Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  The proper metric for gauging the implications of our counterfactual is not so much what the historical Europeans did do, but rather what they could do; and what they could do was clearly sufficient to master Pacific routes just as they had mastered Atlantic ones. And we must also bear in mind that by increasing some distances between Europe and the New World, these scenarios reduce the effort Europeans had to make to reach China via the Americas across the Atlantic in order to exchange Andean bullion for trade goods.

  Even so, distance is only part of the story. Natural endowments also played an important role, and it is in this respect that the counterfactual creates more serious problems for European development. For one, the plantation system sprang up on the eastern side of the Americas, on the Caribbean islands, and then in Brazil and what was to become the southeastern United States. Had the real cost of shipping goods to Europe been much higher, as it would inevitably have been, this would have been much more difficult to accomplish on a comparably large scale. This casts doubt on the potential for development beyond tributary extraction as practiced by the Spanish crown. If, as has often been argued, it was more advanced features of the New World economy that contributed significantly to the (Second) Great Divergence, this qualification carries very considerable weight.

  Triangular trade between manufacturing and staple-consuming Western Europe, slave-exporting and staple-consuming West Africa, and slave-importing and staple-exporting Atlantic America would have faced huge obstacles. Much increased distances between suitable parts of the New World and Europe would have weighed on commercial development. Shipping sugar, tobacco, and cotton around South America would have been expensive, albeit not impossible. Construction of a Panama canal became feasible only once certain breakthroughs had already occurred, not just in civil engineering but also in disease prevention. Reliance on the Strait of Magellan and the Isthmus of Panama would have created chokepoints that protected incumbents and stifled competition, with unpredictable second-order effects on conditions back in Europe.

  Africa’s novel remoteness would conceivably have represented the biggest obstacle. The distance between the Gulf of Guinea—employed as a convenient stylized proxy for the sources of slave labor—and the American Eastern Seaboard would have been dramatically greater than in real life. Slaves would have had to travel two and a half times as far (including a land crossing) if routed via Central America, or twice as far if routed around South America. Given the grueling nature of the historical Middle Passage, one must wonder how many of them would have survived journeys that long. Considerable adjustments would have become necessary but were practicable in principle. The South Pacific is endowed with enough island chains to break up the journey from the rotated Gulf of Guinea (located roughly where Indonesia is now) to Chile. Stops at some of these locations would have made these trips even longer and considerably more expensive but not necessarily that much deadlier.

  Whatever the workarounds, both American geomorphology and distance from Africa were bound to raise costs by a wide margin. This, of course, might have triggered second-order counterfactuals that are hard to predict. One option would have been greater reliance on indigenous forced labor from the Americas to staff plantations, even though hostilities among colonial powers might well have restricted access. More intensive development of California early on is another option. Yet this region’s output could not have replaced that of the eastern Atlantic Seaboard. Overall, it seems unlikely that the negative consequences for development arising from our counterfactual rotation could readily have been offset by plausible alternative strategies. In view of this, a deficit in the development of resources that at least some have deemed critical to Europe’s economic transformation must count as the most probable outcome.

  Easy fixes will not do: questioning the significance of New World resources, or envisioning substitution of Indian for American cotton. This chapter is built on the premise that we need to take seriously arguments that emphasize external inputs to early modern Europe’s most advanced economies, if only for the sake of evaluating the relevance of the polycentrism thesis to this line of reasoning.

  At the same time, it is important to be clear about what matters for our present purposes. We cannot rule out the possibility that different geographical conditions might have derailed the (Second) Great Divergence by restricting colonial development and the flow of critical resources to Europe. But this has no bearing on the idea that Europe’s multiple fragmentations were required to bring about modernization. Even if counterfactual environmental restraints had blocked the latter, the underlying argument would remain unaffected: even in that case, competitive dynamics would still have favored transformative change.

  … But China Is Still China

  Most importantly, the plausible notion that higher geographical hurdles might have obstructed Europe’s exploitation of the New World and West Africa and thus curbed Triangular Trade effects does not translate to the inverse regarding China: a counterfactual environment that crimped European opportunities would not automatically boost China’s economic development. For the latter, improved access to the New World was hardly enough.

  The main point is not that these logistical gains would have been fairly modest. It is true that the distance between Japan and Alaska is not that much greater than that between a repositioned Japan and Newfoundland, or that after the rotation, Japan would not have been much closer to Virginia than actual Japan is to California.

