10

THE WESTERN AGE

WHAT ALL THE WORLD DESIRES

Once in a while a single year seems to shift the ground under our feet. In the West, 1776 was such a moment. In America a tax revolt turned into a revolution; in Glasgow, Adam Smith finished his Wealth of Nations, the first and greatest work of political economy; in London, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire hit the bookstores and became an overnight sensation. Great men were doing great things. Yet on March 22 James Boswell—Ninth Laird of Auchinleck, thwarted man of letters, and ambitious hanger-on around the rich and famous—was to be found not in some wit-filled salon but in a coach splashing through the mud toward Soho, an estate outside Birmingham in the English Midlands (Figure 10.1).

From a distance Soho’s clock tower, carriageway, and Palladian façade made it look like just the kind of country house Boswell might want to visit for tea and pleasantries, but on closer approach a clattering hubbub of crashing hammers, screeching lathes, and cursing laborers dispelled any such illusions. This was no setting for a Jane Austen novel; it was a factory. And Boswell, despite his privilege and pretensions, wanted to see it, for there was nothing quite like Soho anywhere else in the world.

Figure 10.1. Power for sale: the cradle of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution

Everything at Soho lived up to Boswell’s expectations—its hundreds of workmen, “the vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery,” and above all its proprietor, Matthew Boulton (“an iron chieftain,” Boswell called him). Boswell confided to his journal, “I shall never forget Mr. Bolton’s [sic] expression to me: ‘I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.’”

It was men like Boulton who gave the lie to political economists’ dismal predictions. When Boswell and Boulton met in 1776, Western social development had clawed its way up just forty-five points since Ice Age hunter-gatherers had prowled the tundra in search of a meal; within the next hundred years it soared another hundred points. The transformation beggared belief. It turned the world inside out. In 1776 East and West were still neck and neck, barely above the old forty-three-point hard ceiling; a century later, the sale of power had turned the West’s lead into Western rule. “ ’Twas in truth,” said the poet Wordsworth in 1805,

… an hour

Of universal ferment; mildest men

Were agitated; and commotions, strife

Of passion and opinion fill’d the walls

Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.

The soil of common life was at that time

Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,

And not then only, “what a mockery this

Of history; the past and that to come!”

What mockery indeed, at least of the past; but not, in fact, of that to come. Universal ferment had barely begun, and over the next century Western development went off the scale. Any graph (like Figure 10.2) that can fit the contemporary West’s 906 points on its vertical axis reduces all the ups and downs, leads and lags, triumphs and tragedies that filled the first nine chapters of this book to insignificance. And all thanks to what Boulton was selling.

Figure 10.2. Universal ferment: social development across the last two thousand years, showing the Western-led takeoff since 1800 that made mockery of all the drama of the world’s earlier history

THE JOY OF STEAM

The world had had power before Boulton, of course. What he was selling was better power. For millions of years nearly all the power to move things had come from muscles; and while muscles can be remarkable—they built the pyramids, dug the Grand Canal, and painted the Sistine Chapel—they do have limits. Most obviously, muscles are parts of animals, and animals need food, shelter, and often fuel and clothes. All of these come from plants or other animals, which also require food, shelter, and so on; and everything in this chain ultimately requires land. So as land grew scarce in the eighteenth-century cores, muscles got expensive.

For centuries wind and water power had augmented muscles by pushing boats along and driving millstones. But wind and water have limits too. They are available only in certain places; streams can freeze in winter or run dry in summer; and whenever the air hangs heavy, windmills’ sails stop.

What was needed was power that was portable, so people could bring it to their work rather than bringing their work to it; reliable, so it did not depend on the weather; and space-neutral, so it did not consume millions of acres of trees and fields. The ironmasters of eleventh-century Kaifeng had seen that coal offered an answer, but this, too, had a limit. It could release energy only as heat.

The breakthrough—turning heat into motion—came in the eighteenth century and began at the coal mines themselves. Flooding was a constant problem, and while muscles and buckets could drain mineshafts (one ingenious English pit owner yoked five hundred horses to a bucket chain), they were hugely expensive. In hindsight, the solution seems obvious: get the water out with engines that eat coal from the mine rather than animals that eat food. But that was easier said than done.

The Eastern and Western cores both needed coal in the eighteenth century and both faced flooded mineshafts, but it was English engine makers who found the answer. As we saw in Chapter 9, here on northwest Europe’s farthest fringe the Atlantic economy had particularly rewarded semiscientific tinkering. This threw up just the kind of men the problem called for, combining business acumen with practical experience of metals and some basic grasp of physics. Such men did exist in China and Japan, but they were rare, and so far as we know none of them even tried to tinker with coal-fired engines.

The first working Western pump, the “Miner’s Friend,” was patented in England in 1698. It burned coal to boil water and then condensed the steam into a vacuum, whereupon operators opened a valve and the vacuum sucked water up from the mine. Now closing the valve, workers stoked the fires to boil this water, too, into steam; and then repeated the gravity-defying process of boiling and condensing over and over again.

The Miner’s Friend was slow, could raise only forty feet of water, and had a distinctly unfriendly tendency to explode, but it was still (usually) cheaper than feeding hundreds of horses. It also inspired more tinkering, but even the improved engines remained horribly wasteful. Because they used the same cylinder to boil water and then cool it to make a vacuum, they had to reheat the cylinder for every stroke of the piston. Even the best engines converted less than 1 percent of the energy in coal into force to pump water.

For decades, this inefficiency restricted steam power to the single job of pumping out coal mines, and even for that, one owner complained, “the vast consumption of fuel of these engines is an immense drawback on the profit of our mines … This heavy tax amounts almost to a prohibition.” For any business that had to ship coal from mines to factories, steam engines were just too expensive.

Engines were, however, fun for professors. Glasgow University bought a miniature example, but when none of the scholars could get it to work, it made its way in 1765 to the workshop of James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University. Watt got it going, but its inefficiency sinned against his craftsman’s soul. In between other tasks he obsessed about better ways to evaporate and condense water, until, as he told it,

I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon … when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the [heated] cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might there be condensed without cooling the cylinder … I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

It being Sunday, the God-fearing Watt could only sit on his hands, but on Monday morning he knocked together a new model separating the condenser from the evaporation cylinder. Instead of alternately heating and cooling one cylinder, the boiler now stayed hot and the condenser cold, cutting coal use by nearly four-fifths.

This threw up a host of new problems, but Watt plodded on with them, year after year. His wife died; his backer went bankrupt; and still he could not make the engine work reliably. But in 1774, just as Watt was about to give up tinkering for steadier work, the iron chieftain Matthew Boulton came to the rescue, buying out Watt’s debt-laden backer and sweeping the engine maker off to Birmingham. Boulton threw both money and the brilliant metalworker “Iron Mad” Wilkinson at the problem. (Wilkinson believed everything should be made of iron, including his own coffin.)

Just six months later Watt wrote to his father—in what strikes me as the second-greatest understatement of all time (I will come to the greatest later in this chapter)—that his engine was now “rather successful.” In a grand public display in March 1776 Watt and Boulton’s engine pumped sixty feet of water from a mineshaft in sixty minutes flat, burning just a quarter as much coal as older machines.

No wonder Boulton was feeling expansive when Boswell visited Soho that month. With engines now cost-effective outside the pits themselves, the sky was the limit. “If we had … a hundred small engines … and twenty large ones executed, we could readily dispose of them all,” Boulton wrote to Watt. “Let us make hay while the sun shines.”

And so they did, although even they were probably surprised at some of the customers who came to their door. The first manufacturers to seize on steam power were makers of cotton cloth. Cotton would not grow in western Europe, and until the seventeenth century Britons had normally worn scratchy, sweaty wool year-round, generally dispensing with underwear altogether. Predictably, when traders started importing light, brightly printed cotton cloth from India, it was a huge hit. “It crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers,” Daniel Defoe recalled in 1708. “Curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs.”

The importers made fortunes, but money spent on Indian cotton was of course money not spent on British wool. Wool magnates therefore lobbied Parliament to ban cotton cloth, whereupon other Britons imported raw cotton (which was still legal) and wove their own cloth. Unfortunately, they were not as good at this as Indians, and as late as the 1760s the market for British cotton was just one-thirtieth of that for British wool.

Cotton did have one thing going for it, though: the laborious task of spinning its fibers into yarn lent itself to mechanization. For ten thousand years textile production had depended on nimble-fingered women (but only rarely men) to twist wisps of wool or fiber onto spindles. We saw in Chapter 7 that by 1300, Chinese spinners were using water- and animal-powered machines to increase productivity. These machines became more common over the following centuries, steadily pushing up output, but the British move to mechanization abruptly made all the ancient skills redundant. In 1700 a spinster with a pedal-powered wheel needed two hundred hours to produce a pound of yarn;* by 1800, extraordinary devices with even more extraordinary names—Hargreaves’s jenny, Arkwright’s throstle, Crompton’s mule—were doing the same work in three hours (Roberts’s self-acting mule, invented in 1824, took just an hour and twenty minutes). The machines’ repetitive movements also made them ideal for steam power and for concentration in large factories, and the first spinning mill powered entirely by steam engines (supplied, naturally, by Boulton and Watt) opened in 1785.

