Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Figure 9.8. All the world’s a stage: the global setting of the War of the West, fought by Britain and its allies against France between 1689 and 1815. Crossed swords mark some of the major battles; the British Empire as it was in 1815 is marked by dots.

  The War of the West, though, was barely half done. Even Britain was feeling the financial strain, and when a poorly thought-out scheme to get the American colonists to pick up part of the check for the war set off a revolt in 1776, France was there with the cash and ships that made all the difference for the rebels. Not even Britain’s credit could master determined rebels three thousand miles from home and another great power.

  Finance could, though, take away the sting of defeat. In any reasonable world, losing America to revolutionaries who celebrated their pursuit of happiness in language inspired by the French Enlightenment should have bankrupted Britain’s Atlantic economy and ushered in a French imperium in Europe. Pitt feared as much, warning that if Britain lost he expected every gentleman in England to sell up and ship out to America, but trade and credit again came to the rescue. Britain paid down its debts, kept its fleets patrolling the sea-lanes, and went on carrying the goods Americans still needed. By 1789 Anglo-American trade was back to prerevolution levels.

  For France, however, 1789 was a disaster. To win the American war Louis XVI had run up debts he could not pay, so he now convened his nobles, clergy, and rich commoners to ask for new taxes, only for the commoners to turn the Enlightenment against him, too. Proclaiming the Rights of Man (and, two years later, those of Woman), rich commoners found themselves half stage-managing and half trying to stay out of the way of an unpredictable spiral of revolt and civil war. “Make terror the order of the day!” the radicals shouted, then executed their king, his family, and thousands of their fellow revolutionaries.

  Once again reasonable expectations were confounded. Instead of leaving Britain master of the West, the revolution opened the way for new forms of mass warfare, and for a few heady years it looked as if Napoleon, its general of genius, would finally create a European land empire. In 1805 he mustered his Grand Army for the fourth French attempt to invade Britain since 1689; “Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours,” he told the troops, “and we are masters of the world!”

  Napoleon never got his six hours, and although he made British traders’ worst nightmares come true by shutting them out of every harbor in Europe, he could not break their financial power. In 1812 Napoleon controlled a quarter of Europe’s population and a French army was in Moscow; two years later he was out of power and a Russian army (on the British payroll) was in Paris; and in 1815 diplomats at the great Congress of Vienna thrashed out terms that would damp down the War of the West for the next ninety-nine years.

  Did all these wars in the end make much difference? In a way, yes. In 1683, on the eve of the Anglo-French conflict, Vienna was again under siege by a Turkish army, but by the time the great and the good convened there in 1815 the War of the West had pushed western European firepower, discipline, and finance far ahead of anything else in the world, and Turkish armies came no more. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 the Ottomans had to rely on Britain to throw him out, and in 1803 fewer than five thousand British troops (half of them recruited locally and trained in European musketry) would scatter ten times their number of South Asians at Assaye. The balance of military power had shifted, spectacularly, toward western Europe.

  But in another way, no. Despite all the battles and bombardments, real wages kept falling after 1750. Beginning in the 1770s, a new breed of scholars, calling themselves political economists, brought all the tools of science and enlightenment to bear on the problem. The news they brought back from their researches was not good: there were, they claimed, iron laws governing humanity. First, although empire and conquest might raise productivity and income, people would always convert extra wealth into more babies. The babies’ empty bellies would then consume all the extra wealth, and, worse still, when the babies grew up and needed jobs of their own, their competition would drive wages back down to the edge of starvation.

  There appeared to be no way out of this cruel cycle. Had the political economists known about the index of social development they would probably have pointed out that although the hard ceiling had been pushed up a little, it remained as hard as ever. They might have been fascinated to learn that the West’s score had caught up with the East’s in 1773, but would surely have said it did not really matter, because the iron laws forbade either score from rising much further. Political economy had proved scientifically that nothing could ever really change.

  But then it did.

  10

  THE WESTERN AGE

  WHAT ALL THE WORLD DESIRES

  Once in a while a single year seems to shift the ground under our feet. In the West, 1776 was such a moment. In America a tax revolt turned into a revolution; in Glasgow, Adam Smith finished his Wealth of Nations, the first and greatest work of political economy; in London, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire hit the bookstores and became an overnight sensation. Great men were doing great things. Yet on March 22 James Boswell—Ninth Laird of Auchinleck, thwarted man of letters, and ambitious hanger-on around the rich and famous—was to be found not in some wit-filled salon but in a coach splashing through the mud toward Soho, an estate outside Birmingham in the English Midlands (Figure 10.1).

  From a distance Soho’s clock tower, carriageway, and Palladian façade made it look like just the kind of country house Boswell might want to visit for tea and pleasantries, but on closer approach a clattering hubbub of crashing hammers, screeching lathes, and cursing laborers dispelled any such illusions. This was no setting for a Jane Austen novel; it was a factory. And Boswell, despite his privilege and pretensions, wanted to see it, for there was nothing quite like Soho anywhere else in the world.

