The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (9 page)

Strength Is Weakness

And yet, how to make sense of those extraordinary Chinese voyages? Zheng He’s dazzling fleet is just one part of a larger picture of remarkable achievements in China and India—palaces, courts, cities—at the very time that the West was moving ahead of them. The Taj Mahal was built in 1631 to honor the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan’s beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. A British traveler, William Hodges, was one of many to point out that there was nothing like it in Europe. “The fine materials, the beautiful forms, and the symmetry of the whole,” he wrote, “far surpasses anything I ever beheld.” Building the Taj took enormous talent and skill, as well as astonishing feats of engineering. How could a society produce such wonders of the world and yet not move ahead more broadly? If China could put together such spectacular and sophisticated naval expeditions, why could it not make clocks?

Part of the answer lies in the way the Moguls built the Taj Mahal. Twenty thousand laborers worked night and day on the site for twenty years. They built a ramp ten miles long just to move materials up to the 187-foot-high dome. The budget was unlimited, and no value was placed on the man-hours put into the project. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford the Taj. Zheng He’s flotilla was produced by a similar command system, as was Beijing’s Forbidden City. Begun in 1406, the city required the labor of a million men—and another million soldiers to watch over them. If all of a large society’s energies and resources are directed at a few projects, those projects often become successes—but isolated successes. The Soviet Union boasted an extraordinary space program well into the 1970s, even though by then it was technologically the most backward of all the industrial nations.

But throwing more manpower at a problem is not the path to innovation. The historian Philip Huang makes a fascinating comparison between the farmers of the Yangtze Delta and those of England, the richest regions of China and Europe respectively in 1800.
⁶
He points out that, by some measures, the two areas might seem to have been at equivalent economic levels. But in fact, Britain was far ahead in the key measure of growth—labor productivity. The Chinese were able to make their land highly productive, but they did so by putting more and more people to work on a given acre—what Huang calls “output without development.” The English, on the other hand, kept searching for ways to make labor more productive, so that each farmer was producing more crops. They discovered new labor-saving devices, using animals and inventing machines. When the multi-spindle wheel, which required one trained operator, was developed, for example, it was widely adapted in England. But in China, the inferior but cheaper single spindle persisted, because it could be used by many untrained operators. (Since labor had little value, why spend money on labor-saving machines?) Ultimately, the result was that a small number of Britons were able to farm huge swaths of land. By the eighteenth century, the average farm size in southern England was 150 acres; in the Yangtze delta, it was about 1 acre.

The naval expeditions also illustrate the difference in the Eastern and Western approaches. The European missions were less grand but more productive. They were often entirely private or public-private partnerships and used new methods to pay for the trips. The Dutch pioneered innovations in finance and taxation; their herring traders were using futures contracts widely by the 1580s. And these financial mechanisms marked a crucial advance, because they ensured funding for an ever-increasing number of expeditions. Each trip was intended to turn a profit, make new discoveries, and find new products. The project moved forward by trial and error, with every expedition building on past ones. Over time, a chain reaction of entrepreneurship, exploration, science, and learning developed.

In China, by contrast, the voyages depended on the interests and power of one monarch. When he was gone, they stopped. In one case, a new emperor even ordered the destruction of ship schematics, so the capacity to build them was lost. The Chinese used cannons effectively in the thirteenth century. Three hundred years later, they couldn’t operate one without a European to show them how. The Harvard economic historian David Landes concludes that China failed to “generate a continuous, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance.”
⁷
Its achievements ended up being episodic and ephemeral. This was the tragedy of Asia: even when there was knowledge, there was no learning.

Is Culture Destiny?

Why did non-Western countries stand still while the West moved forward? These questions have been debated for centuries, and there is no neat answer. Private property rights, good institutions of governance, and a strong civil society (that is, one not dominated by the state) were clearly crucial for growth in Europe and, later, the United States. In contrast, the Russian czar theoretically owned his entire country. In China, the Ming court was run by mandarins who disdained commerce. Almost everywhere in the non-Western world, civil society was weak and dependent on the government. Local businessmen in India were always captive to the whims of the court. In China, rich merchants would abandon their businesses to master Confucian classics so that they could become favorites of the court.

The Moguls and the Ottomans were warriors and aristocrats who thought of trade as unglamorous and unimportant (even though the Middle East had a long merchant tradition). In India, this bias was reinforced by the low position of businessmen in the Hindu caste hierarchy. Historians have taken particular note of Hindu beliefs and practices as barriers to development. Paul Kennedy argues, “The sheer rigidity of Hindu religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuffs were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions, a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the caste system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and restricted the market; and the influence wielded over Indian local rulers by the Brahman priests meant that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level.”
⁸
J. M. Roberts makes a broader point about the Hindu worldview, observing that it was “a vision of endless cycles of creation and reabsorption into the divine [which led] to passivity and skepticism about the value of practical action.”
⁹

But if culture is everything, how to account for China and India now? Today, their remarkable growth is often explained with paeans to their distinctive cultures. Confucianism was once bad for growth; now it is good. The Hindu mind-set, once an impediment, is now seen to embody a kind of practical worldliness that undergirds entrepreneurial capitalism. The success of the Chinese and Hindu diaspora seemingly provides daily confirmation of such theories.