Machines made British cotton cheaper, finer, stronger, and more uniform even than Indian, and British exports of finished cloth increased a hundredfold between 1760 and 1815, turning cotton from a minor industry into the source of almost a twelfth of the national income. A hundred thousand men, women, and (especially) children labored twelve or more hours a day, six days a week, in the mills, flooding markets with so much cotton that the price of yarn fell from thirty-eight shillings per pound in 1786 to under seven shillings in 1807. As prices fell, though, markets expanded. Profits kept booming.

Geography made cotton the perfect industry for Britain. Because its raw materials grew overseas, they did not compete for land at home. Instead Americans, eager for British cash, turned millions of acres into cotton plantations and put hundreds of thousands of slaves to work on them. Production soared from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 in 1810 and 4.5 million in 1860. British innovations in spinning stimulated American innovations on the plantations, such as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (short for engine), which separated cotton fibers from sticky seeds even more cheaply than slaves’ fingers. The American supply of cotton rose to meet British demand, keeping prices low, enriching mill and plantation owners, and creating vast new armies of labor on both sides of the Atlantic.

Back in Britain, technology jumped from industry to industry, stimulating yet more technology. The most important leap was to ironworking, the industry that made the materials that other new industries used. Britain’s ironmasters had known how to smelt iron with coke since 1709 (seven centuries behind Chinese metallurgists), but had trouble keeping their furnaces hot enough for coke smelting. After 1776 Boulton and Watt’s engines solved the problem by providing steady blasts of air, and within a decade Cort’s puddling-and-rolling process (as wonderfully named as anything in cotton spinning) smoothed out the remaining technical difficulties. Following the same path as cotton, ironmakers saw labor costs plummet while employment, productivity, and profits exploded.

Boulton and his competitors had taken the lid off energy capture. Even though their revolution took several decades to unfold (in 1800, British manufacturers still generated three times as much power from waterwheels as from steam engines), it was nonetheless the biggest and fastest transformation in the entire history of the world. In three generations technological change shattered the hard ceiling. By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output. Fossil fuel made the impossible possible.

THE GREAT DIVERGENCE

Locals like to call my hometown, Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands, the cradle of the industrial revolution. Its great claim to fame comes from being the heart of the Potteries, where Josiah Wedgwood mechanized vase-making in the 1760s. Industrial-scale potting pervaded everything in Stoke. Even my own earliest archaeological experiences as a teenager nearly two centuries later went on in Wedgwood’s shadow, working on misfired pots from a vast dump behind the Whieldon factory where Wedgwood had learned his craft.

Stoke was built on coal, iron, and clay, and when I was young most of its workingmen still got up before dawn and headed for the pit, steelworks, or potbank. My grandfather was a steelworker; my father left school for the mines just before his fourteenth birthday. In my own schooldays we were constantly told how the pluck, grit, and ingenuity of our forebears had made Britain great and changed the world. But so far as I remember, no one told us why it was our hills and valleys, rather than someone else’s in some other place, that had cradled the infant industry.

This question, though, is the front line in arguments over the great divergence between West and East. Was it inevitable that the industrial revolution would happen in Britain (in and around Stoke-on-Trent, in fact) rather than somewhere else in the West? If not, was it inevitable that it would happen in the West rather than somewhere else? Or—for that matter—that it would happen at all?

I grumbled in the introduction to this book that even though these questions are really about whether Western dominance was locked in in the distant past, experts offering answers rarely look back more than four or five hundred years. I hope I have made my point by now that putting the industrial revolution into the long historical perspective sketched in the first nine chapters of this book will provide better answers.

The industrial revolution was unique in how much and how fast it drove up social development, but otherwise it was very like all the upswings in earlier history. Like all those earlier episodes of (relatively) rapidly rising development, it happened in an area that had until recently been rather peripheral to the main story. Since the origins of agriculture, the major cores had expanded through various combinations of colonization and imitation, with populations on the peripheries adopting what worked in the core and sometimes adapting it to very different environments at the margins. Sometimes this process revealed advantages in backwardness, as when fifth-millennium-BCE farmers found that the only way to make a living in Mesopotamia was by irrigation, in the process turning Mesopotamia into a new core; or when cities and states expanded into the Mediterranean Basin in the first millennium BCE, developing new patterns of maritime trade; or when northern Chinese farmers fled southward and turned the area beyond the Yangzi into a new rice frontier after 400 CE.

When the Western core expanded north and west from its Mediterranean heartland in the second millennium CE, western Europeans eventually discovered that new maritime technology could turn their geographical isolation, which had long been a source of backwardness, into an advantage. More by accident than design, western Europeans created new kinds of oceanic empires, and as their novel Atlantic economy drove social development up, it presented entirely new challenges.

There was no guarantee that Europeans would meet these challenges; neither the Romans (in the first century CE) nor the Song Chinese (in the eleventh) had found a way through the hard ceiling. All the signs were that muscles were the ultimate source of power, that no more than 10–15 percent of people would ever be able to read, that cities and armies could never grow beyond about a million members, and that—consequently—social development could never get past the low forties on the index. But in the eighteenth century Westerners brushed these limits aside; by selling power they made mockery of all that had gone before.

Western Europeans succeeded where the Romans and Song failed because three things had changed. First, technology had gone on accumulating. Some skills were lost each time social development collapsed, but most were not, and over the centuries new ones were added. The same-river-twice principle thus kept working: each society that pressed against the hard ceiling between the first century and the eighteenth was different from its predecessors. Each knew and could do more than those that had gone before.

Second, in large part because technology had accumulated, agrarian empires now had effective guns, allowing the Romanovs and Qing to close the steppe highway. Consequently, when social development pressed against the hard ceiling in the seventeenth century, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse—migration—did not ride. It was a struggle, but the cores managed to cope with the other four horsemen and averted collapse. Without this change, the eighteenth century might have been as disastrous as the third and thirteenth.

Third, again largely because technology had accumulated, ships could now sail almost anywhere they wanted, allowing western Europeans to create an Atlantic economy unlike anything seen before. Neither the Romans nor the Song had been in a position to build such a vast engine of commercial growth, so neither had had to confront the kinds of problems that forced themselves on western Europeans’ attention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Newton, Watt, and their colleagues were probably no more brilliant than Cicero, Shen Kuo, and theirs; they just thought about different things.

Eighteenth-century western Europe was better placed than any earlier society to annihilate the hard ceiling; within western Europe, the northwest—with its weaker kings and freer merchants—was better placed than the southwest; and within the northwest, Britain was best placed of all. By 1770 Britain not only had higher wages, more coal, stronger finance, and arguably more open institutions (for middle- and upper-class men, anyway) than anyone else, but—thanks to coming out on top in its wars with the Dutch and French—it also had more colonies, trade, and warships.

It was easier to have an industrial revolution in Britain than anywhere else, but Britain still had no lock-in on industrialization. If—as could easily have happened—it had been French bells, not British, that were worn threadbare by ringing victories in 1759, and if France had stripped Britain of its navy, colonies, and trade rather than Britain stripping France, my elders would not have reared me on stories of how Stoke-on-Trent had midwifed the industrial revolution. The elders in some equally smoke-blackened French city such as Lille might have been spinning that yarn instead. France, after all, had plenty of inventors and entrepreneurs, and even a small shift in national endowments or the decisions of kings and generals might have made a big difference.

Great men, bungling idiots, and dumb luck had a lot to do with why the industrial revolution was British rather than French, but they had much less to do with why the West had an industrial revolution in the first place. To explain that, we have to look at larger forces, because once enough technology had accumulated, once the steppe highway had closed, and once the oceanic highways had opened—by, say, 1650 or 1700—it is hard to imagine what could have stopped an industrial revolution from happeningsomewhere in western Europe. If France or the Low Countries had become the workshop of the world rather than Britain, the industrial revolution might have broken more slowly, perhaps beginning in the 1870s rather than the 1770s. The world we live in today would be different, but western Europe would still have had the original industrial revolution and the West would still rule. I would still be writing this book, but it might be in French rather than English.

Unless, that is, the East had independently industrialized first. Could that have happened if Western industrialization had been slower? Here, of course, I am piling what-ifs on top of what-ifs, but I think the answer is still fairly clear: probably not. Even though Eastern and Western social development scores were neck-and-neck until 1800, there are few signs that the East, if left alone, was moving toward industrialization fast enough to have begun its own takeoff during the nineteenth century.

The East had large markets and intense trade, but these did not work like the West’s Atlantic economy, and while ordinary people in the East were not as poor as Adam Smith claimed in his Wealth of Nations (“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe”), Figure 10.3 shows that they were not rich either. Beijingers* were no worse off than Florentines but much worse off than Londoners. With labor so cheap in China and Japan (and southern Europe), the incentives for the local equivalents of Boulton to invest in machinery were weak. As late as 1880 the up-front costs to open a mine with six hundred Chinese laborers were estimated as $4,272—roughly the price of a single steam pump. Even when they had the option, savvy Chinese investors often preferred cheap muscles to expensive steam.

