Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  If we try to establish our minds in a state free of doubt, then our progress will be facilitated as by the breaking forth of a great river … So let us now set our minds on honoring our virtuous natures and pursuing our studies. Let us every day seek to find in ourselves whether we have been remiss about anything in our studies and whether or not we have been lax about anything in our virtuous natures … If we urge ourselves on in this way for a year, how can we not develop?

  Zhu was a man of his times. He turned down imperial offices and lived modestly, establishing his reputation from the ground up by teaching at a local academy, writing books, and mailing letters explaining his ideas. His one venture into national politics ended in banishment and condemnation of his life’s work as “spurious learning.” But as external threats mounted in the thirteenth century and Song civil servants cast around for ways to bind the gentry to their cause, Zhu’s philosophically impeccable but politically unthreatening elaboration of Confucius started to seem rather useful. His theories were first rehabilitated, then included in state examinations, and finally made the exclusive basis for administrative advancement. Zhu Xi thought became orthodoxy. “Since the time of Zhu Xi the Way has been clearly known,” one scholar happily announced around 1400. “There is no more need for writing; what is left is to practice.”

  Zhu is often called the second-most-influential thinker in Chinese history (after Confucius but ahead of Mao), responsible, depending on the judge’s perspective, either for perfecting the classics or for condemning China to stagnation, complacency, and oppression. But this praises or blames Zhu too much. Like all the best theorists, he simply gave the age the ideas it needed, and people used them as they saw fit.

  This is clearest in Zhu’s thinking on family values. By the twelfth century Buddhism, protofeminism, and economic growth had transformed older gender roles. Wealthy families now often educated their daughters and gave them bigger dowries when they married, which translated into more clout for wives; and as women’s financial standing improved, they established the principle that daughters should inherit property like sons. Even among poorer families, commercial textile production was giving women more earning power, which again translated into stronger property rights.

  A male backlash began among the rich in the twelfth century, while Zhu was still young. It promoted feminine chastity, wifely dependence, and the need for women to stay in the house’s inner quarters (or, if they really had to go out, to be veiled or carried in a curtained chair). Critics particularly attacked widows who remarried, taking their property into other families. By the time Zhu Xi thought was rehabilitated in the thirteenth century, his pious ideal of re-creating perfect Confucian families had come to seem like a useful vehicle to give philosophical shape to these ideas, and when bureaucrats began rolling back property laws that favored women in the fourteenth century they happily announced that it was all in the name of Zhu Xi thought.

  Zhu’s writings did not cause these changes in women’s lives. They were merely one strand of a broader reactionary mood that swept up not just learned civil servants but also people who were most unlikely to have been reading Zhu. For instance, artisans’ representations of feminine beauty changed dramatically in these years. Back in the eighth century, in the heyday of Buddhism and protofeminism, one of the most popular styles of ceramic figurines was what art historians rather ungallantly call “fat ladies.” Reportedly inspired by Yang Guifei, the courtesan whose charms ignited An Lushan’s revolt in 755, they show women solid enough for Rubens doing everything from dancing to playing polo. When twelfth-century artists portrayed women, by contrast, they were generally pale, wan things, serving men or languidly sitting around, waiting for men to come home.

  The slender beauties may have been sitting down because their feet hurt. The notorious practice of footbinding—deforming little girls’ feet by wrapping them tightly in gauze, twisting and breaking their toes in the interest of daintiness—probably began around 1100, thirty years before Zhu was born. A couple of poems seem to refer to it around then, and soon after 1148 a scholar observed that “women’s footbinding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras.”

  The earliest archaeological evidence for footbinding comes from the tombs of Huang Sheng and Madame Zhou, women who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1243 and 1274, respectively. Each was buried with her feet bound in six-foot-long gauze strips and accompanied by silk shoes and socks with sharply upturned tips (Figure 8.9). Madame Zhou’s skeleton was well-enough preserved to show that her deformed feet matched the socks and sandals: her eight little toes had been twisted under her soles and her two big toes were bent upward, producing a slender-enough foot to fit into her narrow, pointed slippers.

  Twelfth-century China did not invent female foot modification. Improving on the way women walk seems to be an almost universal obsession (among men, anyway). The torments visited on Huang and Zhou, though, were orders of magnitude greater than those served up in other cultures. Wearing stilettos will give you bunions; binding your feet will put you in a wheelchair. The pain this practice caused—day in, day out, from cradle to grave—is difficult to imagine. In the very year Madame Zhou was buried, a scholar published the first known criticism of footbinding: “Little girls not yet four or five, who have done nothing wrong, nevertheless are made to suffer unlimited pain to bind [their feet] small. I do not know what use this is.”

