Even though one can trace some of the origins of the modern in Europe back to the sixteenth century, the decisive period of change was the nineteenth century, when industrialization swept across north-west Europe, the economic power of European nations was transformed, the modern nation-state was born, and virtually the entire world was brought into a global system dominated by Europe. The merging of all these trends marked a qualitative shift in human organization. This was the period when modernity began to acquire a global reach, and people aspired to be modern and to think of themselves as modern — from dress and ways of being named to the possession of objects like fob watches and umbrellas — not only in Europe and North America, but also even amongst elite groups, though not amongst the masses (with the exception of Japan), in Asia and Africa. [48]
This process has been gathering speed ever since. By previous standards, Britain ’s Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 was breathtakingly rapid, but, when judged by later examples, especially those of the Asian tigers, it was, paradoxically, extremely slow. Each successive economic take-off has got faster and faster, the process of modernization, with its attendant urbanization and rapid decline in agrarian employment, steadily accelerating. Although Europe has, in the debates about post-modernity, recently expressed qualms about modernity, seen from a global perspective, it is abundantly clear — as it sweeps across the Asian continent, home to 60 per cent of the world’s population — that the insatiable desire for modernity is still the dominant force of our time; far more, in fact, than ever before. Europe’s confidence and belief in the future may have dimmed compared with that of Victorian Britain, but the United States is still restlessly committed to notions of progress and the future. And if one wants to understand what ‘the embrace of the future’ means in practice, then there is no better vantage point than China.
Europe was the birthplace of modernity. As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies left a huge and indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other: they appeared synonymous. But though modernity was conceived in Europe, there is nothing intrinsically European about it: apart from an accident of birth it had, and has, no special connection to that continent and its civilization. Over the last half-century, as modernity has taken root in East Asia, it has drawn on the experience of European — or, more precisely, Western — modernity. However, rather than simply being clones of it, East Asian modernities are highly distinctive, spawning institutions, customs, values and ideologies shaped by their own histories and cultures. In Part I, I will explore how modernity came to be indelibly associated with Europe, and more broadly the West, and how East Asia is now in the process of prising that relationship apart.
2. The Rise of the West
By the mid nineteenth century, European supremacy over East Asia had been clearly established, most graphically in Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War in 1839- 42. But when did it start? There is a temptation to date it from considerably earlier. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that China ’s history after the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and especially after the genius of the Song dynasty (960-1279), was to blaze an altogether less innovative trail. Writing of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), for example, the historian David Landes suggests that: ‘ China had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility.’ As a result, he argues: ‘So the years passed and the decades and the centuries. Europe left China far behind.’ [49]
As China disappointed compared with its previous record, Europe, on the other hand, grew steadily more dynamic. From around 1400, parts of it began to display steady economic growth, while the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance provided some of the foundations for its later scientific and industrial revolutions. The longer-term significance of these developments, though, has probably been exaggerated by what might be described as hindsight thinking: the belief that because of the dazzling success and extraordinary domination of Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the roots of that success must date back rather longer than they actually did. The result has been a tendency — by no means universal — to believe that Europe’s lead over China, and China ’s own decline, commenced rather earlier than was in fact the case. [50]
The idea that Europe enjoyed a comfortable lead over China and Japan in 1800 has been subject to growing challenge by historians. Kaoru Sugihara has argued that, far from going into decline after 1600, over the course of the next three centuries there was an ‘East Asian miracle’ based on the intensive use of labour and market-based growth — which he describes as an ‘industri ous revolution’ — that was comparable as an economic achievement to the subsequent ‘European miracle’ of industrialization. He shows that Japanese agriculture displayed a strong capacity for innovation long before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, with major improvements in crops and productivity helping to support a growing population. [51] It is clear, as Adam Smith pointed out, that in the late eighteenth century China enjoyed a rather more developed and sophisticated market than Europe. [52] The share of the Chinese harvest that was marketed over long distances, for example, was considerably higher than in Europe. A key reason for the early development of the market in China was the absence of feudalism. In medieval Europe the serf was bound to the land and could neither leave it nor dispose of it, whereas the Chinese peasant, both legally and in reality, was free, provided he had the wherewithal, to buy and sell land and the produce of that land. [53]
In 180 °China was at least as urbanized as Western Europe, while it has been estimated that 22 per cent of Japan ’s eighteenth-century population lived in cities compared with 10–15 per cent in Western Europe. Nor did Western Europe enjoy a decisive advantage over China and Japan before 1800 in terms of capital stock or economic institutions, with plenty of Chinese companies being organized along joint-stock lines. Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain ’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round. [54] What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China. [55] For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.
