by Morris, Ian;
In the giddy years after 1500, almost anything seemed possible to the adventurers who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Africa. Why not simply take over the East now they had got there? So in 1517 the Portuguese king decided to test Pires’s theory, sending him to Guangzhou to propose peace and trade with the Celestial Kingdom. Unfortunately, Pires was about as diplomatic as da Gama, and a three-year face-off developed, with Pires demanding to meet the emperor and local officials stalling. Pires finally got his way in 1521, the very year that Cortés entered Tenochtitlán.
Pires’s story, though, ended very differently from Cortés’s. On reaching Beijing, Pires had to wait more weeks for an audience, only for it to go disastrously wrong. While Pires was negotiating, a letter arrived from the sultan of Malacca denouncing the Portuguese envoy for stealing his throne. More letters flooded in from officials Pires had offended in Guangzhou, accusing him of cannibalism and espionage. Then, at the worst possible moment, the Chinese emperor dropped dead. In a swirl of accusations and counteraccusations Pires’s party was clapped in irons.
What happened to Pires remains unclear. One letter from a sailor imprisoned with him says he died in jail, but another account says he was banished to a village, where, twenty years later, a Portuguese priest met his daughter. The cleric insisted that the girl proved her identity by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese and told him that Pires had grown old with a wealthy Chinese wife and only recently died. But all in all, it is most likely that Pires shared the fate of the rest of the embassy. After being pilloried and publicly mocked, they were executed and dismembered. Each man’s penis was chopped off and stuffed in his mouth before his body parts were displayed on spikes around Guangzhou.
Whatever his fate, Pires learned the hard way that despite their guns, here at the real center of the world Europeans still counted for little. They had destroyed the Aztecs and shot their way into the markets of the Indian Ocean, but it took more than that to impress the gatekeepers of All Under Heaven. Eastern social development remained far ahead of Western, and despite Europe’s Renaissance, sailors, and guns, in 1521 there was still little to suggest that the West would narrow the gap significantly. Three more centuries would pass before it became clear just what a difference it made that Cortés, not Zheng, had burned Tenochtitlán.
9
THE WEST CATCHES UP
THE RISING TIDE
“A rising tide lifts all the boats,” said President John F. Kennedy. Never was this truer than between 1500 and 1800, when for three centuries Eastern and Western social development both floated upward (Figure 9.1). By 1700 both were pushing the hard ceiling around forty-three points; by 1750 both had passed it.
Kennedy spoke his famous line in Heber Springs, Arkansas, in a speech to celebrate a new dam. The project struck his critics as the worst kind of pork barrel spending: sure, they observed, the proverbial rising tide lifts all the boats, but it lifts some faster than others. That, too, was never truer than between 1500 and 1800. Eastern social development rose by a quarter, but the West’s rose twice as fast. In 1773 (or, allowing a reasonable margin of error, somewhere between 1750 and 1800) Western development overtook the East’s, ending the twelve-hundred-year Eastern age.
Historians argue passionately over why the global tide rose so much after 1500 and why the Western boat proved particularly buoyant. In this chapter I suggest that the two questions are linked and that once we set them into their proper context, of the long-term saga of social development, the answers are no longer so mysterious.
Figure 9.1. Some boats float better than others: in the eighteenth century the rising tide of social development pushed East and West through the ceiling that had always constrained organic economies, but pushed the West harder, further, and faster. In 1773, according to the index, the West regained the lead.
MICE IN A BARN
It took a while to get over Tomé Pires. Not until 1557 did Chinese officials start turning a blind eye to the Portuguese traders who were settling at Macao (Figure 9.2), and although by 1570 other Portuguese traders had set up shop as far around the coasts of Asia as Nagasaki in Japan, their numbers remained pitifully small. To most Westerners, the lands of the Orient remained merely magical names; to most Easterners, Portugal was not even that.
