Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  A similar conservatism characterized many areas of Germany. For instance, whilst immediately after the Thirty Years War ended in 1648 the authorities of Ottobeuren welcomed immigrants who wanted to settle (page 616 above), as early as 1661 they denied permission for a penniless man from Tyrol to come and marry his local fiancée and settle, ‘because there are still several native sons’ who could take over vacant farms. This rejection ended the engagement and eventually the former fiancée left the monastery lands. Fewer than 20 per cent of all marriages in the 1660s involved an immigrant, and fewer than 10 per cent after the 1680s. The population of Ottobeuren therefore stood at only 72 per cent of the pre-war total in 1675 and still at only 92 per cent in 1707.74

  The rural textile industry in the Black Forest region of Württemberg, centred on Calw, provides another striking example of ‘stagnating routine’. On the eve of the Thirty Years War, villages in the area produced thousands of light woollen cloths (Zeuge or worsted), exporting them to Italy, Switzerland and Poland as well as other parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Spinning, weaving and dyeing cloth employed up to half the families in some villages; but hostile troops occupied Württemberg for much of the war, burning Calw to the ground in 1634, cutting trade routes, increasing risks and destroying several of its export markets. Once the war ended, the merchant-dyers formed an association and (supported by the local overlord) compelled the weavers' guilds to sign a permanent agreement with them which, they claimed, would guarantee a reasonable living for all. The contract contained three important restrictions. First, whereas previously each weaver had produced up to 200 cloths annually, henceforth the maximum would be 50 (carefully punctuated: no more than one cloth per week). Second, each year the merchant-dyers' association unilaterally fixed a price and agreed not to purchase above or sell below that price. Third, the weavers had to swear not to sell to anyone outside the merchant-dyers' association, or to compete with one another for apprentices, spinners, or raw materials. Although these restrictions harmed ‘outsiders’ (consumers, employees, women, migrants, Jews), they protected the interests of native merchant-dyers, the master-weavers and the male householders – at least until they eventually undermined the competitiveness of Württemberg textiles.

  For similar reasons, guilds proliferated elsewhere in the wake of the crisis. Not far from Calw, on the Ottobeuren estates, before the war only potters and butchers had organized their own guilds, but between 1648 and 1700 rural guilds came to control virtually every sector of the economy: the activities of carters, blacksmiths, locksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, coopers, brewers, painters, gunsmiths, cutlers, rope-makers, bakers, millers, carpenters, cabinet-makers, glassmakers, masons, barbers and even bathhouse-keepers were regulated by guilds. In every case, the restrictive practices of the guilds guaranteed a living to all producers equally, and so facilitated a slow but sure recovery from the mid-century crisis; but in doing so they discouraged innovation and growth.75

  The development of book printing in a cluster of villages in Sibao, a mountainous area in Fujian province in southeast China, offers a final example of a ‘low-pressure’ strategy for economic recovery. Devastation during the Ming-Qing transition left much abandoned land in the area until, with Qing encouragement, migrants ‘who can farm mountain land come with their families and support themselves through their labour’. The sources often referred to the newcomers as pengmin (‘shed people’, because they lived in flimsy shacks), which conveys their initial poverty, but some of them turned a profit by cultivating bamboo that others used to make paper. Starting in 1663, other Sibao families took advantage of this cheap local paper to print cheap books from woodblocks. ‘They targeted primarily the largest textbook market: the students at the base of the educational pyramid’, who were preparing to sit the civil-service examinations. By 1700 Sibao boasted over a dozen publishing houses, each distributing their products through pedlars who travelled from market to market selling their wares.76 The publishers of Sibao thus managed to create something from nothing, but creativity soon gave way to conservatism. They now strove, like the worsted producers of Calw, to eliminate competition, claiming thereby to maintain a fair share of profits for all. To begin with, although all male heirs got an equal share of their father's goods upon his death, a practice that led to the division of woodblocks and other printing stock along with other assets, the sons and their families might choose to remain under the same roof and run the print shop as a cooperative family business. Within this labour pool, which might include 70 relatives, the household head divided responsibilities and scrutinized accounts to eliminate competition and conflict; and even if fragmentation took place, with some sons taking a share of the blocks and setting up on their own, the families still minimized competition. At the end of each year the manager of each enterprise ‘printed a sample cover page of each new work it planned to print in the coming year and posted these on the gate to its [premises]’. Should two enterprises propose the same title, the village elders would intervene to broker an agreement or, if that proved impossible, to impose a settlement. In the words of Cynthia Brokaw, who uncovered the methods of the Sibao printers, ‘these measures aimed to ensure some profit for even the smallest [print] shops’ and to inhibit ‘large concerns from monopolizing these inexhaustibly popular educational texts’. In this goal they succeeded: the households that founded the prosperous printing industry of rural Sibao after 1663 were still producing the same texts almost three centuries later.77

