by Morris, Ian;
The second thing that strikes me about Figure 3.8 is that we can draw vertical lines on it as well as horizontal ones. The obvious place to put a vertical line is in the first century CE, when Western and Eastern scores both peaked, even though the Eastern score was well below the Western (34.13 versus 43.22 points). Rather than (or as well as) focusing on the West hitting a low-forties ceiling, perhaps we should be looking for some set of events affecting both ends of the Old World, driving down Roman and Han Chinese social development scores regardless of the levels they had reached.
We could put another vertical line around 1300 CE, when Eastern and Western scores again followed similar patterns, although this time it was the Western score that was much lower (30.73 as against 42.66 points). The Eastern score had already been sliding for a hundred years, but the Western score now joined it, only for both lines to pick up after 1400 and accelerate even more sharply around 1700. Again, instead of focusing on the scores hitting a low-forties ceiling in the early eighteenth century, perhaps we should look for some global events that started pushing Eastern and Western development along a shared path in the fourteenth century. Perhaps the industrial revolution came first to the West not because of some extraordinary fluke, as Pomeranz concluded, but because East and West were both on track for such a revolution; and then something about the way the West reacted to the events of the fourteenth century gave it a slight but decisive lead in reaching the takeoff point in the eighteenth.
It seems to me that Figures 3.3, 3.7, and 3.8 illuminate a real weakness in both long-term lock-in and short-term accident theories. A few of the theorists focus on the story’s beginning in the agricultural revolution, while the great majority look only at its very end, in the last five hundred years. Because they largely ignore the thousands of years in between, they rarely even try to account for all the spurts of growth, slowdowns, collapses, convergences, changes in leadership, or horizontal ceilings and vertical links that jump out at us when we can see the whole shape of history. That, putting it bluntly, means that neither approach can tell us why the West rules; and that being the case, neither can hope to answer the question lurking beyond that—what will happen next.
SCROOGE’S QUESTION
At the climax of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Ebenezer Scrooge to a weed-choked churchyard. Silently, the Ghost points out an untended tombstone. Scrooge knows his name will be on it; he knows that here, alone, unvisited, he will lie forever. “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?” he cries out.
We might well ask the same question about Figure 3.9, which takes the rates of increase in Eastern and Western social development in the twentieth century and projects them forward.* The Eastern line crosses the Western in 2103. By 2150 the West’s rule is finished, its pomp at one with Nineveh and Tyre.
The West’s epitaph looks as clear as Scrooge’s:
WESTERN RULE
1773–2103
R.I.P.
Yet are these really the shadows of the things that Will be?
Confronted with his own epitaph, Scrooge fell to his knees. “Good Spirit,” he begged, grabbing the specter’s hand, “assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” Christmas Yet to Come said nothing, but Scrooge worked out the answer for himself. He had been forced to spend an uncomfortable evening with the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present because he needed to learn from both of them. “I will not shut out the lessons that they teach,” Scrooge promised. “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
Figure 3.9. The shape of things to come? If we project the rates at which Eastern and Western social development grew in the twentieth century forward into the twenty-second, we see the East regain the lead in 2103. (On a log-linear graph, the Eastern and Western lines would both be straight from 1900 onward, reflecting unchanging rates of growth; because this is a linear-linear plot, both curve sharply upward.)
I commented in the introduction that I’m in a minority among those who write on why the West rules, and particularly on what will happen next, in not being an economist, modern historian, or political pundit of some sort. At the risk of overdoing the Scrooge analogy, I would say that the absence of premodern historians from the discussion has led us into the mistake of talking exclusively to the Ghost of Christmas Present. We need to bring the Ghost of Christmas Past back in.
To do this I will spend Part II of this book (Chapters 4–10) being a historian, telling the stories of East and West across the last few thousand years, trying to explain why social development changed as it did, and in Part III (Chapters 11 and 12) I will pull these stories together. This, I believe, will tell us not only why the West rules but also what will happen next.
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PART II
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4
THE EAST CATCHES UP
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
There is an old South Asian story about six blind men who meet an elephant. One grabs its trunk, and says it is a snake; another feels its tail, and thinks it is a rope; a third leans against a leg, and concludes it is a tree; and so on. It is hard to avoid thinking of this fable when reading long-term lock-in or short-term accident theories of Western rule: like the blind men, long- termers and short-termers alike tend to seize one part of the beast and mistake it for the whole. An index of social development, by contrast, makes the scales fall from our eyes. There can be no more nonsense about snakes, ropes, and trees. Everyone has to recognize that he or she is hanging on to just one piece of a tusker.
