Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Culture and free will are wild cards, complicating the Morris Theorem that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. Culture and free will speed up or slow down our reactions to changing circumstances. They deflect and muddy any simple theory. But—as the story that filled Chapters 1–10 shows all too clearly—culture and free will never trump biology, sociology, and geography for long.

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  The causes of Western rule are both long-term and short-term, lying in the constantly shifting interplay of geography and social development, but Western rule itself was neither locked-in nor accidental. It would make more sense to call it probable, the most likely result, through most of history, in a game where geography stacked the odds in the West’s favor. Western rule, we might say, has often been a good bet.

  To explain these rather cryptic comments I want to borrow a method from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 comedy Back to the Future. Near the beginning of the movie, a mad professor has combined a giant guitar amplifier, stolen plutonium, and a DeLorean car to create a time machine. When terrorists kill the professor, the teenage Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) gives chase and the time machine/car catapults him back to 1955. There he meets his future parents when they were his age. Disaster strikes—instead of falling in love with his father-to-be, Marty’s mother-to-be falls in love with Marty himself. A small dropped stitch in the tapestry of history, we might say, but to Marty it matters very much: unless he can put the past straight before the film ends, he will never be born.

  Instead of following the historian’s normal method of starting a story at the beginning and telling it until we reach our own times, I think it might be useful to leap McFly-like into the past, and then, just as the movie does, stop to ask what could have happened to prevent the future—let us say the year 2000—from turning out more or less as it did.

  I will start two centuries ago, in 1800. Alighting in the age of Jane Austen we will find that it was already overwhelmingly likely that the West would come to rule by 2000. Britain’s industrial revolution was under way, science was thriving, and European military power dwarfed everyone else’s. Of course, nothing was set in stone; with a bit more luck Napoleon might yet have won his wars or with a bit less luck Britain’s rulers might have bungled the challenges of industrialization. Either way, the British takeoff would have been slower, or—as I suggested in Chapter 10—the industrial revolution might have shifted to northern France. There are all kinds of possibilities. It is very hard, though, to see what could plausibly have happened after 1800 to have prevented a Western industrial revolution altogether. And once industrialization got going, it is equally hard to imagine what could have stopped its insatiable markets from going global. “It is … in vain,” Lord Macartney spluttered when the Chinese government rejected his trade embassy in 1793, “to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge”—a pompous way to put it, perhaps, but he had a point.

  No matter how much we stack the deck against the West, such as by imagining a hundred-year delay in its industrialization and little European imperial expansion until the twentieth century, there is still no obvious reason to think that there would have been an independent Eastern industrial revolution before then. Such an Eastern takeoff would probably have required the rise of a diversified regional economy like the one Westerners had created around the shores of the Atlantic, and that would have taken several centuries to build up. Western rule by 2000 was not locked in in 1800, in the sense of being 100 percent certain, but I suspect it was at least 95 percent probable.

  If we leap back another hundred and fifty years from 1800 to 1650, when Newton was still a boy, Western rule by 2000 would look less certain but still likely. Guns were closing the steppes and ships were creating the Atlantic economy. Industrialization remained undreamedof, but its preconditions were settling into place in western Europe. If the Dutch had won their wars against England in the 1650s, if the Dutch-backed coup in England had fallen through in 1688, or if the French had successfully invaded England in 1689, the particular institutions that wet-nursed Boulton and Watt might never have taken shape; and in that case the industrial revolution might, as I suggested earlier, have taken decades longer or have happened somewhere else in western Europe. But once again it is difficult to see what could plausibly have happened after 1650 to prevent it altogether. Perhaps if Western industrialization had slowed and the Qing rulers had also behaved differently, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China might have caught up more quickly with European science, but as we saw in Chapter 9, it would have taken more than that for the East to have industrialized first. Western rule by 2000 was less locked in in 1650 than it would be by 1800, but it was still the most plausible outcome—perhaps 80 percent likely?

  Another hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1500, the prognosis was murkier still. Western Europeans had ships that could sail to the New World, but their first instinct was simply to plunder it. If the Habsburgs had been even luckier than they actually were (if, perhaps, Luther had never been born, or if Charles V had co-opted him, or if the armada against England had succeeded in 1588 and the Dutch rebellion had then folded), perhaps they really would become the shepherds of Christendom—in which case the Spanish Inquisition might have silenced radical voices such as Newton’s and Descartes’s, and arbitrary taxation might have destroyed Dutch, English, and French trade the way it destroyed Spanish commerce in historical reality. That is a lot of ifs, though, and for all we know a Habsburg Empire might have had exactly the opposite effect, driving even more Puritans to cross the Atlantic and build cities on hills, kick-starting an Atlantic economy and scientific revolution from the far side.

