Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Didn’t you see her,

  Last winter, when travelers were stopped by the rain and snow,

  And city-dwellers’ bones were torn by the wind?

  With a half-bundle of damp firewood, “bearing her bedding at dawn.”*

  At twilight she knocked on the gate, but no one wanted her trade.

  Who would have thought that in those mountains lay a hidden treasure,

  In heaps, like black jewels, ten thousand cartloads of coal.

  Flowing grace and favor, unknown to all.

  The stinking blast— zhenzhen†—disperses;

  Once a beginning is made, [production] is vast without limit.

  Ten thousand men exert themselves, a thousand supervise.

  Pitching ore into the roiling liquid makes it even brighter,

  Flowing molten jade and gold, its vigorous potency.

  In the Southern Mountains, chestnut forests now breathe easy;

  In the Northern Mountains, no need to hammer the hard ore.

  They will cast you a sword of a hundred refinings,

  To chop a great whale of a bandit to mincemeat.

  Coal and iron took off together. One well-documented foundry, at Qicunzhen, employed three thousand workers to shovel 35,000 tons of ore and 42,000 tons of coal into furnaces each year, harvesting 14,000 tons of pig iron at the other end. By 1050 so much coal was being mined that householders were using it too, and when the government overhauled poor relief in 1098 coal was the only fuel its officials bothered to mention. Twenty new coal markets opened in Kaifeng between 1102 and 1106.

  By then Eastern social development had risen as high as the peak reached in ancient Rome a millennium earlier. The West, split between a Muslim core and a Christian periphery, now lagged far behind, and would not match this level of social development until the eighteenth century, on the eve of Britain’s industrial revolution. Every indication was, in fact, that a Chinese industrial revolution was brewing within Kaifeng’s soot-blackened walls and would turn the huge Eastern lead in social development into Eastern rule. History seemed to be moving down the path that would take Albert to Beijing rather than Looty to Balmoral.

  8

  GOING GLOBAL

  THREE BIG THINGS

  Everything about China amazed Marco Polo. Its palaces were the best in the world and its rulers the richest. Its rivers supported more ships than all the waters of Christendom combined, carrying more food into its cities than a European could imagine anyone eating. And what food it was, so subtle that Europeans could scarcely believe it. Chinese maidens excelled in modesty and decorum; Chinese wives were angelic; and foreigners who enjoyed the hospitality of the courtesans of Hangzhou never forgot them. Most amazing of all, though, was China’s commerce. “I can tell you in all truthfulness,” said Marco, “that the business … is on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it.”

  That, it turned out, was the problem. When Marco returned to Venice in 1295 many of those who thronged to hear his stories did not, in fact, credit them.* But despite its occasional oddities, such as pears that weighed ten pounds, Marco’s account is quite consistent with what we see in Figure 8.1. When he went to China its social development was far ahead of the West’s.

  Figure 8.1. A shrinking gap in a shrinking world: trade, travel, and turbulent times bring East and West together again

  There were three big things, though, that Marco did not know when he marveled at the East. First, its lead was shrinking, from almost twelve points on the index of social development in 1100 to less than six in 1500. Second, the scenario foreseen at the end of Chapter 7—-that Eastern ironmasters and mill owners would begin an industrial revolution, unleashing the power of fossil fuels—had not come to pass. Marco admired the “black stone” that burned in Chinese hearths, but he admired China’s fat fish and translucent porcelain just as much. The land he described, for all its marvels, remained a traditional economy. And third, the fact that Marco was there at all was a sign of things to come. Europeans were on the move. In 1492 another Italian, Christopher Columbus, would land in the Americas, even if he remained convinced until his dying day that he had reached China, and in 1513 Columbus’s cousin Rafael Perestrello would correct the family’s confusion by becoming the first European who actually did sail to China.

  Another three centuries would pass between Columbus’s landfall and the West regaining the lead in social development from the East. The long period covered by this chapter was not the end of the Eastern age. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, without doubt, the end of the beginning.

