A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (4 page)

But all efforts fail. Under the hammer-blows of Germans and Slavs, themselves harassed by Turks and Mongols, Rome retreats and grows weary, and is soon to find rivals in other cities of the empire, such as Byzantium in Asia Minor.

In 284, the emperor Diocletian tries once again to collect for Rome taxes that are now increasingly rejected. In vain. The empire no longer has the means to finance its defense. In 313, the emperor Constantine, striving to regain the support of his people and nobility, grants freedom of worship to the swelling number of Christians through the Edict of Milan. Once again in vain. In 320, Constantine defeats Maxentius and converts. On the death of the emperor Theodosius in 395, the Roman Empire, unmanageable from a single center, permanently splits into two parts with two capitals, Rome and Byzantium (now called Constantinople). The Roman Empire of the East begins. Europe distances itself from Asia.

A host of Indo-European tribes (Goths, Franks, Vandals, Slavs, Alamans, Lombards, Teutons, Huns, and Mongols) together fall on what remains of the Roman
Empire of the West. These invaders dream only of becoming Romans — in fact, Christians and Judeo-Greeks — in their culture and way of life. In 406, nomad hordes cross the Rhine and penetrate the Roman Empire: the Huns push the Visigoths toward Rome, but they pull back within an ace of delivering the deathblow.

Yet the end soon comes. In 476 the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, is replaced by a Herulian king, Odoacre. The Roman Empire of the West disappears. For the first time, an empire is conquered without leaving a successor. It will not be the last.

Constantinople remains the center of a virtually intact Empire of the East. In the West, by contrast, bishops, princes, and townships organize themselves into small autonomous powers. In 496, like many other Western rulers, Clovis, king of the Franks, is baptized a Christian and detaches himself from the last shreds of the Roman Empire. All Europe, overrun by brigands and wanderers, builds itself around tiny kingdoms, Gallo-Roman villas, and convents — rare protected species.

Meanwhile, in Asia, America, and Africa, other empires crumble when their leaders — as at Palenque in Mexico — fail to compensate for the disappearance of natural resources. Or they survive when a monarch organizes the move from his capital in time — like the abandonment of Amber in Rajasthan, later replaced by Jaipur. Dynasties also succeed one another in China, without managing to reunify a country that has been fragmented since the collapse of the Han dynasty at the beginning of the third century of our era. Only in 618 does the Tang dynasty raise the country’s fortunes
again. Buddhism now becomes the state religion: the capital, Xi’an, is still far and away the most populous city in the world. The Tang vanish in turn during a chaotic period known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Throughout the world, empires become more and more fragile and unmanageable.

At the same time, in Arabia, the future Prophet Muhammad flees Mecca for Medina in 622. His message grows harsher, more geared toward conquest. The Koran is slowly elaborated and Islam is born. In less than a century its power, at once religious, political, and military, overturns aging structures just as Christianity had done. By force of arms, it terminates thousand-year-old empires. In less than a century, the soldiers of the Prophet’s successors themselves almost constitute a new empire, light-footed, quick-moving, almost nomadic. To finance their armies these first caliphs, based initially in Damascus and then in Baghdad, resort for the first time to bankers — all of them Jewish because they alone are permitted by their religion to deal in money. The soldiers of Islam rapidly overrun the Middle East, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, often forcibly converting their peoples, before being stopped in France (at Poitiers in 732) by Frankish troops.

The Muslim empire, the Caliphate, structures itself around new lightweight institutions, more effective than those of earlier empires, all of whose knowledge and wealth they exploit. Now (with China) it becomes one of the two strongest powers in the world, and the Caliphate installs its capitals in Baghdad and Córdoba. There all products, all religions, and the whole corpus of knowledge coexist uneasily, their relations marked by
sporadic conflict. Highways become safer. The markets of Europe and Asia come back to life again. Merchants, financiers, men of letters, musicians, poets, and soldiers move back and forth from city to city, from fair to fair.