Figure 4.1 sums up what we saw impressionistically in Chapter 2. At the end of the last ice age, climate and ecology conspired to set social development rising earlier in the West than in the East, and despite the climatic catastrophe of the Younger Dryas, the West maintained a clear lead. Admittedly, back in these early times before 10,000 BCE our chainsaw art is very rough-and-ready indeed. In the East it is hard to detect any measurable change in social development for more than four thousand years, and even in the West, where development was clearly higher by 11,000 BCE than it had been in 14,000, the subtleties of the changes are lost to us. Yet although the light the index casts is flickering and dim, a little light is better than none, and it reveals a very important fact: just as long-term lock-in theories predict, the West got a head start and held on to it.
Figure 4.1. The shape of things so far: the West’s early lead in social development between 14,000 and 5000 BCE, as described in Chapter 2
But Figure 4.2, continuing the story from 5000 through 1000 BCE, is less straightforward. It differs as much from Figure 4.1 as, say, a rope from a snake. Like ropes and snakes, the two graphs do have similarities: in both graphs the Eastern and Western scores close higher than they started and in both, Western scores are always higher than Eastern. The differences, though, are just as striking. First, the lines rise much faster in Figure 4.2 than in Figure 4.1. In the nine thousand years between 14,000 and 5000 BCE the Western score doubled and the Eastern score increased by two-thirds, but in the next four thousand years—less than half the period covered by Figure 4.1—the Western score tripled and the Eastern increased two-and-a-half times. The second difference is that for the first time in history, we actually see social development falling in the West after 1300 BCE.
In this chapter I try to explain these facts. I suggest that the acceleration and the West’s post-1300 BCE decline were in fact two sides of the same process, which I call the paradox of development. In the chapters that follow we will see that this paradox plays a major part in explaining why the West rules and in telling us what will happen next. But before we can get to that we need to look into exactly what happened between 5000 and 1000 BCE.
Figure 4.2. Onward, upward, farther apart, and closer together: the acceleration, divergence, and convergence of Eastern and Western s
ocial development, 5000–1000 BCE
HOTLINES TO THE GODS
Between 14,000 and 5000 BCE Western social development scores doubled and farming villages spread from their starting point in the Hilly Flanks deep into central Asia and to the shores of the Atlantic. Yet by 5000 BCE agriculture had hardly touched Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” that we now call Iraq, even though it was just a few days’ walk from the Hilly Flanks (Figure 4.3).
In a way, that is not surprising. Since 2003 news flashes have made the world all too familiar with Iraq’s harsh environment. Summer temperatures soar over 120°F, it hardly ever rains, and deserts press in on every side. It is difficult to imagine farmers ever choosing to live there, and back around 5000 BCE Mesopotamia was even hotter. It was also wetter, though, and the main problem for farmers was not how to find water but how to manage it. Monsoon winds off the Indian Ocean brought some rain, though barely enough to support agriculture; but if farmers could control the summer floods of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers and bring the waters into their fields at the right time to fertilize their crops, the possibilities were endless.
Figure 4.3. The expansion of the Western core, 5000–1000 BCE: sites and regions mentioned in this chapter
The people who carried agricultural lifestyles over horizon after horizon across Europe, or who adopted agriculture from farming neighbors, were constantly tinkering with tradition to make farming work in new settings. Making techniques developed for rain-fed agriculture in the Hilly Flanks work for irrigated farming in Mesopotamia took more than tinkering, though. Farmers had to start almost from scratch. For twenty generations they improved their canals, ditches, and storage basins; and gradually they made Mesopotamia’s marginal lands not just livable, but actually more productive than the Hilly Flanks had ever been. They were changing the meaning of geography.
Economists sometimes call this process the discovery of advantages of backwardness. When people adapt techniques that worked in an advanced core to operate in a less-developed periphery, the changes they introduce sometimes make those techniques work so well that the periphery becomes a new core in its own right. By 5000 BCE this was happening in southern Mesopotamia, where elaborate canals supported some of the world’s biggest towns, with perhaps four thousand souls. Such crowds could build much more elaborate temples, and in one town, Eridu, we can trace superimposed temples on brick platforms from 5000 through 3000 BCE, always using the same basic architectural plan but getting bigger and more ornate through time.
So many advantages accrued to Mesopotamia that people in the old core back in the Hilly Flanks started emulating the dynamic new societies in the floodplains. Around 4000 BCE inhabitants of Susa, in a plain nestling in the Hilly Flanks in southwest Iran, outdid even Eridu by building a brick platform 250 feet long and 30 feet high. It probably supported a grand temple, although its nineteenth-century excavators, a little vague on the finer points of archaeological technique, hacked through the site and destroyed the evidence. But even they could not miss all the signs of increasingly complex organization, including some of the world’s earliest copper ornaments as well as stamps and clay impressions that may indicate administrative control of goods, and images that some scholars interpret as “priest-kings.” Archaeologists often imagine that a regional chief lived at Susa, which was much bigger than the villages around it. The outlying villagers may have come to Susa to worship the gods, acknowledge their lord, and exchange food for ornaments and weapons.