The main impact these European adventurers did have on ordinary Easterners’ lives in the sixteenth century was through the extraordinary plants—corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts—they brought from the New World. These grew where nothing else would, survived wretched weather, and fattened farmers and their animals wonderfully. Across the sixteenth century millions of acres of them were planted, from Ireland to the Yellow River.
Figure 9.2. A crowded world: the East in an age of rising tides, 1500–1700
They came, perhaps, in the nick of time. The sixteenth century was a golden age for Eastern and Western culture. In the 1590s (admittedly a particularly good decade) Londoners could watch new dramas such as Shakespeare’s Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet or read inexpensive religious tracts such as John Foxe’s gory Book of Martyrs, churned out in their thousands by the new printing presses and crammed with woodcuts of true believers at the stake. At the other end of Eurasia, Beijingers could catch Tang Xianzu’s twenty-hour-long Peony Pavilion, which remains China’s most-watched traditional opera, or read The Journey to the West (the hundred-chapter tale of Monkey, Pig, and a Shrek-like ogre named Friar Sand, who followed a seventh-century monk to India to find Buddhist sutras, along the way rescuing him from countless cliff-hangers).
But behind the glittering façade all was not well. The Black Death had killed a third or more of the people in the Western and Eastern cores and for about a century after 1350 recurring outbreaks kept population low. Between 1450 and 1600, however, the number of hungry mouths in each region roughly doubled. “Population has grown so much that it is entirely without parallel in history,” one Chinese scholar recorded in 1608. In faraway France observers agreed; people were breeding “like mice in a barn,” as a proverb put it.
Fear has ever been an engine of social development. More children meant more subdivided fields or more heirs left out in the cold, and always meant more trouble. Farmers weeded and manured more often, dammed streams, and dug wells, or wove and tried to sell more garments. Some settled on marginal land, squeezing a meager living from hillsides, stones, and sand that their parents would never have bothered with. Others abandoned the densely settled cores for wild, underpopulated frontiers. Yet even when they planted the New World wonder crops, there never seemed to be enough to go around.
The fifteenth century, when labor had been scarce and land abundant, increasingly became just a fuzzy memory: happy days, beef and ale, pork and wine. Back then, said the prefect of a county near Nanjing in 1609, everything had been better: “Every family was self-sufficient with a house to live in, land to cultivate, hills from which to cut firewood, gardens in which to grow vegetables.” Now, though, “nine out of ten are impoverished … Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone … Alas!” A German traveler around 1550 was blunter: “In the past they ate differently at the peasant’s house. Then, there was meat and food in profusion.” Today, though, “everything is truly changed … the food of the most comfortably off peasants is almost worse than that of day laborers and valets in the old days.”
In the English fairy tale of Dick Whittington (which, like many such stories, goes back to the sixteenth century), a poor boy and his cat drift from the countryside to London and make good, but in the real world many of the hungry millions that fled to cities merely jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Figure 9.3 shows how urban real wages (that is, consumers’ ability to buy basic goods, corrected to account for inflation) changed after 1350. The graph rests on years of painstaking detective work by economic historians, deciphering crumbling records, recorded in a regular Babel of tongues and measured in an even greater confusion of units. Not until the fourteenth century do European archives begin providi
ng data good enough to calculate incomes this precisely, while in China we have to wait until after 1700. But despite the gaps in the data and the mass of crisscrossing lines, the Western trend, at least, is clear. Basically, wages roughly doubled everywhere we have evidence in the century after the Black Death, then, as population recovered, mostly fell back to pre–Black Death levels. The Florentines who hauled blocks and raised the soaring dome of Brunelleschi’s cathedral in the 1420s feasted on meat, cheese, and olives; those who dragged Michelangelo’s David into place in 1504 made do with bread. A century later their great-grandchildren were happy to get even that.