  Figure 8.9. Little foot: silk slippers and socks from the tomb of Huang Sheng, a seventeen-year-old girl buried in 1243, the first convincingly documented footbinder in history

  What use indeed? Yet footbinding grew both more common and more horrific. Thirteenth-century footbinding made feet slimmer; seventeenth-century footbinding actually made them shorter, collapsing the toes back under the heel into a crippled ball of torn ligaments and twisted tendons known as a “golden lotus.” The photographs of the mangled feet of the last twentieth-century victims are hard to look at.*

  Blaming all this on Zhu Xi would be excessive. His philosophy did not cause Chinese elite culture to turn increasingly conservative; rather, cultural conservatism caused his ideas to succeed. Zhu Xi thought was just the most visible element of a broader response to military defeat, retrenchment, and falling social development. As the world turned sour in the twelfth century, antiquity became less a source of renewal than a source of refuge, and by the time Madame Zhou died in 1274 the sort of Renaissance spirit that might drive global exploration was sorely lacking.

  So does the stagnation and then decline of social development after 1100 explain why Cortés, not Zheng, went to Tenochtitlán? Well, partially. It probably does explain why there were no great voyages of exploration in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But by 1405, when Zheng’s first Treasure Fleet sailed from Nanjing, Eastern social development was once again rising quickly. The very fact that Yongle kept sending Zheng across the Indian Ocean indicates an expansive mindset. As social development surged upward again, fifteenth-century intellectuals started looking for alternatives to Zhu Xi thought.

  The extraordinary Wang Yangming, for instance, tried hard to follow Zhu’s rules. In the 1490s Wang spent a week contemplating a bamboo stalk, as Zhu had recommended, but instead of providing insight it made him ill. Wang then had just the kind of epiphany appropriate for a successful, expanding society: he realized that everyone intuitively knows the truth without years of quiet sitting and studying commentaries on Confucius. We can all attain wisdom if we just get out and do something. Wang, as good as his word, became a new Renaissance man, ranking among the period’s top generals, administrators, editors of ancient texts, and poets. His followers, rebelling still more against Zhu Xi thought, proclaimed that the streets were full of sages, that everyone could judge right and wrong for themselves, and that getting rich was good. They even advocated women’s equality.

  The decision to end Zheng’s voyages was in fact made not against a background of conservative retrenchment but against one o
f expansion, innovation, and challenges faced and overcome. There is little to suggest that a rigid, inward-turned mind-set cut off Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century while a dynamic Renaissance culture pushed Europeans across the seas. So what did?

  THE ADVANTAGES OF ISOLATION

  We have already seen the answer: once again it was maps, not chaps, that took East and West down different paths. Geography just made it easier for Westerners to wash up in the Americas than for Easterners (Figure 8.10).

  Europeans’ most obvious geographical advantage was physical: the prevailing winds, the placing of islands, and the sheer size of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made things easier for them. Given time, East Asian explorers would surely have crossed the Pacific eventually, but other things being equal, it was always going to be easier for Viking or Portuguese sailors to reach the New World than for Chinese or Japanese.

  In reality, of course, other things are rarely equal, and in the fifteenth century economic and political geography conspired to multiply the advantages that physical geography gave western Europe. Eastern social development was much higher than Western, and thanks to men like Marco Polo, Westerners knew it. This gave Westerners economic incentives to get to the East and tap into the richest markets on earth. Easterners, by contrast, had few incentives to go west. They could rely on everyone else to come to them.

  The Arabs were conveniently placed to dominate the western stretches of the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade routes, and for many centuries Europeans, at the farthest end of both East-West arteries, mostly stayed home and made do with the crumbs that Venetians collected from Arab tables. The Crusades and Mongol conquests began changing the political map, though, easing European access to the East. Greed began trumping sloth and fear, pulling traders (particularly Venetians) down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean or, like the Polos, across the steppes.

  When western European states began moving toward the high end and intensifying their wars after the Black Death, political geography added a push to the economic pull. Rulers along the Atlantic fringe were desperate to buy more cannons and were exhausting the usual ways to get rich (ramping up the bureaucracy to tax their subjects, robbing Jews, plundering neighbors, and so on). They were ready to talk to anyone who could offer them new revenue sources, even the shady, greedy characters who hung around harbors.

  Figure 8.10. A third way of seeing the world: how physical geography stacked the odds in favor of western Europe by putting it just three thousand miles from America, while China had the misfortune to lie twice as far from the New World

  The Atlantic kingdoms lay as far as it was possible to get from the Red Sea and Silk Road routes, but captains of all kinds, confident in their marvelous new ships, offered—in return for gifts, loans, and trade monopolies—to turn what had previously been geographical isolation into an advantage. They would find an Atlantic route to the Orient. Some promised to sail around the southern tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean, avoiding the awkward business of dealing with Venetians and Muslims. Others insisted they would simply sail west till they came around the globe and showed up in the East.* (A third approach, sailing over the North Pole, was for obvious reasons less attractive.)

  Most Europeans favored heading south over heading west because they calculated—rightly—that they would have to sail a very long way west to get to the East. If there is any place for bungling idiots in this story, it surely belongs to Columbus, who opened the road to Tenochtitlán by massively underestimating the distance around the globe and refusing to believe that he had the numbers wrong. Conversely, if there is a place for great men, it must go to the Ming emperors’ tough-minded advisers who, after calculating the costs and benefits, shut down Zheng’s quixotic tours in the 1430s and “lost” their paperwork in the 1470s.

