How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (32 page)

Why didn’t the woolen industry on the Continent similarly disperse to small towns and villages? Because in Europe only the cities provided enough freedom and property rights to sustain industry. In the European countryside rule by the nobility prevailed, and everyone had to fear the local lord’s avarice. But in England, freedom and security prevailed throughout the realm, and medieval English industrialists did not need to huddle in crowded, expensive, disorderly, filthy cities—many devoid of water power—as their counterparts in Flanders, in Holland, along the Rhine, and in Italy were forced to do. As a result, the English woolen industry was remarkably decentralized.

Exploiting the advantages of the fulling mill was but the first step in England’s mechanization of the textile industry. Soon after the fulling mill came the gig mill, for raising the pile on fabrics. Then came the knitting machine (1589), the flying shuttle (1733), the spinning jenny (1770), the spinning mule (1779), and the power loom (1785). When James Watt built the first practical steam engine in 1776, there all these inventions were, waiting to be hooked up. Technological innovation was the hallmark of English capitalism.

Finally, dispersion and relatively unfettered capitalism may have contributed to the international dominance of English woolens by producing more fashionable and attractive products. As A. R. Bridbury put it, to explain the success of English woolens, it is not enough to invoke better fleeces or lower prices; what should be stressed is “art and skill … the exotic dyeing of these cloths and … the subtle blending of design and colour in their creation … the search for making cloth which would be more fashionable internationally.”
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In European textile centers the guilds often exerted the dead hand of tradition on colors and designs, and originality nearly always suffers when creative people are crowded together and fully aware of one another’s work. Greater variations in styles and quality turned up in England’s dispersed woolen industry, where designers couldn’t look over one another’s shoulders. Moreover, capitalist managers were free to respond to market feedback by shifting production toward popular goods. In modern terminology, the English woolen industry was
market driven
.

Coal Power

The growth of the woolen industry marked the beginning of England’s rise to international commercial prominence. The English became the world’s first truly industrial nation by applying the lessons learned from woolens to other opportunities. The crucial next step came when England shifted to coal-powered industries, a development that illustrates the dynamic link between capitalism and technological innovation.

As had most civilizations since ancient times, England had long depended on wood power. Wood was an inferior fuel to coal, but unlike coal, it was relatively abundant, close at hand, and easy to transport. Wood and charcoal (created from wood) thus were used not only to heat buildings and to cook and bake but also for metallurgy and making bricks, glass, soap, salt, pottery, and much more. The low temperatures produced by wood fires imposed severe limits on the quality of these products. For example, most weapons and armor were made of bronze and brass because these were alloys of soft metals that melted at a relatively low temperature. It was well known that iron was superior for these purposes, but it required far higher temperatures.

As London’s population swelled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the price of firewood rose correspondingly. At Hampstead, about five miles from London, the price of firewood nearly doubled between the 1270s and the 1290s; in Surrey, about twenty miles from London, the price jumped about 50 percent between the 1280s and the 1330s.
²⁵
As the price gap between coal and wood narrowed, more firms needing industrial heat switched to coal, importing it by water from Newcastle to London. The competitive price of coal in England partly reflected technical improvements in mining and transportation, but to a far greater extent the growing market for coal
prompted
the invention and adoption of such technology. In addition, just as water power caused the woolen industry to cluster near streams, the switch from wood to coal caused many industries to cluster near coal mines.
²⁶

Even in England, where high-quality coal was abundant, it soon proved necessary to follow seams well below ground. Boring rods were invented to locate seams. Underground mining necessitated removal of the water that often flooded mine shafts. The Romans had dealt with seepage by hand-bailing via bucket brigades. The English met the problem with a variety of pumps driven by water power or by horses turning a wheel. They powered ventilating fans the same way to force fresh air
down mine shafts.
²⁷
These techniques were used on the Continent too, and some probably originated there, but the English exploited them more extensively because their mines were managed on a far larger scale.

An additional problem facing mining industries involved how to transport heavy loads of coal or mineral ores. Toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, unknown inventers in southern Nottinghamshire found the solution by installing metal rails to support horse-drawn wagons—later known as trams or trolleys. Two techniques were used. One was like the modern railroad in that the wagon wheels were flanged so that they stayed on the track. The second was known as a “plateway” and involved a flange attached to the rails to guide the wagon wheels. The latter approach was the preferred method at first, because the wagon could proceed normally when it reached the end of the rail line, having no flange on its wheels. But the other method became popular because it cost much less to attach a flange to wagon wheels than to put one all along a track.

The great virtue of rails was to reduce friction so that much less power was needed to move a load. A wagon set in motion on a rail will roll about five times as far after the power is removed as will one set in motion on a paved highway.
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Consequently, a horse could pull a far heavier load along rails than down a road. So, long before steam engines, England had an extensive system of rails in industrial areas. Little wonder that the locomotive was invented in England and that England led the world in the development of railroads. In truth, the extensive horse-drawn rail system virtually demanded perfection of the locomotive once Watt’s stationary engine proved practical and reliable.

The transition to coal accelerated England’s technological advances. Now able to work iron properly, both to smelt the ore and to produce molten iron, by the early sixteenth century the English were manufacturing the finest cannons in Europe. Cast from iron, these weapons had much greater range and dependability—and were far cheaper to produce—than the brass and bronze weapons cast on the Continent. Come the battle with the Spanish Armada, the English ships were outnumbered, but the Spanish were outgunned.