Figure 9.3. For richer, for poorer: the real wages of unskilled urban workers in six Western cities plus Beijing, 1350–1800. Every city and every industry had its own story, but almost everywhere we can measure it, after roughly doubling between 1350 and 1450 workers’ purchasing power fell back to pre-1350 levels by 1550 or 1600. For reasons that will become clear later in the chapter, after 1600 cities in Europe’s northwest increasingly pulled away from the rest. (Data begin at Paris and Valencia only around 1450 and at Beijing around 1750, and—not surprisingly—there is a gap in the figures from Constantinople around 1453, when the Ottomans sacked the city.) Data from Allen 2006, Figure 2.
By then hunger stalked Eurasia from end to end. A disappointing harvest, an ill-advised decision, or just bad luck could drive poor families to scavenging (in China for chaff and bean pods, tree bark and weeds, in Europe for cabbage stumps, weeds, and grass). A run of disasters could push thousands onto the roads in search of food and the weakest into starvation. It is probably no coincidence that in the original versions of Europe’s oldest folktales (like Dick Whittington), peasant storytellers dreamed not of golden eggs and magic beanstalks but of actual eggs and beans. All they asked from fairy godmothers was a full stomach.
In both East and West the middling sorts steadily hardened their hearts against tramps and beggars, herding them into poorhouses and prisons, shipping them to frontiers, or selling them into slavery. Callous this certainly was, but those who were slightly better off apparently felt they had troubles enough of their own without worrying about others. As one gentleman observed in the Yangzi Delta in 1545, when times were tough “the stricken [that is, poorest] were excused from paying taxes,” but “the prosperous were so pressed that they also became impoverished.” Downward social mobility stared the children of once-respectable folk in the face.
The sons of the gentry found new ways to compete for wealth and power in this harder world, horrifying conservatives with their scorn for tradition. “Rare styles of clothing and hats are gradually being worn,” a Chinese official noted with alarm; “and there are even those who become merchants!” Worse still, one of his colleagues wrote, even formerly respectable families
are mad for wealth and eminence … Taking delight in filing accusations, they use their power to press their cases so hard that you can’t distinguish between the crooked and the straight. Favoring lavishness and fine style, they drag their white silk garments as they roam about such that you can’t tell who is honored and who base.
In China the civil service became a particular flashpoint. The ranks of the gentry swelled but numbers of administrative positions did not, and as the thorny gates of learning narrowed, the rich found ways to make wealth matter more than scholarship. One county official complained that “poor scholars who hoped to get a place [at the examinations] were dismissed by the officials as though they were famine refugees.”
Even for kings, at the very top of the pile, these were tense times. In theory, rising population was good for rulers—more people to tax, more soldiers to enlist—but in practice things were not so simple. Pressed into a corner, hungry peasants might rebel rather than pay taxes, and fractious, feuding nobles often agreed with them. (Failed Chinese civil service candidates developed a particular habit of resurfacing as rebels.)
The problem was as old as kingship itself, and most sixteenth-century kings chose old solutions: centralization and expansion. Japan was perhaps the extreme case. Here political authority had collapsed altogether in the fifteenth century, with villages, Buddhist temples, and even individual city blocks setting up their own governments and hiring toughs to protect them or rob their neighbors.* In the sixteenth century population growth set off ferocious competition for resources, and from lots of little lords there gradually emerged a few big ones. The first Portuguese guns reached Japan in 1543 (a generation ahead of the Portuguese themselves) and by the 1560s Japanese craftsmen were making outstanding muskets of their own, just in time to help already-big lords who could afford to arm their followers get bigger still. In 1582 a single chief, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, made himself shogun over virtually the whole archipelago.
Hideyoshi talked his quarrelsome countrymen into handing over their weapons, promising to melt them down into nails and bolts for the world’s biggest statue of the Buddha, twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. This would “benefit the people not only in this life but in the life hereafter,” he explained. (A Christian missionary was unimpressed; Hideyoshi was “crafty and cunning beyond belief,” he reported, “depriving the people of their arms under pretext of devotion to Religion.”)
