Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Boulton and his competitors had taken the lid off energy capture. Even though their revolution took several decades to unfold (in 1800, British manufacturers still generated three times as much power from waterwheels as from steam engines), it was nonetheless the biggest and fastest transformation in the entire history of the world. In three generations technological change shattered the hard ceiling. By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output. Fossil fuel made the impossible possible.

  THE GREAT DIVERGENCE

  Locals like to call my hometown, Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands, the cradle of the industrial revolution. Its great claim to fame comes from being the heart of the Potteries, where Josiah Wedgwood mechanized vase-making in the 1760s. Industrial-scale potting pervaded everything in Stoke. Even my own earliest archaeological experiences as a teenager nearly two centuries later went on in Wedgwood’s shadow, working on misfired pots from a vast dump behind the Whieldon factory where Wedgwood had learned his craft.

  Stoke was built on coal, iron, and clay, and when I was young most of its workingmen still got up before dawn and headed for the pit, steelworks, or potbank. My grandfather was a steelworker; my father left school for the mines just before his fourteenth birthday. In my own schooldays we were constantly told how the pluck, grit, and ingenuity of our forebears had made Britain great and changed the world. But so far as I remember, no one told us why it was our hills and valleys, rather than someone else’s in some other place, that had cradled the infant industry.

  This question, though, is the front line in arguments over the great divergence between West and East. Was it inevitable that the industrial revolution would happen in Britain (in and around Stoke-on-Trent, in fact) rather than somewhere else in the West? If not, was it inevitable that it would happen in the West rather than somewhere else? Or—for that matter—that it would happen at all?

  I grumbled in the introduction to this book that even though these questions are really about whether Western dominance was locked in in the distant past, experts offering answers rarely look back more than four or five hundred years. I hope I have made my point by now that putting the industrial revolution into the long historical perspective sketched in the first nine chapters of this book will provide better answers.

  The industrial revolution was unique in how much and how fast it drove up social development, but otherwise it was very like all the upswings in earlier history. Like all those earlier episodes of (relatively) rapidly rising development, it happened in an area that had until recently been rather peripheral to the main story. Since the origins of agriculture, the major cores had expanded through various combinations of colonization and imitation, with populations on the peripheries adopting what worked in the core and sometimes adapting it to very different environments at the margins. Sometimes this process revealed advantages in backwardness, as when fifth-millennium-BCE farmers found that the only way to make a living in Mesopotamia was by irrigation, in the process turning Mesopotamia into a new core; or when cities and states expanded into the Mediterranean Basin in the first millennium BCE, developing new patterns of maritime trade; or when northern Chinese farmers fled southward and turned the area beyond the Yangzi into a new rice frontier after 400 CE.

  When the Western core expanded north and west from its Mediterranean heartland in the second millennium CE, western Europeans eventually discovered that new maritime technology could turn their geographical isolation, which had long been a source of backwardness, into an advantage. More by accident than design, western Europeans created new kinds of oceanic empires, and as their novel Atlantic economy drove social development up, it presented entirely new challenges.

  There was no guarantee that Europeans would meet these challenges; neither the Romans (in the first century CE) nor the Song Chinese (in the eleventh) had found a way through the hard ceiling. All the signs were that muscles were the ultimate source of power, that no more than 10–15 percent of people would ever be able to read, that cities and armies could never grow beyond about a million members, and that—consequently—social development could never get past the low forties on the index. But in the eighteenth century Westerners brushed these limits aside; by selling power they made mockery of all that had gone before.

  Western Europeans succeeded where the Romans and Song failed because three things had changed. First, technology had gone on accumulating. Some skills were lost each time social development collapsed, but most were not, and over the centuries new ones were added. The same-river-twice principle thus kept working: each society that pressed against the hard ceiling between the first century and the eighteenth was different from its predecessors. Each knew and could do more than those that had gone before.

  Second, in large part because technology had accumulated, agrarian empires now had effective guns, allowing the Romanovs and Qing to close the steppe highway. Consequently, when social development pressed against the hard ceiling in the seventeenth century, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse—migration—did not ride. It was a struggle, but the cores managed to cope with the other four horsemen and averted collapse. Without this change, the eighteenth century might have been as disastrous as the third and thirteenth.

  Third, again largely because technology had accumulated, ships could now sail almost anywhere they wanted, allowing western Europeans to create an Atlantic economy unlike anything seen before. Neither the Romans nor the Song had been in a position to build such a vast engine of commercial growth, so neither had had to confront the kinds of problems that forced themselves on western Europeans’ attention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Newton, Watt, and their colleagues were probably no more brilliant than Cicero, Shen Kuo, and theirs; they just thought about different things.

