Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Like every other age, the 1830s got the thought it needed, and as workers became more valuable the middle classes discovered sympathy—of a kind—for the downtrodden. On the one hand, unemployment came to seem positively wicked, and paupers were herded (for their own good, said the middle classes) into workhouses; on the other, Dickens’s picture of these same workhouses made Oliver Twist a bestseller and reform became the watchword of the hour. Official commissions decried urban squalor; Parliament banned children under nine from factories and limited under-thirteens to a forty-eight-hour workweek; and the first stumbling steps were taken toward mass education.

  These early Victorian reformers can seem hypocritical today, but the very idea of taking practical steps to improve the lives of the poor was revolutionary. The contrast with the Eastern core is particularly strong: in China, where Gradgrinds, Coketowns, and factory hands remained conspicuously rare, learned gentlemen carried on with the centuries-old tradition of sending hand-painted scrolls about utopian reform schemes up to the imperial bureaucrats, who maintained the equally old tradition of ignoring them. Would-be reformists continued to come mostly from the margins of the elite. Hong Liangji (condemned to death for “extreme indecorum” after criticizing government inactivity on social issues) and Gong Zizhen (an eccentric who dressed strangely, used wild calligraphy, and gambled madly), arguably the most constructive social critics, both failed the highest exam multiple times and neither had much impact. Even eminently practical schemes, such as an 1820s program for shipping rice to Beijing by sea to avoid the decay and corruption along the Grand Canal, were allowed to languish.

  In the West, but nowhere else, a brave new world of coal and iron was being born, and for the first time in history the possibilities seemed truly limitless. “We consider it a happiness and a privilege to have had our lot cast in the first fifty years of this century,” the British journal The Economist enthused in 1851; “the period of the last fifty years … has witnessed a more rapid and astonishing progress than all the centuries which have preceded it. In several vital points the difference between the 18th and the 19th century, is greater than between the first and the 18th, as far as civilised Europe is concerned.” Time was speeding up in the West, leaving the rest of the world behind.

  ONE WORLD

  London, October 2, 1872, 7:45 p.m. It is a famous scene: “Here I am, gentlemen!” announces Phileas Fogg as he strides into his club. Despite being mistaken for a bank robber in Egypt, attacked by Sioux in Nebraska, and drawn into saving a beautiful widow from enforced suicide in India (Figure 10.4), Fogg had done what he said he would do. He had traveled around the world in eighty days, with one second to spare.

  It is also a fictional scene, but like all Jules Verne’s tales, Around the World in Eighty Days was firmly grounded in fact. The aptly named George Train really did travel around the world in eighty days in 1870, and although the fictional Fogg fell back on elephants, sledges, and sailboats when technology let him down,* neither he nor Train could have managed their tours without brand-new triumphs of engineering—the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), the San Francisco–New York railroad (completed the same year), and the Bombay–Calcutta train line† (finished in 1870). The world, as Fogg observed before he set off, was not as big as it used to be.

  Rising social development and expanding cores had always gone together as colonists carried new lifestyles outward and people on the peripheries copied, resisted, or ran away from them. The nineteenth century differed only in scale and speed, but these differences changed the course of history. Before the nineteenth century, great empires had dominated this or that part of the world, bending it to their will, but the new technologies stripped away all limits. For the first time, a lead in social development could be turned into global rule.

  Converting the energy of fossil fuels into motion annihilated distance. As early as 1804 a British engineer showed that lightweight, high-pressure engines could push carriages along iron rails, and by the 1810s similar engines were driving paddleboats. After another generation of inspired fiddling, George Stephenson’s famous Rocket was puffing along the Liverpool–Manchester railroad at twenty-nine miles per hour* and boats were paddling across the Atlantic. Social development transformed geography faster than ever before: freed from wind and wave, ships could sail not just where they wanted but also when they wanted, and so long as someone laid the rails, goods could move over land almost as cheaply as over water.

  Figure 10.4. Around the world: Western rule shrinks the globe.

  Technology transformed colonization. More than 5 million Britons (out of a population of 27 million) emigrated between 1851 and 1880, mostly to the ultimate new frontier in North America. Between 1850 and 1900 this “white plague,” as the historian Niall Ferguson calls it, felled 168 million acres of American forest, more than ten times Britain’s farmable area. Already in 1799 a traveler had recorded that American pioneers “have an unconquerable aversion to trees … they cut away all before them without mercy … all share the same fate and are involved in the same havoc.” A hundred years later their aversion had only grown, fed by stump-removing machines, flamethrowers, and dynamite.

  An unprecedented agricultural boom fed equally astonishing cities. In 1800 there were 79,000 New Yorkers; in 1890, 2.5 million. Chicago meanwhile became the wonder of the world. A prairie town of thirty thousand in 1850, by 1890 it was the sixth-largest city on earth, more than a million strong. Chicago made Coketown look genteel. “For her,” one astonished critic wrote,

  all the Central States, all the Great Northwest roared with traffic and industry; sawmills screamed; factories, their smoke blackening the sky, clashed and flamed; wheels turned, pistons leaped in their cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings clasped the drums of mammoth wheels; and converters of forges belched into the clouded air their tempest breath of molten steel.

