"A Chinese novel," I said. "That must be rather curious."
"Not as curious as one might be tempted to think," replied Goethe. "These people think and feel much as we do, and one soon realizes that one is like them."
—Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, January 31, 1827
Western scholars have spent a lot of time puzzling over the East. Why, they ask, was it Europe, not Asia, that launched the industrial revolution? How could China and India and the Near East—all homelands of great ancient empires—be so outclassed, technologically and economically, during the past half-millennium?
Sometimes the answers have focused on spiritual matters. Max Weber touted Europe’s "Protestant work ethic" and said India and China had been stymied by "magical traditionalism." Sometimes the answer have focused on politics. According to the theory of "Oriental Despotism," Asian civilizations, from Mesopotamia to China, were often built around large irrigation systems, which invited centralized bureaucratic control, leading to top-heavy governance that continued to stifle initiative for millennia.
But, whatever the various explanations for the pace of Asian development, their upshot tends to be that Asian cultures are strange things. The eminent economic historian David Landes, pondering China’s erratic, seemingly futile pattern of technological ups and downs ("almost as though the society were held down by a silk ceiling"), declared it simply "weird."
Of course, weirdness is a relative thing. From the standpoint of nineteenth-century Asia, the industrial revolution, as heralded by menacing European ships, may have seemed weird. And since there were more Asians than Europeans, maybe this is the perspective that should prevail: maybe what needs explaining is not the apparent stagnation of Asia, but rather the oddly explosive advance of Europe.
This, at least, is a frequently drawn conclusion. Etienne Balazs, after pondering China’s sluggishness, suggested that the series of events which led to capitalism in Europe—and thus "set in motion the industrialization of the entire world"—may have been "a freak of fortune, one of history’s privileged occasions, in this case granted solely to that tiny promontory of Asia, Europe." In much the same spirit, E. L. Jones titled his influential study of economic history The European Miracle. As little Europe steamed along the highway of industrial progress, wrote Jones, the bulk of the Eurasian landmass was heading into "a demographic cul-de-sac"; had modernity not been imposed on China, India, and the Ottoman Empire, they would have faced "stagnation at the best, or Malthusian crisis at the worst." As miraculous as Europe’s economic revolution was, "comparable development in Asia would have been supermiraculous."
Is that true? Does a look at Asian culture and history reveal indefinite inertia, suggesting that the industrial revolution was a fluke? Or does it show us, rather, that the supposedly inscrutable Orient is actually quite like the Occident—prone to harness new technologies and follow them to deeper and vaster social complexity?
THOSE ZEALOUS MUSLIMS
Landes spent part of his magnum opus The Wealth and Poverty of Nations trying to figure out why the westernmost of Oriental cultures, the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages, had not been destined for industrial greatness. His answer, in part: short time horizons. Whereas Europe’s pragmatic medieval Christians coolly pursued "continuing, sustainable profit," the rampaging Muslims were propelled by "fighting zeal" and paused "only for an occasional digestion of conquest and booty."
It’s true that many western Europeans pursued profit smartly. In the previous topic, we saw how some basic elements of capitalism coalesced in Europe during the late Middle Ages—notably the justly celebrated contratto di commenda, used to pool capital for trade.
But the idea of the commenda may well have come from the Islamic world. Before the commenda appeared in Italy in the tenth century, the very same tool, under another name, was used by Muslims as they turned Baghdad and Basra into centers of world commerce, trading goods ranging from paper and ink to panther skins and ostriches. As early as the late eighth century, texts of the Hanafite school, one of four Islamic legal traditions, discuss the commenda—and the business partnership, another capital-pooling tool. (At about the same time, checks drafted in Baghdad could be cashed in Morocco, a convenience not offered by European banks until centuries later.) Over the years, Hanafite scholars would again and again defend the legal infrastructure of finance on grounds of "the need of trade" or "the attainment of profit." In this light, Landes’s simple dichotomy—that European Christians were moved by sustainable "profit," whereas those zealous Muslims were just "doing God’s work"—begins to blur.
