How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (59 page)

A major point of contention during the Reformation had to do with reading the Bible. For centuries the Church had thought the best way to avoid endless bickering about God’s Word was to encourage only well-trained theologians to read the Bible. To this end, the Church discouraged translations of the Bible into contemporary languages, thus tending to limit readership to those proficient in Latin or Greek, which even most clergy were not. In the days before the printing press there were so very few copies of the Bible that even most bishops did not have access to one. Consequently, the clergy learned about the Bible from secondary sources written to edify them and to provide them with suitable quotations for preaching. What the public knew about the Bible was only what their priests told them.

Then came the printing press. The Bible was the first book Gutenberg published. It was written in Latin, but soon Bibles were being printed in all the major “vulgar” languages (hence “vulgate” Bibles), making the Bible the first bestseller. As had been feared, conflict quickly arose as one reformer after another denounced various church teachings and activities as unbiblical. And the one doctrine most widely shared among the various dissenting Protestant movements was that everyone must consult scripture for themselves. So when the Pilgrims arrived in America in 1620, one of the first things they did was to concern themselves with educating their children.

In 1647 the Massachusetts Colony enacted a law asserting that all children must attend school.
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It required that in any township having fifty households, one person must be appointed to teach the children to read and write, with the teacher’s wages to be paid either by parents or by the inhabitants in general. In any township having a hundred or more households, a school must be established, “the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” Any community that failed to provide these educational services was to be fined “till they shall perform this order.” Other states followed suit, and free
public schools became a fixture of American life. As the nation spread west, one-room schoolhouses were among the first things the settlers constructed (along with saloons, jails, and churches). Much the same took place in Canada, and by the end of the eighteenth century North America had by far the world’s most literate population.
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Notice that the Massachusetts law required that schoolmasters be qualified to prepare students for college. This was not as unreasonable as it might appear. A decade before they passed this law and only sixteen years after landing at Plymouth Rock, the Puritans had founded Harvard. This initiated three centuries of intense competition among the religious denominations to found their own colleges and universities. Prior to the Revolution ten institutions of higher learning had begun operating in the American colonies (compared with two in England). Of these, only the University of Pennsylvania, instituted by Benjamin Franklin to train businessmen, was not affiliated with a denomination. At least twenty more colleges were founded before 1800, including Georgetown University, founded by Jesuit scholars in 1789. During the next century literally hundreds of colleges and universities arose in the United States, and most of these also were of denominational origin (although many abandoned their denominational ties during the twentieth century). In 1890 two out of every hundred Americans age eighteen to twenty-four were enrolled in college; by 1920 this had risen to five of each hundred.
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At the time, nothing like this was going on anywhere else in the world.

Immigration

British North America grew at a remarkable rate from the very start. An estimated total of 600,000 people came from Britain between 1640 and 1760,
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and many others came from the Netherlands, France, Germany and other parts of Europe. The thirteen colonies had 1.6 million residents by 1760, more than 2.1 million in 1770, nearly 3 million by 1780, and 4 million by 1790.
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Given that Britain had a population of only about 8 million in the 1770s,
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the Revolutionary War was not as unequal as is often supposed. Moreover, by 1830 the United States population (13 million) was equal to that of Britain, and by 1850 it was far larger (23 million versus 17 million). In 1900 there were 76 million Americans and 32 million British.
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Hence, the American domestic market far surpassed that of Britain.

It also seems obvious that there was a powerful selective factor in
who chose to come to America—the most ambitious and alert. In fact, immigrants were more likely to have come in pursuit of opportunity than to escape poverty. In his remarkable study based on immigration records, the celebrated historian Bernard Bailyn found that only 23 percent of immigrants from Britain from 1773 to 1776 were classified as laborers (most of them as servants), while half were classified as skilled craftsmen and another 20 percent as independent farmers. Aristocrats made up 2 percent of the British immigrants.
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This is consistent with the fact that younger sons of the nobility flocked to America.
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For example, during the last half of the nineteenth century membership in the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association and its famous Cheyenne Club was dominated by younger sons of the British nobility as well as some titled Frenchmen and Germans.
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In the 1880s the largest ranch in the New Mexico Territory was owned by the youngest son of the 4th Marquis of Waterford.
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It seems significant that many of those involved in the explosion of American invention were immigrants. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was an immigrant from Scotland. Nikola Tesla, inventor of fluorescent lighting and of the alternating current (AC) electrical system, was raised in what is now Croatia. Thomas Edison’s two most important assistants were immigrants, one from Switzerland, the other from England.

