The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  • Compass (fourteenth century). Never underestimate the importance of being able to know which direction you are going. Extensive cloud cover plagues much of Western Europe and its surrounding seas, particularly from October to March. Being bereft of sun or stars while plying the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean was a risky business, and so naval shipping tended to be seasonal to avoid cloudy skies and the uncertainty they generated. The compass made sunny days less a requirement and extended shipping seasons, for example, allowing Italian merchants to make two annual convoy trips to the Levantine coast to pick up spices rather than one. The initial design of the compass probably dates back to eleventh-century China, but it was not until the fourteenth century that the Europeans were able to develop a “dry” compass. Earlier versions floated a magnetized metal filament on water, making them impractical in anything but the mildest of seas.

  • Cross-staff (fifteenth century). Once you know what direction you are going, you need to know where you are. A cross-staff is a simple pole with a sliding crossbar that could be used to measure the angle between a known celestial object and the horizon, enabling its user to determine his latitude. A later version—the backstaff (1594)—allowed the same process without having to look at the object in question (which was often the eye-searing sun). In time the technology evolved into the mariner’s astrolabe and the Davis quadrant. Combine the cross-/backstaff with the compass, and captains could consult the wind speed to estimate their locations out of sight of land.

  • Carvel technique (fifteenth century). Dark Age vessels were constructed with a series of overlapping planks held together with pegs. The design was simple, but the ships were both heavy and difficult to repair, which drastically limited their speed, cargo capacity, and seaworthiness. The carvel process instead laid down a frame of wooden ribs to which exterior planks were attached, eliminating pegs completely. The result was a ship design that was lighter, faster, safer, and easier to scale up. The scaling up proved particularly important for trade vessels. Now not only could they transport far larger cargoes, but their sides would also be high enough that even the waves of raging Atlantic storms could not crash onto their decks and founder them. The only downside was that the new technique required far more skill than the traditional peg/clinker vessels to craft. This drastically slowed its adoption, allowing those few nations that commanded the appropriate skill sets to dominate global commerce for over a century.

  • Gunport (c. 1500). Naval guns and supporting equipment are extremely heavy, and storing them on the deck not only created extreme safety hazards, but also often caused ships to founder. Consequently, it was rare for any vessel to have more than a handful of guns, which could only be stationed on the prow. The gunport allowed the guns to be stored—and fired—from belowdecks. This lowered a ship’s center of gravity considerably, making it far easier to avoid capsizing, while keeping the guns at a remove from potential boarders (you could just close the port). It also allowed guns to be mounted all along the side of the ship, increasing the potential firepower of a vessel by a factor of twenty and allowing a single ship to ruin almost anyone’s day.

  Nearly all of these technologies were developed, refined, and operationalized by two countries that had almost nothing to do with the Ottomans.

  Europe’s westernmost peninsula is Iberia. At the time of the Ottoman rise, the peoples of Iberia, the Portuguese and Spanish, had very little going for them. Nearly alone among the major European regions, Iberia has no rivers of meaningful length and only very narrow coastal strips, forcing most of its people to live in a series of elevated valleys. Unsurprisingly, in the 1300s Iberia was Europe’s poorest region. It also didn’t help that the two had borne the brunt of the Arab invasion, being occupied by the Moors for nearly seven centuries.

  But it wasn’t their poverty or history that induced them to turn the page of technological history. It was their location. Being at the far western end of the continent meant that the Iberians had to recruit additional middlemen—typically either the French government or Italian traders—to access the spice trade. The additional step pushed up the price even more, not to mention making their spice supplies beholden to the politics of often hostile powers.

  They had a stark choice to make: Suffer on as Europe’s laggards, or devise a means of changing the game. They needed to find a way to bypass the Ottomans. Bypass the Italians. Bypass the pirates. Bypass the known world in its entirety. Their solution was deepwater navigation.

  The newfound reach allowed Spain to break across the Atlantic and dominate the Western Hemisphere without competition. American gold and silver played the central role in Spain’s rise to become the most powerful of the Western European empires. Their application of that military power proved critical in undoing the Ottoman position. Spanish forays into the Apennine Peninsula (contemporary Italy) resulted not just in the occupation of the southern and western portions of the peninsula, breaking Ottoman control over the Mediterranean. Spain also put a portion of its long-arm navy permanently on station in the western Mediterranean. The Ottomans, still using pre-deepwater ships, had to downgrade their naval tactics to mere privateering. The Turks found themselves forced to divert massive resources from their Danube campaigns to an increasingly failed effort to defend their Mediterranean assets (most notably the Egyptian breadbasket).

  But as potent as Spain was in challenging the Ottoman position, it was tiny Portugal that upended it. Until Portugal’s arrival in South Asia, local oceanic shipping—including the maritime arms of the spice trade that the Ottomans controlled—was purely coastal, sailing with the monsoonal winds: east in May–June and west in August. Winds offshore may have blown year round, but they were erratic and local ships couldn’t reliably navigate or survive the turbulence. The Portuguese deepwater craft, in contrast, found navigating the Indian Ocean to be child’s play. Portuguese vessels were able to eviscerate the Ottoman connections to the Asian spice world, and then directly occupy key spice production locations, via its ships redirecting the trade in its entirety to Lisbon. Even with the military cost of maintaining a transcontinental empire and the twenty-two-thousand-mile round trips factored in, the price of spices in Portugal dropped by 90 percent. The Silk Road and its Ottoman terminus lost cohesion, and the robust income stream that had helped make the Ottoman Empire the big kid on the block simply stopped, all because of the ambitions of a country less than one-twelfth its size.