Indeed, one of Muhammad’s great accomplishments, and one key to Islam’s potency, was making the larger world safe for commerce. In the early seventh century, before he started preaching in Mecca, the town’s main commercial lubricant was its sacred shrine, the Kabah; violence was forbidden in its vicinity, so otherwise contentious Arab tribes could meet and trade. Muhammad and his successors, metaphorically speaking, expanded that sacred realm across much of the known world. For him—as for other great leader before and since—waging war turned out to be a way of waging peace.
Of course, during the early Islamic expansion, the war part predominated. In that sense Landes’s cartoonish sketch of the Muslim mind has a kind of time-bound truth. But as the Middle Ages progressed, and the Islamic empire grew and crystallized, stretching from Spain across North Africa to Pakistan, its formative mind-set faded. With the trust barrier between distant lands now eroded by a common religion, and communication barrier penetrated by the spread of the Arabic language, this huge wath became a low-friction zone for commerce. Taxation replaced booty as the empire’s financial base.
The Muslims, as people are wont to do, retained and refined information technologies that further reduced the friction, including some early algorithms of capitalism, ranging from the commenda to basic accounting. (Speaking of algorithms: the word "algorithm" comes from the name of the ninth-century Islamic astronomer and mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who also popularized the term al jabr, or algebra.) Though tracing the path of medieval memes is tricky, some of these algorithms seem to have reached Europe in time to help usher in the High Middle Ages. It is probably no coincidence that the hotbed of medieval Europe’s inchoate capitalism was Italy, with its Mediterranean exposure to Islamic culture.
CHINA’S CAPITALIST TOOLS
Meanwhile, at the other end of Asia, the Chinese were also adept at greasing the wheels of commerce. By the ninth century, if not earlier, tea merchants were using "flying money"—the rough equivalent of traveler’s checks—that spared them the risk and burden of lugging copper coins. Eventually, the merchants who issued the checks realized that they could invest some of the deposited money. Thus did the idea of banking dawn on China before it dawned on Europe.
There were other ways to raise capital in China during the European Middle Ages. As many as sixty merchants might together finance the construction of a fleet of ships, then own them collectively. People of more modest means invested in trade expeditions via merchants they knew.
Shipping was vital not just to over eas trade but to commerce within China, thanks to a thick network of rivers and canals that featured fancy locks for handling inclines. Marco Polo, hailing from thirteenth-century Venice, was no stranger to boats, but even he was floored by the traffic on the Yangtze River around the city of I-ching. "I give you my word that I have seen in this city fully five thousand ships at once, all afloat on this river." Actually, Marco Polo’s word and a dollar fifty will get you a ride on the subway; he is notorious for exaggeration. But even a more sober source, the historian Jacques Gernet, says that China’s internal network of waterways, 50,000 kilometers long, was "traversed by the biggest and most various collection of boats that the world had ever seen."
Farmers shipped fruits and vegetables to urban markets, harvested lumber for shipbuilding, made salable tools, pressed oils for medicines and hair creams. By the late Middle Ages, Chinese peasants, writes the historian Mark Elvin, were "adaptable, rational, profit-oriented, petty entrepreneurs." They don’t seem to have found their alleged "magical traditionalism" stultifying. With or without a Protestant work ethic, they worked.
In China, as in Europe, merchants sensed their common interest and formed associations. They never lobbied for commercial freedom as effectively as their western counterparts; Chinese cities didn’t become self-governing. But the Sung government, which assumed power in the tenth century, did grasp the value of freer markets, and changed its modus operandi. Rather than control prices and get its share of the pie via requisitioned labor, it let goods flow freely and got its share via sales taxes. Like European leaders and Islamic leaders, Chinese leaders saw the downside of a too-heavy hand.