Organized Invention

Accidental inventions are the stuff of dreams. Almost always, an inventor has set about trying to meet a significant need—often with a pretty good notion of how to do so. In fact, most “inventions” are actually
improvements
, and therefore the goal is well defined. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, however, the flood of inventions gave rise to a new approach—a general commitment to invention and discovery per se. Leading this movement was Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931). It could be said that Edison invented modern life, as he was responsible for the electric lightbulb, recorded sound, movies, the fluoroscope, great improvements to the telephone and telegraph, and basic research on electric railroads—a total of 1,093 patents.

But his most important contribution was to invent the research laboratory, with the primary mission of discovering that some new technology was
needed and then launching research efforts to invent it. Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was so successful at discovering needs and solutions that it became known as the “invention factory.” Today we take such an approach for granted. Most major companies survive by sustaining effective research and development divisions. Consumers expect new products and the constant improvement of old ones. That expectation, and the reality it reflects, is the epitome of modernity.

From Freedom to Prosperity

From early days, the rise of Western modernity was a function of freedom—freedom to innovate and freedom from confiscation of the fruits of one’s labors. When the Greeks were free they created a civilization advanced beyond anything else in the world. When Rome imposed its imperial rule all across the West, progress ceased for a millennium. The fall of Rome once again unleashed creativity and, for good and for ill, the fragmented and competing Europeans soon outdistanced the rest of the world, possessed not only of invincible military and naval might but also of superior economies and standards of living. All these factors combined to produce the Industrial Revolution, which subsequently changed life everywhere on earth.

18

Globalization and Colonialism

W
ith all the elements of Western modernity in place, this chapter turns to the ways by which it spread around the world.

The primary means of cultural transmission was colonialism. In 1800 Europeans controlled 35 percent of the land surface of the globe. By 1878 this figure had risen to 67 percent. Then, in the next two decades, Europeans seized control of nearly all of Africa, so that in 1914, on the eve of World War I, Europeans dominated 84 percent of the world’s land area.
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The British Empire alone ruled about 25 percent of the earth’s inhabitants.
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Everywhere Europeans ruled, Western culture quickly penetrated, aided by the fact that most colonial regimes established a substantial number of local schools.

Nearly all modern accounts stress greed and racism as the basis for Europe’s colonial expansion. Granted, both were significant factors, but so too were idealism and charity, especially on the part of Christian missionaries, who often were at least as concerned to educate and modernize foreign lands as to convert the world to Christ. For example, by 1910 British and American overseas mission organizations had established 86 colleges and universities, 522 teachers colleges (often referred to as
normal schools
), and thousands of elementary schools in Asia and Africa.
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Nor were missionaries the only idealists involved. The earliest British military intrusions into Africa were devoted mainly to stamping out the slave trade.
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During 1840 alone the British navy intercepted 425 slave
ships off the West African coast, hanged the slavers, returned the slaves to Sierra Leone, and set them free.
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Of course, some instances of European colonialism were brutal and entirely exploitative—Belgian king Leopold II’s rule of the Congo being the most notorious example. But while some individuals and companies profited greatly from colonialism, they usually did so at the expense of their fellow countrymen, since when government expenses are taken into account, European nations typically lost money on their colonial empires.
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It is worth remembering that the American Revolution was fought largely because the British Parliament, tired of losing money on the thirteen colonies, tried to impose taxes sufficient to cover the costs of administering and defending them.

Why, then, did Europeans establish colonies and try so hard to preserve them? Partly it was a matter of prestige. Many European leaders sought to expand their empires to qualify as “world powers.” And everyone cited the economic benefits of colonies, for the fact that most, if not all, colonies were money-losing operations was not obvious and often required complex calculations. For example, the huge British Empire could not have existed without the superiority of the British navy—but no naval costs were charged against the colonies. Nor did anyone seem concerned about the costs to taxpayers of maintaining the huge number of British civil servants needed to rule and run the many colonies. These officials were drawn overwhelmingly from among the privileged, their ranks abounding in those with “firsts” from Oxford and Cambridge.
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Meanwhile, many powerful British families and firms grew rich from colonial commerce; they not only served as “proof” that colonies were a national asset but also formed a potent lobby on behalf of imperial policies. It was the same in other European nations. Nevertheless, for the average European, colonialism was a losing proposition.
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Unfortunately, many social scientists remain convinced that colonialism was mainly responsible for the wealth of the West while causing “underdevelopment” or even substantial economic decline in the non-Western world.
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The facts are otherwise. Indeed, it is clear that the major impact of the West has been to immensely
improve
the quality of life in other parts of the world.

Imperial Technology

Economic and prestige motives aside, perhaps the key factor in the nineteenth century’s massive wave of European colonialism was that never before had the subjugation of other societies been so easy to accomplish. Because of revolutionary developments in medicine, ships, firearms, and communications, the Western advantage over the rest of the world was even greater than the one Cortés and Pizarro had enjoyed over the Aztecs and the Mayans. And, once again, the temptations of such superiority were irresistible.
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