  The ‘low-pressure’ economic strategies observed in Calw, Ottobeuren and Sibao probably formed the norm before 1700, because few regions dared to adopt what might be called a ‘high-pressure’ strategy that allowed anyone – migrants, labourers, women, Jews – to participate in rural industries. Such a system was flexible, adaptable and dynamic, but it also risked alienating vested interests and creating popular disorder. Even though opening up an enterprise to competition normally increased the size of the economic pie, the competitive melee usually left many with smaller slices. At least in the short term, it made good political and social sense to limit each enterprise to a closed corps of licensed experts, whose activities were micro-managed through their own professional associations, reinforced by state regulation, because vested interests remained content, minimizing the risk of disorder. Probably only regions with a sophisticated welfare system, such as England and the Dutch Republic, could take such risks.

  Economic conservatism also involved risks, however. In 2011 an international team of economic historians headed by Robert C. Allen published data from around the eighteenth-century world concerning the number of ‘baskets of basic goods’ that unskilled labourers could purchase with their daily wages – something that might be called the ‘welfare ratio’. Their study showed that important disparities existed in the 1730s, the first point at which comparative data become available, and that those disparities increased over time. In London the minimum daily wage could buy four ‘baskets of basic goods’, and in both Amsterdam and Oxford it could buy three, but in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou, Shanghai, Edo, Kyoto and Istanbul it could buy barely one. In addition, workers in the cities of central and southern Europe included in the survey had a welfare ratio no better than their comrades in Beijing; while no Asian city came close to achieving the welfare ratios already evident in parts of northwest Europe. Put another way, the available data suggest that by the 1730s (and probably earlier) a London labourer could support a family of four, while an Amsterdam or Oxford labourer could support a family of three, but a comrade in Asia or in south and east Europe could scarcely support himself. Moreover, in both England and Holland, wage labourers formed perhaps one-half of the working population in some towns by the early eighteenth century, whereas in Jiangnan (and in many parts of continental Europe) they formed less than one-fifth of urban and less than one-tenth of rural populations. This disparity magnified the differences in purchasing power.78

  Although each ‘basket of basic goods’ contained enough food t
o provide 1,940 calories per day, mainly from the cheapest available carbohydrate, London workers did not of course eat four times as many carbohydrates as before. Instead they ate more expensive foods, drank more expensive beverages and bought a wide range of non-food items, thus fuelling the consumer revolution that so impressed Daniel Defoe. At least in Britain, it seems that the ‘fatal synergy’ that produced the mid-seventeenth century crisis had by 1700 given way to a ‘benign synergy’ in which demand for food no longer exceeded supply, while warfare did not stifle welfare, enabling a return of political stability, demographic recovery and economic growth, so that Grimmelshausen's phoenix could arise from the ashes. So why did it not arise everywhere, particularly in China?

