Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  It was very vexing, therefore, that the East’s great powers chose to ignore this, restricting Western traders to tiny enclaves at Guangzhou and Nagasaki. When, as I mentioned in Chapter 9, Britain’s Lord Macartney traveled to Beijing in 1793 to demand open markets, Emperor Qianlong firmly rebuffed him—even though, as Macartney acidly observed in his journal, the ordinary Chinese “are all of a trafficking turn, and it seemed at the seaports where we stopped that nothing would be more agreeable to them than to see our ships come often into their harbours.”

  Matters came to a head in the 1830s. For three centuries Western merchants had been sailing to Guangzhou and swapping silver, the only thing they had that Chinese officials seemed to want, for tea and silk. By the 1780s nearly seven hundred tons of Western silver flowed into Guangzhou each year. Britain’s East India Company, however, had discovered that whatever the bureaucrats might say, plenty of Chinese people were also interested in opium, the wonder drug grown in India. Western dealers (particularly the British) pushed the drug hard; by 1832 enough was pouring into Guangzhou—nearly twelve tons—to keep two or three million addicts high year-round (Figure 10.5). Paying for narcotics turned the influx of silver into China into a net outflow of nearly four hundred tons. This was a lot of drugs and a lot of money.

  Figure 10.5. Just say yes: the British East India Company’s soaring opium sales in Guangzhou, 1730–1832

  The dealers insisted that opium “simply did for the upper levels of Chinese society what brandy and champagne did for the same levels in England,” but that was not true, and they knew it. Opium left a trail of broken lives as grim as anything in today’s inner cities. It also hurt peasants who had never even seen an opium pipe, because the outflow of silver to the drug lords increased the value of the metal, forcing farmers to sell more crops to raise the silver they needed to pay their taxes. By 1832 taxes were effectively twice as high as they had been fifty years before.

  Some of Emperor Daoguang’s advisers recommended a cynical market solution: legalize opium so that homegrown poppies would undercut British imports, stanching the outflow of silver and increasing tax revenues. But Daoguang was a good Confucian, and instead of caving in to his subjects’ baser urges, he wanted to save them from themselves. In 1839 he declared war on drugs.

  I said a few words about this first war on drugs in the introduction. At first it went well. Daoguang’s drug czar confiscated tons of opium, burned it, and dumped it in the ocean (after writing a suitably classical poem of apology to the sea god for polluting his realm). But then it went less well. The British trade commissioner, recognizing that where the magic of the market would not work that of the gun might do better, dragged his unwilling homeland into a shooting war with China.

  What followed was a shocking demonstration of the power of industrial-age warfare. Britain’s secret weapon was the Nemesis, a brand-new all-iron steamer. Even the Royal Navy had reservations about such a radical weapon; as her captain admitted, just “as the floating property of wood, without reference to its shape or fashion, rendered it the most natural material for the construction of ships, so did the sinking property of iron make it appear, at first sight, very ill adapted for a similar purpose.”

  These worries seemed well-founded. The iron hull made the compass malfunction; the Nemesis hit a rock even before leaving England; and she almost cracked in two off the Cape of Good Hope. Only by hanging overboard in a howling gale and bolting odd bits of lumber and iron to her sides did her captain keep her afloat. But on reaching Guangzhou all was forgiven. The Nemesis lived up to her name, steaming up shallow passages where no wooden ship could go and blasting all opposition to pieces.

  In 1842 the British ships closed the Grand Canal, bringing Beijing to the verge of famine. Governor-General Qiying, charged with negotiating peace, assured his emperor that he could still “pass over these small matters and achieve our larger scheme,” but in reality he handed the British—then the Americans, then the French, then other Westerners—the access to Chinese ports that they demanded. And when Chinese hostility toward these foreign devils (Figure 10.6) made the concessions less profitable than expected, Westerners pushed for more.

  The Westerners also pushed one another, terrified that a commercial rival would gain some concession that would shut their traders out of the new markets. In 1853 their rivalry spilled over into Japan. Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay and demanded the right for American steamships bound for China to refuel there. He brought just four modern ships, but they carried more firepower than all the guns in Japan combined. His ships were “castles that moved freely on the waters,” one amazed witness said. “What we’d taken for a conflagration on the sea was really black smoke rising out of [their] smokestacks.” Japan granted Americans the right to trade in two ports; Britain and Russia promptly demanded—and received—the same.

  Figure 10.6. Cultural dissonance: a Chinese sketch of a fire-breathing British sailor, 1839

  The jockeying for position did not stop there. In an appendix to their 1842 treaty with China, British lawyers had invented a new status, “most favored nation,” meaning that anything China gave another Western power, it had to give Britain too. The treaty the United States had signed with China in 1843 included a provision allowing for renegotiation after twelve years, so in 1854 British diplomats claimed the same right. The Qing stalled and Britain went back to war.

