* They persuaded the Inca Atahualpa to embrace Christianity by telling him that if he died a Christian, his body would not be burned; which meant, by Inca belief, that he might yet return to lead his people.
* The peoples of the empire knew how to make boats, or rather rafts, of balsa wood; also small barks and floats made buoyant by the use of inflated skins and the like and propelled by swimmers. But however unsinkable the bigger rafts, they were small, unstable craft, easily waterlogged, unsuited to the open sea. Cf. Rowe, “Inca Culture,” p. 240: “The real limitation to Peruvian navigation was not lack of ingenuity but lack of convenient supplies of suitable lumber.” Which raises the question, why not bring timber down from the mountains? The answer probably lies in the lack of iron or steel cutting tools and hard transport.
† These runners, to be sure, relied on more than their own juices; the coca leaf was there to stimulate and impart an artificial stamina. Indeed, it was not uncommon to measure tasks by the amount of coca required (cocadas), just as the Chinese were wont to measure in bowls of rice.
* Chaunu speaks of “manioc, the mediocre, the dangerous pan cazabe ou cazabi. The shift from the traditional bread to manioc flour proved catastrophic”—L’Amérique, p. 86. Manioc, or cassava, contains a cyanide-developing sugar that primitive peoples have learned to eliminate by a complex process of grating, pressing, and heating. Presumably the Caribbean Indians were not telling the Spanish how to do this.
† Ibid. Many of these cattle ran wild and offered the prospect of easy game to interlopers and buccaneers. The buccaneers got their name from the grill (bocan) they used to smoke meat, both for themselves and for sale to passing vessels. (My French dictionary, le Robert, says the word meant the smoked meat, and by extension the grill.) But hides came to be the big staple, and once the freebooters began to supply these, the herds were not long for this world.
* The potential margins of profit were substantial. The one ship that survived Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe brought back 26 tons of cloves, which were sold for 10,000 times cost, just about enough to cover the cost of the expedition—Humble, The Explorers, p. 162. (Note that cloves were probably the most valuable spice of all in proportion to weight: a small bag constituted a fair bounty for a seaman over and above wages.) Needless to say, such fabulous differentials rapidly narrowed as other sources of supply responded to the competition.
* The Portuguese “old Christians” eventually came to call themselves puritanos.
* The printing press was not brought to Brazil until 1807, when the Portuguese court fled there. Modern bureaucracies keep records and issue decrees and regulations, and a printing press was indispensable—Lang, Portuguese Brazil, p. 195.
* Golconda: (1) A ruined city of western Andhra Pradesh, Republic of India, the capital (1512-1687) of a former Muslim kingdom. (2) A source of great riches, as a mine—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1978.
† The prince had returned from some years of exile in Ceylon. Cited by Vlekke, Nusantara, pp. 225-26.
* Because of the westerlies (winds are named for their source) and the easting Gulf Stream, the Azores were in effect the gullet for vessels returning from the West and East Indies alike. On their role in the American trade, see Landes, “Finding the Point at Sea”; also Broad, “Watery Grave of the Azores.”
* Saltpeter (potassium nitrate, KNO,) was an essential ingredient of gunpowder, hence a raw material of unusual political as well as economic potency. The nitrogen was recovered from soil deposits of urine, which contains urea (CO(NH2)2); and India, with a population as large as that of western Europe, produced a lot of urine while possessing singularly favorable soil conditions. Compounds of nitrogen are an essential ingredient of all manner of explosives (thus nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine), and as early as the fifteenth century, Henry V ordered that gunpowder not be exported from England without a license. Such countries as France and Germany tried to give nature a helping hand by creating saltpeter farms or nitriaries. The opening of a large Indian supply provided an important strategic advantage.
** As ballast, it made some East India ships smell better than most vessels on the long oceanic reaches, but it had one inconvenience. Its overpowering odor altered the flavor of goods in transport, in particular coffee. The English had to reconcile themselves to lower prices for coffee moved on pepper. But they needed that ballast. It made all the difference to stability in stormy waters—Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, p. 313.
* The conversion is based on the then prevailing wage of a skilled worker (50 a year) into the equivalent modern wage of $25,000. In conversions of this kind, covering long periods, the best standard of comparison is the price of labor.
** Clive’s cash reward was the equivalent of some $140 million in our money. Some regarded this fabulous sum as extortionate, but Macaulay says that Clive could as easily have had twice that for the asking: “He accepted twenty lacs of rupees [2 m. rupees]. It would have cost him only a word to make the twenty forty”—Macaulay, “Clive,” p. 243. This is certainly what Clive gave the world to understand. Cf. Keay, Honourable Company, pp. 320 ff. Macaulay does raise the question, however, whether it was appropriate for a British subject to accept a large gift from a foreign ruler. True, it was not against the law; but what would people have said, he asks, if Wellington had accepted such a gift from Louis XVIII of France?
* In places such as the Caribbean, however, where the pool of slaves could not maintain itself by natural reproduction, the interdiction of fresh supplies would kill the old plantation system.
