Why the West Rules--For Now (75 page)

Up to a point, settlers on new frontiers had always done something like this. Ancient Greeks sent wheat home from the western Mediterranean; Chinese settlers in the Yangzi Valley shipped rice up the Grand Canal; and colonists along the edge of the steppe were now dispatching timber, fur, and minerals to Moscow and Beijing. But the sheer variety of ecological niches around the Atlantic and the ocean’s size—big but still manageable, given the sophistication of modern shipping—allowed western Europeans to create something new: an interdependent, intercontinental economy, linked via overlapping triangular networks of trade (
Figure 9.6
).

Rather than just carrying merchandise from A to B, traders could take western European manufactured goods (textiles, guns, and so on) to west Africa and exchange them, at a profit, for slaves. Then they
could ship the slaves to the Caribbean and exchange them (again at a profit) for sugar. Finally they could bring the sugar back to Europe, selling it there for more profits, before buying a new consignment of finished goods and setting off to Africa again. Alternatively, Europeans who settled in North America could take rum to Africa and swap it for slaves; then carry the slaves to the Caribbean and exchange them for molasses; then bring the molasses back to North America to make into more rum. Others carried food from North America to the Caribbean (where sugar-producing land was too valuable to waste on growing food for slaves), bought sugar there and carried it to western Europe, finally returning with finished goods for North America.

The advantages of backwardness also contributed. Spain, sixteenth-century Europe’s great imperial power, had the most fully developed absolutist monarchy, which generally treated its merchants like cash machines that paid out on demand when threatened and its colonies as sources of plunder. If the Habsburgs had succeeded in forcing their European rivals into a land empire, the Atlantic economy would surely have continued in this vein well into the seventeenth century. Instead, though, merchants from Europe’s relatively backward northwestern fringe, where kings were weaker, took matters in a new direction.

Foremost among them were the Dutch. In the fourteenth century the Netherlands had been a waterlogged periphery divided among tiny city-states. In theory the Dutch owed fealty to the Habsburgs, but in practice those busy, distant rulers found that imposing their will on the far northwest was more trouble than it was worth, and left government to the local urban worthies. To survive at all, Dutch cities had to innovate. Lacking wood, they developed peat as an energy source; lacking food, they fished the North Sea and traded their catches for grain around the Baltic Sea; and lacking interfering kings and noblemen, wealthy burghers kept their cities business-friendly. Sound money and sounder policy attracted more money, until by the late sixteenth century the formerly backward Netherlands was Europe’s banking hub. Able to borrow at low rates, the Dutch could finance the grinding, endless war of attrition that slowly broke Spanish power.

England moved steadily in the Dutch direction. Before the Black Death, England was already a real kingdom, but its booming wool trade made its merchants more influential than those anywhere outside the Netherlands. Traders took the lead in the seventeenth century in
opposing, fighting, and finally beheading their relatively weak ruler, then pushing the government toward building big, state-of-the-art fleets. When a coup d’état/bloodless invasion put a Dutch prince on England’s throne in 1688, merchants were among the main beneficiaries.

Spain’s grip weakened after 1600 and Dutch and English merchants aggressively pushed into the Atlantic. As
Figure 9.3
shows, in 1350 ordinary people’s wages had been slightly higher on Europe’s Anglo-Dutch northwestern fringe than in the richer but more crowded cities of Italy. After 1600, though, the gap yawned wider and wider. Elsewhere the relentless pressure of hungry mouths drove wages back to pre–Black Death levels, but in the northwest wages came close to returning to where they had been in the golden age of the fifteenth century.

This was not a result of simply extracting wealth from the Americas, as Spain had done, and shipping it to Europe. While experts debate how much of the northwest’s new wealth came directly from colonization and trade, even the highest estimates put it below 15 percent (and the lowest at just 5 percent). What was revolutionary about the Atlantic economy was that it changed how people worked.

I have suggested several times in this book that the motors of history are fear, sloth, and greed. Terror tends to trump laziness, and so when population grew after 1450, people leaped into action all over Eurasia out of anxiety about losing status, going hungry, or even starving. But after 1600, greed also began trumping sloth as the Atlantic economy’s ecological variety, cheap transport, and open markets brought a world of little luxuries within reach of northwest Europe’s everyday folk. By the eighteenth century a man with a little extra cash in his pocket could do more than just buy another loaf of bread; he could get imports such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar, or homemade marvels such as clay pipes, umbrellas, and newspapers. And the same Atlantic economy that generated this bounty also generated people ready to give such a man the cash he needed, because traders would buy every hat, gun, or blanket they could get to ship to Africa or America, and manufacturers would therefore pay people to make them. Some farmers put their families to spinning and weaving; others joined workshops. Some gave up farming altogether; others found that feeding these hungry workers provided steady-enough markets to justify enclosing, draining, and manuring land more intensively and buying more livestock.

The details varied, but northwest Europeans increasingly sold their labor and worked longer hours. And the more they did so, the more sugar, tea, and newspapers they could buy—which meant more slaves dragged across the Atlantic, more acres cleared for plantations, and more factories and shops opened. Sales rose, economies of scale were achieved, and prices fell, opening this world of goods to even more Europeans.

For good or ill, by 1750 the world’s first consumer culture had taken shape around the shores of the North Atlantic and was changing millions of lives. Men who would not dare show their faces in a coffee shop unless they sported leather shoes and a pocketwatch—let alone tell their wives that they could not put sugar in the tea when visitors called—were less inclined to take dozens of holy days as holidays or observe the old tradition of “Saint Monday,” using that day to sleep off Sunday’s hangover. Time was money when there was so much to buy; no more, the novelist Thomas Hardy lamented, did “
one-handed clocks
sufficiently subdivide the day.”

