Why the West Rules--For Now (5 page)

The biologist and geographer Jared Diamond makes a similar case in his classic
Guns, Germs, and Steel
. His main goal is to explain why it was societies within the band of latitude that runs from China to the Mediterranean Sea that developed the first civilizations, but he also suggests that Europe rather than China came to dominate the modern world because Europe’s peninsulas made it easy for small kingdoms to hold out against would-be conquerors, favoring political fragmentation, while China’s rounder coastline favored centralized rulers over petty princes. The resulting political unity allowed fifteenth-century Chinese emperors to ban voyages like Zheng’s.

In fragmented Europe, by contrast, monarch after monarch could reject Columbus’s crazy proposal, but he could always find someone else to ask. We might speculate that if Zheng had had as many options as Columbus, Hernán Cortés might have met a Chinese governor in Mexico in 1519, not the doomed Montezuma. But according to long-term lock-in theories, vast impersonal forces such as disease, demography, and geography ruled that possibility out.

Lately, though, Zheng’s voyages and plenty of other facts have started striking some people as just too awkward to fit into long-term models at all. Already in 1905 Japan showed that Eastern nations could give Europeans a run for their money on the battlefield, defeating the Russian Empire. In 1942 Japan almost swept the Western powers out of the Pacific altogether, then, bouncing back from a shattering defeat in 1945,
changed direction to become an economic giant. Since 1978 China, as we all know, has moved along a similar path. In 2006 China beat out the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and even in the darkest days of the 2008–2009 financial crisis, China’s economy kept growing at rates that Western governments would envy in the best of years. Maybe we need to throw out the old question and ask a new one: not
why
the West rules, but
whether
the West rules. If the answer is no, then long-term lock-in theories that seek ancient explanations for a Western rule that does not actually exist seem rather pointless.

One result of these uncertainties has been that some Western historians have developed a whole new theory explaining why the West used to rule but is now ceasing to do so. I call this the short-term accident model. Short-term arguments tend to be more complicated than long-term ones, and there are fierce disagreements within this camp. But there is one thing short-termers do all agree on: pretty much everything long-termers say is wrong. The West has not been locked into global dominance since the distant past; only after 1800
CE
, on the eve of the Opium War, did the West pull temporarily ahead of the East, and even that was largely accidental. The Albert-in-Beijing scenario is anything but silly. It could easily have happened.

LUCKING OUT

Orange County in California is better known for conservative politics, manicured palm trees, and long-time resident John Wayne (the local airport is named after him, despite his dislike of planes flying over the golf course) than for radical scholarship, but in the 1990s it became the epicenter of short-term accident theories of global history. Two historians (Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz) and a sociologist (Wang Feng) at the University of California’s Irvine campus
*
wrote landmark books arguing that whatever we look at—ecology or family structures, technology and industry or finance and institutions, standards of living
or consumer tastes—the similarities between East and West vastly outweighed the differences as late as the nineteenth century.

If they are right, it suddenly becomes much harder to explain why Looty came to London rather than Albert heading east. Some short-termers, like the maverick economist Andre Gunder Frank (who wrote more than thirty books on everything from prehistory to Latin American finance), argue that the East was actually better placed to have an industrial revolution than the West until accidents intervened. Europe, Frank concluded, was simply “a
distant marginal peninsula
” in a “Sinocentric world order.” Desperate to get access to the markets of Asia, where the real wealth was, Europeans a thousand years ago tried to batter their way through the Middle East in the Crusades. When this did not work some, like Columbus, tried sailing west to reach Cathay.

That failed too, because America was in the way, but in Frank’s opinion Columbus’s blunder marked the beginning of the change in Europe’s place in the world system. In the sixteenth century China’s economy was booming but faced constant silver shortages. America was full of silver; so Europeans responded to China’s needs by getting Native Americans to claw a good 150,000 tons of precious metal out of the mountains of Peru and Mexico. A third of it ended up in China. Silver, savagery, and slavery bought the West “a third-class seat on the Asian economic train,” as Frank put it, but still more needed to happen before the West could “displace Asians from the locomotive.”

Frank thought that the rise of the West ultimately owed less to European initiative than to a “decline of the East” after 1750. This began, he believed, when the silver supply started shrinking. This set off political crises in Asia but provided a bracing stimulus in Europe, where, as they ran out of silver to export, Europeans mechanized their industries to make goods other than silver competitive in Asian markets. Population growth after 1750 also had different results at each end of Eurasia, Frank argued, polarizing wealth, feeding political crises, and discouraging innovation in China but providing cheaper labor for new factories in Britain. As the East fell apart the West had the industrial revolution that should, by rights, have happened in China; but because it happened in Britain, the West inherited the world.

Other short-termers, though, disagree. The sociologist Jack Goldstone (who taught for some years at the University of California’s Davis campus and coined the term “California School” to describe the
short-term theorists) has argued that East and West were roughly equally well (or poorly) placed until 1600, each ruled by great agrarian empires with sophisticated priesthoods guarding ancient traditions. Everywhere from England to China, plagues, wars, and the overthrow of dynasties brought these societies to the brink of collapse in the seventeenth century, but whereas most of the empires recovered and re-imposed strictly orthodox thought, northwest Europe’s Protestants rejected Catholic traditions.

It was that act of defiance, Goldstone suggests, that sent the West down the path toward an industrial revolution. Freed from the fetters of archaic ideologies, European scientists laid bare the workings of nature so effectively that British entrepreneurs, sharing in this pragmatic can-do culture, learned to put coal and steam to work. By 1800 the West had pulled decisively ahead of the rest.