Farther north, in the former Roman Empire of the West, the first city fairs of Christianity emerge in the ninth century, replicating those of Islam. Embryonic states appear around them. In 800 the Roman Empire of the West, more shadow than reality, is reborn in Germany, first of all with Charlemagne and then his sons Otto and Friedrich. Close by, two nations, France (dominated by the Franks) and Russia (by the Norsemen), are born, along with countless principalities dominated by the Visigoths in Spain, by the Saxons in Germany and Flanders, and by the Lombards in Italy.

This history is still ours. Even today, France, Russia, Italy, Spain, and England bear the name of one of their invaders during this period. Germany evokes the name of three of them, depending on the language in which the country is named. And Vikings, nomads from the North, are among the founders of the Danish, Swedish, French, Icelandic, English, Russian, and Italian peoples.

In southern China, in 960, unity is restored by the Song and consolidated by the Jin, whose response results chiefly from military pressure exerted by the principalities of the north.

In the Mediterranean, Islam is still at the leading edge of what will become the mercantile order. In the
Córdoban capital of the Caliphate, the biggest city in Europe, they speak Arabic, think in Greek, and pray in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. Riches stream in from everywhere — African gold, Asian spices, and wheat from the rest of Europe. There are more books in the caliph’s library than in all the European libraries put together.

The other great world empire, the Chinese, controls all the seas of Asia, arranging for the shipment of spices to Europe in exchange for agricultural and craft products, borne aboard awe-inspiring vessels equipped with steering oars and compasses.

Midway through the twelfth century, European Islam is still the first-ranking power in the Mediterranean. In Córdoba, capital of a Muslim empire extending from Andalusia to Libya, an outstanding creative elite comes together: bankers, poets, scientists, merchants, from Omar Khayyam to Ibn Gabirol, from Maimonides to Averroes. In the Mediterranean, Muslim armies and fleets begin to confront the Christian princes’ new forces, embarked on a crusade to recover the Holy Places and open a commercial road to Asia.

In the mid-twelfth century, the biggest city in Asia is still Xi’an. Paris, capital of the most populous kingdom in Europe, plays only a marginal economic and cultural role. The most powerful city in Europe is still Córdoba.

Until, in 1148, the Almohades (doctors of religion from the Moroccan south) forbid Muslims to study Greek thought and expel Jews and Christians from their empire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mediterranean, other Muslim leaders leave for the recapture of the Holy Places recently seized by the Crusaders.

At this pivotal moment, Islam triumphs in Asia but loses the means for victory in Europe. By shutting itself off from knowledge it loses all chance of maintaining its leading role in the mercantile order. Islam enters into decline, as does China.

The world thus changes radically. The two great empires, China and the Muslim world, turn their backs on the competition imposed by the mercantile order. India, divided into too many brilliant kingdoms, does not concern itself with the rest of the world, except to trade with it for the wealth necessary to the splendor of a handful of princes. Threatened by Islam, Byzantium is no longer agile or powerful enough to become a truly great mercantile power.

These mid-twelfth-century events weigh very heavily on our present, and even more heavily, as we shall see, on our future.

The center of world power now tilts toward Christian Europe, but without fixing on a single one of the great kingdoms in process of formation. France, England, and Russia still lie under the feudal system. Unpaid labor, voluntary or forced, still represents the bedrock of production, and the nobility maintains itself in power by protecting its serfs against everything that moves — mercenaries, brigands, traders, sailors, doctors, musicians, troubadours, explorers, philosophers, and beggars. Even in France, by far the most populous and promising of the three, empire prevails: the sea is not the final horizon, the merchant is not the master. The land still dominates.

Yet in a handful of the continent’s rare fairs the new order (still laughably small, parasitic, unseen but
revolutionary) pries its way into the narrow cracks between these kingdoms. The mercantile order is still here today, more powerful than ever, and without doubt it is here for a very long time.

In these first townships, men can think more freely than elsewhere. In them, religious and military powers gradually lose control of the economy and of politics. A new ruling class, composed of merchants and financiers, brandishes its freedoms as an absolute ideal. This new class exploits slaves, peasants, wage-earners, and craftsmen, using control of work tools as the instrument of its power. The new elite also forges an alliance with the church, whose misgivings about the financial world wane — at the same time as its restrictions on sexuality are on the rise.