With so little to gain from tinkering, neither Eastern entrepreneurs nor scholars in the imperial academies showed much interest in boilers and condensers, let alone jennies, throstles, and puddling. To have had its own industrial revolution, the East would have needed to create some equivalent to the Atlantic economy that could generate higher wages and new challenges, stimulating the whole package of scientific thought, mechanical tinkering, and cheap power.

Figure 10.3. Workers of the world, divide: despite their woes, British workers earned much more than non-British between 1780 and 1830 and did better still after 1830. The graph compares the real wages of the unskilled in London, Florence (fairly typical of southern Europe’s low wages), and Beijing (exemplifying Chinese and Japanese wages).

Again, given time, that might have come to pass. Already in the eighteenth century there was a flourishing Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia; other things being equal, the kind of geographical interdependence that characterized the Atlantic economy might have emerged in the nineteenth century. But other things were not equal. It took Westerners two hundred years to get from Jamestown to James Watt. If the East had been left in splendid isolation, if it had moved down the same path as the West across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries toward creating a geographically diversified economy, and if it had moved at roughly the same pace as the West, a Chinese Watt or Japanese Boulton might at this very moment be unveiling his first steam engine in Shanghai or Tokyo. But none of those ifs eventuated, because once the West’s industrial revolution began, it swallowed the world.

THE GRADGRINDS

As late as 1750, the similarities between the Eastern and Western cores were still striking. Both were advanced agrarian economies with complex divisions of labor, extensive trade networks, and growing manufacturing sectors. At both ends of Eurasia rich landowning elites, confident in their order’s stability, traditions, and worth, were masters of all they surveyed. Each elite defended its position with elaborate rules of deference and etiquette, and each consumed and produced culture of great subtlety and refinement. Behind all the obvious differences of style and narration, it is hard not to see a certain kinship between sprawling eighteenth-century novels of manners such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber.

By 1850 all these similarities were being washed away by one massive difference: the rise in the West of a new, steam-powered class of iron chieftains that, according to its most famous critics, “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’” This new class, Marx and Engels went on, “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Opinions differed—violently—over just what this new class was doing, but most agreed that whatever it was, it was changing everything. To some, the millionaires who tapped and sold power were heroes whose “energy and perseverance, guided by sound judgment, [merely] secured their usual reward.” Thus Samuel Smiles, author of the Victorian classic Self-Help. “In early times,” Smiles explained, “the products of skilled industry were for the most part luxuries intended for the few, whereas now”—thanks to the captains of industry—“the most exquisite tools and engines are employed in producing articles of ordinary consumption for the great mass of the community.”

To others, though, industrialists were hard-faced, frock-coated brutes, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times. “Facts alone are wanted in life,” Gradgrind insisted. “Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” Dickens had learned about the industrial revolution the hard way, laboring in a boot-black factory while his father languished in debtors’ prison, and had strong views on the Gradgrinds. As he saw it, they leached the beauty out of life, herding workers into soul-destroying cities like his imaginary Coketown, “a triumph of fact … a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.”

There were certainly real-life Gradgrinds aplenty. The young Friedrich Engels described running into one in 1840s Manchester and lecturing him on the plight of this Coketown’s workers. “He listened patiently,” said Engels, “and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir!’”

The businessman was right: by tapping into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, Boulton and Watt’s engines had unleashed a storm of moneymaking. Yet Engels was right too: the workers who made the money saw precious little of it. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer grew by more than 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The rest was skimmed off as profits. Anger mounted in the slums. Workers formed unions and demanded a People’s Charter; radicals plotted to blow up the government. Farmworkers, their livelihoods threatened by mechanical threshers, smashed machines and burned hayricks in 1830, signing threatening letters to the gentry under the piratical-sounding name “Captain Swing.” Everywhere magistrates and clergymen caught the whiff of Jacobinism, their catchall term for French-style insurrection, and men of property bore down on it with the full weight of the state. Cavalry trampled demonstrators; unionists were jailed; machine breakers were shipped to penal colonies at the farthest fringes of Britain’s empire.

To Marx and Engels, the process seemed crystal clear: Western industrialization was driving social development up faster than ever before but was also kicking the paradox of development into warp speed.* By turning men into mere “hands,” flesh-and-blood cogs in mills and factories, capitalists were also giving them common cause and making them revolutionaries. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,” Marx and Engels concluded, “are its own gravediggers … Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”

Marx and Engels believed that capitalists had brought this on themselves by fencing off the countryside and driving the dispossessed into cities to be wage slaves, but they had the facts wrong. Rich landlords did not drive country folk off the land; sex did. The nineteenth century’s intensive agriculture actually needed more field hands, not fewer, and the real reason people exchanged farms for cities was reproduction. Life expectancy increased by about three years between 1750 and 1850, and although historians cannot agree why this happened (Fewer outbreaks of plague? More nutritious foods? Better water supplies and sewers? Smarter child-rearing practices? Cotton underwear? Something else completely?), those extra childbearing years meant that unless women married later, had sex in different ways, or aborted/starved their young, they would raise more children. Women did in fact change their behavior, but not enough to cancel out their longer lives, and Britain’s population roughly doubled (to about 14 million) between 1780 and 1830. About a million of these extra people stayed on the land, but 6 million sought jobs in towns.

These hard facts of reproduction make the industrial revolution’s glass look half-full rather than half-empty: industrialization was traumatic but the alternatives were worse. In the sixteenth century wages had collapsed all over the West when population grew, but British wages actually rose after 1775 and pulled away from everyone else’s (Figure 10.3). When Britons did starve en masse, in the horrific 1840s Irish famine, it had more to do with greedy landlords and stupid politicians than with industry (which was strikingly scarce in Ireland).

The irony is that the tide turned in workers’ favor in the very years Marx and Engels formulated their doctrines. Since 1780 capitalists had been spending much of their profits on country houses, peerages, and the other trappings of the arriviste, but they had plowed even more back into new machines and mills. By about 1830 these investments were making the mechanically augmented labor of each dirty, malnourished, ill-educated “hand” so profitable that bosses often preferred cutting deals with strikers to firing them and competing with other bosses to find new ones. For the next fifty years wages grew as fast as profits, and in 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, British workers’ pay was finally regaining the heights it had reached after the Black Death.

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 wings 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 heroes 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.

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 thefloating 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 torturing, 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.

Ever since Japan’s abortive effort to conquer China in the 1590s, rulers in the Eastern core had assumed that the costs of interstate war would outweigh the benefits, but the coming of the West turned that assumption on its head. Whichever Eastern nation industrialized, reorganized, and rearmed fastest would be able not just to hold the Western imperialists off but also to hold the rest of the East down.

It was ultimately Japanese industrialization, not British warships, that was China’s nemesis. Japan lacked resources; China had plenty. Japan needed markets; China was full of them. Arguments in Tokyo over what should be done were furious and even murderous, but across two generations the country gradually committed to forcing its way into China’s materials and markets. By the 1930s Japan’s most militant officers had determined to take over the entire Eastern core, turn China and Southeast Asia into colonies, and expel the Western imperialists. A War of the East had begun.

The great difference between this War of the East and the eighteenth-century War of the West, though, was that the War of the East took place in a world where the West already ruled. This complicated everything. Thus in 1895 when Japan swept aside Chinese resistance to its advances in Korea, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II reacted by sending his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia a rather awful drawing called “The Yellow Peril” (Figure 10.7), urging him “to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race.” Nicholas responded by confiscating much of the territory Japan had seized from China.

Figure 10.7. “The Yellow Peril,” an 1895 drawing based on a sketch by Kaiser Wilhelm II, aimed, he explained, to encourage Europeans “to unite in resisting the inroad of Buddhism, heathenism, and barbarism for the Defense of the Cross.”

Other Westerners, though, saw advantages in working with Japan, using its burgeoning power to police the East for them. The first opportunity came in 1900, when a Chinese secret society called the Boxers United in Righteousness rose up against Western imperialism (claiming, among other things, that a hundred days of martial-arts training would make its members bulletproof). It took twenty thousand foreign troops to suppress them; and most of the soldiers—though you would not know it from Western accounts (particularly the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster 55 Days in Peking)—were Japanese. So pleased was Britain with this outcome that in 1902 it signed a naval alliance recognizing Japan’s great-power status in the East. Confident of British neutrality, in 1904 Japan took its revenge on Russia, sinking its Far Eastern fleet and overwhelming its army in the biggest land battle ever fought. When Tsar Nicholas sent his main fleet twenty thousand miles around the Old World to put matters right, Japanese battleships sank it, too.

Fewer than fifty years had passed since Looty relocated to London, but the old Eastern core had responded so dynamically that it could already defeat a Western empire. “What happened … in 1904–5,” the disgraced Russian commander Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin concluded, “was nothing more than a skirmish with the advance guard … Only with a common recognition that keeping Asia peaceful is a matter of importance to all of Europe … can we keep the ‘yellow peril’ at bay.” But Europe ignored his advice.