  Eighteenth-century western Europe was better placed than any earlier society to annihilate the hard ceiling; within western Europe, the northwest—with its weaker kings and freer merchants—was better placed than the southwest; and within the northwest, Britain was best placed of all. By 1770 Britain not only had higher wages, more coal, stronger finance, and arguably more open institutions (for middle- and upper-class men, anyway) than anyone else, but—thanks to coming out on top in its wars with the Dutch and French—it also had more colonies, trade, and warships.

  It was easier to have an industrial revolution in Britain than anywhere else, but Britain still had no lock-in on industrialization. If—as could easily have happened—it had been French bells, not British, that were worn threadbare by ringing victories in 1759, and if France had stripped Britain of its navy, colonies, and trade rather than Britain stripping France, my elders would not have reared me on stories of how Stoke-on-Trent had midwifed the industrial revolution. The elders in some equally smoke-blackened French city such as Lille might have been spinning that yarn instead. France, after all, had plenty of inventors and entrepreneurs, and even a small shift in national endowments or the decisions of kings and generals might have made a big difference.

  Great men, bungling idiots, and dumb luck had a lot to do with why the industrial revolution was British rather than French, but they had much less to do with why the West had an industrial revolution in the first place. To explain that, we have to look at larger forces, because once enough technology had accumulated, once the steppe highway had closed, and once the oceanic highways had opened—by, say, 1650 or 1700—it is hard to imagine what could have stopped an industrial revolution from happening somewhere in western Europe. If France or the Low Countries had become the workshop of the world rather than Britain, the industrial revolution might have broken more slowly, perhaps beginning in the 1870s rather than the 1770s. The world we live in today would be different, but western Europe would still have had the original industrial revolution and the West would still rule. I would still be writing this book, but it m
ight be in French rather than English.

  Unless, that is, the East had independently industrialized first. Could that have happened if Western industrialization had been slower? Here, of course, I am piling what-ifs on top of what-ifs, but I think the answer is still fairly clear: probably not. Even though Eastern and Western social development scores were neck-and-neck until 1800, there are few signs that the East, if left alone, was moving toward industrialization fast enough to have begun its own takeoff during the nineteenth century.

  The East had large markets and intense trade, but these did not work like the West’s Atlantic economy, and while ordinary people in the East were not as poor as Adam Smith claimed in his Wealth of Nations (“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe”), Figure 10.3 shows that they were not rich either. Beijingers* were no worse off than Florentines but much worse off than Londoners. With labor so cheap in China and Japan (and southern Europe), the incentives for the local equivalents of Boulton to invest in machinery were weak. As late as 1880 the up-front costs to open a mine with six hundred Chinese laborers were estimated as $4,272—roughly the price of a single steam pump. Even when they had the option, savvy Chinese investors often preferred cheap muscles to expensive steam.

  With so little to gain from tinkering, neither Eastern entrepreneurs nor scholars in the imperial academies showed much interest in boilers and condensers, let alone jennies, throstles, and puddling. To have had its own industrial revolution, the East would have needed to create some equivalent to the Atlantic economy that could generate higher wages and new challenges, stimulating the whole package of scientific thought, mechanical tinkering, and cheap power.

  Figure 10.3. Workers of the world, divide: despite their woes, British workers earned much more than non-British between 1780 and 1830 and did better still after 1830. The graph compares the real wages of the unskilled in London, Florence (fairly typical of southern Europe’s low wages), and Beijing (exemplifying Chinese and Japanese wages).

  Again, given time, that might have come to pass. Already in the eighteenth century there was a flourishing Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia; other things being equal, the kind of geographical interdependence that characterized the Atlantic economy might have emerged in the nineteenth century. But other things were not equal. It took Westerners two hundred years to get from Jamestown to James Watt. If the East had been left in splendid isolation, if it had moved down the same path as the West across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries toward creating a geographically diversified economy, and if it had moved at roughly the same pace as the West, a Chinese Watt or Japanese Boulton might at this very moment be unveiling his first steam engine in Shanghai or Tokyo. But none of those ifs eventuated, because once the West’s industrial revolution began, it swallowed the world.

  THE GRADGRINDS

  As late as 1750, the similarities between the Eastern and Western cores were still striking. Both were advanced agrarian economies with complex divisions of labor, extensive trade networks, and growing manufacturing sectors. At both ends of Eurasia rich landowning elites, confident in their order’s stability, traditions, and worth, were masters of all they surveyed. Each elite defended its position with elaborate rules of deference and etiquette, and each consumed and produced culture of great subtlety and refinement. Behind all the obvious differences of style and narration, it is hard not to see a certain kinship between sprawling eighteenth-century novels of manners such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber.