These mercantile elites now elaborate on the Judeo-Greek ideal, establishing freedom to travel, create, transmit, learn, and make a fortune. Bypassing Christian apologia for poverty, they employ a marginally freer labor force — wage-earners — in their workshops and their warehouses, on their ships or in their banks. These elites are neither peaceful nor liberal, for the market needs a powerful state to inaugurate and defend property rights. Mercenaries fight for the merchants’ rights and interests. This leads them to delegate management of their common affairs to representatives of their own group, some assigned to creating law, others to implementing it, with the former sometimes keeping a watchful eye on the latter.

In private life, the freedom of each member of the new elite is henceforth limited only to what he owns. In public life, it is determined by the majority decision
of the others. All are convinced that these simultaneous decisions lead to their maximum collective satisfaction.

Freedom, mercantile and political, is more than ever the driving force of history.

Unlike the two previous orders — in which at any moment on earth a thousand tribes, kingdoms, and empires coexisted, revering a thousand leaders, worshiping a thousand gods, speaking a thousand languages, ignorant of one another or else engaging in bloody combat, the mercantile order speaks a single language, that of money. It constantly reinvents itself in a unique shape, around a single center, a single core, which attracts an
innovative class
(shipbuilders, manufacturers, traders, technicians, and financiers) marked by its taste for the new and its passion for discovery. Until a crisis, or a war, leads to replacement of one core by another.

This springs from the very nature of the new order. Markets and democracy are founded on the organization of competition, resulting in insistence on the new and in the selection of an elite. Moreover, in the very long term, accumulation of capital cannot be pursued in a firm or a family, both of which are fragile units. It is pursued in a city, a core that becomes the organizing center of capitalism. Finally, competition implies battle, and there will therefore be a continuum between market, democracy, and violence.

All cores must necessarily have a vast hinterland for the development of agriculture, and a big port to
export their produce. All these cores respond to a lack that otherwise would destroy them; all develop direction from the top in order to gain the upper hand over competition. Emulation, rigor, force, state control, protectionism, and mastery of the exchange rates are their weapons. A city becomes a core if its innovative class is in a better position than anyone else to transform a service into an industrial product. To achieve this, it must master capital, fix prices, gather in the profits, hold wages in check, deploy an army, bankroll explorers, and nurture the ideology that guarantees its power.

Now each core seizes control at home and abroad of the most efficient energy sources and the swiftest means of communication. Bankers, artists, intellectuals, and innovators move in, bringing their money, building palaces and tombs, painting the portraits of the world’s new masters, commanding their armies.

Girdling this core is a median zone made up of old and future rivals, either in decline or expanding. I shall call this zone the environs. The kingdoms and empires of the rest of the world, partially governed by the earlier orders, form the outer rim, or what I call the periphery, selling its raw materials and labor force (usually slaves) to the core and environs.

A mercantile form lasts for as long as the core can amass enough wealth to master both the environs and the periphery. It loses momentum and collapses when the core has to devote too many resources to maintaining internal peace or to protecting itself against one or several enemies.

Form by form, each core (bankrupted by its
expenditures) yields its place to a rival. In general, this rival is not one of its attackers. It is another power, concerning itself during the core’s battles with inaugurating another culture and another growth dynamic, centered around another innovative class, a new freedom, a new source of surpluses, around new energy and information technology, and replacement of an old service by a new mass-produced object.

Form by form, the production of agricultural and later man-made goods is industrialized. Form by form, slaves disappear and paid labor takes their place. Form by form, production of energy and information becomes automated. Form by form, engineers, merchants, bankers, shipbuilders, fighting men, artists, and intellectuals relocate. Form by form, the fields of individual freedom, of the market and of democracy, expand. Form by form, peasants, craftsmen, and independent workers are transformed into insecure wage-earners. Form by form, wealth is concentrated in a shrinking number of hands; wider freedoms are enjoyed by consumers and citizens, and greater alienations are inflicted on the workers.