  But is there any reason to believe that smaller distances would actually have mattered? If China never showed any particular interest in Japan or the Philippines or, for most of its history, even nearby Taiwan, why would reducing its distance from a desirable spot on the American mainland from 10,000 kilometers to 6,000 or 7,000 kilometers have made the slightest difference? On this scale, distance is utterly meaningless once we take account of the underlying institutions. That “China had the misfortune to lie twice as far from the New World” (or rather, Mexico) as Spain, as Morris puts it, is both factually correct and substantively irrelevant.101

  For all we can tell, the New World could have lain just a couple of thousand kilometers east of China without ever being discovered, let alone colonized, as long as there were no structural incentives to take any steps in that direction. Nothing that we know of Chinese history suggests that such incentives existed, waiting to be activated by fortuitous discovery. In one respect, the (in)famous fantasies of the British former submarine commander Gavin Menzies, who has Zheng He’s treasure fleets discover terra incognita from Australia and New Zealand to the Americas and circumnavigate the whole world, turn out to be right on the mark: in his telling, Zheng He discovered everything but nobody cared, and the imperial court suppressed all records.102

  Arguments derived from distance are based on a triple fallacy: the assumptions that distance determines the odds of discovery, that it determines the real cost of exploration and colonization, and that discovery equates to colonization and development. None of this is obvious. Pacific history conveniently provides us with a real-life alternative to the Chinese default position of indifference: the Polynesian expansion I referred to above. If the Pacific Ocean is wider than the Atlantic, it is also, in the southern hemisphere, far less empty. If ancient Polynesians, disposing of incomparably smaller resources than the average Chinese empire, were able to spread out across 25,000 kilometers, what kept more advanced civilizations from doing the same?

  And, more specifically, what prevented China from piggybacking on this process once it was under way? The Song empire, the most sea-friendly Chinese polity thus far, coincided with a period of extensive connectivity among the different clusters of Polynesian-settled islands during the first half of the second millennium. Had there been any genuine interest in overseas exploration, it would hardly have been beyond Song capabilities to exploit this extraordinary network for China’s own purposes.103

  Distance does not equal true cost. In a sense, it was costlier for any on
e European state to become involved in the Americas than it would have been for imperial China. European colonizers competed with their peers. If China had arrived first, it would have had the New World to itself. Any comparative accounting of “cost” needs to factor in this crucial difference. Nor were other financial considerations decisive: although it is true that China needed to focus on the steppe while Europe could afford to “face away from it,” the outlays for sustainable overseas initiatives were so modest that the Middle Kingdom could easily have afforded them on the side: no pricey treasure fleets were required.104

  As far as China is concerned, geographical explanations of its lack of exploration and colonization are red herrings. Given its hegemonic position, institutional structure, and configuration of social power, China’s empires thoroughly lacked adequate incentives for embarking on any such projects. In this case, greater distance, however real, was entirely coincidental to observed outcomes.

  Geography played a different role for Europe. Our counterfactual indicates that initial overseas development would not have been overly burdened had Europe faced the same oceanic distances as China. Conversely, the buildup of the slave-based plantation economy would have had to contend with more formidable barriers. Whereas Andean silver would have been shipped to Europe and (some of it) on to India and China, the Triangular Trade that so stimulated British economic, financial, and technological innovation might have been much smaller in scale or not have occurred at all.

  Thus, while geography had the potential to hamper transoceanic colonization, it could not act as a driving force: on its own, it could only discourage, not stimulate. Political economy was of paramount importance, exemplified by the stark contrast between Britain as a fiscal-naval, mercantilist, and colonizing state on the one hand and China as a traditional agrarian empire on the other. The former was a product of the competitive extraversion of European states that embraced capitalism, militarism, and protectionism. This dynamic divided the globe into core and peripheries and created the overseas ghost acreages that helped fuel industrial takeoff.105

  Even as they added territory, most notably during the massive Qing expansion, China’s empires never sought to reorder lands, peoples, and resources in this manner. Outlying areas were not turned into producers of raw materials for processing in a core that would have reaped benefits from the added value. Instead, the empire sought to control migration and neglected or on occasion even obstructed the development of natural resources in border regions such as Manchuria, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and Tibet. If the Americas had been handed to the Ming or Qing rulers on a platter, would their attitude have been any different?106

  One way or another, Europeans were bound to make it to the New World. As James Belich reminds us, “By the late fifteenth century, with or without Columbus … Europeans were on their way to the Americas on three trajectories: across the South Atlantic after slaves and sugar-lands, across the North Atlantic in pursuit of cod and whales, and across Siberia in search of furs.” By contrast, mighty empires such as that of the Ming “did not need to chase furs or fish” for the simple reason that others were happy to do it for them. Not all exploratory initiatives were driven by power fragmentation, but all of them could be checked by imperial hegemony and wealth.107

  In the end, access to overseas resources was inextricably bound up with institutional development, the subject of chapter 10. We now move on to the final piece of the puzzle: technological innovation, which determined the benefits that such resources delivered. In its absence, Europeans might have ended up taking over the New World without being able to capitalize on this tremendous windfall.