  THE RACE OF SATAN

  Kaifeng, January 9, 1127. The city walls shook under the crunch of battering rams and the blast of bombs. No one could really see what was going on in the driving snow but still the Chinese defenders on the ramparts fired great iron bolts from their giant crossbows and sprayed burning gunpowder into the dark, hoping to hit the creaking siege towers coming toward them. Three thousand men from the Jurchen Empire, the latest threat to China’s northern borders, had fallen in the first assault on the walls—some burned up, others smashed by stones, more pierced with arrows—but still the attackers gathered up their dead and regrouped. They were used to worse.

  Inside the walls, though, where barely a hundred men had fallen, even this scattering of bodies unnerved the defenders. Officers melted away and rumors spread, and all too soon, muffled by the snow, came the rumble of returning siege towers and the deadly hiss of more arrows. We do not know exactly how the panic begin, but suddenly tens of thousands of men were streaming from the battlements, desperate to get away. The enemy was inside, looting, burning, raping, and killing. Many of the palace women drowned themselves rather than endure what lay ahead, but the emperor just waited to be led into captivity.

  The fall of Kaifeng was a self-inflicted wound. Despite the eleventh-century economic boom, the Song dynasty’s endless war against the Khitans on the northern frontier was a constant financial drain and the emperors kept looking for new ways to pay their bills. Consequently, when in 1115 the “Wild Jurchens” of Manchuria offered to help fight the Khitans, Emperor Huizong eagerly accepted (Figure 8.2). It should have worried him that these Jurchens had gone from being backwoods farmers to fearsome cavalrymen in just twenty years, but it did not. Huizong was a connoisseur of music, a noted painter, and a calligrapher of genius, but no statesman, and his advisers mostly preferred office politics to facing hard facts. By backing the Jurchens, Huizong created a monster that devoured first the Khitans and then Huizong himself. It would have swallowed the desperate remnants of the Song court, too, had they not fled on boats. Only in 1141 did a frontier settle down between the Jurchens, now ruling northern China, and a much-reduced Song state based at Hangzhou.*

  Figure 8.2. Creating monsters: the Jurchen and Song empires in 1141. Dotted areas show China’s main coalfields.

  The fall of Kaifeng and the disruption of north-south trade that followed meant that social development barely grew at all in the twelfth century. Yet while it stagnated, development did not actually collapse; Kaifeng quickly recovered from the sack, even becoming the Jurchen capital at one point, and Hangzhou grew into the metropolis that so impressed Marco Polo. The coalfields of southern China were not as rich as those of the north, but they were abundant all the same, and twelfth-century industrialists learned how to use cheaper, dirtier coal in iron production and even how to extract copper from the polluted by-products of ironworking. Trade, paper money, fossil fuels, and commodity production kept growing, and in 1200 a Chinese industrial takeoff still looked as possible as it had a century earlier.

  What changed all that was a ferocious young steppelander named Temujin. Born in frozen Mongolia in 1162, Temujin came from the ultimate broken home. His father, Yesugei, had kidnapped Temujin’s mother, Hoelun, from her original bridegroom, impregnated her, and named the resulting baby after a man he had killed. So distant were Temujin
’s parents that they once forgot him when moving camps and waited a year before coming back to look. After they married Temujin off at eight, Yesugei was murdered (not, perhaps, before time) and his fellow tribesmen then cast Hoelun out, stole her animals, and left her to starve. Temujin rushed home and supported Hoelun by hunting rats. He also murdered his older half-brother, who, under tribal law, had the right to marry Hoelun. Next Temujin was sold into slavery, and by the time he escaped, his fiancée had been abducted and was perhaps carrying another man’s child. Temujin killed her captors and got her back.