THE WARS OF THE WORLD

Between 1914 and 1991 the Western core fought the greatest wars in history: the First World War, between 1914 and 1918, to determine whether Germany would create a European land empire; the Second, between 1939 and 1945, over the same question; and the Cold War, between 1947 and 1991, to settle how the United States and Soviet Union would divide the spoils (Figure 10.8). Together these added up to a new War of the West that dwarfed the eighteenth-century version. It subsumed the War of the East, left a hundred million dead, and threatened humanity’s very survival. In 1991 the West still ruled, but it seemed to many that Kuropatkin’s fears were finally coming true: the East was poised to overtake it.

The story of how the new War of the West began has often been told—how the Ottoman Empire’s long decline filled the Balkans with terrorists/freedom fighters; how, through bungling and bad luck, a gang called the Black Hand murdered the heir to Austria’s Habsburg throne in June 1914 (the bomb tossed by the would-be assassin bounced off the Austrian archduke’s car, only for the chauffeur to take a wrong turn, back up, and stop right in front of a second assassin, who made no mistake); and how the web of treaties designed to keep Europe’s peace dragged everyone over the precipice together.

What followed is equally well known—how Europe’s modernized states called up their young men in unprecedented numbers, armed them with unprecedented weapons, and bent their vast energies to unprecedented slaughter. Before 1914, some intellectuals had argued that great-power war had become impossible because the world’s economies were now so interlinked that the moment war broke out all of them would collapse, ending the conflict. By 1918, though, the lesson seemed to be that only those states that could effectively harness their vast, complex economies could survive the strains of twentieth-century total war.

Figure 10.8. The world at war, 1914–1991. Gray shading shows the United States and its major allies around 1980; the Soviet Union and its major allies are indicated by diagonal lines.

The war seemed to have shown that the advantage lay with liberal, democratic states, whose citizens were most fully committed to the struggle. Back in the first millennium BCE, Easterners and Westerners had all learned that dynastic empires were the most effective organizations for waging war; now, in the space of a single decade, they learned that these dynastic empires—history’s most enduring form of government, with an unbroken heritage from Assyria, Persia, and Qin—were no longer compatible with war.

First to go was China’s Qing dynasty. Mired in debt, defeat, and disorder, the boy emperor Puyi’s ministers lost control of the army as early as 1911, but when the rebel general Yuan Shikai promoted himself to emperor in 1916—as rebel generals had been doing for two thousand years—he found that he could not hold the country together either. Another military clique restored Puyi in 1917, with no better results. China’s imperial history ended a few days later, if not with a whimper then with just a very small bang: a single airplane dropped a bomb on the Forbidden City in Beijing, Puyi was deposed again, and the country descended into anarchy.

Next was Russia’s Romanov dynasty. Defeat by Japan had almost toppled Tsar Nicholas in 1905, but the First World War finished the job. In 1917 liberals swept his family from power and in 1918 Bolsheviks shot them. Germany’s Hohenzollerns and Austria’s Habsburgs quickly followed, escaping the Romanovs’ fate only by fleeing their homelands. In Turkey the Ottomans limped on, but only until 1922.

Despite the destruction, World War I strengthened Western rule by sweeping away Europe’s archaic dynastic empires and leaving China weaker than ever. The big winners seemed to be France and above all Britain, who not only gobbled up German colonies and pushed their oceanic empires still farther into Africa, the Pacific, and the oil fields of the old Ottoman Empire, but also bullied their Eastern ally Japan into handing over most of the German colonies it had captured. By 1919 more than a third of the world’s landmass and almost a third of its population were ruled from either London or Paris.

Yet the great swaths of color that still marked these empires in older atlases when I was a schoolboy were misleading. As well as strengthening Western power, the war redistributed it. Europe had fought beyond its means and the bills overwhelmed even British credit. Inflation hit 22 percent in 1920; the next year unemployment passed 11 percent. Eighty-six million worker-days were lost to strikes. The sun still never set on the British Empire, but it was struggling to stay open for business.

To pay its debts Britain hemorrhaged capital, most of it flowing across the Atlantic. The war had been hell, but the United States had had a hell of a war, emerging as both workshop and banker to the world. Back in the fifteenth century the Western core had shifted from the Mediterranean toward western Europe and in the seventeenth it had shifted again toward the oceanic empires of the northwest. Now, in the twentieth, it moved once more as northwest Europe’s bankrupt oceanic empires lost out to a North American empire.

The United States had turned itself into a new kind of organization, one we might call a subcontinental empire. Unlike traditional dynastic empires, it had no ancient aristocracy ruling downtrodden peasants; unlike Europe’s oceanic empires, it had no small, liberal, industrialized homeland holding dominion over palm and pine. Rather, after almost exterminating its native population, fighting a brutal civil war, and pushing millions of ex-slaves back into virtual serfdom, Euro-Americans had spread democratic citizenship from sea to shining sea, with prosperous farmers feeding a massive industrial heartland in the northeast and upper Midwest and buying its goods. By 1914 this subcontinental American Empire already rivaled Europe’s oceanic empires, and after 1918 its businessmen went global.

The giant sucking sound of European wealth rushing into the United States astonished contemporaries. An American secretary of state observed, “The financial center of the world, which required thousands of years to journey from the banks of the Euphrates to the Thames and the Seine, seems [to be] passing to the Hudson between daybreak and dark.” By 1929 Americans held more than $15 billion in foreign investments, almost as much as Britons had owned in 1913, and their global trade was worth almost 50 percent more.

The golden age of global capitalism seemed reborn under American leadership, but there was one crucial difference. Before 1914, thought Keynes, “the influence of London on credit conditions throughout the world was so predominant that the Bank of England could almost have claimed to be the conductor of the international orchestra,” but after 1918 the United States was unwilling to take on the job. Fleeing Europe’s contagious rivalries and wars, American politicians left the conductor’s podium empty, withdrawing into political isolation worthy of eighteenth-century China or Japan. While times were good the orchestra improvised and muddled through, but when they turned bad its music became cacophony.

In October 1929 a little bungling, a lot of bad luck, and the absence of a conductor turned an American stock market bubble into an international financial disaster. Contagion raced through the capitalist world: banks folded, credit evaporated, and currencies collapsed. Few starved, but by Christmas 1932 one American worker in four was jobless. In Germany it was closer to one in two. Lines of the gray-faced unemployed stretched out, “gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as animals in a trap,” the English journalist George Orwell thought. “They simply could not understand what was happening to them.”

At least until the mid-1930s everything the liberal democracies did just made things worse. Not only did it seem that the paradox of development had laid the Western core low; it also looked as if the advantages of backwardness were coming into play elsewhere. Russia, for centuries a rather backward periphery, had been reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like the United States, it joined a burgeoning industrial core to a vast agricultural hinterland, but unlike the United States, it promoted state ownership, collective agriculture, and central planning. The Soviet Union mobilized its people more like a modern Western state than like an old dynastic empire, yet its autocrats Lenin and Stalin ruled more like tsars than democratic presidents.

The Soviet Union was a kind of anti-America—a subcontinental empire, but decidedly illiberal. Stalin preached equality but built a centralized economy by forcibly transporting millions of his comrades around his empire and locking another million in gulags. Ideologically suspect ethnic groups and class enemies (often the same thing) were purged. And unlike the failing capitalist economies, the successful Soviet Union did let 10 million of its subjects starve. Yet Stalin was clearly doing something right, for while capitalist industry collapsed between 1928 and 1937, Soviet output quadrupled. “I have seen the future, and it works,” the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously told his fellow Americans after visiting the Soviet Union.*

By 1930 it seemed to many that the real lesson of World War I was not that liberal democracy was the shape of the future: it was that the Anglo-Franco-American alliance had won in spite of, not because of, its liberalism. The real answer was subcontinental empire, and the less liberal, the better. Japan, which had profited so much from following liberal models, abandoned them when global markets and its trade-oriented economy went into a tailspin. With unemployment soaring, democracy floundering, and Communist agitation growing, militarists stepped in, baying for an empire Japan could live off. The army—particularly its radical junior officers—went haywire, exploiting the Western democracies’ disarray and China’s civil wars to annex Manchuria and push toward Beijing. “It is only by bringing about Japanese-Manchurian cooperation and Japanese-Chinese friendship,” a lieutenant-colonel explained, “that the Japanese people can become rulers of Asia and be prepared to wage the final and decisive war against the various white races.”

Up to a point, militarism paid off. Japan’s economy grew by 72 percent in the 1930s; steel output rose eighteenfold. But once again the costs were high. “Cooperation” and “friendship” often meant enslavement and slaughter, and even by the low, dishonest standards of the 1930s, Japanese brutality was shocking. Further, by 1940 it was clear that conquest had not solved Japan’s problems, since the war consumed resources even faster than it captured them. Of every five gallons of oil the battleships and bombers burned, four had to be bought from Westerners. The army’s plan—keep conquering—brought no relief, and with China becoming a quagmire, an even more alarming naval plan gained traction: to strike into Southeast Asia and liberate its oil and rubber from Western imperialists, even if that meant war with America.