  CHAPTER 12

  Understanding

  CULTURES OF KNOWLEDGE

  ALONGSIDE POLITICAL and economic institutions and access to overseas resources, the (Second) Great Divergence and more specifically the Industrial Revolutions are commonly attributed to the culture and ideas that promoted and sustained scientific inquiry, technological innovation, and the valorization of attitudes and norms that fostered economic progress—or, more generally, the way people viewed and understood the world. I therefore place this final chapter under the heading of “understanding,” an aptly multivalent term.

  Here it covers the way we improved our understanding of the workings of the physical universe and harnessed it for economic development and human welfare; the way societies understood the role and status of certain practices and constituencies, such as commercial enterprise and the bourgeoisie; and finally, the way modern observers seek to understand the clustering of different types of factors in bringing about the modern world. This and the following two sections draw on these different meanings one by one.

  I begin by reviewing, in utmost brevity, the institutional underpinnings of critical changes in engaging with the world that are associated with the European Enlightenment, the emergence of a culture of scientific knowledge, and the practical application of new insights in technological experimentation. As before, I also consider contrasting features elsewhere, above all in China, and, where applicable, in other Asian cultures so as to throw the European trajectory into sharper relief.

  Preindustrial Enlightenments and Their Alternatives

  POLYCENTRISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT

  In recent years, Joel Mokyr has been the foremost champion of the role of what he calls a “culture of knowledge” in driving Europe’s—and especially Britain’s—transformative economic development. For him as for many others, this phenomenon is rooted in the early modern period.1

  In this telling, Enlightenment culture grew out of the commercial capitalism of the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, and the “individualism, man-made formal law, corporatism, self governance, and rules that were determined through an institutionalized process.” All of these putatively significant traits were the result of the institutional arrangements discussed in chapter 10 that were predicated on the post-Roman fragmentation of social power.2

  A fortuitous blend of pervasive political splintering and overarching cultural integration created a viable marketplace of ideas. Polycentrism opened up space for cultural innovation by reducing “coercion bias,” the ability of powerful incumbents to suppress innovation and heterodoxy. Whereas monopolistic systems tend to preserve the status quo, a fragmented political ecology is less likely to impose this outcome.3

  Rather than by serving as an active driver of competitive innovation, the European state system facilitated ideational change by preventing conservative forces from consistently coordinating resistance to and suppression of innovation. This insight dates back at least to David Hume, who observed in 1742 that “the divisions into small states are favorable to learning, by stopping the progress of authority as well as that of power.”4

  Productive fragmentation deepened in the sixteenth century: whereas post-Roman Europe had always been politically fractured, the Reformation became a novel means of undermining the Catholic Church’s transnational capacity to quell dissent. As a result, “the power of authorities in charge of defending the orthodoxy was increasingly constrained by their inability to coordinate their actions across different political entities.” This lack of efficacy should not be mistaken for growing tolerance: at first, and indeed for some time, secular and clerical leaders were hamstrung solely by their inability to fully implement reactionary responses.5

  Owing to the manifold rivalries among Catholic and Protestant countries and between secular rulers and the papacy, coordinated repression eventually became unfeasible. Thus, whereas Jan Hus was burned at the stake in 1415 because the king of Germany, who had initially guaranteed his safety, abandoned him to the pope and his council, a century later Martin Luther operated under the protection of three consecutive Electors of Saxony whom neither emperor nor pope managed to rein in. Ulrich Zwingli exploited divisions among the Swiss cantons to establish his reform movement, and Jean Calvin found refuge from France in Geneva.

  Famous émigré scholars included Paracelsus, Comenius (w
ho fled Bohemia to live in Poland, Sweden, and England, among other places), René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes (who found refuge in Paris), John Locke (who escaped to the Netherlands until the Glorious Revolution allowed his return to England), and Pierre Bayle (who fled France twice, first to Geneva and then to the Netherlands). Later Voltaire, beset by trouble in France, spent a lot of time in various European countries. Others played different powers off against each other, most notably Galileo Galilei and his onetime defender Tommaso Campanella, who wrote his most important works in prison, published in Germany and France, was freed from Spanish detention thanks to papal intervention, and eventually ended up in France. Polycentrism played an essential role in allowing thinkers to change patrons and protectors.6

  Fragmentation of power within states also mattered. Self-governing corporations such as monasteries and especially universities could enjoy considerable autonomy. The communal movement of the Middle Ages—a consequence as well as a driver of polycentrism—had created corporations that elected leaders by consent and set rules that governed their conduct. Universities were a product of this process, legally autonomous corporate entities with rights and privileges that opened up a neutral space for discourse rather than religious foundations (as in Islamic societies) or state-sponsored entities (as in China). Pluralism broadened horizons. Even though most universities had long tended to uphold existing authority, not all of them did so in equal measure: from the sixteenth century, outliers such as Padua and Leiden acquired a reputation for greater innovativeness.7