  Temujin was a hard man, but had he not been, the Mongols would not have given him the title Genghis Khan*—“Fearless Leader”—and he would not have become history’s greatest conqueror. It does not take a therapist to suspect that his path to power (via hunting down and killing his blood brother Jamuka,† transforming Mongol warfare by ignoring the claims of kinship, and siding against his squabbling, alcoholic sons in every dispute) owed something to his early family experiences.

  In some ways not much had changed on the steppes in two thousand years. Like so many chiefs before him, Genghis Khan was driven partly by fear (of China) and partly by greed (for its wealth). These motives pushed him into raiding the Jurchen kingdom in northern China and using the loot to bribe other Mongol chiefs to follow him. In other ways, though, a great deal had changed, and not even the khan stood above the historical law that you can’t step into the same river twice. For half a millennium Chinese, Muslim, and Christian settlers had been pushing towns, irrigation, and the plow into the steppes. Farmers took land from the nomads, but what the nomads took from the farmers was knowledge of their weapons and ways.

  The nomads, it transpired, got the better of the deal. Once again the advantages of backwardness came into play, and Genghis Khan—the most brilliant of all nomad chiefs—learned to integrate city-dwelling engineers into his cavalry armies so well that he could storm any fortification as easily as he could defeat any army. He plundered his way from the Pacific to the Volga before his death in 1227 (Figure 8.3), sweeping away obstacles “as lines of writing are effaced from paper,” according to a Persian eyewitness. After the Mongols passed though, “those abodes became a dwelling for the owl and the raven; in those places the screech-owls answer each other’s cries, and in those halls the winds moan.”

  Genghis Khan needed no index of social development to tell him that China was the mother lode of plunder. So far as we can tell, he intended to steal everything, drive the peasants off the land, and convert the whole of northern China into winter pastures for his tough steppeland ponies. In 1215 he destroyed more than ninety cities, leaving Beijing burning for a month. After his death in 1227, though, wiser (Chinese) counsels prevailed, insisting that leaving peasants in place and taxing them would pay better.

  An opportunity to try the new policy came quickly. Undeterred by the fact that Huizong’s alliance with the Jurchens against the Khitans had ended with the Jurchens sacking Kaifeng and kidnapping the emperor, in 1234 a new Song ruler proposed a similar alliance with the Mongols against the Jurchens. The outcome was even worse: the Mongols swallowed the Jurchen Empire and brought China’s armies to the brink of collapse.

  Only the peculiarities of Mongol politics prevented the Song Empire from falling in the 1230s. When Genghis Khan died in 1227 his son Ögödei had replaced him as Great Khan, but Genghis’s grandsons had immediately started maneuvering to see who would succeed Ögödei. Some of them, worried that letting Ögödei conquer China would put too much power in his hands and would favor his son in the succession struggle, pressured the minor Mongol chiefs to back a gigantic raid in the far west instead. In 1237 they got their way, and the main Mongol hordes abruptly wheeled westward.

  Figure 8.3. Where the nomads roam: the boundaries of the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan died in 1227 and (heavy broken lines) the wars his sons and grandsons waged between then and 1294

  Europeans literally did not know what hit them. To Matthew Paris, an English chronicler, the invaders were an utter mystery. “Never,” he said, “has there been any mode of access to them, nor have they themselves come forth, so as to allow any knowledge of their customs or persons to be gained through common intercourse with other men.” Incorrectly interpreting the name Tatars (one of the terms used for the Mongols) as a reference to Tartarus, the ancient Greek name for Hell, Matthew wondered whether they were “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan.” Or maybe, he speculated, they were the Lost Tribes of Israel, finally going home. Despite recognizing that the Mongols did not speak Hebrew and seemed unaware of Mosaic Law, Matthew decided this must be right: having gone astray before Moses received the Ten Commandments, these were Jews who

  followed after strange gods and unknown customs, so now in a more wonderful manner, owing to the vengeance of God, they were unknown to every other nation, and their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational beast.

