A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (6 page)

At the same time, Ming China forbids its subjects to build oceangoing vessels or to leave the country. The
planet’s leading power decides yet again to avert its eyes from abroad. In so doing it cuts itself off all over again — and the rupture will endure for a considerable length of time — from the mercantile order.

No port in France, England, or Russia yet possesses the means to take over from Venice. In those countries the rulers spend recklessly, building monuments and exhausting themselves in fruitless warfare, while their bureaucracies wear themselves out trying to curb their expenses.

It is now that the caravel enters the picture: an outer jib, two square sails, and a lateen make of it a totally mobile vessel. Perfected in Portugal around 1430, it might have handed power to Portugal’s navigating rulers, ideally situated to explore the African coastline and link Flanders to the Mediterranean. But Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors are more eager for glory and salvation than for commerce.

Seville might also have become the third core. Castile and Aragon, now united under a single crown, are ideally situated to range over all the seas, from Flanders to the eastern Mediterranean. When the Genoese Christopher Columbus, seeking gold for the Spanish kings, stumbles upon a new continent full of promise, he might still have been able to make Spain the world’s premier power and Seville the new core of the mercantile order. But the Andalusian port (with its southerly neighbor Cadiz) lacks an agricultural hinterland, confidence in its own bankers, and the expert shipbuilders it needs. The city places too much trust in its military commanders. The Most Catholic Kings and their court think only of consuming, idly and unproductively, what
they steal in the Americas while slaughtering the natives. They foster no technology, no industry, no commercial networks. Worse: by expelling Spain’s Jews and Moriscos they discourage their own innovative classes, leaving the core to two ports in succession, ports which through the workings of dynastic chance have become at once provinces of the Hapsburg Empire and Spanish colonies — Antwerp, followed by Genoa.

Around 1500, one after another, these two cities will don the mantle of Venice after a century and half of the Serenissima’s reign. The cores of two short-lived forms, they share the sixteenth century between them. Lesson for the future: accessibility to foreign elites is one of the conditions of success.

First, around 1500, comes Antwerp’s day. Blessed with a rich hinterland where farmers raise the sheep that provide the wool Antwerp spins, over the past two centuries the city has traded Flemish linen, Zeeland salt, English cutlery, Flemish glassware, and German metals for products from the East. It still has only twenty thousand inhabitants when (around 1450) it becomes the Low Countries’ principal port. There, northern European products are traded for the spices now arriving from Africa and Asia aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships: pepper,
malagueta
, cinnamon, and sugar. Everyone, even the French and English, comes here to have fabrics dyed using techniques the city jealously keeps secret.
The Antwerp Exchange becomes Europe’s leading financial center for insurance, wagers, and lotteries. The city builds a sophisticated banking network, using new silver currencies — their rates strictly controlled — such as the groat, to finance external trade. Lacking an army, Antwerp dominates the form — as the other cores have already done and will continue to do — through its ability to manage the financial markets and dragoon them into its service. Lesson for the future: closely linked, finance and insurance make up an essential dimension of commercial power.

Antwerp is also (as other cores will be) the first industrial user of a major technological innovation from abroad: the movable-type printing press, a Chinese invention rediscovered in Germany and at first reserved exclusively for the church.

What we have here is the first in a long series of advances aimed at accelerating the transmission of data. The written word becomes the major source of wealth, whose marginal reproduction cost is virtually zero. It will not be the last. The book thus becomes the first mass-produced nomadic object. It too will not be the last.

The success of the printing press is dazzling, so hungry are the new administrative classes for the things they favor — freedom of expression, the progress of individualism and of reason, and the wider dissemination of the Judeo-Greek ideal.

Around 1490 (forty years after their arrival in Europe), presses are at work in 110 European cities. At first, Venice leads the way, then Antwerp plays a key role with the workshops of Christophe Plantin. By 1500, twenty million texts have already been printed in
Europe. In Florence, the books of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola lead to a rediscovery of the Judeo-Greek and Arabic heritage — hitherto painstakingly censored by the church. New readers now find that the Bible does not offer exactly what the priests say of it, that it also contains philosophical essays and even novels, that it speaks of reason and love, and that a corpus of knowledge (Jewish, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Persian) has been carefully sealed off from them. Many wish to read these texts in another language than the Latin they no longer speak. Vernacular tongues batter at the language of the church so effectively that Latin is soon just the official language of a handful of chanceries.