Most alarming of all was the plan coming out of Germany. Defeat, unemployment, and financial collapse scarred the heirs of Goethe and Kant so deeply that they were ready to listen even to a madman blaming the Jews and peddling the panacea of conquest. “The first cause of the stability of our currency is the concentration camp,” Adolf Hitler assured his finance minister as he brutalized and banished Germany’s Jewish business class and threw trade unionists into jail. Yet there was method in Hitler’s madness: deficit spending, state ownership, and rearmament wiped out unemployment and doubled industrial output during the 1930s.

Hitler openly trumpeted his plan to secure Germany’s western flank by defeating the oceanic empires and then to replace eastern Europe’s Slavs and Jews with sturdy Aryan farmers. His vision of a subcontinental empire centered on Germany went beyond illiberal to downright genocidal; and few Westerners could believe he really meant it. Their self-deception brought on the one thing they most wished to avoid, another all-out war. For a few dark months it looked—for the first time since 1812—like a land empire might unite Europe after all, but in an uncanny echo of Napoleon, Hitler was turned back at the English Channel, in the snows of Moscow, and in the deserts of Egypt. Overreaching, he tried to fold Japan’s War of the East into his own War of the West, but instead of knocking Britain out of the war this only brought the United States in. War made bedfellows of the liberal American and illiberal Soviet empires, and despite looting the minerals and labor of Europe and the East, Germany and Japan could not resist these empires’ combined money, manpower, and manufactures.

In April 1945 American and Soviet troops joined hands in Germany, embracing, drinking toasts, and dancing together; days later Hitler shot himself and Germany surrendered. In August, as fire rained from the skies and atomic bombs turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into ash, Japan’s god-king broke with all tradition to speak to his people directly. Making what gets my vote as history’s greatest understatement, he informed them, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” Even then die-hard generals attempted a coup in the hope of fighting on, but on September 2 Japan surrendered too.

Nineteen forty-five simultaneously ended Japan’s attempt to win the War of the East and expel the Western imperialists, and Germany’s to create a subcontinental empire in Europe, but it also ended the western European oceanic empires. Too drained by total war to resist nationalist revolts any longer, these melted away within a generation. Europe was shattered. Its “economic, social and political collapse,” one American officer mused in 1945, seemed “unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire.”

Western social development did not collapse in 1945, though, because the core was by now so big that not even the greatest war ever fought could wreck all of it. The Soviets had rebuilt their industries beyond Germany’s reach, and bombs had barely touched the United States.* By contrast, the devastation visited by Japan on China and by the United States on Japan had gutted the Eastern core, with the consequence that the Second World War—like the First—made Western rule still stronger. There seemed little doubt that Western dominance was here to stay; the question was whether its leadership would be Soviet or American.

These two empires divided the old European core between them, splitting Germany down the middle. American moneymen then hashed out a new international financial system for capitalism and crafted the Marshall Plan, perhaps the most enlightened piece of self-interest on record. If Europeans had money in their pockets, Americans reasoned, they could buy American food, import American machinery to rebuild their own industry, and—most important of all—restrain themselves from voting Communist; so America simply gave them $13.5 billion, one-twentieth of its entire 1948 production.

Western Europeans mostly grabbed America’s money, accepted its military leadership, and joined or drifted toward a democratic, pro-trade European union.^† (The irony of the United States nudging Europeans toward a pale version of a land empire under West German industrial domination was lost on no one.) Eastern Europeans accepted Soviet military leadership and a Communist, inward-turned Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Instead of pumping resources into eastern Europe and promoting democracy, the Soviets pumped resources out and jailed or shot their opponents, but even so, eastern European output regained prewar levels by 1949. In the American sphere things went better still, and with remarkably few jailings or shootings, output doubled between 1948 and 1964.

The American and Soviet empires were not the first to share the Western core, but atomic weapons made them different from all their predecessors. The Soviets tested a bomb in 1949 and by 1954 both sides had hydrogen bombs a thousand times more violent than the weapon that eviscerated Hiroshima—as far beyond it, Churchill wrote in his diary, as the “atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow.” A Kremlin report concluded that war might “create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”

Yet the mushroom cloud had a silver lining: “Strange as it may seem,” Churchill told the British Parliament, “it is to the universality of potential destruction that I think we may look with hope and even confidence.” The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction had been born, and although a string of terrifying slip-ups brought the world several times to the brink of Armageddon, in the end the West fought no Third World War.

Instead, it fought a war in the Third World over the ruins of the western European and Japanese empires, waged mostly through proxies (normally rural revolutionaries for the Soviets and thuggish dictators for the Americans). On the face of it, this should have been a walkover for the United States, which bestrode the globe even more colossally than Britain had done a century earlier. In the East in particular, Washington apparently held all the cards. Pumping half a billion dollars into Japan, it created a loyal, prosperous ally, and backed by generous American aid a Nationalist army looked set to defeat Mao Zedong’s Communists and finally end China’s civil war.

The Nationalists’ abrupt collapse in 1949 changed everything, turning the East into the hottest spot of the now-cold War of the West. Stalin encouraged North Korea to invade America’s client state South Korea, and when things went badly Mao joined in too. By the time the fighting ground to a halt in 1953, 4 million people had died (including one of Mao’s sons) and guerrilla wars were raging in the Philippines, Malaya, and Indochina. American proxies won the first two, as well as a struggle in Indonesia, but by 1968 half a million Americans were on the ground in Vietnam—and losing.

These struggles were simultaneously fronts in the Soviet-American War of the West and wars of national liberation, but were in no sense a renewed War of the East. China and Japan, the East’s great powers, saw little to gain from expansion after 1945. China had troubles enough at home, while Japan—in an irony every bit as odd as West Germany’s successes in Europe—was busy achieving peacefully many of the goals it had sought violently in 1941. Brilliantly exploiting American support, Japan took advantage of the destruction of its old industries to reorganize, mechanize, and find profitable niches. By 1969 Japan’s economy overtook West Germany’s, and through the 1970s it steadily gained on the United States.

By then the United States was feeling the strain of the multifront Cold War. Despite dropping more bombs on Vietnam than it had on Germany, America suffered a humiliating defeat, dividing opinion at home and wounding its influence abroad. Soviet proxies started winning wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and even America’s successes turned to ashes. Eastern clients that the United States had so assiduously built up were now doing so well that they were invading American markets, while the European allies it defended at such expense now talked of disarmament and going nonaligned. By making Israel a client, Washington drove Arab governments toward the Soviets; and when Israel repulsed Arab invasions in 1973, Arab oil embargoes and price hikes set loose the new monster of stagflation—simultaneous stagnation and inflation.

When I was a teenager in 1970s Britain, my friends and I talked casually of the coming American collapse as we sat around wearing American jeans, watching American films, and playing American guitars. So far as I remember, none of us ever saw a contradiction in this, and I’m pretty certain that it never crossed our minds that far from witnessing the end of the American Empire, we were actually doing our bit to win the War of the West for Washington. The decisive front, it would soon emerge, was not in Vietnam or Angola. It was in the shopping malls.

THE AGE OF EVERYTHING

“Let’s be frank about it,” Britain’s prime minister told voters in 1957. “Most of our people have never had it so good.” The British might have lost an empire and failed to find a role, but, like increasing numbers of people around the world, they at least had lots of things. By the 1960s luxuries that had not even existed a century before—radios, televisions, record players, cars, refrigerators, telephones, electric lights (and, what I remember best, the plastic toys)—were everyday items in the Western core (Figure 10.9).

It struck some as an age of vulgarity, a world, one poet put it, where

… residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,*

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come.

Figure 10.9. Never had it so good: the author and his toys, Christmas Day, 1964

Suburbs and satellite cities unfolded around every exit ramp and bypass, from America’s Levittown to Britain’s Telford, offending the aesthetes with their boxiness and monotony; but they gave the people what we wanted—a little space, indoor plumbing, and garages for our shiny Fords.

The twentieth century was the age of everything, of material abundance beyond the dreams of avarice. Cheap coal and oil generated electricity for all, turning on engines and lighting up houses at the flick of a switch. More than two thousand years earlier Aristotle had observed that slaves would always be with us, unless people had automata—self-moving machines—to do the work for them. Now his fantasy came true, electricity giving even the humblest among us the equivalent of dozens of slaves to fulfill our every demand for entertainment, warmth, and—particularly—food.

This energy revolution turned the sixteenth century’s fairy tales of endless feasts into reality. Between 1500 and 1900 wheat yields had roughly doubled in the Western core, thanks to better-organized farming and more draft animals and manure, but by the 1890s farmers were reaching the limits of ingenuity. Adding more animals could drive up productivity only so far, and by 1900 a quarter of North America’s farmland was being used to feed horses. Then gasoline came to the rescue. America’s first tractor factory opened in 1905, and by 1927 tractors provided as much energy on American farms as horses.