LIKE CLOCKWORK

Two-handed clocks were in fact the least of the demands this new age was making. Westerners wanted to know about seed drills and triangular plows, vacuums and boilers, and clocks that not only had two hands but would keep time even when carried to the far side of the world, allowing sea captains to calculate longitude. For two thousand years—in fact, since the last time Western social development had pressed against the hard ceiling in the low forties on the index—the wise old voices of the ancients had provided guidance for most of life’s burning questions. But now it was becoming clear that the classics could not tell people the things they needed to know.

The title of Francis Bacon’s 1620 book
Novum Organum
(“New Method”) said it all.
Organum
was the label philosophers used for Aristotle’s six books on logic; Bacon set out to replace them. “
The honour and reverence
due to the ancients remains untouched and undiminished,” Bacon insisted; his goal, he said, was to “appear merely as a guide to point out the road.” Yet once we started down his road, Bacon noted, we would find there was “but one course left … to commence
a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.”

But what would provide such foundations? Simple, said Bacon (and growing numbers of his peers): observation. Philosophers should get their noses out of books and look instead at the things all around them—stars and insects, cannons and oars, falling apples and wobbling chandeliers. And they should talk to blacksmiths, clockmakers, and mechanics, people who knew how things worked.

When they did so, thought Bacon, Galileo, the French philosopher René Descartes, and legions of lesser-known scholars, they could hardly avoid coming to the same conclusion: that contrary to what most of the ancients said, nature was not a living, breathing organism, with desires and intentions. It was actually mechanical. In fact, it was very like a clock. God was a clockmaker, switching on the interlocking gears that made nature run and then stepping back. And if that was so, then humans should be able to disentangle nature’s workings as easily as those of any other mechanism. After all, Descartes mused, “
it is not less natural
for a clock, made of the requisite number of wheels, to indicate the hours, than for a tree which has sprung from this or that seed, to produce a particular fruit.”

This clockwork model of nature—plus some fiendishly clever experimenting and reasoning—had extraordinary payoffs. Secrets hidden since the dawn of time were abruptly, startlingly, revealed. Air, it turned out, was a substance, not an absence; the heart pumped blood around the body, like a water bellows; and, most bewilderingly, Earth was not the center of the universe.

All these discoveries, contradicting the ancients and even scripture, produced firestorms of criticism. Galileo’s reward for watching the skies was to be dragged before a papal court in 1633 and browbeaten into retracting what he knew to be true. Yet all that the bullying really accomplished was to accelerate the new thinking’s migration from the old Mediterranean core to the northwest, where social development was rising fastest, the shortcomings of ancient thinking seemed clearest, and anxieties about challenging authority were weakest.

Northerners began turning the Renaissance on its head, rejecting antiquity instead of seeking answers in it, and in the 1690s, as social development nudged within a hair’s breadth of its peak under the Roman Empire, learned gentlemen in Paris formally debated whether the
Moderns were now surpassing the Ancients. By then the answer was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. Isaac Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
had appeared in 1687, using the new tool of calculus that Newton himself developed to express his mechanical model of the heavens mathematically.
*
It was as incomprehensible (even to educated readers) as Einstein’s general theory of relativity would be when he published it in 1905, but all the same, everyone agreed (as they would about relativity) that it marked a new age.

Hyperbole seemed inadequate for such monuments of mind. When called upon to immortalize Newton, England’s leading poet, Alexander Pope, exclaimed,

Nature, and Nature’s laws
lay hid in night,
God said
Let Newton be!
And all was
Light.

In reality, the shift from night to day was a little less abrupt. Newton’s
Principia
came out just five years after England’s last witch-hanging and five years before the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts began. Newton himself, as became clear when thousands of his personal papers were auctioned off in 1936, was as enthusiastic about alchemy as about gravity, remaining convinced to the end that he would turn lead into gold. Nor was he the only seventeenth-century scientist to hold views that today seem distinctly odd. But gradually Westerners were disenchanting the world, dispersing its spirits and devils with mathematics. Numbers became the measure of reality.

According to Galileo,

Philosophy is written
in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze … It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

And what was true of nature, some scientists speculated, might be true of society too. Up to a point, government officials—especially financiers—welcomed this thought. The state, too, could be seen as a machine; statisticians could calculate its revenue flows and ministers could calibrate its intricate gears. But the new ways of thinking were also worrying. Natural science had taken its new turn by exposing ancient authority as arbitrary; would social science do the same to kings and the church?

If scientists were right and observation and logic were really the best tools for understanding God’s will, then it stood to reason that they would be the best tools for running governments, too. It was equally reasonable, the English theorist John Locke argued, that in the beginning God had endowed humans with certain natural rights; “
Man
,” he deduced, “hath by nature a power … to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty, and estate—against the injuries and attempts of other men.” Therefore, Locke concluded, “The great and chief end … of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” And if that was so, and if man was “by nature all free, equal, and independent, [then] no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”

These ideas would have been troubling enough if they had been limited to intellectuals arguing in Latin in ivy-clad colleges. But they were not. First in Paris, then more widely, wealthy women sponsored salons where scholars rubbed shoulders with the mighty and new thinking moved back and forth. Amateurs established discussion clubs, inviting lecturers to explain new ideas and demonstrate experiments. Cheaper printing, better distribution, and rising literacy allowed new journals, combining reporting with social criticism and readers’ letters, to spread the ferment to tens of thousands of readers. Three centuries before Starbucks, enterprising coffeehouse owners realized that if they provided free newspapers and comfortable chairs, patrons would sit there—reading, arguing, and buying coffee—all day long. Something new was coming into being: public opinion.