, porcelain, lacquer, and paper, and the most successful blossomed into factories. Even villagers could buy what had formerly been luxuries, such as books. By the 1040s, millions of relatively cheap books were rolling off wooden printing presses and making their way into even quite modest buyers’ hands. Literacy rates probably rivaled those of Roman Italy a thousand years earlier.

  The most momentous changes of all, though, were in textiles and coal, exactly the spheres of activity that would drive the British industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. Eleventh-century textile workers invented a pedal-powered silk-reeling machine, and in 1313 the scholar Wang Zhen’s Treatise on Agriculture described a large hemp-spinning version, adapted to use either animal or waterpower. It was, Wang noted, “several times cheaper than the women it replaces,” and was “used in all parts of north China which manufacture hemp.” So moved was Wang by this wizardry that he interrupted his technical account with bursts of poetry:

  It takes a spinner many days to spin a hundred catties,

  But with waterpower it may be done with supernatural speed! …

  There is one driving belt for wheels both great and small;

  When one wheel turns, the others all turn with it!

  The rovings are transmitted evenly from the bobbin rollers,

  The threads wind by themselves onto the reeling frame!*

  Comparing eighteenth-century plans for a French flax-spinning machine with Wang’s fourteenth-century design, the economic historian Mark Elvin felt compelled to conclude that “the resemblance to Wang [Z]hen’s machine is so striking that suspicions of an ultimate Chinese origin for it … are almost irresistible.” Wang’s machine was less efficient than the French one, “but,” Elvin concludes, “if the line of advance which it represented had been followed a little further then medieval China would have had a true industrial revolution in the production of textiles over four hundred years before the West.”

  No statistics survive for Song-era textile production and prices, so we cannot easily test this theory, but we do have information on other industries. Tax returns suggest that iron output increased sixfold between 800 and 1078, to about 125,000 tons—almost as much as the whole of Europe would produce in 1700.*

  Ironworks clustered around their main market, the million-strong city of Kaifeng, where (among other uses) iron was cast into the countless weapons the army required. Chosen as a capital because it lay conveniently near the Grand Canal, Kaifeng was the city that worked. It lacked the history, tree-lined boulevards, and gracious palaces of earlier capitals and it inspired no great poetry, but in the eleventh century it grew into a crowded, chaotic, and vibrant metropolis. Its raucous bars served wine until dawn,† fifty theaters each drew audiences of thousands, and shops even encroached on the city’s one great processional avenue. And beyond the walls, foundries burned day and night, dark satanic mills belching fire and smoke, sucking in tens of thousands of trees to smelt ores into iron—so many trees, in fact, that ironmasters bought up and clear-cut entire mountains, driving the price of charcoal beyond the reach of ordinary homeowners. Hundreds of freezing Kaifengers were trampled in fuel riots in 1013.

  Kaifeng was apparently entering an ecological bottleneck. There was simply not enough wood in northern China to feed and warm its million bodies and to keep foundries turning out thousands of
tons of iron. That left just two options: the people and/or industries could drift away, or someone could innovate and find a new fuel source.

  Homo sapiens had always lived by exploiting plants and animals for food, clothes, fuel, and shelter. Over the ages humans had become much more efficient parasites; subjects of the Han and Roman empires in the first centuries CE, for instance, consumed seven or eight times as much energy per person as their Ice Age ancestors had grubbed up fourteen thousand years earlier.* The Han and Romans had also learned to tap winds and waves to move boats, going beyond what plants and animals could do for them, and to apply waterpower to mills. Yet the cold Kaifengers who rioted in 1013 were still basically feeding off other organisms, standing little higher in the Great Chain of Energy than Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

  Within a few decades that had begun to change, turning Kaifeng’s ironmasters into unwitting revolutionaries. A thousand years earlier, in the days of the Han dynasty, some Chinese had tinkered with coal and gas, but these energy sources had had few obvious applications. Only now, with the voracious forges competing with hearths and homes for fuel, did industrialists push hard at the door between the ancient organic economy and a new world of fossil fuels. Kaifeng was near two of China’s biggest coal deposits (Figure 7.9), with easy access via the Yellow River, so it did not take genius—just greed, desperation, and trial and error—to work out how to use coal instead of charcoal to smelt iron ore. It also took capital and labor to locate, dig up, and move the coal, which probably explains why businessmen (who had resources) rather than householders (who did not) led the way.

  A poem written around 1080 gives a sense of the transformation. The first verse describes a woman so desperate for fuel that she sells her body for firewood; the second, a coal mine coming to the rescue; the third, a great blast furnace; and the fourth, relief that people can now have their cake and eat it: great iron swords can be cast but the forests will survive.