Or, of course, they may not have—it is hard to tell from such a poorly excavated site. But archaeologists are forced to rely on Susa to understand this period because contemporary Mesopotamian towns are deeply buried under silt from six thousand years of Euphrates and Tigris floods, making them hard to study (plus there has, for obvious reasons, been little new research in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution or in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait). Comparable changes were probably under way all along the Euphrates and Tigris after 4500 BCE, but only after 3800 do they become clearly visible to archaeologists.
Just why towns got bigger and more complex remains controversial. The sixth millennium BCE, when farmers first moved into Mesopotamia, saw Earth reaching the warmest, wettest point in its endlessly changing orbit round the sun and its wobbly rotation around its own axis, but by 3800 BCE the world was cooling again. Good news for Mesopotamian farmers, you might think; but you would be wrong. Cooler summers meant that the rain-bearing monsoons blowing off the Indian Ocean got weaker. Rain fell less often and less predictably, and Mesopotamia started looking more like the parched place we see on CNN. Problems compounded one another: declining spring rains meant shorter growing seasons, which meant that crops ripened before the Euphrates and Tigris flooded each summer. The systems Mesopotamian farmers had painstakingly built up across two thousand years no longer worked.
Climate change forced tough choices on Mesopotamians. They could bury their heads in the sand as it encroached on their fields and carry on as usual, but the price of doing nothing would be hunger, poverty, and perhaps starvation. Or they could migrate to regions less dependent on the monsoon; but it is no small thing for farmers to abandon their well-tended fields. In any case, the Hilly Flanks—the obvious place to go—was already packed with villages. In 2006 archaeologists at Tell Brak in northeast Syria uncovered two mass graves of young men dating to around 3800 BCE, apparently the victims of massacres. Moving back to the crowded, violent Hilly Flanks might not have been a very attractive option.
If enough Mesopotamians had done nothing or run away, this new core would have collapsed. However, a third possibility presented itself. People could abandon their villages but stay in Mesopotamia, congregating in a few big sites. That seems counterintuitive: if crop yields are falling, cramming more people into smaller spaces should make things worse. But some Mesopotamians seem to have figured out that if more of them worked together they could run larger irrigation systems and store floodwaters until the crops were ready. They could feed more miners to dig copper from the ground; more smiths to make ornaments, weapons, and tools; and more traders to carry these goods around. So successful were they that by 3000 BCE bronze (an alloy of copper and a little tin) had largely replaced stone for weapons and most tools, sharply increasing fighters’ and workers’ effectiveness.
Getting to that point, though, required organization. Centralized administration was the answer. By 3300 BCE people were scratching onto little clay tablets such sophisticated records of their activities that most archaeologists call the symbols writing (even if as yet only a tiny scribal elite could read them). Little villages that could not support such sophisticated activities went to the wall while one site, Uruk, turned into a true city with maybe twenty thousand residents.
Mesopotamians were inventing management, meetings, and memoranda—the curses of life for so many of us today, and hardly the stuff of soaring narratives of human achievement. Yet as will become clear in the next few chapters, these were often the most important motors of social development. Organization turned villages in the Hilly Flanks and along the banks of the Yellow River into cities, states, and empires; failures of organization caused their fall. Managers are simultaneously the heroes and the villains of our story.
The birth of management as the monsoons dried up must have been traumatic. We should probably picture bedraggled, defeated columns of the hungry slouching toward Uruk under a dusty sky, like Okies but without the jalopies, let alone the New Deal. We should probably also imagine angry villagers refusing to cede power to self-important bureaucrats who tried to requisition their fields or crops. Violence must often have been the outcome. Uruk could easily have broken apart; perhaps plenty of rival towns did.
We will never know the stories of the ancient managers who pulled Uruk through, but archaeologists suspect that they were tied to temples. Many pieces of evidence point this way, propping one another up like the poles in a tepee. For instance, excavations at temples ha
ve uncovered stacks of uniform-sized dishes known as “bevel-rimmed bowls,” probably for distributing food. The earliest clay tablets scratched with crude symbols come mostly from temples, and the symbol for “rations” on them is a sketch of a bevel-rimmed bowl. And when writing systems developed to the point they could record such information, they tell us that temples controlled broad acres of irrigated land and the labor to work them.
The temples themselves mushroomed into huge monuments, dwarfing the communities that built them. Long flights of stairs led to hundred-foot-high enclosures where specialists took counsel with the gods. If the tenth-millennium shrines that we saw in Chapter 2 were amplifiers for messages to the spirits, the mighty sanctuary of fourth-millennium Uruk was a public address system worthy of Led Zeppelin. The gods would have to be deaf not to hear.