  22

  The Great Divergence

  THE ‘GENERAL CRISIS’, ACCORDING TO THE EMINENT SINOLOGIST SAMUEL Adshead in 1970, ‘marks the decisive point of divergence between the modern histories of Europe and China’. In one of the few attempts to compare the experience of two distinct regions in the mid-seventeenth century, Adshead examined economic, social and political data, and concluded that ‘European society emerged from this crisis reconstructed, more powerful and better integrated than before, while Chinese society remained relatively unchanged.’ Thirty years later another eminent Sinologist, Kenneth Pomeranz, published a powerful comparative study, entitled The Great Divergence (a term that has subsequently gained widespread currency), that disagreed. On the basis of a comparison not only of leading economic indicators but also of learning and technology in the two regions, Pomeranz concluded that as late as 1750, little distinguished the economically advanced areas of China, such as Jiangnan, from the economically advanced areas of Europe, such as England.1 Although the subsequent debate over the ‘Great Divergence’ has focused on economic contrasts, a comparison of the intellectual innovations in the wake of the Global Crisis at both ‘ends’ of Eurasia reveals some surprising similarities.

  Educate and Punish

  In 1654, just after the French government regained control of its capital, ‘A Parish Priest of Paris’ with 18 years of teaching experience published a 335-page book entitled The parish school: or, how best to teach children in small schools. The first section, which extolled ‘the virtues of teachers’, compared running a school with running an army. The key to successful instruction, claimed the anonymous author, was hierarchy and subordination: effective classroom teachers needed four ‘observers’ and ‘admonishers’, who noted the names of delinquents to be punished; eight ‘visitors’, who followed students home to see how they and their families behaved after school hours, and then denounced any faults to the teacher; and 12 ‘repeaters’, who recited the lesson and showed the alphabet to the youngest pupils. The second section of The parish school discussed how to teach children piety; and then came two sections filled with ‘best practices’ on how to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and the rudiments of Latin. The author, later identified as abbé Jacques de Batencour, devoted many pages to the importance of discipline: segregating boys from girls; preventing children from talking to each other (therefore only one child at a time should leave the classroom to urinate); making sure the classroom had large windows (‘to get rid of the evil smell of children’); and administering punishments that aimed to humiliate rather than to hurt, because their effects lasted longer. Batencour's 18 years in the classroom had also taught him the special difficulty of educating boys who were ‘only children’: having been spoiled at home, they required more humiliation and punishment at school than the rest.2

  Such valuable pedagogical insights attracted a wide audience, and the book went through many editions. In addition, Louis XIV sent copies to his colony in Canada (Canadian libraries contain both extant copies of the first edition), while several French bishops praised its precepts and also commanded the schools of their diocese to follow them. Above all, Batencour's book set the agenda for the host of French charity schools founded during the later seventeenth century expressly ‘to remedy the ignorance that prevails among the poor whose children, lacking money and unable to attend the parish schools, roam for the most part as vagabonds in the streets, without discipline and in total ignorance of the principles of religion’. To end this threat to public order, the government argued that ‘There is no better cure than to establish charity schools in the principal parishes of the city, where the poor can be taught their catechism and at the same time learn to read and write’. Subsequent legislation to create primary schools included the same rationale, often word for word, and claimed that Louis XIV's initiative had not only educated the poor but also ‘reformed the libertines whose excesses would have been a public scandal’.3

  The ‘Sun King’ was not the only European ruler to see basic education as an effective antidote to the disorders fomented by the General Crisis. In 1651 Duke Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel issued a comprehensive School Ordinance that mandated universal primary education explicitly to avoid the next generation turning into savages (‘die Verwilderung der Jugend’). ‘Unfortunately,’ the duke thundered,

  Experience clearly shows that the accursed recent war has destroyed (among other things) the education of the young, and unless it is remedied in time we can expect no end to misfortune and misery. Instead of learning honour, virtue and well-being, young people have grown up with the example and experience of barbarism, so that we can expect in future, indeed in just a few years, nothing except wicked and indisciplined subjects of the state, who will shun neither evil nor injustice, but will instead continue the destruction of the ruins that remain of the State that God has graciously saved from the searing flames of war.