In China during the Middle Ages, as usual with market economies, the virtues of size showed themselves. There were silk factories with 500 looms and iron factories employing thousands. Near the close of the eleventh century, China was producing 150,000 tons of iron a year, an output that Europe as a whole wouldn’t match until 1700.
One driver of economic, technological, and scientific advance was printing. China invented paper and had both wood block printing and movable type before they showed up in the west. They were used largely to spread practical knowledge. Hence such topics as Pictures and Poems on Husbandry and Weaving and Mathematics for Daily Use.
Whether China of the Middle Ages showed much real impetus toward modern science is still debated. Some say no, insisting that its expertise reached no further than technology. In truth, though, science and technology are inseparable, in two senses. First, because an understanding of the laws of the universe is always at least implicit in technology. (Francis Bacon said, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.") Second, because, beyond a certain level of technology, the understanding tends to become explicit. Arguably the most profound scientific truth is the second law of thermodynamics, which notes the inexorability of universal chaos and thus (as we’ll see in part II) defines the current against which organic evolution and cultural evolution both swim. The earliest statement of the second law came in the nineteenth century from the Frenchman Sadi Carnot, who described himself as a "constructor of steam engines," the vocation that indeed had led him to see the gist of the second law.
By the same token, China’s invention of the magnetic compass brought the articulation of laws of polarity and magnetic induction long before these things were discussed in Europe. China of the fourteenth century, Elvin believes, was on the "threshold of systematic experimental investigation of nature."
With or without formal science, China was the technological center of the world. The Chinese invented gunpowder, and by 1232 an iron bomb known as "Heaven-shaking thunder" was deciding the outcome of battles. By the early 1300s, a water-powered, thirty-two-spindle spinning machine could produce 130 pounds of thread a day, making it "several times cheaper than the women worker it replaces," as one observer noted. It was a advanced as any such machine that Europe would see for more than 300 years.
All told, China’s technological base during the Middle Ages was a harbinger of modernity. Printing! The magnetic compass! Bombs! Hair cream!
THE BRINK OF GREATNESS
There was a time, early this century, when medieval Asia’s technological feats were scarcely acknowledged by western historians, and so posed no threat to the standard view of the Orient as constitutionally sedate. But since mid-century, thanks partly to Joseph Needham’s landmark Science and Civilization in China, such extreme Eurocentricism has waned. Today the only reason to argue with Jacques Gernet’s verdict—that "the two great civilizations of the 11th to 13th centuries were incontestably those of China and Islam"—would be to quibble over whether Islam, which fell into disarray in the tenth century, really deserves equal billing. Mark Elvin, marveling at the Chinese water-powered spinning machine, has written, "if the line of advance which it represented had been followed a little further then medieval China would have had a true industrial revolution in the production of textiles over four hundred years before the West."
Faced with the spectacle of a world-dominant China in the late Middle Ages, Europe’s more persistent cheerleaders have turned it to their advantage. Now that we know how close China came to having its own industrial revolution, its failure to actually have one is all the more inexcusable! So China, once deemed an earnest but dim-witted student, is reclassified as a bright underachiever, but still gets a failing grade. "The mystery lies in China’s failure to realize its potential," Landes declares.
Actually, if you look at China after its "brink of greatness" period, the failure to industrialize doesn’t look all that mysterious. It is just another example of the caprice of history—the way political decisions and other flukes can alter the course of events for decades or even centuries without reversing the basic direction of cultural evolution as played out globally over the millennia. Before examining the particular roll of the dice that seems to have spelled future stagnation for China, let’s briefly examine its precursor: the barbarian onslaught that shook China in the late Middle Ages. This incursion illustrates some of our favorite barbarian themes.
NEW, IMPROVED BARBARIANS
In this case the barbarians were the world-famous Mongols, as in Genghis Khan. As is often the case, the barbarian assault was a tribute to the victim. It was on the strength of Chinese memes that the barbarians encroached on China, conquering the whole nation in the late thirteenth century. The Mongols combined their expert horsemanship with Chinese iron technology and Chinese principles of administration and siege warfare.