  Some Christians concluded that the logical defense against the Lost Tribes of Israel was to massacre local Jews, but that produced predictably few results. The Mongols overwhelmed the massed knights of Germany and Hungary and probed as far as Vienna. But then—just as suddenly as they had abandoned China—they departed, turning their ponies around and herding their prisoners off into Inner Asia. The whole point of the European raid had been to influence succession to the khanate, and so when Ögödei died on December 11, 1241, Europe abruptly lost all importance.

  When the Mongols did look west again, they sensibly chose a richer target, the Muslim core. It took them just two weeks to breach Baghdad’s walls in 1258. They left the last of the caliphs without food or water for three days, then threw him into a pile of gold and told him to eat it. When he did not, he and his heirs were rolled in rugs and trampled to death.*

  An Egyptian army finally stopped the Mongols on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in 1260, but by then their rampage had put the seal on two centuries of economic decline in the old Muslim heartlands of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Mongols’ greatest impact on the West, though, was what they did not do. Because they did not sack Cairo it remained the West’s biggest and richest city, and because they did not invade western Europe, Venice and Genoa remained the West’s greatest commercial centers. Development tumbled in the old Muslim core but continued to rise in Egypt and Italy, and by the 1270s, when Marco Polo set off for China, the Western core had shifted decisively into the Mediterranean lands that the Mongols had spared.

  The Mongols definitively abandoned their Western wars when one more khan died and his successor, Khubilai, immortalized by the English poet Coleridge’s drug-crazed vision of his palace at Xanadu* (“That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!”), finally determined to finish off China. This was the hardest war the Mongols ever fought, and the most destructive. It took a five-year siege of the great fortress Xiangyang to break Chinese resistance, and by the time Khubilai chased the last Song child-emperor into the sea in 1279, the complex infrastructure that had brought China to the verge of an industrial revolution was breaking down. Eastern social development went into free fall.

  Natural disasters certainly contributed to this. After recovering from the Jurchen sack, Kaifeng’s real decline began when the Yellow River burst its dykes in 1194, destroying the canals that fed the city, brought in its coal, and carried away its products. But the Yellow River had flooded plenty of times before; the big difference now was that Mongol destruction magnified nature’s cruelties. In the 1230s famine and epidemic followed the Mongol armies, carrying off a million people around Kaifeng and perhaps even more in Sichuan, and in the 1270s the death toll was even worse. Overall, the four horsemen of the apocalypse that stalked China in the thirteenth century—migration, state collapse, famine, and disease—reduced the population by perhaps a quarter. Despite Marco Polo’s amazement, China was no longer on track toward an industrial takeoff by 1290. In fact, the gap between East and West was closing.

  GUNS,
GERMS, AND CAST IRON

  When Eastern social development had fallen before, from the first until the fourth century CE, it had been part of a Eurasia-wide paradox. The sharp rise in social development in the first millennium BCE had effectively shrunk the distance between the cores, and a handful of travelers, traders, and raiders had created overlapping zones of contact across the steppes and Indian Ocean. This Old World Exchange was a consequence of rising development but also generated the forces that would undermine development, and when the Western core failed to break through the hard ceiling around forty-three points, the horsemen of the apocalypse dragged down both cores.

  By the ninth century Eastern development had recovered enough to set off a Second Old World Exchange. Merchants, missionaries, and migrants crossed the steppes and Indian Ocean, again building overlapping zones of contact (Figure 8.4). By Genghis Khan’s boyhood years, traders were already carrying not just luxuries such as spices and silk but also bulk foods across the Indian Ocean in quantities even Romans would have envied, and from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Majapahit in Java, cosmopolitan merchant cities were flourishing.

  The Mongol conquest of the steppes brought stability to a second East-West artery, and Khan Ögödei, eager to turn the new capital he built at Karakorum into a worthy imperial metropolis, reportedly lured merchants there by paying 10 percent over whatever price they asked for their goods. He “would sit,” the Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote, “every day, after he finished his meal, on a chair outside his court, where every kind of merchandise that was to be found in the world was heaped up in piles.”