In all, in the space of a few decades, the press shatters the dream — long cherished by the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire — of homogenizing Europe around the Latin language and the church. Lesson for the future: a new communications technology, seen as a centralizing influence, turns out to be the implacable enemy of the powers that be.

In 1517, Luther has his followers read the Bible, rebels against the corruption of the papacy, and joins forces with the German princes against church and emperor. Protestantism now places itself at the service of nationalism and builds its nest there. The era of nations can begin.

Sovereign in Madrid and Flanders, Charles V must now confront the clamor for independence coming from the Low Countries. Those claims are supported by England (Protestant like the Low Countries). He vainly seeks to make Antwerp off-limits to the foreigners who continue to flock there, accelerating progress
and the city’s forward march. The leading German bankers — the Höschstellers, Fuggers, and Welsers — descend upon it. Silver from the Americas arrives by the shipload, and it is on silver that the city’s trade is hence-forward based. At its apogee in 1550, Antwerp numbers one hundred thousand inhabitants. Cores are getting bigger.

Then this third form of the mercantile order weakens. Like its two predecessors, it once again loses the means of holding its networks together. Massive exploitation of America’s silver mines lowers the value of the metal underpinning Antwerp’s commercial networks. Trading in gold, now costlier and out of Antwerp’s control, becomes much more tempting to speculators. What is more, the Wars of Religion disrupt seaborne links between the Low Countries and Spain, and sever Antwerp (which lacks a standing army) from its commercial networks. American silver can no longer head northward, but must either remain in Seville or be shipped to the Mediterranean. In 1550 Antwerp, now at the mercy of the slightest financial crisis, is forced to step aside, broken by share speculation that originates in Seville.

France, the biggest and most populous European nation, now has a second chance of becoming the core of capitalism. Its standard of living soars and its navy improves. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, a Genoese turned Frenchman, ships out from Honfleur under the orders of François I and is the first to enter New York Harbor. But France, lacking a sturdy middle class, a merchant fleet, and a large port either in the Mediterranean or on the North Sea, fails to raise itself to the status of a core. Moreover, its size plays against France:
its domestic market is so enormous that it has no need to export the products of its industry and agriculture, nor even to export products with high returns.

Elsewhere, in Germany and Poland, the feudal system and serfdom linger on. The nobility, fearful of the rise of its domestic middle classes, satisfy themselves with admitting a handful of foreign merchants who come in to purchase wheat for the rest of Europe. Finally, despite the fascinating trading dynamic of a few Baltic ports, northern Europe remains marginal.

Spain too has a second chance of raising itself to the top rung. First the silver and then the gold of the Americas guarantee it an immense income that might help it finally become a core. But the imperial culture is more influential than ever; lords dominate merchants; Spanish soldiers receive increasingly high wages, although Spain does not produce the textiles, jewelry, and weapons they dream of. It must therefore import them from the Low Countries and Italy. Inflation sets in, Castile sinks into debt, its currency is eroded, bankers quit the financial centers of Madrid and Seville, which go bankrupt in 1557. Next, in 1560, it is Lisbon’s turn to founder.

Antwerp is dragged down by the Spanish collapse. The Atlantic is no longer secure enough to carry the world’s traffic.

The only available Mediterranean port, Genoa (site of the foremost gold market), becomes the new heartland
around 1560. It will last for just over a half century, as though the mercantile order still hesitated to leave a Mediterranean that had witnessed its birth.

As early as the thirteenth century, Genoese businessmen had realized that political power was a fount of troubles. To exercise that power, they find two families, the Viscontis and the Sforzas, and devote their energies to trade and finance. In the fourteenth century, that is to say as soon as the church authorizes them, certain of these Lombards become financiers and finally issue interest-bearing loans. Among them are many converted Jews. These bankers first finance — in silver and gold — most of Europe’s rulers, and later the bulk of Florentine trade and its textile industry.