  It was Empire.

  Emulation did much more than colonization to spread industrialization eastward across Europe. In 1860 Britain was still the only thoroughly industrial economy, producing half the world’s iron and textiles, but first in Belgium (which had good coal and iron) and then along an arc from northern France through Germany and Austria, the age of steam and coal took off. By 1910 the former peripheries of Germany and the United States discovered advantages in their backwardness and outstripped their teacher.

  Germans, less blessed with coal than Britain, learned to use fuel more efficiently, and lacking workers with that sixth sense—bred by generations of on-the-job training—for just when to close a valve or tighten a bobbin, Germany substituted technical education. Americans, lacking old family firms with accumulated capital, discovered a different advantage. Selling shares to raise money for huge modern enterprises effectively separated owners from hired managers, who felt free to experiment with time-and-motion studies, assembly lines, and the new science of management. All this book-learning struck Britons as rather ridiculous, but in new, high-tech industries such as optics and chemistry, knowing a little science and management theory produced better results than going by feel. By 1900 it was Britain, with its faith in improvisation, muddling through, and inspired amateurs, that was starting to look ridiculous.

  Germany and the United States led the way in what historians often call the Second Industrial Revolution, applying science to technology more systematically. They quickly made Phileas Fogg’s feats seem archaic, turning the twentieth century into an age of oil, automobiles, and aircraft. In 1885 Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz figured out how to burn gasoline (hitherto a low-value by-product of the kerosene used in lamps) efficiently in an internal combustion engine, and in the very same year British mechanics perfected the bicycle. Putting light new engines together with robust new chassis yielded cars and planes. In 1896 automobiles were still so slow that hecklers yelled “Get a horse!” at America’s first car race, but in 1913 American factories turned out a million vehicles. By then the Wright brothers, two bicycle mechanics from North Carolina, had bolted w
ings onto a gasoline engine and made it fly.

  Oil was transforming geography. “The development of the internal Combustion engine is the greatest the world has ever seen,” one British oilman enthused in 1911; “it will supersede steam and that too with almost tragic rapidity.” Because oil was lighter than coal, yielded more power, and made things go faster, those who stuck with steam inevitably lost out to those who invested in the new engines. “The first of all necessities,” Britain’s top naval adviser insisted in 1911, “is SPEED,” and bowing to the inevitable, Britain’s young first lord of the admiralty—Winston Churchill—switched the Royal Navy from coal to oil. Britain’s endless coal reserves were beginning to matter less than access to oil fields in Russia, Persia, Southeast Asia, and above all America.

  Communications were changing just as quickly. In 1800 the quickest way to send a message around the world was to put a letter on a boat, but by 1851 Britons and Frenchmen could exchange messages using electrical signals sent down an underwater cable. In 1858 the British queen and American president telegraphed across the Atlantic, and more than once in Around the World in Eighty Days everything hinged on a timely telegram. Between 1866 and 1911 the cost of transatlantic telegrams fell by 99.5 percent, but by then such savings were taken for granted. The first telephones started ringing in 1876, just three years after Verne’s book came out; in 1895 came wireless telegraphy; in 1906, the radio.

  Faster transport and communication drove an explosive growth in markets. Back in the 1770s Adam Smith had realized that wealth depended on the size of markets and the division of labor. If markets are big, everyone can produce what they make cheapest and best, then sell it, using their profits to buy whatever else they need. That, Smith reasoned, would make everyone richer than if they tried to make everything for themselves. The key, Smith argued, was liberalization: economic logic required tearing down the walls that separated people and leaving them to indulge their “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”

  But that was easier said than done. Those who produced the cheapest goods in the world, such as British industrialists, were all for free markets, but those who made uncompetitive, overpriced goods—such as British farmers—often thought lobbying Parliament to slap tariffs on more efficient rivals sounded better than switching to new lines of work. It took bloodshed, the fall of a government, and the specter of famine to persuade Britain’s rulers to abandon protectionism, but as they did so (and as the average duty on imports fell from over 50 percent around 1825 to under 10 percent fifty years later), global markets took off.

  To some, the craze for free markets seemed like madness. British manufacturers were exporting trains, ships, and machines, and British financiers were lending foreigners the money to buy them. Britain was, in effect, building up foreign industries that would challenge its economic dominance. To free traders, however, there was method in the madness. By selling and lending everywhere, even to rivals, Britain created such a big market that it could concentrate on those industrial (and increasingly financial) skills that made the biggest profits. And not just that; British machines helped Americans and Europeans produce the food Britons needed to buy, and the profits foreigners made by selling food to Britain allowed them to buy even more British goods.