None of this was locked in, Goldstone argues, and in fact a few accidents could have changed the world completely. For instance, at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 a Catholic musket ball ripped through the shoulder of the coat worn by William of Orange, the Protestant pretender to England’s throne. “
It’s well
it came no nearer,” William is supposed to have said; well indeed, says Goldstone, speculating that if the shot had hit a few inches lower England would have remained Catholic, France would have dominated Europe, and the industrial revolution might not have happened.

Kenneth Pomeranz at Irvine goes further still. As he sees it, the fact that there was an industrial revolution at all was a gigantic fluke. Around 1750, he argues, East and West were both heading for ecological catastrophe. Population had grown faster than technology and people had already done nearly everything possible in the way of extending and intensifying agriculture, moving goods around, and reorganizing themselves. They were about to hit the limits of what was possible with their technology, and there was every reason to expect global recession and declining population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Yet the last two hundred years have seen more economic growth than all earlier history put together. The reason, Pomeranz explains in his important book
The Great Divergence
, is that western Europe, and above all Britain, just got lucky. Like Frank, Pomeranz sees the West’s luck beginning with the accidental discovery of the Americas, creating a trading system that provided incentives to industrialize production;
but unlike Frank, he suggests that as late as 1800 Europe’s luck could still have failed. It would have taken a lot of space, Pomeranz points out, to grow enough trees to feed Britain’s crude early steam engines with wood—more space, in fact, than crowded western Europe had. But a second stroke of luck intervened: Britain, alone in all the world, had conveniently located coalfields as well as rapidly mechanizing industries. By 1840 Britons were applying coal-powered machines to every walk of life, including iron warships that could shoot their way up the Yangzi River. Britain would have needed to burn another 15 million acres of woodland each year—acres that did not exist—to match the energy now coming from coal. The fossil-fuel revolution had begun, ecological catastrophe had been averted (or at least postponed into the twenty-first century), and the West suddenly, against all odds, ruled the globe. There had been no long-term lock in. It was all just a recent, freakish accident.

The variety of short-term explanations of the Western industrial revolution, stretching from Pomeranz’s fluke that averted global disaster to Frank’s temporary shift within an expanding world economy, is every bit as wide as the gulf between, say, Jared Diamond and Karl Marx on the long-term side. Yet for all the controversy within both schools, it is the battle lines
between
them that produce the most starkly opposed theories of how the world works. Some long-termers claim that the revisionists are merely peddling shoddy, politically correct pseudo-scholarship; some short-termers respond that long-termers are pro-Western apologists or even racists.

The fact that so many experts can reach such wildly different conclusions suggests that something is wrong in the way we have approached the problem. In this book I will argue that long-termers and short-termers alike have misunderstood the shape of history and have therefore reached only partial and contradictory results. What we need, I believe, is a different perspective.

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY

What I mean by this is that both long-termers and short-termers agree that the West has dominated the globe for the last two hundred years, but disagree over what the world was like before this. Everything
revolves around their differing assessments of premodern history. The only way we can resolve the dispute is by looking at these earlier periods to establish the overall “shape” of history. Only then, with the baseline established, can we argue productively about why things turned out as they did.

Yet this is the one thing that almost no one seems to want to do. Most experts who write on why the West rules have backgrounds in economics, sociology, politics, or modern history; basically, they are specialists in current or recent events. They tend to focus on the last few generations, looking back at most five hundred years and treating earlier history briefly, if at all—even though the main issue at dispute is whether the factors that gave the West dominance were already present in earlier times or appeared abruptly in the modern age.

A handful of thinkers approach the question very differently, focusing on distant prehistory then skipping ahead to the modern age, saying little about the thousands of years in between. The geographer and historian Alfred Crosby makes explicit what many of these scholars take for granted—that the prehistoric invention of agriculture was critically important, but “
between that era
and [the] time of development of the societies that sent Columbus and other voyagers across the oceans, roughly 4,000 years passed, during which little of importance happened,
relative to what had gone before
.”

This, I think, is mistaken. We will not find answers if we restrict our search to prehistory or modern times (nor, I hasten to add, would we find them if we limited ourselves to just the four or five millennia in between). The question requires us to look at the whole sweep of human history as a single story, establishing its overall shape, before discussing why it has that shape. This is what I try to do in this book, bringing a rather different set of skills to bear.

I was educated as an archaeologist and ancient historian, specializing in the classical Mediterranean of the first millennium
BCE.
When I started college at Birmingham University in England in 1978, most classical scholars I met seemed perfectly comfortable with the old long-term theory that the culture of the ancient Greeks, created two and a half thousand years ago, forged a distinctive Western way of life. Some of them (mostly older ones) would even say outright that this Greek tradition made the West better than the rest.

So far as I remember, none of this struck me as being a problem until I started graduate research at Cambridge University in the early 1980s, working on the origins of Greek city-states. This took me among anthropological archaeologists working on similar processes in other parts of the world. They openly laughed at the quaint notion that Greek culture was unique and had started a distinctive democratic and rational Western tradition. As people often do, for several years I managed to carry two contradictory notions in my head: on the one hand, Greek society evolved along the same lines as other ancient societies; on the other, it initiated a distinctive Western trajectory.

The balancing act got more difficult when I took my first faculty position, at the University of Chicago, in 1987. There I taught in Chicago’s renowned History of Western Civilization program, ranging from ancient Athens to (eventually) the fall of communism. To stay even one day ahead of my students I had to read medieval and modern European history much more seriously than before, and I could not help noticing that for long stretches of time the freedom, reason, and inventiveness that Greece supposedly bequeathed to the West were more honored in the breach than the observance. Trying to make sense of this, I found myself looking at broader and broader slices of the human past. I was surprised how strong the parallels were between the supposedly unique Western experience and the history of other parts of the world, above all the great civilizations of China, India, and Iran.