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A number of scholars have acknowledged that Europe’s broken political landscape played a role in its rapid advance. For some of them, such as David Landes, this is among the reasons to doubt that China, left to its own devices, would ever have reached the industrial age.
They are missing a key point. This European advantage—being a neighborhood of competitive laboratories—was an advantage of degree only. All nations have some relatively robust neighbors within some proximity. China had Japan, among others. That’s why no government can countenance stagnation forever without facing the consequences. Even the much-maligned Ming dynasty periodically felt the need to flirt anew with international trade (which it had never quite stifled anyway, thanks to the enterprise of Chinese and Japanese smugglers). And, though technological advance slowed to a crawl during much of the Ming and Manchu periods, it didn’t stop—and the economy continued to grow.
Not only do all states have some competitor within their neighborhoods; the number of those competitors grows inexorably. The reason is that, as the means of transport and communication advance, the size of a "neighborhood" grows. That is what China and Japan had begun to learn by the sixteenth century, but were taught with special force during the nineteenth century, when westerners in gunships showed up and demanded access to Asian markets: Europe and Asia were now in the same neighborhood.
Such jarring encounters can incite a nativist reaction. At the turn of the twentieth century, China’s Boxer Rebellion provided a fine metaphor for the illusions that nourish such reactions; it was inspired by a cult whose rituals were thought to render members impervious to western bullets. This thesis was abandoned in the face of painful evidence, as was the larger thesis of imperviousness to western influence. Witness China—and the rest of Asia—today.
Of course, in the view of Landes and other champions of Europe’s greatness, to do what China is doing today—cloning western technologies and economic principles—is cheating. The question, as they want to pose it, is whether China would have industrialized on its own—no outside help allowed.
It would be tempting to answer yes if the question didn’t hover so close to meaninglessness. Could France have industrialized "on its own"—without using steam engines made in Britain? Could Britain have developed the steam engines had not a Frenchman earlier shown that steam could move a piston? Could either France or Britain have reached the verge of steam power without first absorbing capitalist algorithms from Italy, which in turn seems to have gotten some of them from Islamic civilization? The answer to these questions isn’t no; it’s yes, but—but it would have taken them longer to reach these milestones, because they would have been laboring under the handicap that afflicted China.
The point is just that western economic historians have stacked the deck. They habitually compare progress in China to that in Europe, although China is just one polity and Europe is a synergistic cauldron of them. If China is going to be pitted against Europe in the game of hypothetical economic development, shouldn’t it at least be allowed to team up with Japan?
Apparently not. Landes speculates that the Japanese, but not the Chinese, would "sooner or later have made their own" industrial revolution, even without European contact. Let’s play out this thought experiment. If the Japanese had indeed done so, then China would have adopted Japan’s industrial technology—either willingly or under coercion of one sort or another. Indeed, high-tech Japanese aggression was eventually a spur to Chinese modernization. But in Landes’s calculation, apparently, China doesn’t get credit for such derivative development. Then how, in his calculation, does Japan get credit for being in a position to industrialize in the first place? It got there largely with technology from China, after all—beginning with writing.
For that matter, how does Europe get credit for being in a position to industrialize in the first place? In the early seventeenth century, amid the faint stirrings of the industrial revolution, Francis Bacon singled out three technologies that had "changed the appearance and state of the whole world": printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. We now know that all three were first invented in China, and it may be that all three diffused to Europe. (And paper became affordable in Europe thanks to waterwheel paper mills, which seem to have been an Islamic contribution, first appearing in Baghdad.)
Throughout history, cultural evolution has transcended political bounds. Ideas have wished back and forth across continents as the centers of innovation shifted. The question of what individual nations can do "on their own" is more or less pointless—and the fact that economic historians often ask it of Asian nations, but rarely of European ones, doesn’t do much to shore up its utility.
Once you view China and Japan as part of a larger east Asian brain, some noted examples of China’s forgetfulness during the listless Ming period lose their force. It’s true, for example, that China’s encyclopedic Exploitation of the Works of Nature, written in 1637, was destroyed (perhaps because of the author’s political views). But by then there were Japanese editions, which survived. Once again, the world makes backup copies.