  The free traders reasoned that everybody—everybody willing to swallow the hard, Gradgrindian logic of liberalization, anyway—would win. Few countries were as enthusiastic as Britain (Germany and the United States in particular shielded their infant industries from British competition), but by the 1870s the Western core was effectively tied into a single financial system. Its various currencies were pegged at fixed rates against gold, making trade more predictable and committing governments to play by the market’s rules.

  But that was only the beginning. Liberalization would not stop at the borders, sweeping away barriers between nations while leaving the barriers within them intact. Liberalization was a package deal, as Marx and Engels saw most clearly:

  Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can fossilize. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

  If traditional rules and regulations about how people could dress, whom they should worship, and what jobs they might do interfered with productivity and the growth of the market, those traditions had to go. “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection,” concluded the liberal theorist John Stuart Mill. “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Everything else was up for grabs.

  Serfdom, guilds, and other legal restrictions on movement and occupation crumbled. It took a war to end American slavery in 1865, but within a generation the West’s other slaveholding states legislated peaceful (and often profitable) ends to that ancient institution. Employers increasingly compromised with workers, and after 1870 most countries legalized trade unions and socialist parties, granted universal male suffrage, and provided free, compulsory primary education. As wages rose, some governments offered saving plans for retirement, public health programs, and unemployment insurance. In return, workers agreed to national service in armies and navies; after all, with so much to protect, who would not be willing to fight?

  Liberalization gnawed at even the hoariest prejudices. For nearly two thousand years Christians had persecuted Jews and those who followed Jesus inappropriately, but all of a sudden other people’s faiths seemed to be their own business, and certainly no reason to stop them from owning property or voting. In fact, for growing numbers, faith seemed less of an issue altogether, and new creeds such as socialism, evolutionism, and nationalism filled the place religion had so long held. And as if dethroning God were not enough, the solidest prejudice of all, female inferiority, also came under attack. “The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,” wrote Mill. “No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife.”

  Film and fiction often present the Victorian age as a cozy world of candles, roaring hearths, and people who knew their place, but contemporaries experienced it very differently. The nineteenth-century West was “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells,” thought Marx and Engels. Artists and intellectuals reveled in this; conservatives pushed back. Churches took stands (some crude, some clever) against socialism, materialism, and science; landed noblemen defended the privileges of their orders; and anti-Semitism and slavery reared their heads again, sometimes behind new masks. Confrontations could be violent; Marx and Engels in fact only pulled their ideas together in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 because revolutions were rocking almost every European capital that year and the hour of apocalypse seemed at hand.

  Western society was rapidly shedding the features that as recently as 1750 had made it so like the East. As so often, nothing reveals this as clearly as fiction. You will search early nineteenth-century Chinese literature in vain for the kind of assertive heroines that crowd the pages of European novels. The closest thing to a protest about women’s subjugation may be Li Ruzhen’s bizarre satire Flowers in the Mirror, in which a male merchant is forcibly feminized, even to the point of footbinding. (“His feet lost much of their original shape,” Li wrote. “Blood and flesh were squeezed into a pulp … little remained of his feet but dry bones and skin, shrunk, indeed, to a dainty size.”) Dickens’s upwardly mobile her
oes are just as hard to find, and Samuel Smiles’s self-made men still more so. The mood of Shen Fu’s heartrending Six Records of a Floating Life—romantic and moving, but crushed by a rigid hierarchy—is much more typical.

  The really new thing about the West, though, was that the more it sped itself up and raced down paths utterly unlike those the rest of the world was strolling along, the more it forced the rest of the world to follow its direction and frenetic pace. The market could not sleep; it must expand, integrating ever more activity, or the ravening beast of industry would die. The West’s corrosive, liberal acid ate away the barriers within societies and those between them, and no amount of custom, tradition, or imperial edicts could preserve the kind of ancient order that so oppressed Shen Fu. It was one world, ready or not.

  NEMESIS

  Globalization revealed the secret of the age—that in this new world, to talk of the West merely leading the world in social development was to talk nonsense. For millennia the original agricultural cores had expanded largely independently in several parts of the planet, but the upward movement of social development steadily transformed geography, linking the world’s cores together.

  Already in the sixteenth century new kinds of ships enabled Europeans to overwhelm the Aztecs and Incas, converting the New World’s formerly independent cores into a far-flung periphery of a vastly enlarged West. In the eighteenth century Europeans began turning the South Asian core into another such periphery, and in the nineteenth, steamships, railroads, and telegraphs gave the West worldwide reach, transforming geography once again. Britain, the West’s great power, could project its will almost anywhere on the planet, and as Westerners extracted more energy from the environment, the proportion of this they turned to war skyrocketed. Western energy capture increased two and a half times between 1800 and 1900, but its military capacity increased tenfold. The industrial revolution turned the West’s lead in social development into Western rule.