* Some medical ethnologists question the American origin of syphilis, pointing to evidence of pre-Columbian veneral disease in Europe of somewhat similar course and effects. But similar is not identical, and there is no question that syphilis became an epidemic phenomenon only in the sixteenth century. Compare AIDS, which may be older than we know but surfaced as an epidemic disease only in the 1980s.
* Ironically, the economists of today have adopted the term “Dutch disease” to describe this syndrome, from the response of the economy of Holland to the discovery and exploitation of natural gas under the North Sea. As though the Dutch did not know how to make the most of these new resources.
* The best analysis of the Weberian model is still Talcott Parsons’s Structure of Social Action. Elaborating the paradigm, Parsons divides action into three categories: rational (appropriate to ends), irrational (unrelated to ends), and nonrational (action as an end in itself). A good example of this last: “Father, I cannot tell a lie; it was I cut down the cherry tree.” Weber’s Calvinist ethic falls in the realm of the nonrational.
* Lincei = lynxes. The animal was chosen for its reputedly keen sight.
* Compare the long-standing Italian rule about publication of pornography: so long as the book was costly and appeared in a limited edition, it was tolerable; but no cheap editions could be allowed, for fear of corrupting those simple folk who did not have the cultural resources to resist temptation and sin. On the Church’s fear of the vernacular, cf. the troubles of Giambattista della Porta in the 1580s. Eamon, “From the Secrets of Nature,” p. 361, n. 41.
* As it did in Italy. Compare the short-lived Accademia del Cimento, organized and patronized by Duke Leopold of Tuscany, summoned at his beck and call and dissolved after his departure for Rome to pursue higher callings. No intellectual autonomy: the members reported on their experiments, but that was all—science, in other words, without scientia.
* By factory is meant a unified unit of production (workers brought together under supervision), using a central, typically inanimate source of power. Without the central power, we have a manufactory.
* The technique that worked for boilers (roll up a sheet, weld the seams, and cap top and bottom) would not work for an engine cylinder—too much leakage. The new method, which consisted in boring a solid casting, was the invention of John Wilkinson, c. 1776, who learned by boring cannon (patent of 1774). A year later, Wil
kinson was using the steam engine to raise a 60-pound stamping hammer to forge heavy pieces. By 1783, he was up to 7.5 tons. With this he was soon building rolling mills, coining presses, drawing benches (for wire manufacture), and similar heavy machinery. “By a strange caprice of public fancy,” writes Usher, “this grim and unattractive character has never secured the fame he deserves as one of the pioneers in the development of the heavy-metal trades.” History of Mechanical Inventions, p. 372. Vulcan wasn’t pretty either.
* The latter part of the nineteenth century saw substantial improvement in the steam engine thanks to scientific advances in thermodynamics. Where before technology had led science in this area, now science led and gave the steam engine a new lease on life.
On the logistic (lazy-S) curve of possibilities implicit in a given technological sequence—slow gains during the experimental preparatory stage, followed by rapid advance that eventually slows down as possibilities are exhausted—see the classic essay of Simon Kuznets, “Retardation of Industrial Growth.”
† Pig (cast) iron is high in carbon content (over 4 percent). It is very hard, but will crack or break under shock. It cannot be machined, which is why it is cast, that is, poured into molds to cool to shape. Wrought iron can be hammered, drilled, and otherwise worked. It will not break under shock and is highly resistant to corrosion, which makes it ideal for balcony railings and other open-air uses (cf. the Eiffel Tower). To get from pig to wrought iron, most of the carbon has to be burned off, leaving 1 percent or less. Wrought iron has long since been replaced by steel (1 to 3 percent carbon), which combines the virtues of both cast and wrought iron, that is, hardness with malleability; as a result, wrought iron is just about unobtainable today except as scrap. The difficulty with the early coke-blast iron was that, on refining, it yielded an iron that was red-short, that is, brittle when hot. Until that problem was solved, wrought iron was made using charcoal-blast pig.
* Power machinery was inevitably a new source of industrial accidents. On problems in the sugar mills and the greater safety of hand-operated or animal-driven devices, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, pp. 143—44. Horses were more dangerous than mules or oxen: “…the screams of the unfortunate slave caused the horses to run faster.”
* Core of the process: John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History, p. 147, and Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, p. 291, would not agree. Hicks saw the early cotton machinery as “an appendage to the evolution of the old industry” rather than as the beginning of a new one. He thought that something like this might well have occurred in fifteenth-century Florence had waterpower been available (but Italy does have waterpower). “There might have been no Crompton and Arkwright, and still there would have been an Industrial Revolution.” “Iron and coal,” writes Cipolla, “much more than cotton stand as critical factors in the origins of the Industrial Revolution.” Perhaps; it is not easy to order improvements by impact and significance. But I would still give pride of place to mechanization as a general phenomenon susceptible of the widest application and to the organization of work under supervision and discipline (the factory system).