  By 1850 all these similarities were being washed away by one massive difference: the rise in the West of a new, steam-powered class of iron chieftains that, according to its most famous critics, “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’” This new class, Marx and Engels went on, “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

  Opinions differed—violently—over just what this new class was doing, but most agreed that whatever it was, it was changing everything. To some, the millionaires who tapped and sold power were heroes whose “energy and perseverance, guided by sound judgment, [merely] secured their usual reward.” Thus Samuel Smiles, author of the Victorian classic Self-Help. “In early times,” Smiles explained, “the products of skilled industry were for the most part luxuries intended for the few, whereas now”—thanks to the captains of industry—“the most exquisite tools and engines are employed in producing articles of ordinary consumption for the great mass of the community.”

  To others, though, industrialists were hard-faced, frock-coated brutes, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times. “Facts alone are wanted in life,” Gradgrind insisted. “Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” Dickens had learned about the industrial revolution the hard way, laboring in a boot-black factory while his father languished in debtors’ prison, and had strong views on the Gradgrinds. As he saw it, they leached the beauty out of life, herding workers into soul-destroying cities like his imaginary Coketown, “a triumph of fact … a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.”

  There were certainly real-life Gradgrinds aplenty. The young Friedrich Engels described running into one in 1840s Manchester and lecturing him on the plight of this Coketown’s workers. “He listened patiently,” said Engels, “and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir!’”

  The businessman was right: by tapping into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, Boulton and Watt’s engines had unleashed a storm of moneymaking. Yet Engels was right too: the workers who made the money saw precious little of it. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer grew by more than 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The rest was skimmed off as profits. Anger mounted in the slums. Workers formed unions and demanded a People’s Charter; radicals plotted to blow up the government. Farmworkers, their livelihoods threatened by mechanical threshers, smashed machines and burned hayricks in 1830, signing threatening letters to the gentry under the piratical-sounding name “Captain Swing.” Everywhere magistrates and clergymen caught the whiff of Jacobinism, their catchall term for French-style insurrection, and men of property bore down on it with the full weight of the state. Cavalry trampled demonstrators; unionists were jailed; machine breakers were shipped to penal colonies at the farthest fringes of Britain’s empire.

  To Marx and Engels, the process seemed crystal clear: Western industrialization was driving social development up faster than ever before but was also kicking the paradox of development into warp speed.* By turning men into mere “hands,” flesh-and-blood cogs in mills and factories, capitalists were also giving them common cause and making them revolutionaries. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,” Marx and Engels concluded, “are its own gravediggers … Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”

  Marx and Engels believed that capitalists had brought this on themselves by fencing off the countryside and driving the dispossessed into cities to be wage slaves, but they had the facts wrong. Rich landlords did not drive country folk off the land; sex did. The nineteenth century’s intensive agriculture actually needed more field hands, not fewer, and the real reason people exchanged farms for cities was reproduction. Life expectancy increased by about three years between 1750 and 1850, and although historians cannot agree why this happened (Fewer outbreaks of plague? More nutritious foods? Better water supplies and sewers? Smarter child-rearing practices? Cotton underwear? Something else completely?), those extra childbearing years meant that unless women married later, had sex in different ways, or aborted/starved their young, they would raise more
children. Women did in fact change their behavior, but not enough to cancel out their longer lives, and Britain’s population roughly doubled (to about 14 million) between 1780 and 1830. About a million of these extra people stayed on the land, but 6 million sought jobs in towns.

  These hard facts of reproduction make the industrial revolution’s glass look half-full rather than half-empty: industrialization was traumatic but the alternatives were worse. In the sixteenth century wages had collapsed all over the West when population grew, but British wages actually rose after 1775 and pulled away from everyone else’s (Figure 10.3). When Britons did starve en masse, in the horrific 1840s Irish famine, it had more to do with greedy landlords and stupid politicians than with industry (which was strikingly scarce in Ireland).

  The irony is that the tide turned in workers’ favor in the very years Marx and Engels formulated their doctrines. Since 1780 capitalists had been spending much of their profits on country houses, peerages, and the other trappings of the arriviste, but they had plowed even more back into new machines and mills. By about 1830 these investments were making the mechanically augmented labor of each dirty, malnourished, ill-educated “hand” so profitable that bosses often preferred cutting deals with strikers to firing them and competing with other bosses to find new ones. For the next fifty years wages grew as fast as profits, and in 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, British workers’ pay was finally regaining the heights it had reached after the Black Death.