Whatever Hideyoshi’s spiritual intent may have been, disarming the people was certainly a huge step toward centralizing the state, greatly easing the task of counting heads, measuring land, and assigning tax and military obligations. By 1587, according to a letter he sent to his wife, Hideyoshi saw expansion as the solution to all his problems and decided to conquer China. Five years later his army—perhaps a quarter-million strong, armed with the latest muskets—landed in Korea and swept all before it.
He faced a Chinese Empire deeply divided over the merits of expansion. Some of the Ming emperors, like Hideyoshi in Japan, pushed to overhaul their empire’s rickety finances and expand. They ordered up new censuses, tried to work out who owed taxes on what, and converted complicated labor dues and grain contributions into simple silver payments. Civil servants, however, overwhelmingly shunned all this sound and fury. Centuries of tradition, they pointed out, showed that ideal rulers sat quietly (and inexpensively) at the center, leading by moral example. They did not wage war and certainly did not squeeze money out of the landed gentry, the very families that the bureaucrats themselves came from. Censuses and tax registers, Hideyoshi’s pride and joy, could safely be ignored. So what if one prefecture in the Yangzi Valley reported exactly the same number of residents in 1492 as it had done eighty years earlier? The dynasty, scholars insisted, would last ten thousand years whether it counted the people or not.
Activist emperors floundered in a bureaucratic quagmire. Sometimes the results were comical, as when Emperor Zhengde insisted on leading an army against the Mongols in 1517 only for the official in charge of the Great Wall to refuse to open the gates to let him through because emperors belonged in Beijing. Sometimes things were less amusing, as when Zhengde had his senior administrators whipped for stubbornness, killing several in the process.
Few emperors had Zhengde’s energy, and rather than take on the bureaucratic and landed interests, most let the tax rolls decay. Short of money, they stopped paying the army (in 1569 the vice-minister for war confessed that he could find only a quarter of the troops on his books). Bribing the Mongols was cheaper than fighting them.
Emperors also stopped paying the navy, even though it was supposed to be suppressing the enormous black market that had sprung up since Hongwu had banned private maritime trade back in the fourteenth century. Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese smugglers ran lucrative operations up and down the coast, buying the latest muskets, turning piratical, and easily outgunning the underfunded coastguards who intercepted them. Not that the coastguards really tried; kickbacks from smugglers were among their major perks.
China’s coast increasingly resembled something out of TV cop shows such as The Wire, with dirty money blurring distinctions among violent criminals, local worthies, and shady
politicians. One upright but naïve governor learned this the hard way when he actually followed the rules, executing a gang of smugglers even though one of them was a judge’s uncle. Strings were pulled. The governor was fired and committed suicide when the emperor issued a warrant for his arrest.
The government effectively lost control of the coast in the 1550s. Smugglers turned into pirate kings, controlling twenty cities and even threatening to loot the royal tombs at Nanjing. In the end it took a whole team of officials, politically savvy as well as incorruptible, to defeat them. With a covert force (known as “Qi’s Army” after Qi Jiguang, the most famous of these untouchables) of three thousand musketeers, the reformers fought a shadow war, sometimes with official backing, sometimes not, funded by a prefect of Yangzhou who channeled money to them under the table by squeezing back taxes out of the local elite. Qi’s Army showed that when the will was there the empire could still crush challengers, and its success inspired a (brief) era of reform. Transferred to the north, Qi revolutionized the Great Wall’s defenses, building stone towers,* filling them with trained musketeers, and mounting cannons on carts like the wagon forts that Hungarians had used against the Ottomans a century before.
In the 1570s Grand Secretary Zhang Zhuzheng, arguably the ablest administrator in Chinese history, updated the tax code, collected arrears, and modernized the army. He promoted bright young men such as Qi and personally oversaw the young emperor Wanli’s education. The treasury refilled and the army revived, but when Zhang died in 1582 the bureaucrats struck back. Zhang was posthumously disgraced and his acolytes fired. The worthy Qi died alone and penniless, abandoned even by his wife.