  Sometimes a little bungling is a good thing, but in reality neither bungling nor good sense made much difference, because maps left little scope for chaps to do anything except what they did do. When Yongle came to China’s throne in 1403 he needed to repair his nation’s standing in South Asia. Sending Zheng’s Treasure Fleets to Calicut and Hormuz was an expensive way to do this, but it did work; but sending Zheng east into an empty ocean was simply out of the question, no matter how many herbs of immortality might lie there. It was always likely that fifteenth-century China’s administrators would eventually shut down the costly voyages into the Indian Ocean, and it was never likely that they would send fleets into the Pacific. Economic geography made exploration irrational.

  It is also hard to see how European sailors could not have run into the Americas quite quickly once they struck out across the Atlantic in search of a route to the riches of the East. Columbus and his men needed hearts of oak and intestines of iron to plunge into the unknown, the wind at their backs, with no guarantee of finding another wind to bring them home, but if they had balked, there were brave men aplenty in Europe’s ports to try again. And if Queen Isabella had rejected Columbus’s third proposal in 1492, Europeans would not have stopped sailing west. Either Columbus would have found another backer or we would simply remember a different mariner—Caboto, perhaps, or the Portuguese Pedro Alvares Cabral, who found Brazil blocking his way to India in 1500—as the great discoverer.

  Maps made it as inevitable as things get—as inevitable, say, as when farmers replaced hunter-gatherers or states replaced villages—that the daredevil sailors of the Atlantic fringe would find the Americas sooner rather than later, and certainly sooner than the equally daredevil sailors of the South China Sea.

  And once that happened, the consequences were largely predetermined too. European germs, weapons, and institutions were so much more powerful than Native American ones that indigenous populations and states simply collapsed. Had Montezuma or Cortés made other choices, the first conquistadors might well have died on the blood-soaked altars of Tenochtitlán, their hearts hacked from their screaming bodies and offered to the gods, but there would have been more conquistadors right behind them, bringing more smallpox, cannons, and plantations. Native Americans could no more resist European imperialists than native European hunter-gatherers could resist farmers seven or eight millennia earlier.

  Geography mattered just as much when Europeans rounded South Africa and sailed into the Indian Ocean, but in different ways. Here Europeans entered a world of higher social development, with ancient empires, long-established trading houses, and its own virulent diseases. Distance and cost—physical and economic geography—kept European incursions as tiny as those to the Americas. The first Portuguese mission to sail around Africa and on to India in 1498 involved just four ships. Its commander, Vasco da Gama, was a nobody, chosen in the expectation he would fail.

  Da Gama was a great captain, covering six thousand miles of open sea to catch the winds to take him south of Africa, but he was no politician. He did almost everything possible to justify people’s lack of faith in him. His habit of kidnapping and flogging local pilots almost led to disaster before he even left Africa, and when his maltreated guides got him to India he offended the Hindu rulers of Calicut by assuming they were Christians. He insulted them further by offering paltry gifts, and when he finally extracted a cargo of spices and gems he ignored all advice and set sail into contrary winds. Almost half his crew died on the Indian Ocean and scurvy crippled the survivors.

  But because profit margins on Asian spices exceeded 100 percent, da Gama still made fortunes for himself and his king in spite of all his blunders. Dozens of Portuguese ships followed in da Gama’s wake, exploiting the one advantage they did have: firepower. Slipping as the occasion demanded among trading, bullying, and shooting, the Portuguese found that nothing closed a deal quite like a gun. They seized harbors along the Indian coast as trading enclaves (or pirates’ lairs, depending who was talking) and shipped pepper back to Portugal.

  Their tiny numbers meant that Portuguese ships were more like mosquitoes buzzing around the great kingdoms of the Indian Ocean than like conquistadors, but af
ter nearly a decade of their biting, the sultans and kings of Turkey, Egypt, Gujarat, and Calicut—egged on by Venice—decided enough was enough. Massing more than a hundred vessels in 1509, they trapped eighteen Portuguese warships against the Indian coast and closed to ram and board them. The Portuguese blasted them into splinters.

  Like the Ottomans when they advanced into the Balkans a century earlier, rulers all around the Indian Ocean rushed to copy European guns, only to learn that it took more than just cannons to outshoot the Portuguese. They needed to import an entire military system and transform the social order to make room for new kinds of warriors, which proved just as difficult in sixteenth-century South Asia as it had been three thousand years earlier, when the kings of the Western core had struggled to adapt their armies to chariots. Rulers who moved too slowly had to open port after port to the fierce intruders, and in 1510 the Portuguese cowed the sultan of Malacca, who controlled the straits leading to the Spice Islands themselves, into granting them trading rights. When the sultan rediscovered his backbone and threw them out, the Portuguese seized his whole city. “Whoever is lord of Malacca,” observed Tomé Pires, its first Portuguese governor, “has his hand on the throat of Venice.”

  And not just Venice. “China,” Pires wrote,

  is an important, good, and very wealthy country, and the Governor of Malacca would not need as much force as they say in order to bring it under our rule, because the people are very weak and easy to overcome. And the principal people who have often been there affirm that with ten ships the Governor of India who took Malacca could take the whole of China along the seacoast.