ZEN AND THE ART OF COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION
A Chinese magnum opus on how to "exploit" nature is rather at odds with the stereotype that past Asian cultures, unlike past western ones, abided in harmony with their habitats. According to this view, as summarized by one proponent, the western belief that nature exists "to be manipulated and enjoyed" insofar as technology permits is "exceptional in human history, and is mainly derived from the anthropocentric philosophies of Judeo-Christian religions." Tell that to the Chinese who during the T’ang dynasty of the early Middle Ages wiped out the forests of North China to create some lebensraum.
The idea that westerners exploit nature while easterners commune with it is akin to a larger fallacy that has long haunted the study of economic history: religious determinism. In the standard version, western religion—whether the "Judeo-Christian ethic" or the narrower "Protestant work ethic"—explains why full-blown capitalism and industrialization first appeared in the west. While Christians are putting in a good day’s work, Buddhists sit under trees.
It’s true that Buddhist doctrine, as laid out by the Buddha, doesn’t sound like fuel for material acquisition. Then again, the teachings of Jesus Christ aren’t a capitalist manifesto, either. But religious doctrines evolve. China’s first pawn shops were run by Buddhist monks. In seventeenth-century Japan, a Buddhist monk advised that "All occupations are Buddhist practice; through work we are able to attain Buddhahood"—an utterance that has rightly drawn comparison with the Protestant work ethic. Meanwhile, over in the cities of Mughal India, purportedly otherworldly Hindus were, as the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, "excellent examples of Weber’s Protestant ethic."
Confucianism, unlike Buddhism, treated the profit motive with suspicion well into the Middle Ages. Then again, as Kennedy has noted, in that regard it is reminiscent of the pope’s condemnations of usury during the Middle Ages. But this papal doctrine adapted to commercial exigencies, and so would Confucianism. In the thirteenth century, when Eurasia was spanned by a commercial web of unprecedented density, commerce was abetted by Confucians and for that matter by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians—a transcontinental patchwork of spiritual traditions, all with one thing in common: their adherents were human beings, and thus liked mutually profitable exchange. Economic ecumenicalism.
Religions don’t always adjust to the dictates of economic growth. In the short run, their attitudes toward technology—including, sometimes, a professed abhorrence of it—can matter greatly. But in the long run—over centuries, not decades—religions either make their peace with encroaching economic and technological reality or fade into obscurity. The Old Order Amish are admirable in their principled refusal to adopt modern technology, but they are not the wave of the future.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN ISLAM . . .
By the eve of the industrial revolution, prospects that the Islamic states of western and southern Asia might host it were dim. The Ottoman Empire had flourished for a time— not just on the strength of conquest, but also by restoring security to international trade routes and charging for the service. But the regime grew oppressive. The printing press was banned lest dissidence arise, and justice was warped by bribery. In short: the empire not only failed to lower the two great barrier to non-zero-sum interaction—the communications barrier and the trust barrier—but actually raised them. Some Ottoman rulers compounded matters by resisting cultural input from the west, and by the time this policy was clearly reversed, in the nineteenth century, it was too late.
Mughal India, born in the early sixteenth century, showed promise for a time, with robust commerce and an advanced banking system. And one of its earliest rulers, Akbar, faced with the prospect of governing lots of Hindus, announced that respect for all religions was now the will of Allah. But the later empire saw institutionalized discrimination, the razing of Hindu temples, and a self-indulgent ruling class. When a local prince yawned, according to one contemporary observer, "all present must snap their fingers to discourage flies."
Both of these Islamic states, having failed to nourish economic and technological growth, paid the price. The Mughal empire expired in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman in the twentieth. Why did they fail to thrive? Theories abound, but, obviously, we see some familiar culprits: parasitic governance and an oppression that left much non-zero-sumness untapped. India, with its caste system, is a famously vivid example.
Maybe, then, the world should be thankful that neither of these empires survived to become a much-emulated model. When regimes that ban printing presses and mandate bias are given the thumbs down, we can only compliment history on its judgment.
