Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Emperor Wanli, frustrated at every turn now that his great minister was gone, lost all patience and in 1589 went on strike. Withdrawing into a world of indulgence, he squandered a fortune on clothes and got so fat that he needed help standing up. For twenty-five years he refused to attend imperial audiences, leaving ministers and ambassadors kowtowing to an empty throne. Nothing got done. No officials were hired or promoted. By 1612 half the posts in the empire were vacant and the law courts had backlogs years long.

  No wonder Hideyoshi expected an easy victory in 1592. But whether because Hideyoshi made mistakes, because of Korean naval innovations, or because the Chinese army (especially the artillery Qi had established) performed surprisingly well, the Japanese attack bogged down. Some historians think Hideyoshi would still have conquered China had he not died in 1598, but as it was, Hideyoshi’s generals immediately rethought expansion. Abandoning Korea, they rushed home to get on with the serious business of fighting one another, and Wanli and his bureaucrats went back to their own serious business of doing not very much at all.

  After 1600, the great powers of the Eastern core tacitly agreed that the bureaucrats were right: centralization and expansion were not the answers to their problems. The steppe frontier remained a challenge for China, and European pirates/traders still posed problems in Southeast Asia, but Japan faced so few threats that—alone in the history of the world—it actually stopped using firearms altogether and its skilled gunsmiths went back to making swords (not, alas, plowshares). In the West, however, no one had that luxury.

  THE CROWN IMPERIAL

  In a way, the Western and Eastern cores looked rather similar in the sixteenth century. In each, a great empire dominated the traditional center (Ming China in the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys in the East, Ottoman Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean in the West) while smaller commercially active states flourished around its edges (in Japan and Southeast Asia in the East, in western Europe in the West). But there the similarities ended. In contrast to the squabbles in Ming China, neither the Ottoman sultans nor their bureaucrats ever doubted that expansion was the answer to their problems. Constantinople had been reduced to fifty thousand people after the Ottoman sack in 1453 but rebounded as it once more became the capital of a great empire. Four hundred thousand urbanites lived there by 1600, and—like Rome so many centuries before—they needed the fruits of the whole Mediterranean to feed themselves. And like ancient Rome’s senators, Turkey’s sultans resolved that conquest was the best way to guarantee all these dinners.

  The sultans carried on a complex dance, keeping one foot in the Western core and one in the steppes. This was the secret of their success. In 1527 Sultan Suleiman reckoned that his army boasted 75,000 cavalry, mostly aristocratic archers of traditional nomad type, and 28,000 Janissaries, Christian slaves trained as musketeers and backed by artillery. To keep the horsemen happy, sultans parceled out conquered lands as fiefs; to keep the Janissaries content—that is, paid in full and on time—they drew up land surveys that would have impressed Hideyoshi, managing cash flows to the last coin.

  All this took good management, and a steadily expanding bureaucracy drew in the empire’s best and brightest while the sultans adroitly played competing interest groups against one another. In the fifteenth century they often favored the Janissaries, centralizing government and patronizing cosmopolitan culture; in the sixteenth they leaned toward the aristocracy, devolving power and encouraging Islam. Even more important than these nimble accommodations, though, was plunder, which fueled everything. The Ottomans needed war, and usually won.

  Their toughest tests came on their eastern front. For years they had confronted a low-grade insurgency in Anatolia (Figure 9.4), where Red-Head* Shiite militants denounced them as corrupt Sunni despots, but this ulcer turned septic when the Persian shah declared himself the descendant of ‘Ali in 1501. The Shiite challenge gave focus to the hungry, dispossessed, and downtrodden of the empire, whose violent rage shocked even hard-bitten soldiers: “They destroyed everything—men, women, and children,” one sergeant recorded of the rebels. “They even destroyed cats and chickens.” The Turkish sultan pressured his religious scholars into declaring the Shiites heretical, and jihads barely let up across the sixteenth century.