  Even the British Parliament thought this was a little much. It censured Prime Minister Palmerston; his government fell; but the voters returned him with an increased majority. In 1860 Britain and France occupied Beijing, burned the Summer Palace, and sent Looty back to Balmoral. Not to be outdone in renegotiation, America’s consul general bullied Japan into a new treaty by threatening that the alternative was for British ships to open the country to opium.

  The West bestrode the world like a colossus in 1860, its reach seemingly unlimited. The ancient Eastern core, which just a century before had boasted the highest social development in the world, was becoming a new periphery to the Western core, just like the former cores in South Asia and the Americas; and North America, now heavily settled by Europeans, was pushing into the core in its own right. Responding to this massive reorganization of geography, Europeans opened still newer frontiers. Their steamships carried the white plague of settlers to South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and returned with their holds full of grain and sheep. Africa, still largely a blank space on Western maps as late as 1870, was almost entirely under European rule by 1900.

  Looking back on these years in 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes remembered them as a golden age when

  for … the [West’s] middle and upper classes, life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth … and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world; … He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or any other formality … and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

  But things looked rather different to the novelist Joseph Conrad after he had spent much of 1890 in the Congo Basin. “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” he observed in his anti-colonialist classic Heart of Darkness.

  The Congo was certainly the extreme case: King Leopold of Belgium seized it as his personal property and made himself a billionaire by to
rturing, mutilating, and murdering 5 million or more Congolese to encourage the others to provide him with rubber and ivory. It was hardly unique, though. In North America and Australia white settlers almost exterminated the natives, and some historians blame European imperialism for turning the weak monsoons of 1876–79 and 1896–1902 into catastrophes. Even though crops failed, landlords kept on exporting food to Western markets, and from China to India and Ethiopia to Brazil hunger turned to famine. Dysentery, smallpox, cholera, and the Black Death itself came in its wake, carrying off perhaps 50 million weakened people. Some Westerners raised aid for the starving; some pretended nothing was happening; and some, like The Economist magazine, grumbled that famine relief merely taught the hungry that “it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive.” Small wonder that the dying whisper of Mr. Kurtz, the evil genius whom Conrad pictured carving out a personal kingdom in the jungle, has come to stand as the epitaph of European imperialism: “The horror! The horror!”*

  The East avoided the worst, but still suffered defeat, humiliation, and exploitation at Western hands. China and Japan fell apart as motley crews of patriots, dissidents, and criminals, blaming their governments for everything, took up arms. Religious fanatics and militiamen murdered Westerners who strayed outside their fortified compounds and bureaucrats who appeased these intruders; Western navies bombarded coastal towns in retaliation; rival factions played the Westerners against one another. European weapons flooded Japan, where a British-backed faction overthrew the legitimate government in 1868. In China civil war cost 20 million lives before Western financiers decided that regime change would hurt returns, whereupon an “Ever-Victorious Army” with American and British officers and gunboats helped save the Qing.

  Westerners told Eastern governments what to do, seized their assets, and filled their council chambers with advisers. These, not surprisingly, kept down tariffs on Western imports and prices on goods Westerners wanted to buy. Sometimes the process even made Westerners uncomfortable. “I have seen things that made my blood boil in the way the European powers attempt to degrade the Asiatic nations,” Ulysses S. Grant told the Japanese emperor in 1879.

  Most Westerners, however, concluded that things were just as they should be, and against this background of Eastern collapse, long-term lock-in theories of Western rule hardened. The East, with its corrupt emperors, groveling Confucians, and billion half-starved coolies, seemed always to have been destined for subjection to the dynamic West. The world appeared to be reaching its final, predestined form.

  THE WAR OF THE EAST

  The arrogant, self-congratulatory champions of nineteenth-century long-term lock-in theories overlooked one big thing—the logic of their own market-driven imperialism. Just as the market had led British capitalists to build up the industrial infrastructure of their own worst rivals in Germany and the United States, it now rewarded Westerners who poured capital, inventions, and know-how into the East. Westerners stacked the deck in their own favor whenever they could, but capital’s relentless quest for new profits also presented opportunities to Easterners who were ready to seize them.

  The speed with which Easterners did so was astonishing. In the 1860s Chinese “self-strengthening” and Japanese “civilization and enlightenment” movements set about copying what they saw as the best of the West, translating Western books on science, government, law, and medicine into Chinese and Japanese and sending delegations to the West to look for themselves. Westerners rushed to sell their latest gadgets to Easterners, and Chinese and Japanese Gradgrinds dirtied the countryside with factories.