Their power is based on their remarkable accounting abilities. For Genoa, in fact, accounting is what the printing press represented for Antwerp or the
galere da mercato
for Venice — a major strategic innovation that guarantees its power over all other mercantile networks. It is also in Genoa that first Patini and then Masari invent the profit-and-loss system of accounting. Thanks to the works of the Genoese Luca Pacioli, it later spreads abroad. This is a revolution in the economic and philosophical orders.

For accounting, like philosophy, is also the art of weighing the negative against the positive; and reason makes strides in Genoa around the figure of the merchant who takes risks, who speculates on the future, and must therefore attempt to foresee it. In Genoa as elsewhere, this innovative class is now particularly influenced by the writings of Jewish exiles from Spain, such as Isaac Abravanel, and by the works of Jean Bodin, the first
Frenchman to speculate on the concept of sovereignty and make himself a spokesman for religious tolerance.

Falling under Spanish domination early in the sixteenth century, Genoa thus becomes Europe’s leading financial market, the core of the capitalism of its day. Masters of the gold trade, Genoese bankers fix the exchange rates of all currencies and finance the operations of the kings of Spain and France, as well as those of the Italian, German, and Polish princes.

Since no port can become a core without also controlling farming and industry, the Genoese hinterland (which extends far beyond fabulously wealthy Tuscany) becomes a great industrial, wool-producing, and metal-lurgical power. Genoa now generates the Mediterranean world’s final explosion of energy — the last echo of the dream of Athens, Rome, Florence, and the Spanish kings Charles V and Philip II.

Then the Atlantic becomes a peaceful ocean once again. In 1579 — eight years after the meaningless victory at Lepanto of Charles V’s unacknowledged son over Selim II’s Turks — the Spanish are driven from the Low Countries, an event much more consequential and less celebrated than Lepanto. The English fleet, a newcomer on the seas, led by great captains like Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, arrives to steal the gold still flowing in from the Americas. In 1588, the invincible Spanish Armada, cumbersome and ill-manned, founders off the coast of England. Two-thirds of its seamen and ships sink while confronting English vessels armed with much more accurate cannon. Now the Atlantic is open once again to merchant shipping, and in
particular Genoese, Dutch, English, and French vessels. It becomes a new locus of commerce.

While China defeats the Japanese in Korea in 1598 without actually occupying the peninsula (this will happen again on three occasions and will fix essential ground rules for the future), Genoa grows weary. The city no longer boasts sufficient human and financial resources to stand up to its rivals on every front. Without an army, the city cannot prevent the Dutch — free at last — from taking control of the new Atlantic sea-ways and welcoming the American gold and silver which Antwerp had vainly lusted for a century earlier. But like Antwerp before it, Genoa is now enfeebled by a new countrywide recession in Spain.

Born after a stock exchange coup of the kind that weakened Antwerp, Genoa fades away around 1620, following a power move that strengthens Amsterdam. And with Genoa, the Mediterranean fades forever from the front rank.

Around 1620, capitalism’s center tilts a second time from Mediterranean to Atlantic. There will be no going back: the Mediterranean forever becomes a secondary body of water. The countries surrounding it — the kingdom of Spain, Italian principalities, southern France — fall into decline, even permanently losing contact with the core. Henceforth their standard of living will always be inferior to that of the new powers.

The Low Countries have enormously lengthened their lead. Their living standards have overtaken those of Genoa and Venice. They are five times higher than those of France, Spain, and England.

The same logic still prevails — progressive expansion of the mercantile space, of industry’s reach, of finance and technology. This logic raises a new innovative class to power, at once interventionist and free, in a modern port blessed with a vast agricultural hinterland, a shipbuilding industry, a battle fleet and a merchant fleet, its arms open to financiers, shipbuilders, innovators, and adventurers. Little by little, this logic extends the rights of wage-earners and condemns forced labor to extinction. It takes global control of raw-material sources and of markets.