  Figure 9.4. The Western empires: the Habsburg, Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Russian empires around 1550

  Superior firearms gave the Ottomans the edge, and though they never completely defeated Persia they were able to fight it to a standstill and then swing southwest to take the biggest prize of all, Egypt, in 1517. For the first time since the Arab conquests nearly nine centuries earlier, hungry Constantinopolitans now had guaranteed access to the Nile breadbasket.

  But like every expansionist power since the Assyrians, the Ottomans found that winning one war just set off another. To reinstate the Egypt-Constantinople grain trade they had to build a fleet to protect their ships, but their victories over the Mediterranean’s ferocious pirates (Muslim as well as Christian) only drew the fleet farther west. By the 1560s Turkey controlled the whole North African coast and was fighting western European navies. Turkish armies also pushed deep into Europe, overwhelming the fierce Hungarians in 1526 and killing their king and much of their aristocracy.

  In 1529 Sultan Suleiman was camped outside Vienna. He was unable to take the city, but the siege filled Christians with terror that the Ottomans would soon swallow all Europe. “It makes me shudder to think what the results [of a major war] must be,” an ambassador to Constantinople wrote home.

  On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories … On ours are found an empty treasury, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits … and, worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we, to defeat. Can we doubt what the result must be?

  But some Europeans did doubt, particularly Charles V. He was patriarch of the Habsburg family, one of several superrich clans that had been contending to dominate central Europe since the Black Death. Thanks to astute marriages and the almost preternaturally good timing of their in-laws’ deaths, Habsburgs squeezed themselves onto thrones from the Danube to the Atlantic, and in 1516 the whole inheritance—Austria, chunks of Germany and what is now the Czech Republic, southern Italy, Spain, and modern Belgium and Holland—fell into Charles’s lap. His many crowns gave him access to Europe’s best soldiers, richest cities, and leading financiers, and in 1518 the princes of Germany elected him Holy Roman Emperor too. This particular crown, an odd relic of Europe’s messy Middle Ages, was a mixed blessing; as Voltaire famously remarked in the 1750s, the Holy Roman Empire “was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Herding its squabbling princes normally cost more than the throne was worth, but all the same, whoever sat on the imperial throne was, in principle, Charlemagne’s heir—no small matter when rallying Europe against the Turk.

  Many observers foresaw only two alternatives for western Europe: conquest by Islam or subjugation by the Habsburgs, the only people strong enough to stop the Turks. Charles’s chancellor summed it up in a letter to the emperor in 1519: “God has been very merciful to you. He has raised you above all the kings and princes of Christendom to a power such as no sovereign has enjoyed since your ancestor Charlemagne. He has set you on the way toward a world monarchy, toward the uniting of Christendom under a single shepherd.”

  Had either the ambassador or the chancellor been right, western Europe would have started looking more like the rest of world’s core areas, dominated by a great land empire. But the idea of being shepherded so alarmed Christendom’s kings and princes that some launched preemptive wars against Charles to head it off. France even concluded a treaty with the Ottomans against the Habsburgs, and a joint Franco-Turkish fleet bombarded the French Riviera (then under Charles’s control) in 1542—all of which, of course, forced Charles to try even harder to shepherd Christendom.

  Charles and his son Philip II spent most
of their long reigns* fighting other Christians, not Muslims, but rather than turning western Europe into a land empire, their struggle pulled Europe apart, deepening old divisions and creating new ones. When the German monk Martin Luther nailed ninety-five protests about Christian practices to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church on Halloween, 1517, for instance, he was doing nothing extraordinary; this was a traditional way of publicizing theological debates (and compared to many critics of the Church since the Black Death, Luther was positively moderate). But the charged atmosphere turned his religious protest into a political and social earthquake that his contemporaries regularly likened to Turkey’s Shiite-Sunni split.