Living standards in the core regions of China and Western Europe appear to have been roughly comparable in 1800, with Japan perhaps slightly ahead, while the figures for life expectancy and calorie-intake were broadly similar. [56] European life expectancy — an important measure of prosperity — did not surpass that of China until the end of the nineteenth century, except in its most affluent regions. [57] Paul Bairoch has calculated figures for per capita income which put China ahead of Western Europe in 1800, with Asia as a whole behind Western Europe but in advance of Europe. [58] In referring to China and Europe, of course, we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with huge land masses populated by very large numbers of people: in 1820, China ’s population was 381 million while that of Western Europe was 133 million, and that of Europe as a whole 169 million. Levels of economic development and standards of living inevitably varied considerably from region to region, making comparisons be
tween the two problematic. The key point is that the most advanced regions of China, notably the Yangzi Delta, seem to have been more or less on a par with the most prosperous parts of north-west Europe, in particular Britain, at the end of the eighteenth century. [59] Given the crucial role played by the most advanced regions in pioneering industrial take-off, the decisive comparison must be that between Britain and the Yangzi Delta.
The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them. [60] In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious: instead, it would appear more likely that industrialization was, for the most part, a consequence of relatively contingent factors. [61] This still begs the question, however, as to why Western Europe, rather than Japan or China, was able to turn its fortunes around so rapidly from around 1800 and then outdistance Japan, and especially China, by such a massive margin during the nineteenth century.
Here the fortuitous or chance factor, while by no means the sole reason, played a critical role. Around 1800 the most heavily populated regions of the Old World, including China and Europe, were finding it increasingly difficult to sustain rising populations. The basic problem was that food, fibre, fuel and building supplies were all competing for what was becoming increasingly scarce land and forest. This was particularly serious in China because its heartland, which lay between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, had always supported a very large population as a result of its fertility; now, however, it became increasingly exhausted through overuse. [62] This, combined with the fact that new land brought under cultivation was not of a high quality, posed an increasingly acute problem. [63] For two crucial reasons, Europe — or rather specifically Britain — was able to break this crucial land constraint in a way that was to elude China. First, Britain discovered large quantities of accessible coal that helped to ease the growing shortage of wood and fuel the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, although China also had very considerable deposits of coal, they lay a long way from its main centres of population, the largest being in the north-west, far from the textile industries and canals of the lower Yangzi Valley. Second, much more importantly, the colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America, was to provide huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labour in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials: the early growth of Manchester, for example, would have been impossible without cheap and plentiful supplies of cotton from the slave plantations. Raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain ’s New World cotton imports would have required huge quantities of land (almost 9 million acres in 1815 and over 23 million acres by 1830). Overall, it is estimated that the land required in order to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been between 25 and 30 million acres — or more than Britain ’s total arable and pasture land combined. [64] The role played by colonization, in this context, is a reminder that European industrialization was far from an endogenous process. [65] The New World — together with the discovery of large quantities of coal in Britain — removed the growing pressure on land that was endangering Britain ’s economic development. China was to enjoy no such good fortune. The consequences were to be far-reaching: ‘England avoided becoming the Yangzi Delta,’ argues the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘and the two came to look so different that it became hard to see how recently they had been quite similar.’ [66]
The fact that the New World colonies proved a vital source of raw materials for Britain at such a critical time was a matter of chance, but there was nothing fortuitous about the way that Britain had colonized the New World over most of the two previous centuries. Colonization also provided Europe with other long-term advantages. Rivalry over colonies, as well as the many intra-European wars — combined with their obvious economic prowess — helped to hone European nation-states into veritable fighting machines, as a result of which, during the course of the nineteenth century, they were able to establish a huge military advantage over every other region in the world, which thereby became vulnerable to European imperial expansion. The scale of this military expenditure should not be underestimated. HMS Victory, commanded by Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafal gar in 1805, cost five times as much as Abraham Crowley’s steelworks, one of the flagship investments of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. [67] Colonial trade also provided fertile ground for innovations in both company organization and systems of financing, with the Dutch, for example, inventing the joint-stock company for this purpose. Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did. It is true that China also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World. [68] South-East Asia, which was abundant in resources, would have been a more likely candidate to play the role of China’s New World. Admiral Zheng’s exploits in the early fifteenth century, with ships far larger than anything that Europe could build at the time, show that China was not lacking the technical ability or financial means, but the attitude of the Chinese state towards overseas interests and possessions was quite different from that of Europe. Although large numbers of Chinese migrated to South-East Asia, the Chinese state, unlike the European nations, showed no interest in providing military or political backing for its subjects’ overseas endeavours: in contrast, the Qing dynasty displayed great concern for its continental lands in the north and west, reflecting the fact that China saw itself as a continental rather than maritime civilization.