There was no gain without pain. Half of all Americans worked the soil in 1875, but a century later only one in fifty did. Machines ate men, tractoring whole communities off land that could be worked more profitably by a few hired hands and diesel engines. “Snub-nosed monsters,” the novelist John Steinbeck called the tractors, “raising dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines.”

Steinbeck anticipated the wretched of the earth rising in revolution, but when the tidal waves of dispossession that swept surplus Okies westward and black cotton pickers northward receded, most migrants found city jobs that paid better than the rural grind they had fled. The agrobusinessmen who had displaced them now sold them cheap food and invested the profits in chemical fertilizers and herbicides, electric motors to pump water to dry fields, and eventually genetically modified crops that could withstand almost anything. By 2000 each acre of American farmland absorbed eighty times more energy than it had in 1900 and yielded four times as much food.

Where America went today, the world followed tomorrow. A “green revolution” quadrupled global food production between 1950 and 2000. Prices fell steadily, meat replaced grains in diets, and—except when disaster, stupidity, and brutality intervened—starvation was steadily banished.

Like all organisms, humans converted extra energy into offspring, and the world’s population almost quadrupled along with the food supply in the twentieth century. But in other ways humans departed from the norm. Instead of turning their entire energy windfall into new bodies, they hoarded some of it in their own bodies. On average, adults were 50 percent bigger by 2000 than they had been in 1900. They grew four inches taller, filled out, and had more energy for work. Growing more robust organs and carrying more fat (in rich countries, too much fat), these bigger humans could resist more disease and trauma. Modern Americans and western Europeans typically live thirty years longer than their great-grandparents and enjoy an extra decade or two before their eyes, ears, and other organs weaken and arthritis freezes their joints. In much of the rest of the world, including China and Japan, life spans have lengthened by closer to forty years. Even in Africa, plagued by AIDS and malaria, average life expectancy was twenty years higher in 2009 than it was around 1900.

The human body has changed more in the last hundred years than in the previous fifty thousand, and—particularly in rich countries—people have learned to intervene to correct the failings that remained. Europeans had been using eyeglasses since 1300, but these now spread all over the globe. Doctors invented new techniques to salvage hearing, keep hearts pumping, reattach limbs, and even intervene in cells. Public health programs eradicated smallpox and measles as mass killers; garbage collection and clean drinking water did still more.

Figure 10.10, showing what kinds of chronic conditions afflicted veterans from the United States Army, gives a sense of just how much health has improved. Veterans may not be the ideal subset of humanity to study, given the violence of their line of work, but thanks to obsessive military record-keeping they are the best subset we have, and the improvements are stunning.

These veterans were mostly men, but women’s lives changed even more. Throughout history, women had been baby-making machines. Because half of their babies died in their first year (most, in fact, in their first week) and only half of those who survived childhood made it to their fortieth birthdays, maintaining a stable population (rearing two offspring to adulthood to replace a mother and her mate) required the average woman to give birth about five times, spending most of her adult life pregnant and/or nursing. But in the twentieth century this high-mortality, low-technology world collapsed.

Figure 10.10. Be all that you can be: the health of United States Army veterans, 1910–1988

Even before 1900 bigger, better-fed, stronger women were bearing sturdier babies, feeding them more, and keeping them cleaner. Fewer of their young died, so population grew explosively—until women brought their fertility under control. People had always had ways to avoid conception (legend has it that the eighteenth-century lover Casanova made his own condoms by cutting lemons in half) and birth rates were falling in the richest countries by 1900, but in the twentieth century American technology rose to this challenge too. In 1920 came latex condoms; in 1960 the oral contraceptive; and in rich countries the birth rate dropped below the replacement level of two per couple.

As healthier children and the pill released women from lifetimes of breeding, cheap electrical heating coils for irons and toasters and little motors for washing machines and vacuum cleaners released them from household drudgery too. Pressing a button took care of tasks that previously called for hours of tedious labor. A woman’s work was still never done, but by 1960 she could jump in the car (almost every American family had one), drive to the supermarket (where two-thirds of the country’s food was sold), store her purchases in the refrigerator (98 percent of houses had them), and put the laundry on before the two or three kids got back from school and settled in front of the TV.

The changes freed women for work outside the home in an economy rapidly shifting from manufacturing toward services, shedding blue-collar labor but crying out for pink-collar workers. In the richest countries the proportion of women in paid jobs and higher education rose steadily after 1960, and, like every era before it, this age got the thought it needed. Books such as The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics urged middle-class American women to seek fulfillment outside their traditional roles. In 1968 a hundred protestors broke up the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. By the 1990s men were actually sharing housework and parenting (even if their wives and girlfriends generally still did more).

As early as 1951 an American sociologist named David Riesman saw where things were heading. In a story called “The Nylon Wars,” simultaneously celebrating and mocking American consumerism, he imagined strategists advising the president that “if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners.” The United States drops stockings and cigarettes on the Soviet Union and communism at once collapses.

Reality was almost as strange as fiction. In 1958 the Soviet Union and United States, each confident of overawing the other with its industrial strength, agreed to hold manufacturing expositions in each other’s country. To the first, in New York, the Soviets sent tractors, trucks, and mock-ups of rockets to convince the capitalists that resistance was futile. In 1959 the United States struck back brilliantly, dispatching Richard Nixon (then vice president) to Moscow to superintend a fifty-thousand-square-foot exhibit of American home appliances, including an exact copy of a new tract house from Long Island. While puzzled Muscovites looked on, Nixon and Khrushchev squared off across a Westinghouse washing machine.

“Anything that makes women work less is good,” Nixon opened, but Khrushchev was ready for him. “You want to keep your women in the kitchen,” he countered. “We don’t think of women in those terms. We think better of them.” Possibly so; more women worked outside the home in the Soviet Union than in the United States. On the other hand, another decade would pass before even half of Soviet households owned a washing machine. After taking the bus back from her factory job, the typical Soviet wife did an additional twenty-eight hours of housework per week. Only one apartment in eight had a vacuum cleaner, though perhaps, good Communists all, the comrades shared them.

Nixon responded with a paean to free enterprise. “We don’t have one decision made at the top by one government office,” he explained. “We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice … Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets? … We won’t thrust it [our lifestyle] upon you,” he concluded, “but your grandchildren will see it.”

Nixon was right. In 1959 Khrushchev simply denied that American workers lived in such houses, but by the 1980s his grandchildren could see they were being lied to. In a way, the paradox of development was to blame again: most Soviet citizens did now have washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but they also had radios, televisions, and black-market rock music records. They could see for themselves that Americans were pulling even further ahead. A joke started doing the rounds. A train, it said, is carrying former Soviet leaders across the steppes. Suddenly the train stops. Acting true to form, Stalin jumps up and shouts: “Flog the driver!” The driver is flogged but the train does not move. Khrushchev then orders: “Rehabilitate the driver!” This is done, but still nothing happens. Then Brezhnev smiles and suggests: “Let’s just pretend the train is moving.”

It was bad enough that the subjects of the Soviet Empire could turn on their televisions and see people like me with my guitars and jeans, but what was catastrophic was that they could see that a whole new phase of the industrial revolution was beginning, driven by information technology and generating even greater wealth for those on the right side of the Iron Curtain. The first American computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), had been unveiled in 1946. It weighed thirty tons and used so much electricity that when it was switched on, lights all over Philadelphia dimmed. Over the next thirty years, International Business Machines (IBM) sold smaller but still monstrous machines to the West’s corporations, but the real transformation followed the invention of the microprocessor in 1971.

As so often, the innovators came from the fringes of the elite—in this case, not from ultrarespectable firms such as IBM but, like Steve Wozniak, from garages in places such as suburban Menlo Park in California. Starting with just $91,000 capital and a few geeky friends, Wozniak and his business partner Steve Jobs released their Apple I microcomputer into the world in 1976. By 1982 Apple’s sales had reached $583 million and IBM had invented the Personal Computer to compete. By then the Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded Microsoft and relocated to the West Coast. Computing moved into every office and home, getting cheaper and easier every year. It even became fun.

Computers changed how the Western core entertained itself, did business, and waged war. By 1985 there was no walk of Western life computers had not touched—except in the Soviet Empire. Pretending the train was moving was no longer an option.

THE PEOPLE’S PARADISE

Nor was it an option in the East, where America’s client states were rapidly pulling away from Communist China. Japan, followed by Taiwan and South Korea, swiftly moved up the economic food chain from the plastic toys I so appreciated in the 1960s to heavy industry and electronics, and as they did so, other Eastern nations (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand) took their places at the bottom of the ladder. All over the East wages rose. Lives lengthened; babies fattened up; bigger apartments filled with gadgets. There were far fewer televisions in China than in the Soviet Union, but the policy makers in Beijing saw all too clearly the threat posed by outposts of prosperity around their east coast. These “Asian Tigers,” as they became known, were an affront. All had more or less one-party rule and all shared China’s Confucian and Buddhist background. So if neither authoritarianism nor Eastern cultural traditions prevented meteoric growth, where could the problem lie except with communism itself ?