  To avert these dangers, the duke continued (anticipating Batencour), ‘Young people must be carefully educated, with much wisdom and some severity, in order to turn them away from evil and attract them to the good’. Therefore, he decreed, ‘all parents must send their children’ to school, ‘to study for as many years as it takes them to learn to understand the Catechism and to read printed texts’.4

  Similar concerns led other Protestant rulers to enjoin universal schooling – including those of Sachsen-Gotha in 1642, Hanover in 1646 and Württemberg in 1649 in Germany, and, on a much grander scale, Scotland in 1646. ‘Considering how prejudicial the want of schools in many congregations has been, and how beneficial the founding thereof in every congregation will be to this kirk and kingdom’, the Scots Parliament ordained ‘that there be a school founded and a schoolmaster appointed in every parish’ and that ‘every congregation’ in the kingdom must provide ‘a commodious house for the school’ together with ‘a stipend to the schoolmaster’. By 1695, no fewer than 160 out of 179 Lowland parishes boasted a school and a schoolmaster.5

  At the other ‘end’ of Eurasia, the Qing government also concluded that a thorough overhaul of China's educational system would accelerate recovery from the crisis. In 1652 an imperial edict called for the creation of a school in every village (whether by the community, a clan, a temple or a charity) and the process soon became so common that popular encyclopaedias included a specimen contract for hiring a teacher, leaving blanks for the variables:

  ———— persons establishing a school: Now so that our sons and nephews [will] expound books, we cordially invite ———— in ———— year to take the teacher's seat on a lucky day, to guide the students, taking care that they seek the good, leading them throughout to achievement and to be grateful for beneficence, to respect virtue without limit. Respectfully, with our names and the salary stated below.

  In 1658 another imperial edict imposed the ‘national school curriculum’ on regions not inhabited by Han Chinese: henceforth local chieftains in all areas of the empire must complete a standard education before they could govern.6

  Other mid-seventeenth-century rulers also saw basic education as essential. The insistence of the Tokugawa rulers of Japan on conducting all the essential business of government in writing (see chapter 16 above) encouraged towns and fiefs to establish schools
capable of creating cadres with the necessary reading, writing and arithmetical skills. A study of daimyō fiefs reveals that although only two boasted schools in the 1620s, and only eight by 1650, there were at least 20 by 1703.7 Nevertheless, the post-crisis ‘educational revolution’ had its limits. In the Muslim world, religious schools (medreses) continued to function as before, primarily to impart religious instruction (see chapter 19 above); while even in Japan, China and Europe, where governments accepted the risks associated with promoting functional literacy and thus creating ‘a public sphere’, they showed little or no enthusiasm for higher education.

  ‘The crisis of the universities’

  In Europe, the first quarter of the seventeenth century saw the foundation or chartering of 20 new universities and over 40 other academies, bringing the total number of institutions of higher education close to 200; but the second quarter saw only eight new foundations, and ‘after 1650’, Jonathan Israel has observed, ‘a combination of social and especially cultural factors plunged Europe's universities into the deepest and most prolonged crisis in their history’, because ‘most universities not only ceased growing but steadily contracted’. Total student numbers ‘fell uninterruptedly from the 1680s throughout the eighteenth century’. New foundations virtually ceased.8

  The reasons for this crisis were no secret. When in 1680 the Rector and Senate of Heidelberg University examined why ‘student numbers are constantly in decline’, they compiled a list of damning reasons (some of which still sound familiar): ‘there are not enough professors’, especially in the newer disciplines such as botany, anatomy and chemistry; in the older disciplines the instructors ‘are careless in their lectures and public disputations’; ‘discipline is either too strict or too soft’; ‘fees and accommodation for students cost too much, and there are no scholarships’. These problems were not confined to Heidelberg, or to Germany. At the university of Pisa, mathematics teachers earned between one-sixth and one-eighth of the salary of philosophy professors; while at Leiden, mathematics professor Rudolf Snellius earned so little that he had to teach Hebrew in order to augment his salary, even though (on his own admission) ‘he himself did not understand the rudiments of Hebrew’.9 Confessionalization and bureaucratization ceased to stimulate university expansion, as they had formerly done throughout Europe. After the 1650s, church-building largely ceased and theology began to lose its dominant place in intellectual life; and although states still sought highly educated officials and diplomats, most universities failed to provide ‘useful’ courses in established subjects like history, geography, philosophy and modern languages, and no courses at all in new subjects like physics, chemistry and biology.