  Alternatively, the Habsburgs could easily have fared worse than they did in reality. If the Ottomans had defeated Shiite Persia more thoroughly, the Turks might have taken Vienna in 1529; minarets and the muezzin might yet have pierced the skies over England and, as Gibbon put it, the interpretation of the Koran might now be taught in the schools of Oxford. A Turkish triumph would perhaps have kept the West’s center of gravity in the Mediterranean, leaving the Atlantic economy to wither on the vine—but on the other hand, like the Habsburg victory I imagined a moment ago, it might also have stimulated an even stronger Atlantic world. Another possibility: if the Ottomans and Russians had fought each other more vigorously in the seventeenth century, they might have been too weak to close the Western steppes to nomads. In that case the Qing victories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have driven the Mongols into Europe, turning the West’s seventeenth-century crisis into something as grim as the last days of Rome. With a new dark age in the West, China might, after the passage of enough centuries, have had its own scientific and industrial revolutions as its social development pressed against the hard ceiling. Who knows? One thing is clear, though: in 1500 the odds of Western rule by 2000 were much lower than they would be by 1650, perhaps not much more than fifty-fifty.

  Another hundred and fifty years take us back to 1350, in the dark days of the Black Death, and from that vantage point Western rule by 2000 would have looked frankly rather unlikely. The wildest card in the near future was Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror who burst out of central Asia to devastate India and Persia and then shattered the Ottoman Empire in 1402. At that point Tamerlane decided to turn east to avenge some imagined slight from the Chinese emperor but died before reaching his goal. If instead he had kept riding west after 1402, he might well have devastated Italy, aborting its Renaissance and setting Western development back by centuries. On the other hand, if instead of dying in 1405 on his eastward journey he had hung on a few years longer, he might have repeated Khubilai Khan’s brutal conquest of China, holding back Eastern, not Western, development by centuries.

  There are plenty of other ways things could have gone. The Ming dynasty founder, Hongwu, could easily have failed to reunite China after its civil wars, l
eaving a cluster of warring states rather than a great empire in the fifteenth-century Eastern core. Who can say what the consequences would have been? There might have been chaos, but perhaps removing the heavy hand of Ming autocracy would have stimulated even more vigorous maritime trade. I suggested in Chapter 8 that Ming China was never likely to create an Eastern version of the West’s later Atlantic economy—geography was too strongly against it—but without the Ming, Eastern colonists and merchants might yet have made a smaller Atlantic-style economy closer to home in Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands. The bottom line, though, is that options were even more open in 1350 than they would be in 1500. Western rule by 2000 was just one of many possibilities, perhaps no more than 25 percent likely.

  I could go on; it is fun to play the what-if game. But the point is probably clear. Whether the West would rule by 2000 was a matter of probabilities, not of lock-ins or accidents, and the further back we go, the more wild cards there are. In 1800 it was highly unlikely that different decisions, cultural trends, or accidents would delay Western rule until after 2000; in 1350 that outcome was perfectly plausible. However, it is hard to think of anything happening after 1350 that would have led to the East industrializing before the West or have prevented industrialization altogether.

  To find a past that could plausibly have led to Eastern rule by 2000 we have to go back a full nine centuries, to 1100. If at that point the Song dynasty emperor Huizong had handled the Jurchen nomads better, saving Kaifeng in 1127, or if the baby Temujin’s parents really had forgotten him on the steppes and he had died instead of growing up to be Genghis Khan, who knows what might have happened? Distance and maritime technology probably ruled out a Pacific version of the route to industrialization that Europe followed in the eighteenth century, via an Atlantic economy, but possibly a similar economy could have been created by other means. If China had escaped Jurchen and Mongol devastation, its renaissance culture might have blossomed into a scientific revolution instead of withering into complacency and footbinding. Internal demand from a hundred million Chinese subjects, trade between an agricultural south and an industrial north, and colonization in Southeast Asia might then have been enough to tip the balance. On the other hand, possibly not; until it had the kinds of guns and armies that could close the steppes, China remained open to devastating migrations. It is probably optimistic to think the mandarins could keep so many balls in the air indefinitely. The odds against an Eastern takeoff in the twelfth century were, I suspect, very long.

  If we make one last trip in the time machine, plunging back another thousand years before the Song, the great question changes again. Now we have to ask not whether the East might end up ruling by 2000 but whether the Roman Empire might break through the hard ceiling seventeen hundred years before the West actually did so. Frankly, I do not see any way that could have happened. Like the Song, Rome needed not only to find a way through the hard ceiling without the benefits of an Atlantic economy but also to have astonishing luck in evading the five horsemen of the apocalypse. When China’s Han Empire fell in the third century, Rome muddled on in a weakened state, only to crack in the fifth century. There were certainly ways Rome might have gotten the better of the Goths and their kindred and carried on with their muddling along, but could the empire then have handled the crisis of the seventh century? And even if some larger Roman Empire had survived, how would that have escaped the long winding down of Western social development? A Roman industrial revolution after 100 looks even less likely than a Song breakthrough after 1100.