Capitalism was essential to England’s industrialization. Mining coal—and keeping the mines well ventilated, dry, and served by rail systems—required substantial investments, sophisticated management, and a large, dependable labor force. So English firms got larger and more
complex, a trend that was surprisingly little affected by plagues, wars, and political turmoil. Of course, English capitalism could develop as it did only because the English enjoyed unparalleled levels of freedom.

The Hanseatic League

As the English prospered and innovated, so did a group of German city-states ranged along the coast of the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. Surprisingly, it was the English who gave the merchants of these cities a clear sense of their common commercial interests, even giving them their name.
Hansa
was a term the English used to designate the right of merchants to form associations, and eventually it referred only to foreign merchants in London.
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When the merchants from these German cities organized a formal manufacturing and trading bloc, they adopted their English designation and came to be known as the Hanseatic League.

The league was dominated by a few larger cities, primarily Lübeck, Hamburg, Rostock, Danzig, Bremen, Cologne, Antwerp, and Bruges, but most member towns had fewer than a thousand inhabitants.
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Not that the larger cities were very large. Bruges was the largest of them, with about 60,000 residents in 1400. More typical were Danzig, with 8,500, and Hamburg, with 22,000. Or course, there were only about 50,000 Londoners at that time.
³¹

Using the coastal waterway as well as the major rivers, the Hanseatic League prospered by trade along two axes: east-west and north-south. Furs and beeswax came from Russia and Finland; copper and iron from Sweden; dried codfish from Norway; cattle, butter, and huge amounts of salted herring from Denmark; grain, timber, and amber from Prussia and Poland; woolens, linens, candles, and salt from Flanders and western Germany. To give some sense of the volume of the Hanseatic trade, “One convoy of three ships sailed from Riga to Bruges with 450,000 pelts,” according to historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke.
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Most of the bow staves English archers used were imported from eastern Europe by Hansa merchants in London.
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In addition, all the masts used by the large sailing ships—many of them at least a hundred feet tall—were imported from Sweden. The Hanseatic city-states also did a great deal of business with the Italian city-states—the latter exporting spices, silks, brocades, armor, and eyeglasses while importing fur, metal, and
hardwood. This trade, too, was conducted by sea, the Italians continuing to use galleys long after the northerners had shifted to sailing ships.

As early as the thirteenth century, then, economic specialization had already developed in Europe, and the Hanseatic League was the primary mechanism making it possible. Flanders, for example, could devote nearly its entire economy to woolen and linen cloth, relying on its trading partners for food and drink.

Eventually the Hanseatic League was broken up by the rise of more powerful nation-states and wars among them. But the elaborate network of commercial trade continued to flourish.

Asian Enterprises

Despite the economic success of Flanders, England, and the Hansa merchants, the Italian city-states remained the dominant trade center of Europe. With Genoa, Florence, and Venice leading the way, they did a booming business with England and northern Europe and all around the Mediterranean, and by the late thirteenth century they had established regular trade relations all the way to China. The historian J. R. S. Phillips noted that in about 1340 “the Florentine merchant and banker Francesco Balducci di Pegolotti could write that the route from Tana on the Sea of Azov to Peking, via Turkestan and Mongolia, was safe by day and night, and could give detailed instructions on how to reach China, together with information on local currencies and customs duties.”
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Perhaps because of centuries of humbug over the authenticity of Marco Polo’s account of his travels, it has too often been overlooked that even if the Polo family were fictional, Italian merchants maintained a lucrative trade network all across Asia, and especially with China. In fact, the Polos did exist and they did travel to China, notwithstanding sensational recent claims that Marco got no farther east than Persia.
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Sensible historians
³⁶
are not misled by the many errors and omissions in
The Travels of Marco Polo
(1298) because, as was always known, Marco did not write the book—if published today the authorship would read,
by Marco Polo as told to Rustichello of Pisa
. Rustichello included a lot of nonsense because he set out to write a bestseller, and he succeeded despite the fact that all books had to be hand-copied.
The Travels
circulated all over Europe, in many translations. More than eighty copies made in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have survived, and there are extreme variations among them, some containing a substantial amount of fiction, and some very little.
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Ironically, the earliest doubters of Polo’s story questioned his account because he failed to report then-common fables about the East, such as people without heads, their faces on their chests.

In any event, the Italians carried on a lucrative trade with China. This was possible despite the fact that Chinese goods had to be transported most of the way by overland caravans and therefore had to be small and light. It is estimated that the annual import from Asia to Venice amounted to only one thousand to two thousand tons.
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But these were extremely valuable tons, consisting of luxury goods such as silk and spices. For centuries, of course, the overland routes from China to the West had been known as the Silk Roads. Even though the Italians had developed their own silk industry early in the thirteenth century, silk was so much cheaper in China that it paid the Italian merchants to transport it all the way west. Even then, Chinese wages were far below those paid in the West, which reflected a lower standard of living. In return for silks and spices, China was an eager importer of Flemish linens.
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In 1340 a Genoese merchant took several Frankish warhorses to China, where they were highly prized as “heavenly steeds,” being so much larger and stronger than Chinese horses.
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Italian trade with China became far more perilous when Muslims conquered Armenia in 1337. A decade later the Black Death disrupted trading activities all across Europe and Asia. Finally, Italian trade with China became impossible in 1368 with the fall of the Mongol dynasty in China and the rise of the Ming dynasty, which held all foreigners in contempt.