  Luther had hoped Charles would support him, but Charles believed that shepherding Christendom required one church, undivided. “A single monk must err if he stands against the opinion of all Christendom,” he told Luther. “I am determined to set my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life, my soul upon it.” And so he did; but with all Europe up in arms for or against the Habsburgs, denying the differences within Christendom proved disastrous. Sometimes for reasons of principle, sometimes for narrow advantage, and sometimes out of sheer confusion, millions of Christians renounced the Roman Church. Protestants and Catholics killed one another; Protestants killed other Protestants; and interpretations of protest multiplied. Some Protestants proclaimed the Second Coming, free love, or communism. Many came to bloody, fiery ends. And all, whether their protests were violent or sublime, made the Habsburgs’ job harder—and more expensive.

  People who believe their enemies to be agents of the Antichrist rarely want to compromise, so small conflicts turned into large ones, large ones refused to end, and costs spiraled upward. In the end, the bottom line for the Habsburgs was the bottom line itself: they simply could not afford to unite western Europe.

  Charles, broken by his struggles, retired from his various thrones in 1555–56 and divided them between a cousin, who got Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, and Philip, who got Spain and the other western lands. This was a smart move: by making Habsburg dominion synonymous with Spanish dominion, Philip could streamline administration and focus on the real issue, money.

  For forty years Philip labored like Hercules to reform Habsburg finances. He was an odd man, putting in astonishing hours in his custom-built offices outside Madrid but always too busy to find time to actually visit his possessions. But although he counted and taxed his subjects as enthusiastically as Hideyoshi, increased revenues, and soundly defeated France and Turkey, the final victory that would unite western Europe never came any closer. The harder his taxmen squeezed, the more problems mounted. Philip’s subjects—breeding like mice in a barn, caught between starvation and the state, and seeing their contributions spent on quarrels in faraway countries with peoples of whom they knew nothing—increasingly fought back.

  In the 1560s Philip even managed to push God and Mammon into the same camp. The normally stolid Dutch burghers, persecuted by the Habsburgs for their Protestantism and burdened by heavier taxes, went on an altar-smashing, church-desecrating rampage. Losing the wealthy Netherlands to a nest of Calvinists was unthinkable, so Philip sent in the army, only for the Dutch to raise one of their own. Philip kept winning battles but could not win the war. The Dutch would not consent to pay new taxes to the Habsburgs, but when their faith was at stake they would spend any amount of money and lay down any number of lives to defend it. By the 1580s the war was costing Philip more than the entire empire’s income, and unable to afford victory or defeat, he borrowed more heavily from Italian financiers. When he reached the point that he could pay neither his troops nor his creditors, he declared bankruptcy; then did it again, and again. His unpaid armies ran riot, robbing for their keep, and his credit rating collapsed. Spain was not decisively defeated until 1639 (at sea) and 1643 (on land), but when Philip died in 1598 the empire was already ruined, its debt fifteen times its annual revenue.

  Two centuries would pass before a western European land empire again looked likely, and by then other western Europeans had set off an industrial revolution that was transforming the world. If the Habsburgs or Turks had united Europe in the sixteenth century, perhaps that industrial revolution would not have happened; perhaps in Charles and Philip, who failed to unite western Europe, or the Ottoman Suleiman, who failed to conquer western Europe, we have finally found the bungling idiots who changed the course of history.

  Once again, though, this is too much blame for any one man. The European ambassador who had worried so much about a Turkish takeover had noted that “The only obstacle is Persia, whose position on his rear forces the [Turkish] invader to take precautions”; it was simply beyond the Turks’ powers to defeat Persia, the Shiites, and the Europeans. Similarly, Charles and Philip failed to become Christendom’s shepherds, not because they lost some decisive battle (in fact, they almost always won until the 1580s) or lacked some decisive resource (in fact, they had far more than their fair share of luck, talent, and credit), but because defeating the Turks, schismatic Christians, and the other states of western Europe was beyond their organization and wealth. And if the Habsburgs, with all their advantages, could not unite western Europe, then no one could. Western Europe was bound to remain distinct from the band of empires that stretched from Turkey to China.