The conquest, though disruptive, wasn’t fatal. The Mongols, like so many barbarians, preferred inheriting an empire to destroying one. Indeed, once the initial chaos subsided, Mongol rule was in some ways a shot in the arm. The conquest brought political unity to China. In the now-expanded body of low-friction exchange—with a single currency, and a newly extended main artery, the Grand Canal—commerce flourished.
It even flourished beyond China’s borders. The Mongols had pushed their western frontier all the way to the Caspian Sea by the time of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, and they later extended it into Turkey and eastern Europe. In the process they knocked off the Abbasid caliphate, the second of the great Islamic dynasties. The expansion was epically bloody. But, like the Muslims before them, the Mongols realized that, once the pillaging is over and you’ve got an empire to run, peace is a wonderful thing. They kept trade routes safe, and in return for thus lowering the communication and trust barriers, they exacted what has been compared to the modern value-added tax, at around 5 percent.
This was a bargain. Compared to the series of power brokers through which Jewish and Muslim caravans previously passed, the Mongol thoroughfare offered "less risk and lower protective rent," according to the social scientist Janet Abu-Lughod. By the end of the thirteenth century, with the Mongols having brought China into direct contact with Europe, there existed a "world system that . . . had made prosperity pandemic."
The Mongol Empire’s transcontinental highway, paired with seagoing trade routes to the south, thus carried Eurasia’s invisible brain, and its invisible hand, to new evolutionary heights. They were still primitive organs by modern standards; goods and ideas traveled between east and west without east and west having a clear idea of each other. A global village it wasn’t. Still, mutual awareness was now higher than in ancient times, when the Chinese thought cotton coming from the west was fleece from "water sheep," and Romans thought their imported silk grew on silk trees. In the mid-fourteenth century, a papal envoy to China even managed to convince some Europeans that Asia did not, in fact, contain whole nations of monsters (although, he conceded, "there may be an individual monster here and there").
Alas, at around this time, economic decline beset both China and Europe. By Abu-Lughod’s reckoning, this is no coincidence, but rather a sign of interdependence. Mutual loss, after all, is the seamy underside of that bright promise of non-zero-sumness, mutual gain; stagnation, like prosperity, can become pandemic.
The fourteenth-century downturn was accentuated by what may have been a more literal Eurasian pandemic. William McNeill has suggested that the bubonic plague began in the interior of China and moved over Mongol trade routes to the Black Sea and then finally, via Mediterranean shipping, spread across Europe. Whether or not the black death did move transcontinentally, it certainly could have, and there lies its value as a metaphor that captures a basic trend of history. As economic and social integration grow in depth and scope, the welfare—the health—of ever more distant peoples becomes correlated. The web of non-zero-sumness expands.
To be sure, many scholars would question Abu-Lughod’s claim that the economic fates of Europeans and Chinese had by the fourteenth century grown tightly interwoven. Still, with the web of non-zero-sumness growing larger and thicker, linkage this firm was bound to arrive sooner or later. Even if the eastern and western downturns of the 1300s weren’t related, the eastern and western downturns during the great twentieth-century depression were.
This is one irony of globalization. The impetus behind it is strong largely because individual states see that their long-term interest lies in plugging into the system. But when the system hits a downturn, they would be better off if somehow they could magically become less plugged in—temporarily, at least. Modern China survived the early ravages of the 1997 Asian financial crisis in good shape partly because its currency was not easily converted into other currencies. Even so, China stuck to its plans for convertibility, because in the long run you’re better off plugged in.
China, of all nations, should know. Its epic mistake—the mistake that got it labeled an underachiever—was unplugging from the system beginning in the late fourteenth century. The consequences of this, a single political decision, have ever since been taken as final proof of some deep anti-modern streak in the Asian character.