  In one brief century (the sixteenth), Iberia shot forward from being Europe’s laggards to its leading economic and military powers. But like the Turks before them, the Iberians’ very success set events into motion that would strip them of their empires and wealth. Unlike geography, technology can move, and it keeps moving until it settles in a geography that can make the best use of it. Just as agriculture didn’t remain hidden in Egypt, the deepwater technologies that allowed the Iberians to overturn Ottoman power diffused out of far western Europe. It should come as no surprise that in time the deepwater technologies diffused from the previously land-bound Iberians to a people who were already quite at home on the water.

  Deepwater Navigation II: England’s Rise

  Since they were islanders, it shouldn’t come as a major shock that a good portion of the English knew their way around a boat. But what truly set the English apart from Europe’s (many) other maritime cultures was the body of water those boats had to deal with. The bulk of English life resides in the southeastern quadrant of Great Britain, in the general vicinity of the Thames River. The Thames provided all of the unification and local trade opportunities of Europe’s other rivers, but it empties into the North Sea, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water, frigid, tidal-extreme, and storm-wracked. There is no day where you dare bring your B game on the North Sea, as the Spanish discovered in 1588 when it wrecked over half their armada in their failed invasion of England. The severity of the North Sea is the quintessential example of why it took so long for humans to master the
oceans, and it was in this crucible that the English naval tradition was forged.

  Navies offer a flexibility that no land-bound powers can match, and their especially skilled and potent navy gave the English an unmatched advantage in the European competition for supremacy. England’s maritime acumen enabled it to nimbly switch trade partners at will, keeping it an economic step ahead of all competitors. Its navy let it land forces at the times and places of its choosing, keeping it a military step ahead of all competitors. And its ability to easily relocate military and economic pressure made it the ally of choice for any European power that it was not currently in conflict with.

  And that was before the English learned the Iberian secrets of deepwater navigation. With deepwater technologies, England leveraged its superior maritime acumen onto the global stage. Bit by bit, the better-skilled English navy reached out across the world and seized control of the Iberian trade network. Between 1600 and 1800, South Asia and the Far East were removed forcibly from the Portuguese sphere of influence. English colonies steadily supplanted their competitors at key locations in Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, Diego Garcia, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, relegating the time of Portuguese greatness to history.

  The faster and more maneuverable vessels of the English allowed them to raid deep into the Caribbean while denying the Spanish treasure fleets the “safety” of the open seas, leaving the Spanish with no choice but to put their coastal colonies on security lockdown and to assign naval assets to protect convoys. It quickly became obvious that the only locations the Spanish would be able to derive long-term income from were those that they had directly colonized with populations sufficient to resist English attacks. In response, the English founded a series of their own colonies in the New World to start the ball rolling on a demographic overthrow of Spanish power in the Western Hemisphere.

  The most lasting impact of the deepwater revolution, however, wasn’t the shifting of the spice trade, the fall of the Ottomans, or even the rise of the English/British Empire. It was the transformation of the ocean from a death sentence to a sort of giant river. Deepwater navigation cracked the world open, launching the Age of Discovery, which in turn condensed the world both culturally and economically. Ships capable of making round-the-world voyages made every significant culture aware of the others. Those ships’ cargo capacity enabled every previously sequestered river valley to trade with all of the others. Interaction, whether peaceful or hostile, trade or war, was no longer local but global.

  It was an age custom built for a culture as maritime-oriented as the English, and they crafted an empire greater in reach or wealth than any that preceded them. They emerged as the dominant global power, able to impose economic and military realities on cultures as varied as Northern Europe, southern China, the Indian subcontinent, and throughout the Arab world. Just as the Ottomans had done before them, the English seemed likely to extend their mastery of the seas and globe-spanning empire into something permanent.

  But they failed too. Just as with sedentary agriculture and deepwater navigation, a new suite of technologies changed the rules of how the world worked. Ironically, the technologies that ended English dominance were homegrown.

  As an island nation, the English didn’t have need for as potent an army as the mainland empires, so the crown of England was not as absolute as the Iberian monarchies. There were many interests—political, economic, and even military—that coexisted with the government. When the time came for the English to start challenging the Iberian imperial systems, state assets alone were insufficient to the task. The crown had to mobilize not just its own forces, but the forces of its various aristocrats and businessmen as well. Royal dispensation was granted to a variety of private players—the most famous of which was the East India Company, launched in 1600—to pursue various interests for the greater good of the English nation.