The century of civil war and factional fighting between the 1840s and 1940s had prevented China from following Japan’s rapid industrialization, but after his victory in 1949, Mao Zedong quickly adopted Lenin’s example and reorganized his realm as a subcontinental empire. Peace brought huge dividends, and just as had happened when the Sui dynasty reunited China in the sixth century, the Song in the tenth, and the Ming in the fourteenth, the economy revived. The Soviet-style Five Year Plan that Mao launched when the Korean War petered out was much less effective than the Asian Tigers’ capitalism, but it still more than doubled industrial output and pushed real wages up by a third. Life expectancy at birth soared from thirty-six years in 1950 to fifty-seven in 1957.

There is good reason to think the Chinese economy would have continued growing strongly through the 1960s and ’70s if Mao had let it, but, like so many earlier Chinese emperors, Mao mistrusted his bureaucrats. The spurious laws of economics, he insisted, must yield to the truer laws of Marxism, but his planners—with their slide rules and graphs—seemed suspiciously bourgeois. Only when the indomitable will of the masses was unleashed, Mao insisted, would the people’s paradise be established.

Mao had come of intellectual age in the 1910s, reading Marx (and Spencer); he was a long-term lock-in theorist, convinced that Eastern inferiority had been set in stone centuries ago. The answer, he decided, was to sweep away the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. Even the family had to go: “The dearest people in the world are our parents,” the China Youth Journal explained, “yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party … which has given us everything.” Proclaiming a “Great Leap Forward” in which China would catch up with the West, Mao bundled 99 percent of the population into collective farms with thousands of members. In some places, utopianism ran riot:

The Party Secretary of Paoma town announced in October 1958 that Socialism would end on November 7th and Communism would begin on November 8th. After the meeting, everyone immediately took to the streets and began grabbing goods out of the shops. When the shelves were bare, they went to other people’s homes and took their chickens and vegetables home to eat. People even stopped making a distinction as to which children belonged to whom. Only wives were safe from this sharing because the Party Secretary was unsure about this.

In other places, cynicism prevailed. Some called this the Eat-It-All-Up Period: with every incentive to work and save taken away, many people did neither.

Pressured from higher up to report bigger harvests even though yields were falling, party officials did so and then confiscated ever-larger slices of production to justify their figures. “It is not that there is no food,” one commissar insisted. “There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.”

To make matters worse, Mao fell out with Khrushchev. Cut off from Soviet aid, he tried to match Western steel production by pulling 40 million peasants off the land to build backyard foundries, smelting whatever ores they could find locally and even melting their pots and pans to forge homemade steel. Little of what they produced was usable, but no one dared say so.

The countryside became increasingly surreal. “The air,” said one reporter, “is filled with the high-pitched melodies of local operas pouring through an amplifier above the site and accompanied by the hum of blowers, the panting of gasoline engines, the honking of heavily laden lorries, and the bellowing of oxen hauling ore and coal.”

“Communism is paradise,” the peasants were expected to sing; “the People’s Communes are the bridge to it.” But there was trouble in paradise. When not singing, the people were starving. The following recollection is unusual only in its dispassionate tone:

No one in our family died. By February 1960, Grandpa’s legs were completely swollen. His hair fell out, his body was covered in sores, and he was too weak to open his mouth. A friend came by and drained off some of the sores and this helped. We still had three small goats and an aunt killed two of them secretly to help him. Unfortunately, the cadres discovered this and took the carcasses away.

Even so, Grandpa was lucky. According to another informant,

The worst thing that happened during the famine was this: parents would decide to allow the old and the young to die first … a mother would say to her daughter, “You have to go and see your granny in heaven.” They stopped giving the girl-children food. They just gave them water … One woman was reported and arrested by the Public Security Bureau. No one in the village criticized her when she returned from a labor camp a few years later.

About 20 million starved between 1958 and 1962. After Mao’s death, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party officially concluded that the Great Helmsman had been right 70 percent of the time and wrong 30 percent, but around 1960 the party was much less convinced of this. A technocratic clique sidelined Mao and reintroduced some private property. By 1965 harvests had returned to 1957 levels.

Mao, though, was not beaten. China, like the West, had gone through a postwar baby boom, spawning a huge cohort of impatient teenagers. Affluent youngsters in the liberal Western core exploited their purchasing power to reorient taste around their music, clothes, and sexual mores, but in China Mao reoriented the tastes of angry youngsters around himself. Preaching a permanent “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” in 1966 he incited the young to attack everything.

Abandoning schools and colleges, millions of adolescents became rampaging Red Guards, beating and humiliating first their teachers and then anyone else who looked reactionary. While Western youths sang about revolution, Chinese youths lived it. “It was class hatred that made me denounce [my classmate] Li Jianping,” one literature student proudly wrote on a poster,

and that drove the masses to such popular fury. They beat her—a counterrevolutionary element sheltered by the old municipal party committee for so many years—to death with their clubs. It was an immensely satisfying event, to avenge the revolutionary people, to avenge the dead martyrs. Next I am going to settle scores with those bastards who shelter traitors.

Mao tried to direct this rage against his rivals but never really controlled it. With no one safe from denunciation as a counterrevolutionary, people rushed to get their criticisms in first. To many it was just bewildering: one latrine attendant grumbled that he was out of work because too many professors were being forced to clean toilets as reeducation. Yet plenty found it exhilarating. Young workers flocked to join the students and factories ground to a halt. Red Guards invited film crews to record them smashing Buddhist statues, Confucian temples, and Han dynasty relics. One gang even occupied the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and appointed its own properly proletarian diplomats.

In 1969, with events apparently lurching toward disaster on the scale of the Great Leap Forward, even Mao lost his nerve. Thousands had died. Millions had had their lives ruined. The Asian Tigers were steadily pulling away from the People’s Republic. Relations with the Soviets were so bad that eight hundred Chinese had been killed in border clashes. Mao belatedly distanced himself from the radicals and looked around for a lifeline.

He was thrown one by perhaps the least likely person on earth—the United States’ virulently anti-Communist president Richard Nixon. Nixon saw a deal with China as a way to outflank the Soviets in the Cold War, and in 1972, after much back-channel diplomacy, he flew to Beijing and shook Mao’s hand. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon crowed, and in some ways he was right. The prospect of a Washington-Beijing axis terrified Brezhnev so much that within three months of going to China, Nixon was sitting in Moscow making deals.

Mao profited almost as much. By meeting Nixon he signaled support for the pragmatists who hungered after Western technology and opposition to the radicals who had gutted China’s educated classes. In one celebrated case, a student won a coveted university place by turning in a blank examination book with a note claiming that revolutionary purity was more valuable than “bookworms who for many years have been taking it easy and have done nothing useful.” In a flourish that Soviet jokers might have appreciated, radical bigwigs (allegedly) argued that “a socialist train behind schedule is better than a revisionist train on schedule.”

After 1972 the pragmatists pushed back, although it was only after Mao died in 1976 that the tide turned decisively in their favor. Deng Xiaoping, twice purged as a Right Deviationist under Mao and twice rehabilitated, now muscled his rivals aside and showed his true colors. Taking Mao’s old mantra “seek truth from facts” as his motto, Deng squarely confronted the most inconvenient truth in China: that the population was growing faster than the economy. To feed all the empty stomachs that came onto the job market each year, China’s economy needed to grow by 7 percent every year for at least a generation. The alternative could be famines that would dwarf the Great Leap Forward.

Every experience suggested that given peace and a united government—both largely lacking since the 1840s—China, too, could prosper within the Western-dominated global economy, but Deng went further still, actively pushing China toward integration. To reduce the pressure on resources, he promoted the notorious One Child Policy, which (in theory) required women who had two babies to be sterilized,* and to increase the resources available he embraced the global economy. China joined the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, opened Special Economic Zones to attract capitalists from Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and even admitted a Coca-Cola plant to Shanghai.

By 1983 Deng had effectively killed Mao’s communes. Peasants were pursuing “sideline” activities for personal gain and businessmen were keeping some of their profits. Farmland still belonged to collectives but families could now lease plots for thirty years and work them privately. Urban property, on longer leases, could even be mortgaged. Output soared, and although liberalization horrified conservatives, there was no going back. “During the ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Deng pronounced,

there was a view that poor communism was preferable to rich capitalism … Because I refuted that view, I was brought down … [but] the main task of socialism is to develop the productive forces, steadily improve the life of the people, and keep increasing the material wealth of the society … To get rich is no sin.

Similar thoughts were also assailing Communists four thousand miles away in Moscow. After the shock of Nixon’s trip to China the 1970s had gone rather well for the Soviet Union. When the Arab states drove up the price of oil, the Soviet Union, a massive exporter, benefited too, and with money rolling in, Moscow funded and won a series of proxy wars and overtook America in nuclear arms in 1978. But that was communism’s high tide. An intervention to prop up a client regime in Afghanistan turned into a draining war that dragged on through the 1980s. Oil prices fell by two-thirds, and the United States sharply increased military spending, especially on high-tech weapons.