* One should distinguish here between the spinning and weaving sectors of the industry. In cotton spinning, machinery simply wiped out the older hand techniques. Even the Indian spinner, working for a small fraction of English wages, had to give up in the face of machine-spun yarn. In weaving, however, the power loom took decades to reach the point where it could deal with the more delicate, high-count yarn. So the handloom weavers hung on grimly, forever reducing expectations and standard of living in the effort to stay out of the mills, until death and old age eliminated them. By the second half of the nineteenth century, even those manufacturers who had special reasons to hire handloom weavers could no longer find them. Young persons were not ready to go into a dying trade.
* Economics is a discipline that would be a science, and as everyone knows, science marches on. So away with the monographs and articles of predecessors. Hence the paradox of a discipline that would be up to date, yet is always rediscovering yesterday’s discoveries—often without realizing it.
* The model was the work done by Simon Kuznets and colleagues at the National Bureau of Economic Research. After working on U.S. data, Kuznets helped advise and finance similar projects in other countries from the 1960s. The pioneering work on British industrial output went back even further, to the calculations of Walther Hoffmann, but a fresh start began with the researches of Phyllis Deane, followed after an interval by Charles Feinstein, Nick Crafts, Knick Harley, and others.
* On the weaknesses and pitfalls of these quantitative elucubrations, see Hoppit, “Counting the Industrial Revolution,” who cites (p. 189) Thomas Carlyle on the subject: “There is, unfortunately, a kind of alchemy about figures which transforms the most dubious materials into something pure and precious; hence the price of working with historical statistics is eternal vigilance.” So, mid-nineteenth century and already disillusioned.
* Hence the poison scandal (l’affaire des poisons) of the 1680s in Prance, which saw hundreds of fortunetellers, astrologers, and their clients arrested and strenuously interrogated, and some thirty-four executed for complicity in murder. Nothing, says Grenet, La passion des astres, pp. 136-59, did more to discredit astrology and magic among the larger public and the political authorities. The scientists had already abandoned this nonsense.
* On the resistance of workers in wool to mechanization, see especially Randall, Before the Luddites, who points out this response was also a function of organization and the sharing of gain. Where the workers were in effect independent agents, as in Yorkshire, they had little trouble adopting new ways that profited them; where they served as wage labor, as in the West Country, they fought machines that threatened employment.
† The first in the series of spinning machines that laid the foundation of the factory system was that of Lewis Paul and John Wyatt (patented in Paul’s name) in 1738. The key invention here was the use of rollers turning at different speeds for drawing out the fiber—a feature that became thereafter a regular component of spinning machines fitted with a flyer or equivalent. At that time, we are told, the shortage of spinning labor was nothing like what it would become in another generation; in the words of Wadsworth and Mann, hardly serious—The Cotton Trade, p. 414. Yet the unevenness of the yarn produced by hand spinners—both the individual’s work and from one spinner to the next—meant that weavers had to buy far more yarn than they actually used in order to have enough of a given quality. The machine promised to end that—Ibid., p. 416.
* These constraints were the more vexatious in a context of rising consumer demand. The growing appetite for things should have increased the supply of labor; and so it did in the long run. But in the short, demand got ahead of supply, and manufacturers got impatient. On the link between consumption and industry, see de Vries, “Industrial Revolution.”
* The Chinese Communist regime learned this later when it tried to make a go of backyard blast furnaces.
* Such terms as “values” and “culture” are not popular with economists, who prefer to deal with quantifiable (more precisely definable) factors. Still, life being what it is, one must talk about these things, so we have Walt Rostow’s “propensities” and Moses Abramowitz’s “social capability.” A rose by any other name.
* The tenacity of superstition in an age of science and rationalism may surprise at first, but insofar as it aims at controlling fate, it beats fatalism. It is a resort of the hapless and incapable in the pursuit of good fortune and the avoidance of bad; also a psychological support for the insecure. Hence persistent recourse to horoscopic readings and fortunetelling, even in our own day. Still, one does not expect to find magic used as a tool of business, to learn for example that exploration of coal deposits along the French northern border (the Hainaut) and in the center of the country (Rive-de-Gier) in the eighteenth century was misguided and delayed by reliance on dowsers (tourneurs de baguettes)—Gillet,
Les charbonnages, p. 29.
* The British also had their constraints on participation of religious outsiders in political life and admission to the universities; but these paradoxically steered these “minorities” into business and saved them from the seductions of genteel status.
* Part of the explanation lies in the assignment of such tasks in Asia to women and children, that is, to people who could not say no. One finds similar patterns elsewhere, for example, in Southeast Asia, where women harvested rice with a finger-knife, one stalk at a time, rather than with a sickle. This was said to honor the rice spirit; but then, it is not uncommon to sanctify women’s toil with pious myths. Had men done the cutting, the rice spirit would have been honored by a quick sickle and a symbolic handful of the harvest. On finger-knife harvesting, see Reid, Southeast Asia, I, 5.
* A word about the term comparative advantage, which we shall use again on other occasions. Contrary to appearance, it does not mean the ability to produce something at lower cost than some other producer. It means the ability to make more money doing one thing than another. A country that follows its comparative advantage, then, will make those things that earn it most, and not just anything that it can sell for less than competitors can.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 86