At the same time, it’s worth noting that these civilizations gave much to the world’s river of memes. We’ve already noted a few of Islam’s great gifts; and both Turkey and India, well before Islamic governance, made their own bequests. Around four millennia ago, Turkey—Anatolia, back then—seems to have given Eurasia the idea of smelting iron, the substance that would finally give form to the industrial revolution. And India has been the epicenter of great innovation in two ethereal realms: spiritual and mathematical thought.
In the spiritual realm, India gave us Buddhism, the first major religion to stress tolerance and nonviolence, the only major religion to spread far and wide without conquest, and arguably the major religion whose founding doctrines (unembellished by later additions) most readily survive the modifying force of modern science. In mathematics, India gave Europe, among other things, the concept of zero and the decimal number system, including the numerals that are misleadingly called "Arabic." (If you don’t think they were a big advance, try doing some multiplication using Roman numerals.)
India in the late twentieth century began to reclaim its mathematical legacy, not just with deep contributions to theory, but in such practical matters as software design. This is a reminder—as are the "Japanese miracle" and later economic leaps in Asia—that leadership in cultural evolution is fleeting. All large expanses of Eurasia have had their day in the front of the pack, and their day closer to the rear. The story isn’t over yet.
If we relax our focus—ask not which of the Eurasian cultures is leading the pack, but whether the front of the pack is advancing, whether the cutting edge of Eurasian culture, and thus of social complexity, is moving forward—the answer is that there have been few if any times since the initial closing of the "Eurasian ecumene" in the first century A.D. when the answer wasn’t yes. The peoples and states come and go, rise and fall, but the memes keep flowing upward.
There are phases in cultural evolution that are by their nature big leaps; a technology, or a constellation of them, proves so explosive that its lucky hosts suddenly seem light-years ahead of other cultures. Those laggard cultures, indeed, look so pathetic that it is tempting to ask whether there isn’t some qualitative difference at work, some special something that rendered the "leading" culture, and it alone, capable of crossing the technological threshold.
Surely such flattering interpretations accompanied encounters ten millennia ago between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies, or, five millennia ago, between literate, state-level societies and illiterate chiefdoms. In those cases we have hard evidence that the interpretation is wrong, the thesis of exceptionalism a self-indulgent illusion: we now know that both farming (and chiefdoms) and writing (and state-level societies) appeared independently, multiple times.
In the case of the industrial revolution, evidence of this sort is unattainable. A revolution at this technological level occurs in an age when a global brain is taking shape, and news can travel around the planet in months. So any subsequent episodes of industrialization— such as Japan’s less than a century after Europe’s—are necessariliy derivative. Thus the thesis of European exceptionalism can never be conclusively disproved. Still, it is hard to take that thesis seriously if you are aware of the tens of millennia of cultural evolution that led to the industrial revolution; aware of the diffuse power evinced by that evolution at every turn; aware that what creates great technological change isn’t so much great cultures as the greatness of culture itself.
One key to culture’s greatness is its indifference to local politics. China during the Ming period fails to fulfill the promise of the Sung—but that’s okay: there’s always Japan; there’s also England, France, Italy, India, Egypt, and so on. All these societies had their ups and downs—because of the vagaries of history, the luck of the geographic draw, the greatness or abjectness of political leaders. But through it all, probability overwhelmingly favored progress. If stagnation or regression beset one place, there were always other places.
Isaiah Berlin once wrote a book called Historical Inevitability that was devoted to debunking virtually all grand theories of history, certainly including directional theories. Among its errors was imputing to such theories a strict determinism—a belief that every detail of the future could in principle be predicted, that every detail of the present exists by necessity. To read his topic, you would think that all who see pattern in history believe, as he put it, that "everything that we do and suffer is part of a fixed pattern."
The truth is more nearly the opposite. The key to the pattern of history isn’t the fixedness of everything that people do. The key is the pattern’s long-run imperviousness to the lack of fixedness. A Ming ruler, perhaps out of sheer caprice, rescinds China’s oceanic voyages, and the most sophisticated nation on earth turns inward—yet the big picture remains unchanged: globalization and the information age, with all their political import, are in the cards.