  When the profits from English successes started flooding home, they didn’t just go to the royal coffers but also found their way into the pockets of any number of stakeholders, and each used the newfound financial resources in his own way. Unlike the Iberian monarchs, the English businessmen saw more in the wider world than just spices and precious metals. They also saw bottomless markets. The English system, therefore, didn’t seek (just) simple plunder, but also to develop a global trade system with England at the center. Unlike deepwater navigation, which developed in response to the economic need, industrialization was an outgrowth of opportunity.

  The diverse interests of the English system, the sudden and continuous onrush of wealth that came from the expanding empire, and the still-building shift from superstition and tradition to reasoning and scientific inquiry that began with the Renaissance led to a new sort of technological revolution: an industrial revolution.

  Industrialization I: Manufacturing a New World

  In the preindustrial world everything had to be powered by muscle, wind, or water. That is a trifecta of restrictions on the human condition. Work could only be done where there was muscle, wind, or water to be had, and then only to the degree that the muscle, wind, or water could support it. Most important, you couldn’t just import muscle, wind, or water to a location that had none: A civilization wouldn’t take root or flourish without being able to support a population of sufficient size. That largely eliminated desert, steppe, jungle, and mountain climates from approaching the degree of wealth and development that the Europeans had achieved. Deepwater navigation (vastly) reduced long-haul transport costs and allowed the European empires to nibble at the edges of this problem a bit, but at the end of the day it was still a contest between areas with easily navigable waterways. The world’s marginal lands—which is to say, most of the rest of the planet—remained as undeveloped and untamed as ever.

  Industrialization technologies brought with them the potential to change all that.

  • Steam and coal. In fits and starts over the eighteenth century, steam began displacing muscle, wind, and water as the primary means of power. The first successful modern steam engine was introduced as early as 1712 by Thomas Savery to pump water out of coal mines, thus allowing for deeper excavation. In many ways, the first steam engine was a self-powering technology both literally and developmentally. The more powerful and reliable the steam pump was, the more coal could be produced, which lowered the cost of coal to power it. During the course of the century, the steam engine became more powerful, more reliable, and eventually smaller—and thus more mobile. Coal availability was key at every stage. Unlike wind and water, coal was a solid object that could produce useful energy far from its point of extraction. And unlike muscle, it wasn’t particularly picky about the quality of lodgings or food during the trip. The increased accessibility of coal made it suited for developments in power, smelting, and ultimately transport. In all cases, though, the magic year was 1805. Industry breakthroughs in the 1780s had matured sufficiently that steel became available in high enough volumes and strength to be used to build railroads and steel ships. Steam engines became small and powerful enough to power steel vessels and railway locomotives. Steamships made navigation—deepwater or riverine—faster, more versatile, and more cost-efficient by breaking the link between seasonal winds and shipping. Applying industrial construction techniques to rivers themselves allowed bigger locks so that larger ships could reach deeper inland. Railroads allowed the construction of a sort of artificial waterway between fixed points. Places that didn’t have the natural benefit of rivers or good port locations could now be inland/dry ports. Constructing a mile of track is roughly the same cost as constructing a mile of multilane road, but the combined operating/locomotion costs of rail systems are less than a quarter those of roadways. That’s still double the cost of maritime operations, but unlike rivers, rail lines could be built, and thus serve as powerful economic engines anywhere flat enough to support rail traffic. Traffic times compressed from weeks and months to hours and days.

  • Chemicals. The two major breakthroughs in this area were meth
ods of mass-producing sulfuric acid (1746) and sodium carbonate (1791), the precursor materials for everything from glass, dyes, toothpaste, and washing detergent to steel, paper, medications, and fertilizer. In the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, it was this last item that proved most critical. Just as coal enabled energy to be applied far from a horse’s ass, fertilizers enabled farms to be more productive. If the farm was on already productive land, this was nice to have. But if the farm was on marginal lands, a true revolution occurred. Land under cultivation expanded dramatically, even as the output of the average acre increased. Between fertilizers and better transport options, food could be produced in far greater quantities and be shipped far greater distances with only a fraction of the labor previously required. The far higher per-acre outputs allowed many farmers to relocate to the cities, providing industry with an ever larger pool of labor. Another chemical breakthrough—the development of cheap, strong cements in the 1820s, reinforced with steel—allowed for the hallmarks of modernity that we are all familiar with today: multistory buildings, bridges, high-capacity roadways, and city-scale sewers. Between the new food supplies and new construction techniques, cities needed not be famine-ridden disease incubators. Their sizes exploded. By 1825, London was the world’s largest city.

  • Interchangeable parts. Until 1700, all of the pieces of any advanced manufacture such as a musket or watch were typically constructed by the same professional; such components were crafted and assembled one painstaking piece at a time by highly skilled labor, and had to be repaired in the same manner. During the eighteenth century, higher degrees of engineering precision developed interchangeable parts, and in the early nineteenth century the invention and manufacture of machine tools—everything from lathes to planers to millers—allowed that precision in engineering to be applied to almost every industry. These innovations decreased the need for skilled labor, and by the early 1800s the first assembly lines had appeared. The durability of finished goods drastically increased because anyone with a part could repair most items instead of having to put it in the hands of a skilled craftsman. Output, quality, and worker productivity all expanded by an order of magnitude in the production of everything from textiles to artillery.