  Figure 10.1. Power for sale: the cradle of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution

  Everything at Soho lived up to Boswell’s expectations—its hundreds of workmen, “the vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery,” and above all its proprietor, Matthew Boulton (“an iron chieftain,” Boswell called him). Boswell confided to his journal, “I shall never forget Mr. Bolton’s [sic] expression to me: ‘I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.’”

  It was men like Boulton who gave the lie to political economists’ dismal predictions. When Boswell and Boulton met in 1776, Western social development had clawed its way up just forty-five points since Ice Age hunter-gatherers had prowled the tundra in search of a meal; within the next hundred years it soared another hundred points. The transformation beggared belief. It turned the world inside out. In 1776 East and West were still neck and neck, barely above the old forty-three-point hard ceiling; a century later, the sale of power had turned the West’s lead into Western rule. “ ’Twas in truth,” said the poet Wordsworth in 1805,

  … an hour

  Of universal ferment; mildest men

  Were agitated; and commotions, strife

  Of passion and opinion fill’d the walls

  Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.

  The soil of common life was at that time

  Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,

  And not then only, “what a mockery this

  Of history; the past and that to come!”

  What mockery indeed, at least of the past; but not, in fact, of that to come. Universal ferment had barely begun, and over the next century Western development went off the scale. Any graph (like Figure 10.2) that can fit the contemporary West’s 906 points on its vertical axis reduces all the ups and downs, leads and lags, triumphs and tragedies that filled the first nine chapters of this book to insignificance. And all thanks to what Boulton was selling.

  Figure 10.2. Universal ferment: social development across the last two thousand years, showing the Western-led takeoff since 1800 that made mockery of all the drama of the world’s earlier history
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  THE JOY OF STEAM

  The world had had power before Boulton, of course. What he was selling was better power. For millions of years nearly all the power to move things had come from muscles; and while muscles can be remarkable—they built the pyramids, dug the Grand Canal, and painted the Sistine Chapel—they do have limits. Most obviously, muscles are parts of animals, and animals need food, shelter, and often fuel and clothes. All of these come from plants or other animals, which also require food, shelter, and so on; and everything in this chain ultimately requires land. So as land grew scarce in the eighteenth-century cores, muscles got expensive.

  For centuries wind and water power had augmented muscles by pushing boats along and driving millstones. But wind and water have limits too. They are available only in certain places; streams can freeze in winter or run dry in summer; and whenever the air hangs heavy, windmills’ sails stop.

  What was needed was power that was portable, so people could bring it to their work rather than bringing their work to it; reliable, so it did not depend on the weather; and space-neutral, so it did not consume millions of acres of trees and fields. The ironmasters of eleventh-century Kaifeng had seen that coal offered an answer, but this, too, had a limit. It could release energy only as heat.

  The breakthrough—turning heat into motion—came in the eighteenth century and began at the coal mines themselves. Flooding was a constant problem, and while muscles and buckets could drain mineshafts (one ingenious English pit owner yoked five hundred horses to a bucket chain), they were hugely expensive. In hindsight, the solution seems obvious: get the water out with engines that eat coal from the mine rather than animals that eat food. But that was easier said than done.

  The Eastern and Western cores both needed coal in the eighteenth century and both faced flooded mineshafts, but it was English engine makers who found the answer. As we saw in Chapter 9, here on northwest Europe’s farthest fringe the Atlantic economy had particularly rewarded semiscientific tinkering. This threw up just the kind of men the problem called for, combining business acumen with practical experience of metals and some basic grasp of physics. Such men did exist in China and Japan, but they were rare, and so far as we know none of them even tried to tinker with coal-fired engines.

  The first working Western pump, the “Miner’s Friend,” was patented in England in 1698. It burned coal to boil water and then condensed the steam into a vacuum, whereupon operators opened a valve and the vacuum sucked water up from the mine. Now closing the valve, workers stoked the fires to boil this water, too, into steam; and then repeated the gravity-defying process of boiling and condensing over and over again.

  The Miner’s Friend was slow, could raise only forty feet of water, and had a distinctly unfriendly tendency to explode, but it was still (usually) cheaper than feeding hundreds of horses. It also inspired more tinkering, but even the improved engines remained horribly wasteful. Because they used the same cylinder to boil water and then cool it to make a vacuum, they had to reheat the cylinder for every stroke of the piston. Even the best engines converted less than 1 percent of the energy in coal into force to pump water.

  For decades, this inefficiency restricted steam power to the single job of pumping out coal mines, and even for that, one owner complained, “the vast consumption of fuel of these engines is an immense drawback on the profit of our mines … This heavy tax amounts almost to a prohibition.” For any business that had to ship coal from mines to factories, steam engines were just too expensive.