This raises the wider question of the extent to which the contrasting attitudes of the European and Chinese states, and their respective elites, were a factor in China ’s failure to make the breakthrough that Europe achieved. The capacity of the Chinese state was certainly not in question: as we shall see in Chapter 4, it was able to achieve quite extraordinary feats when it came to the mobilization of economic and natural resources. [69] The highly developed granary system, the government-built 1,400-mile-long Grand Canal and the land settlement policies on the frontiers all demonstrated a strong interventionist spirit. The imperial Chinese state also had the experience and ability to transport bulk commodities over long distances, though its priority here was not coal but grain, salt and copper, since these were crucial for maintaining the stability, cohesion and subsistence of the population, always an overriding Chinese concern. [70] Herein, in fact, lay a significant difference: the priorities of the imperial state tended to be focused on the maintenance of order and balanced development rather than narrow profit-making and industrialization. The state was resistant to excessive income differentiation and marked displays of extravagance, which were seen as inimical to Confucian values of harmony. [71] The state did not block market activities and commerce — on the contrary, it strongly supported the development of an agrarian market economy — but it did not, for the most part, promote commercial capitalism, except for those merchants engaged in the monopolies for salt and foreign trade. In contrast, the European state, especially the British, tended to be more responsive to the new industrial possibilities. [72] Likewise, the imperial state did not believe in pitting one province against another, which would clearly have made for instability, whereas in Europe such competition took the form of nation-state rivalry. The main reason for the different mentalities of the Chinese and Western European states was that while the rising merchant classes were eventually incorporated, in one form or another, into European governance, in China they remained firmly outside, as they have remained to this day. [73] Rather than enjoying an independent power base, the merchants depended on
official patronage and support to promote and protect large-scale commercial undertakings. Western European states, and in the first instance the British, were more favourably orientated towards industrial development than China, where the administrative class and landed interest still predominated. [74]
In 1800, therefore, Britain enjoyed two long-term — as opposed to contingent — advantages over China. The British state (and, in varying degrees, other Western European states) was more favourably disposed towards industrialization than the Chinese state, while colonization and persistent intra-European wars had furnished Western Europe with various strategic assets, notably raw materials and military capacity. The fact that colonization was to provide Britain with the means by which to side-step its growing land and resource problem towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, was entirely fortuitous. The point remains, therefore, that in 180 °China (and, indeed, Japan) found itself in a rather similar economic position to Western Europe and possessed a not dissimilar potential for economic take-off. What made the decisive difference were those contingent factors — New World resources and, to a lesser extent, accessible supplies of coal — that enabled Britain to deal with its resource constraints, together with the supportive attitude of the British state towards industrialization. China enjoyed no such contingent salvation and, as a result, found itself in a hole from which it was unable to extricate itself, a situation that was to be exacerbated within less than half a century by the growing incursions of the European powers, especially Britain, beginning with the Opium Wars. The historical consequences were to be enormous: China was at least as agrarian in 1850 as it was in 1750 and not much less so even in 1950. According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, China ’s GDP in 1820 was $228.6 billion — almost four times greater than in 1600 — but had barely increased at all by 1913, by which time it had nudged up to $241.3 billion, and actually fell to $239.9 billion in 1950. [75]
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