CHINA CHICKENS OUT
The unplugging came during the Ming dynasty, which reigned from 1368 to 1644. When the Ming vanquished the Mongols, it was in theory a glorious moment for China: renewed native control after a century of barbarian rule. But since these particular barbarians had been a gateway to global commerce, the truth was more complicated. The Mongols still controlled trade routes in central Asia, but were now less enthusiastic about using them to channel commerce toward China. Besides, the Ming rulers weren’t big on free trade. Ever fearful of incursion, they constricted overland commerce in iron, arms, even textiles, lest these things empower barbarian neighbors yet again. As if to provide future historians with a nice symbol for a siege mentality, Ming emperors built the Great Wall of China.
The lack of overland trade needn’t, by itself, have been devastating. There was always the sea. But Ming rulers proved touchy about contact not just with barbarians, but with aliens of a manifestly refined variety. Foreign perfume, among other things, was banned at the end of the fourteenth century, and in various other ways, at various times, the Ming made seagoing trade tough.
The irony of this isolationism is that during the early Ming period the Chinese were king of the sea. In 1405 the emperor dispatched a fleet of 317 vessels—nearly twice the size the Spanish Armada would reach—to explore trade routes along southern Eurasia. The voyage (manned, one historian notes, by "a can-do group of eunuchs") was the first of seven expeditions, which over the next three decades would reach India, Africa, and the Persian Gulf. The odysseys were chronicled in books whose titles suggest that the Chinese were feeling their oats: Marvels Discovered by the Boat Bound for the Galaxy, for example, and Treatise on the Barbarian Kingdoms of the Western Oceans. Yet in 1433, the Ming retreated from big-time sailing, eventually banning the construction of large ships.
The reasons for China’s withdrawal are much debated. An anti-eunuch faction of bureaucrats played a role, but most observers agree that something larger was at work, too. The historian John King Fair-bank concluded simply that "anti-commercialism and xenophobia won, and China retired from the world scene." Others discern a more rational motive. The historian Peter Perdue sees China consciously shifting resources from one vast project—ocean voyages that had shown little profit—to another vast project: building the Great Wall to keep barbarians at bay. In this view, the move was neither mindlessly xenophobic (centuries of barbarian rampages were no figment of China’s imagination) nor anti-modern (the Great Wall was high tech back then).
Whatever the cause for China’s withdrawal, the timing was bad. For centuries, China had been a big exporter of good ideas, and western Europe a big importer. Now, just as Europe’s social brain was really humming, China opted out of the exchange.
The timing was bad in a second sense, too. Over the next half-century, European nations would embrace sailing big-time, and find the New World. Some scholar believe this stroke of fortune explains why the industrial revolution happened where it did. Europe stumbled onto a trove of precious metals and vast farmlands and hacienda-ready farmers, all just waiting for exploitation. The ensuing enrichment helped finance a burst of technological progress that pushed Europe into the lead during a crucial phase of technological evolution. To believe otherwise—in particular, to think the industrial revolution reflected some intrinsic European brilliance that has only since penetrated the dimmer parts of the world—is to exhibit "a serious malady of the mind" also known as Eurocentricism, writes the geographer J. M. Blaut, a leading proponent of this theory. If Blaut is right, then the rise of the west to world dominance during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is essentially the result of a lucky break—geographic proximity to an untapped hemisphere.
To back up his claim, Blaut argues that, as of 1491, Europe was not ahead of the rest of the world in any obvious, across-the-board way. Indeed, the world was already awash in incipient capitalism, or "protocapitalism." Cities "strongly oriented to manufacturing and trade" stretched "around all of the coasts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia."
This is indeed evidence that, had Europe not led the world into industrialization, someone else would have—even supposedly solipsistic pre-modern China, given enough time. Still, that’s a long way from saying that Europe’s only leg up in the world was a few big ships and a straight shot to the West Indies. There is one other asset Europe had that neither China nor any other empire had: the absence of empire.