The politburo was already worried that ordinary Russians could see their train was standing still. Its state-run economy could churn out tanks and Kalashnikovs but not computers or cars (another Soviet joke—“How do you double a Lada’s* value?” The answer: “Fill up the tank”). Dissent was simmering everywhere. The thought of a new arms race terrified the Soviet Empire’s rulers.

“We can’t go on living like this,” Mikhail Gorbachev confessed to his wife, Raisa, as they paced their garden in 1985. Gorbachev would, in a few hours, be named premier of the Soviet Union, yet the garden was the only place he could escape his own snooping spies. Like Deng, Gorbachev knew he had to face reality. The explosion of an antiquated nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 revealed that the Soviet Union was not just falling behind but actually falling apart, and Gorbachev threw restructuring (perestroika) and transparency (glasnost’) into high gear—only to rediscover what Marx and Engels had known a century and a half before: liberalization sweeps away all fixed, fast-frozen relations, not just those we dislike.

All that was solid melted into air, and Deng and Gorbachev both learned that economic freedoms merely whetted appetites for political ones. Sometimes Deng found the protesters useful allies against hard-line Communists; sometimes he cracked down on them. Gorbachev, though, suspected that trying to use force could cause the whole regime to collapse. When he allowed open elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in spring 1989 and the deputies repaid this by jeering him on live television, he declined to suspend Congress. Instead he flew to Beijing, where protestors against one-party rule cheered him. “In the Soviet Union they have Gorbachev,” one student poster read. “In China, we have whom?”

Deng, not amused, declared martial law the day after Gorbachev left. By early June 1989 a million protestors were crammed around Tiananmen Square, some dancing and singing, some dying on hunger strike. Deng branded them the “dregs of society,” people determined to “establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West,” and sent in the troops. Pictures flashed around the world of torn bodies, crushed bicycles, and a lone, unknown protestor blocking the path of advancing tanks.

Repression won in China, but even when Hungary and Poland announced multiparty elections, Gorbachev still resisted Deng’s lead. Following what one minister called the Sinatra Doctrine, he left the Soviet satellites to do it their way. So astonished was the newly elected Polish prime minister that he fainted during his own inauguration. Testing the limits, Hungarian troops rolled up the barbed wire along their border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans “vacationing” in Hungary abandoned their cars and walked across the border to freedom.

And still Gorbachev did nothing. When he visited Berlin in October, crowds again cheered him and begged him to stay. Over the next few weeks East Germans started dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and chipping at it with hammers and chisels. When no one shot them, thousands crossed into West Berlin. Confused and incompetent, the East German regime disintegrated. Over the next few months Communist dictators all across eastern Europe went the same way and the nations bundled together within the Soviet Union started declaring independence. When even the president of the new Russian Federation announced his intention to quit the union, Gorbachev was left as general secretary of an empire that no longer existed. On Christmas Day, 1991, he bowed to pressure to sign a decree formally dissolving it. The end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.

The United States had won the War of the West.

EAST WIND, WEST WIND

When dynastic empires proved unable to cope with total war, almost vanishing from the earth between 1917 and 1922, the United States had shown itself a very reluctant leviathan, but when communism proved equally inadequate between 1989 and 1991, Americans were ready to fill the void. Every two years, the Department of Defense reviews its grand strategy in a report called the Defense Planning Guidance. The first draft of the report due in March 1992, just three months after the fall of the Soviet Union, laid out a bold new vision:

Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This … requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

When “an official who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain” (as The New York Times put it) leaked this draft, the government quickly softened its tone, but something very like the original vision of a world with the United States as its sole superpower came to pass all the same.

The old Soviet Union imploded in a scramble to loot its assets. The breakdown was not as bad as the civil war that had followed the fall of the Romanovs, but Russia, the main successor state, nevertheless saw output fall 40 percent in the 1990s and real wages 45 percent. In 1970 the average Soviet citizen died at sixty-eight, just four years younger than the average western European; by 2000 the average Russian died at sixty-six, twelve years behind residents of the European Union. Russia was still enormous, resource-rich, and the world’s biggest nuclear power, and by 2008 the return of strong government and rising energy prices had emboldened it into bullying the former Soviet republics and blackmailing the European Union. But as the Defense Planning Guidance had hoped, Russia posed nothing like the threat of the old Soviet Union.

Nor did the European Union challenge America’s dominance of the Western core. To some viewers Europe’s lurches toward (then away from) economic and political integration looked like steps toward a mighty subcontinental empire, finally achieving peacefully what the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Napoleon, and Hitler had failed to achieve through violence, but in reality Europe’s continuing divisions, slowing economic growth, aging population, and military weakness left it far from superpower status.

Southwest Asia featured in the 1992 planners’ minds largely because they feared a hostile state seizing the region’s oil fields, as Iraq tried to do in 1990. They ignored the Islamist extremism that had been growing since the 1970s, and (like almost everyone else) were blind-sided by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. But it was in the East that the planners’ assumptions proved most spectacularly wrong. Within weeks of the Defense Planning Guidance being leaked to the press, America’s major Eastern ally, Japan, plunged into recession and its major Eastern rival, China, took off.

A hundred and fifty years had passed since the West began turning the old Eastern core into a periphery, and the lessons were clear to all who had eyes to see. Given peace, responsible government, and willingness to bend to Western power, Easterners could turn the capitalist world economy to their own ends, converting the huge populations and learned elites that had struck nineteenth-century Westerners as evidence of Eastern backwardness into engines of economic growth. Since the 1840s China had had precious little peace, responsibility, or flexibility, but in the 1990s it began to take its rightful place in the global order.

From the unlikely podium of the back of a golf cart in the middle of a theme park, Deng announced that economic reform would no longer “proceed slowly like women with bound feet, but … [would] blaze a trail and press forward boldly.” The obstacles to red capitalism crumbled. When Mao and Nixon met in the early 1970s the typical American worker was nearly twenty times as productive as the typical undercapitalized Chinese laborer and the United States created 22 percent of the world’s goods compared with China’s 5 percent. Across the next thirty years American productivity continued to rise, but investment drove China’s up three times as fast. By 2000, American workers were less than seven times as productive as Chinese. The United States’ share of world production had barely changed, at 21 percent, but China’s had nearly tripled, to 14 percent.

China paid a terrible price for this growth. Virtually unregulated factories dumped waste at will, poisoning major rivers. Cancer rates along these waterways were often double the national average. Other rivers, tapped for equally unregulated agriculture, dried up altogether. Logging ran wild and deserts expanded twice as fast as before the 1970s. Protests against government incompetence and endemic corruption became increasingly violent; most years since 2000 the police have recorded around 25,000 “mass incidents” and far more small riots.

In return, though, Deng’s program headed off starvation and delivered big income gains. Country folk, who still make up two-thirds of China’s population, saw real wages rise about 6 percent per year. The gains, however, were concentrated along the eastern seaboard, and in dirt-poor inland villages the decline of Mao’s rudimentary but free education and health care often canceled them out. One result was the biggest migration in history: since the 1990s 150 million people have moved to the cities, creating the equivalent of a new Chicago every year. Relocating to a city typically raised a farmer’s income by 50 percent while simultaneously providing manufacturers with labor at a fraction of its cost in rich countries.

Between 1992 and 2007 China’s exports increased a dozen-fold and its trade surplus with the United States ballooned from $18 billion to $233 billion. In American discount stores such as Wal-Mart, Chinese-made goods typically filled 90 percent of the shelf space by 2008; rare was the American who did not don at least one piece of made-in-China clothing every morning. Business Week magazine observed that “the China price” had become “the three scariest words in U.S. industry.” Companies that could not match it went under.

Like nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century America, China became the workshop to the world. The financial journalist James Kynge describes overhearing a conversation on a train in Italy between two Chinese businessmen, sounding for all the world like a couple of Gradgrinds wrenched from the pages of Dickens:

The boss remarked that they had been traveling for an hour and a half and had hardly seen a single factory. “Foreigners like looking at scenery,” the young man offered. The boss paused for thought, then asked, “Scenery or production, which is more important?” … The boss’s curiosity ranged over many subjects … Why were foreigners so lazy? What was Europe going to do when it did not have much industry left? Could you really run an economy on services alone? Did European cows really consume two dollars a day in farm subsidies?

Half a century earlier, Mao had claimed, “The direction of the wind in the world has changed … At present, it is not the west wind that prevails over the east wind but the east wind that prevails over the west.” At the time, he was fooling himself; the 1950s East was very much under the West’s wing, divided between Soviet and American spheres. But by 2000 Mao’s words were coming true, albeit not in ways he had intended. Western social development was further ahead of Eastern—over three hundred points—than ever before, but whereas the ratio between the Western and Eastern score had been almost 2.4:1 in 1900, by 2000 it was only a little over 1.6:1. The twentieth century was both the high point of the Western age and the beginning of its end.

Figure 10.11. Knowing which way the wind blows: Was the twentieth century both the high point and the end point of Western rule? The West’s lead in social development increased from 101 points in 1900 to 336 in 2000, but the ratio between the Western and Eastern scores shrank by one-third, from 2.4:1 in 1900 to 1.6:1 in 2000.