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America’s leading scholar-senator, once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” That gets it just about right. Culture is important, terribly important. But it can change. Cultures are complex. At any given moment, certain attributes are prominent and seem immutable. And then politics and economics shift, and those attributes wane in importance, making space for others. The Arab world was once the center of science and trade. In recent decades, its chief exports have been oil and Islamic fundamentalism. Any cultural argument must be able to explain both periods of success and periods of failure.

Why was Asian commercialism—so prominent now—buried for centuries? A large part of the explanation must lie in the structure of their states. Most countries in Asia had powerful and centralized predatory states that extracted taxes from their subjects without providing much in return. From the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, Asian rulers largely fit the stereotype of the Oriental tyrant. After the Moguls swept into India from the north in the fifteenth century, their rapacious rule consisted of demanding taxes and tributes and building palaces and forts while neglecting infrastructure, communications, trade, and discovery. (The reign of Akbar, 1556 –1605, was a brief exception.) Hindu princes in southern India were not much better. Businessmen had to keep interest rates high in anticipation of frequent and arbitrary taxation by their rulers. No one had much of an incentive to build wealth, since it was likely to be confiscated.

In the Middle East, centralization came much later. When the region was ruled in a relatively lax and decentralized manner under the Ottoman Empire, trade, commerce, and innovation flourished. Goods, ideas, and people from everywhere mingled freely. But in the twentieth century, an effort to create “modern” and powerful nation-states resulted in dictatorships that brought economic and political stagnation. Civic organizations were marginalized. With strong states and weak societies, the Arab world fell behind the rest of the world by almost every measure of progress.

Why was this type of centralized state being limited and constrained in Europe, even as it flourished in much of the non-Western world? Partly because of the Christian church, which was the first major institution that could contest the power of kings. Partly because of Europe’s landed elite, which had an independent base in the countryside and acted as a check on royal absolutism. (The Magna Carta, the first great “bill of rights” of the Western world, was actually a charter of baronial privileges, forced on the king by his nobles.) Partly—and, some would say, ultimately—because of geography.

Europe is broken up by wide rivers, tall mountains, and large valleys. This topography produced many natural borders and encouraged political communities of varying sizes—city-states, duchies, republics, nations, and empires. In 1500, Europe had more than five hundred states, city-states, and principalities. This diversity meant there was constant competition of ideas, people, art, money, and weapons. People who were mistreated or shunned in one place could escape to another and thrive. States that succeeded were copied. Those that failed, died. Over time, this competition helped Europe become highly skilled at both making wealth and making war.
¹⁰

Asia, by contrast, consists of vast flatlands—the steppes in Russia, the plains in China. Armies can move through these areas quickly and with little opposition. (The Chinese had to build the Great Wall because they could not rely on any natural barrier to protect their territory.) This geography helped sustain large, centralized land empires that were able to maintain their grip on power for centuries. Consider, for instance, the episode with which we began this chapter, the Ming dynasty’s decision to end sea exploration after Zheng He’s voyages. Perhaps the most notable fact about the ban on sea expeditions was that it worked. Such a policy could not have been implemented in Europe. No king was powerful enough to enforce such a decree, and even if one had been, the people and their expertise would have simply moved to a neighboring nation, city-state, or principality. In China, the emperor could turn back time.

Europe’s waterways were also a blessing. Its rivers flowed gently into sheltered, navigable bays. The Rhine is a wide, slow-moving river that can be used as a highway for goods and people. The Mediterranean is calm, almost a lake, with many big ports. Compare this to Africa. Despite being the second-largest continent, Africa has the shortest coastline, much of which is too shallow to build major ports. Most of its big rivers—fast-moving, dramatic, vertiginous—are not navigable. Add to that the tropical heat and propensity for disease and food spoilage, and you have a compelling geographic explanation for African underdevelopment—surely not the only factor, but a significant one.

These grand explanations may make it seem as if things could not have turned out any other way, but in fact, such structural factors tell you only a society’s predispositions, what the odds favor. Sometimes, the odds can be beaten. Despite its geographic diversity, Europe was once conquered by a great land empire, Rome, which tried—with diminishing success—to keep the empire centralized. The Middle East did well at one point under a vast empire. China prospered for centuries despite its flat geography, and India also had its periods of effervescence. European advantages, so clear in retrospect, were initially small and related mostly to the weapons and techniques of war. Over time, however, the advantages multiplied and reinforced each other, and the West moved further and further ahead of the rest.

The Spoils of Victory

Contact with the rest of the world stimulated Europe. The discovery of new seaways, rich civilizations, and strange peoples stirred the energy and imagination of the West. Everywhere Europeans went they found goods, markets, and opportunities. By the seventeenth century, Western nations were increasing their influence over every region and culture with which they came into contact. No part of the world would remain untouched, from the lands across the Atlantic to the far reaches of Africa and Asia. By the end of the eighteenth century, even Australia and the small islands of the South Pacific had been marked for use by Europeans. The Far East—China and Japan—at first remained insulated from this influence, but by the mid-nineteenth century they, too, fell prey to Western advances. The rise of the West led to the beginnings of a global civilization—one that was defined, shaped, and dominated by the nations of Western Europe.