Large, unified polities are two-edged swords. On the one hand, they offer big, low-friction zones for trade—an especially valuable thing in ancient times, when marauders often lurked beyond state bounds. But this day-to-day benefit coexists with a long-run liability: imperial governments have often resisted changes that are key to continuing viability amid technological flux. We’ve already seen this logic at work in medieval Europe, where feudal fragmentation, for all its day-to-day downsides, had the upside of encouraging experimentation with economic and political algorithms.
At the end of the Middle Ages, as monolithic China turned inward, Europe was crystallizing into a land of nation-states, and so its contentious dynamism persisted. By their nature, Europeans were just as capable of formulating self-defeating policies as Ming emperors were. It’s just that, in a more immediately competitive environment, someone else was bound to try a better policy, so bad policies came back to haunt you sooner. And once somebody did try a good idea, it could spread to competing polities fast by emulation.
Columbus himself illustrates the point. He sought Portuguese financing, but the king of Portugal turned him down—rather as the Chinese government had decided half a century earlier that long westward voyages weren’t worthwhile. But there was one difference: Portugal, unlike China, had lots of neighbors that were a stone’s throw away. Columbus went to Spain, got support, and came back from the New World triumphant. Within a few years Portugal was playing the discover-America game, too. The "sail westward" meme, having proved its value, proliferated.
As consequential as this meme was, the more important thing, for this topic’s purposes, is how memes in general exploited the political landscape of Europe. In this hothouse of interstate competition, technologies of energy, of materials, of information—including algorithms of capitalism and of political governance—were bound to keep sprouting and spreading. For example, patent rights, which helped make initiative worthwhile, were granted in Venice in 1474 and diffused to much of Europe by the middle of the next century.
In this light, Europe’s eventual triumph is not just consistent with a directional theory of cultural evolution; the theory virtually predicts such a triumph. After all, the speed of any evolutionary process depends heavily on two factors: how fast potentially fruitful novelties arise, and how fast manifestly fruitful novelties spread. Europe in the fifteenth century, teeming with competitive but mutually communicative polities, scored higher in both categories than any other part of Eurasia. In such a setting the "sail westward" meme—and profitable memes in general—were (a) likely to take root in one polity or another; and (b) having proved their worth, likely to spread.
Can this simple, almost superficial contrast—China’s centralized control versus Europe’s fragmentation—really explain a difference in economic development that has often been attributed to a deep streak of mystical traditionalism in Asian culture? One way to find out is to look at a part of pre-modern Asia that shared much of China’s cultural heritage but lacked its monolithic structure: Japan.
Like China (and via China), Japan was deeply influenced by Buddhism. But unlike Ming China, Japan saw a collapse of centralized rule in the late fifteenth century. The shogun’s power seeped out to feudal lords, creating an amorphously competitive environment reminiscent of late medieval Europe. Sure enough, there ensued a familiar pattern: markets flourished, towns expanded (some started commodities exchanges), and the political power of merchants grew. Jesuits who came to Japan in the sixteenth century compared the city of Sakai to Europe’s medieval "free cities." Edwin O. Reischauer has described this period as one of "extraordinary cultural innovation, institutional development, and even economic growth" in spite of an atmosphere of "great political confusion and almost constant warfare." (Or, perhaps, because of the confusion and warfare?) By the late sixteenth century, "the Japanese, who only a few centuries earlier had been a backward people on the edge of the civilized world, had grown to the point where they were able to compete on terms of equality with the Chinese and also with the Europeans. . . ."
All told, if the key to the "European Miracle" lies in geography, it is not so much Europe’s and China’s relative proximity to America as it is Europe’s and China’s political geographies. Europe comprised lots of independent laboratories for testing memes, while China possessed political unity—an asset, to be sure, in matters of everyday commerce, but a handicap in any long-run race for technological preeminence.