  In a way, this was not so surprising. When Easterners grabbed at the tools that had driven Western social development so high, they were doing just the same thing that Westerners had done six centuries earlier with Eastern tools such as compasses, cast iron, and guns. But in another way, it was very surprising. The Eastern reaction to Western rule differed sharply from the reactions in the former cores in the New World and South Asia, incorporated as Western peripheries across the previous three centuries.

  Native Americans never developed indigenous industries and South Asians were much slower to do so than East Asians. Some historians think culture explains this, arguing (more or less explicitly) that while Western culture strongly encourages hard work and rationality, Eastern culture does so only weakly, South Asian culture even less, and other cultures not at all. But this legacy of colonialist mind-sets cannot be right.

  When we look at reactions to Western rule within a longer time frame, we in fact see two striking correlations. The first is that those regions that had relatively high social development before Western rule, like the Eastern core, tended to industrialize themselves faster than those that had relatively low development scores; the second, that those regions that avoided direct European colonization tended to industrialize faster than those that did become colonies. Japan had high social development before 1853 and was not colonized; its modernization took off in the 1870s. China had high development and was partly colonized; its modernization took off in the 1950s. India had moderate development and was fully colonized; its modernization did not take off until the 1990s. Sub-Saharan Africa had low development and full colonization, and is only now starting to catch up.

  Because the nineteenth-century East was (by preindustrial standards) a world of advanced agriculture, great cities, widespread literacy, and powerful armies, plenty of its residents found ways to adapt Western methods to a new setting. Easterners even adopted Western debates about industrialism. For every Eastern capitalist there was an aging samurai to grumble, “Useless beauty had a place in the old life, but the new asks only for ugly usefulness,” and although real wages were creeping up in the cities by 1900, Chinese and Japanese dissenters eagerly formed socialist parties. By 1920 their members included the young Mao Zedong.

  Eastern debates over industrialization varied from country to country. Just as happened in the West, there was little or nothing that great men, bungling idiots, culture, or dumb luck could have done to prevent an industrial takeoff once the possibility arose, but—again paralleling the West—these forces had everything to do with deciding which country led the way.

  When W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan presented their comic opera The Mikado in London in 1885, they took Japan as the very model of the exotic orient, just the sort of place where little birds died for love and lord high executioners had to cut their own heads off. In reality, though, Japan was already industrializing faster than any previous society in history. Adroitly stage-managing the young new emperor installed in 1868 after the civil war, clever operators in Tokyo managed to keep their country out of wars with Western powers, finance industrialization largely from native capital, and dissuade the angry people from provocative attacks on foreigners. Clumsy operators in Beijing, by contrast, tolerated and even encouraged violence against missionaries, blundered into war with France in 1884 (losing most of their expensive new fleet in an hour), and borrowed—and embezzled—on a ruinous scale.

  Japan’s elite faced up to the fact that liberalization was a package deal. They put on top hats or crinolines; some discussed adopting the Latin script; others wanted Japan to speak English. They were ready to consider anything that might work. China’s Qing rulers, however, were division personified. For forty-six years the dowager empress Cixi ruled from behind the bamboo curtain, opposing any modernization that might endanger the dynasty. Her one flirtation with Western ideas was to divert money intended for rebuilding the fleet into a marble copy of a Mississippi paddleboat for her summer palace (still there and well worth seeing). When her nephew Guangxu tried to rush through a hundred-day reform program in 1898 (streamlining the civil service, updating the examinations, creating modern schools and colleges, coordinating tea and silk production for export, promoting mining and railroads, and Westernizing the army and navy), Cixi announced that Guangxu had asked her to come back as regent, then locked him in the palace and executed his modernizing ministers. Guangxu
remained a reformer to his bitter end, poisoned by arsenic as Cixi lay on her own deathbed in 1908.

  While China stumbled toward modernity, Japan raced. In 1889 Japan published a constitution giving wealthy men the vote, allowing Western-style political parties, and creating modern government ministries. China approved a constitution only in Cixi’s dying days, allowing limited male voting in 1909, but Japan made mass education a priority. By 1890 two-thirds of Japanese boys and one-third of girls received free primary schooling, while China did virtually nothing to educate the masses. Both countries laid their first railroads in 1876, but Shanghai’s governor tore out China’s tracks in 1877, fearing that rebels might use them. In 1896 Japan had 2,300 miles of railway; China, just 370. Much the same story could be told about iron, coal, steam, or telegraph lines.

  Throughout history, the expansion of cores has often set off ferocious wars on the peripheries to decide which part of the fringe would lead resistance (or assimilation) to the great powers. In the first millennium BCE, for instance, Athens, Sparta, and Macedon warred for a century and a half on the fringes of the Persian Empire; and Chu, Wu, and Yue did the same in southern China as the core in the Yellow River valley grew. In the nineteenth century CE, the process repeated itself when the East became a periphery to the West.