  Engines were, however, fun for professors. Glasgow University bought a miniature example, but when none of the scholars could get it to work, it made its way in 1765 to the workshop of James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University. Watt got it going, but its inefficiency sinned against his craftsman’s soul. In between other tasks he obsessed about better ways to evaporate and condense water, until, as he told it,

  I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon … when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the [heated] cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might there be condensed without cooling the cylinder … I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

  It being Sunday, the God-fearing Watt could only sit on his hands, but on Monday morning he knocked together a new model separating the condenser from the evaporation cylinder. Instead of alternately heating and cooling one cylinder, the boiler now stayed hot and the condenser cold, cutting coal use by nearly four-fifths.

  This threw up a host of new problems, but Watt plodded on with them, year after year. His wife died; his backer went bankrupt; and still he could not make the engine work reliably. But in 1774, just as Watt was about to give up tinkering for steadier work, the iron chieftain Matthew Boulton came to the rescue, buying out Watt’s debt-laden backer and sweeping the engine maker off to Birmingham. Boulton threw both money and the brilliant metalworker “Iron Mad” Wilkinson at the problem. (Wilkinson believed everything should be made of iron, including his own coffin.)

  Just six months later Watt wrote to his father—in what strikes me as the second-greatest understatement of all time (I will come to the greatest later in this chapter)—that his engine was now “rather successful.” In a grand public display in March 1776 Watt and Boulton’s engine pumped sixty feet of water from a mineshaft in sixty minutes flat, burning just a quarter as much coal as older machines.

  No wonder Boulton was feeling expansive when Boswell visited Soho that month. With engines now cost-effective outside the pits themselves, the sky was the limit. “If we had … a hundred small engines … and twenty large ones executed, we could readily dispose of them all,” Boulton wrote to Watt. “Let us make hay while the sun shines.”

  And so they did, although even they were probably surprised at some of the customers who came to their door. The first manufacturers to seize on steam power were makers of cotton cloth. Cotton would not grow in western Europe, and until the seventeenth century Britons had normally worn scratchy, sweaty wool year-round, generally dispensing with underwear altogether. Predictably, when traders started importing light, brightly printed cotton cloth from India, it was a huge hit. “It crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers,” Daniel Defoe recalled in 1708. “Curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs.”

  The importers made fortunes, but money spent on Indian cotton was of course money not spent on British wool. Wool magnates therefore lobbied Parliament to ban cotton cloth, whereupon other Britons imported raw cotton (which was still legal) and wove their own cloth. Unfortunately, they were not as good at this as Indians, and as late as the 1760s the market for British cotton was just one-thirtieth of that for British wool.

  Cotton did have one thing going for it, though: the laborious task of spinning its fibers into yarn lent itself to mechanization. For ten thousand years textile production had depended on nimble-fingered women (but only rarely men) to twist wisps of wool or fiber onto spindles. We saw in Chapter 7 that by 1300, Chinese spinners were using water- and animal-powered machines to increase productivity. These machines became more common over the following centuries, steadily pushing up output, but the British move to mechanization abruptly made all the ancient skills redundant. In 1700 a spinster with a pedal-powered wheel needed two hundred hours to produce a pound of yarn;* by 1800, extraordinary devices with even more extraordinary names—Hargreaves’s jenny, Arkwright’s throstle, Crompton’s mule—were doing the same work in three hours (Roberts’s self-acting mule, invented in 1824, took just an hour and twenty minutes). The machines’ repetitive movements also made them ideal for steam power and for concentration in large factories, and the first spinning mill powered entirely by steam engines (supplied, naturally, by Boulton and Watt) opened in 1785.

  Machines made British cotton cheaper, finer, stronger, and more
uniform even than Indian, and British exports of finished cloth increased a hundredfold between 1760 and 1815, turning cotton from a minor industry into the source of almost a twelfth of the national income. A hundred thousand men, women, and (especially) children labored twelve or more hours a day, six days a week, in the mills, flooding markets with so much cotton that the price of yarn fell from thirty-eight shillings per pound in 1786 to under seven shillings in 1807. As prices fell, though, markets expanded. Profits kept booming.

  Geography made cotton the perfect industry for Britain. Because its raw materials grew overseas, they did not compete for land at home. Instead Americans, eager for British cash, turned millions of acres into cotton plantations and put hundreds of thousands of slaves to work on them. Production soared from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 in 1810 and 4.5 million in 1860. British innovations in spinning stimulated American innovations on the plantations, such as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (short for engine), which separated cotton fibers from sticky seeds even more cheaply than slaves’ fingers. The American supply of cotton rose to meet British demand, keeping prices low, enriching mill and plantation owners, and creating vast new armies of labor on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Back in Britain, technology jumped from industry to industry, stimulating yet more technology. The most important leap was to ironworking, the industry that made the materials that other new industries used. Britain’s ironmasters had known how to smelt iron with coke since 1709 (seven centuries behind Chinese metallurgists), but had trouble keeping their furnaces hot enough for coke smelting. After 1776 Boulton and Watt’s engines solved the problem by providing steady blasts of air, and within a decade Cort’s puddling-and-rolling process (as wonderfully named as anything in cotton spinning) smoothed out the remaining technical difficulties. Following the same path as cotton, ironmakers saw labor costs plummet while employment, productivity, and profits exploded.