  What all this adds up to is the conclusion that Western rule by 2000 was neither a long-term lock-in nor a short-term accident. It was more of a long-term probability. It was never very likely, even in 1100, that the East would industrialize first, gain the ability to project its power globally, and turn its lead in social development into rule the way the West would subsequently do. It was always likely, though, that someone would eventually develop guns and empires capable of closing the steppes, and ships and markets capable of opening the oceans. And once that happened, it would become increasingly likely that new geographical advantages would lead Westerners into an industrial revolution before Easterners. The only thing that could have prevented it, I suspect, was a genuine Nightfall moment, the kind of disaster Isaac Asimov described in the story of that name that I talked about in Chapter 2: a cataclysm that overwhelms all responses, destroying civilization and hurling humanity back to square one.

  NIGHTFALL

  But that was never very likely either. The closest the world ever came to Nightfall before the era of Western rule was around 10,800 BCE, when a vast icy lake drained into the North Atlantic and lowered its temperature enough to turn off the Gulf Stream. The twelve-hundred-year-long mini–ice age that followed, known as the Younger Dryas, halted social development and snuffed out the first experiments in settled village life and early farming in the Hilly Flanks. The Younger Dryas makes every episode of global cooling since then seem barely worth the effort of putting a sweater on.

  The consequences of an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas anytime in the last few thousand years are too horrible to think about for long. The world’s harvests would have failed year after year after year. Hundreds of millions would have starved. Mass migration would have emptied much of Europe, North America, and Central Asia. The resulting wars, state failures, and epidemics would have dwarfed anything known. It would have been as if the five horsemen of the apocalypse had traded their steeds for tanks. A shrunken, shivering population would have ended up clustered in villages around the Lucky Latitudes, praying for rain and scratching a meager living from the dry soil. Thousands of years of social development would have been wiped off the graph.

  Other Nightfall-like paths are imaginable too. Morbidly inclined astronomers have calculated that if an asteroid a mile or so in diameter hit the earth, the explosion would be equivalent to 100 billion tons of TNT going off at once. Opinions differ on just how grim that would be. It would certainly temporarily fill the upper atmosphere with dust, blocking the sunlight and causing millions to starve. It might release enough nitrogen oxide to degrade the ozone layer and expose the survivors to murderous solar radiation. A two-mile-wide asteroid impact, by contrast, is easier to model. It would be like setting off 2 trillion tons of TNT, which would probably kill everyone.

  The good news—obviously—is that no such rocks lay in our path, so there is not much point in depressing ourselves by speculating on just how bad things would have been. Asteroid collisions and ice ages are not like wars or culture: they are (or perhaps we should say until recently were) beyond human control. No bungling idiot, cultural trend, or accident could have conjured up another body of icy water large enough to turn off the Gulf Stream, meaning that a new Younger Dryas was impossible, and even the gloomiest astronomers think we will collide with mile-wide asteroids only once every few hundred thousand years.

  There is, in fact, almost nothing that bungling idiots and so on could have done at any point in human history that would have brought on a Nightfall moment. Even the bloodiest wars we have inflicted on ourselves, the twentieth-century Wars of the World, merely confirmed trends that were already under way. In 1900 the United States, a new kind of subcontinental empire with an industrial core, was already challenging western Europe’s oceanic empires. The Wars of the World were largely struggles to see who would replace the western Europeans. The United States itself ? The Soviet Union, rapidly industrializing by the 1930s? Germany, trying to conquer its own subcontinental empire in the 1940s? In the East, Japan tried to conquer and industrialize a subcontinental empire and expel the West in the 1930s–40s; when that failed, China industrialized the subcontinental empire it already had, disastrously in the 1950s–60s and spectacularly since the 1980s. It is hard to see how Europe’s oceanic empires could have survived such competition, particularly when we add the rising tide of nationalism from Africa to Indochina and the steady decline of western Europe’s population
and industry relative to its challengers’.

  If Europe’s great powers had not thrown themselves off cliffs in 1914 and 1939 their oceanic empires would surely have lasted longer; if the United States had not fled its global responsibilities in 1919 the oceanic empires may have collapsed even faster. If Hitler had defeated Churchill and Stalin, things would perhaps have turned out differently; or then again, perhaps they wouldn’t. Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland provides a wonderful illustration. It is a murder mystery set in 1964 Germany, but—as quickly becomes clear—this is a Germany that won the Second World War. Everything seems eerily different. Hitler has killed all of Europe’s Jews, not just most of them. His architect Albert Speer has made his master’s fantasies material, rebuilding Berlin with an Avenue of Victory twice as long as Paris’s Champs Elysées, leading to the biggest building in the world, where the Führer delivers speeches under a dome so high that rain clouds can form inside it. And yet as the story unfolds, the landscape begins to take on an even eerier familiarity. A cold war is under way between the United States and a huge, rickety, totalitarian empire based in eastern Europe. The two empires glower at each other from behind hedges of nuclear missiles, fight proxy wars and manipulate client states in the Third World, and are edging toward détente. In some ways things are not so different from reality after all.