  THE HARD CEILING

  Despite the variety of these experiences of empire, social development kept rising in both cores, and in the decades after Hideyoshi and Philip died in 1598 there was every sign that the paradox of development was kicking in again. As so often in the past, the weather contributed to the growing crisis. Cool since 1300, it now turned colder still. Some climatologists blame this on a volcanic eruption in Peru in 1600; others, on weaker sunspot activity. But most agree that the years 1645–1715 were bitterly cold across much of the Old World. From London to Guangdong, diarists and officials complained about snow, ice, and cool summers.

  Cold city folk and land-hungry cultivators worked together to make the seventeenth century a disaster for the defenseless, whether that meant forests, wetlands, wildlife, or colonized peoples. Conscience sometimes pricked governments into legislating to defend all these victims, but the colonists pushing the frontiers of the cores outward rarely took much notice. In China so-called shack people invaded mountains and forests, devastating fragile ecologies with sweet potatoes and corn. They drove indigenous groups such as the Miao to the brink of starvation, but when the Miao rebelled, the Chinese state sent in armies to crush them. The Ainu of northern Japan, the Irish in England’s oldest colony, and the natives of eastern North America could all tell the same dismal story.

  Colonists came because the cores were depleting their own resources. “There will be some trifling income from every foot or inch of earth,” one Chinese official insisted, and at both ends of Eurasia governments worked with developers to turn scrub and wetland into pasture and arable land. Another Chinese official laid out the rationale in the 1620s:

  Stop the minor profit of the occupants of reedlands and grasslands! … some lazy people, without consideration for the long-term future, go after the minor profits of reeds and reject the great treasure of cultivation of crops. Not only do they not pursue land reclamation themselves, but they also hate others for doing so … the marketplaces are more desolate every day, the government revenues fall short of the regular quota. How can we allow this under these circumstances!

  Dutch and English entrepreneurs attacked wetlands with equal gusto. Giant state-sponsored drainage programs released vast amounts of fertile soil, but the people who already lived there resisted in court and on the streets. Their (mostly anonymous) protest songs are heart-wrenching:

  Behold the great design, which [drainers] do now undermine,

  Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermin;

  For they do mean all fens [wetlands] to drain and waters overmaster;

  All must be dry and we must die, ’cause Essex calves want pasture.

  T
he feathered fowls have wings to fly to other nations,

  But we have no such things to help our transportations;

  We must give place (O grievous case!) to horned beasts and cattle

  Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle.

  Invasive humans, bringing equally invasive plants and animals, displaced native species or hunted them to extinction, plowing up habitats and clear-cutting forests. One scholar complained in the 1660s that four-fifths of Japan’s mountains had been deforested. Only 10 percent of England and Scotland was still wooded around 1550, and by the 1750s more than half those trees were gone too. Ireland, by contrast, was still 12 percent forest in 1600, but colonists eliminated five out of six of those trees by 1700.

  Around the big cities the price of wood rose sharply and people turned to alternatives. Near Edo, Japanese salt and sugar makers, potters, and eventually homeowners started burning coal, and those Europeans who could do so substituted peat and coal for charcoal. Just like Kaifengers five hundred years before, Londoners embraced fossil fuels as they were priced out of the market for wood. Most English households outside the capital could still find firewood, but by 1550 the average Londoner was already burning nearly a quarter of a ton of coal each year. By 1610 that had tripled, and by 1650 more than half of Britain’s fuel energy came from coal. “London was enveloped in such a cloud of sea-coal,” a resident complained in 1659, that “if there be a resemblance of hell on earth, it is in this volcano in a foggy day.”

  Sadly, he was mistaken, because other Eurasians were making much worse hells for themselves. Climate change was only the first horseman of the apocalypse to break free; the rising pressure on resources also set off state failure as regimes came apart under the stresses. When monarchs cut costs, they alienated their civil servants and soldiers; when they squeezed more out of taxpayers, they alienated their merchants and farmers. Violent protests by the poor had been a fact of life since states were invented, but they now intensified as dispossessed gentry, bankrupt traders, unpaid troops, and failed officials all joined them.