A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (7 page)

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic thus becomes the most important sea in the world.

After Antwerp and Genoa, Amsterdam rebuilds the networks essential to a core. To pay for its imported food, Amsterdam’s backcountry produces sophisticated agricultural goods (flax, hemp, rape, hops), raises sheep, and develops the dyeing industry and the mechanization of spinning. This permits it to begin industrialization of garment production after the industrialization of food production. Amsterdam dyes fabric of virgin wool for the whole of Europe. This includes England, despite London’s protectionist measures. With its resulting surpluses, the city can begin to industrialize the construction of an exceptional vessel, the flyboat — much more economical than its predecessors for it can be mass-produced and requires only four-fifths the number of seamen.

In the early seventeenth century, Amsterdam turns into an immense site for the production, sale, and maintenance of ships. Its workshops use cranes and wind-powered saws. Its fleet is now enormous, extraordinarily well manned and armed, and beyond comparison with the fleets of any other country. The Dutch operate two-thousand-ton vessels, with a crew of eight hundred, transport cargoes six times bigger than all the other European fleets combined — in other words, three-quarters of the grain, salt, and timber and half the metals and textiles of all Europe. And since war always supports trade, the Dutch navy becomes master of the seas from the Baltic to Latin America. The Dutch East India Company, and later the Stock Exchange and Bank of Amsterdam, now turn this naval power into an instrument of financial and commercial domination. It is also Amsterdam that dreams up the financing of land-bound operations by stockholding companies in 1604.

Like its predecessors, this new format replaces new services with industrial products and new forced laborers with wage-earners. It increasingly concentrates the wealth in a decreasing number of hands, and grants greater freedoms to its citizens and to consumers while inflicting increasing alienation on its workers.

This fifth core is no longer just a city: it is now a whole region. Leiden is its industrial center, while Rotterdam focuses on shipbuilding. Amsterdam’s bourgeois regents dominate the province and control the surplus, despite conflict between the Great Pensioner of Holland and the Stadhouder of the United Provinces. Even though slavery has entirely disappeared, the people work hard and are often hungry. Protestantism
also liberates men from any guilt in regard to wealth: the church is no longer there to monopolize fortunes. Public life is sumptuous, intellectual life intense; famous universities welcome foreigners. Around 1650, one of their descendants, Baruch Spinoza, has the audacity to imagine a world in which God would be lumped together with Nature, without attempting to impose a moral code on men resolutely autonomous and free.

The rest of the world gazes, fascinated, at this triumph (it will last nearly two centuries and will be the longest-lived mercantile form of all time).

Yet when they describe this period, our history books still dwell longer on the fate of monarchs than on that of wealth. In 1644, the Middle Kingdom is still the world’s leading economic power when Manchu nomads overthrow the Ming dynasty and found the Qing, its capital now in Beijing. The Qing will remain in power for two and a half centuries. In France in 1643, Louis XIV ascends the throne and in 1648 puts an end to the Thirty Years’ War that has devastated Europe. But despite his apparent splendor, the Sun King lacks the means to rival the United Provinces. By 1685 (date of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes), the per capita income of Amsterdam’s inhabitants is already four times higher than that of Parisians — and the gap widens still further with the departure from France of its Protestant Huguenots.

The world is changing. Bruges is now just a second-rank city, Antwerp a suburb of Amsterdam; Genoa is in decline: along with the rest of the rest of Lombardy, it is gradually excluded from the major mercantile circuits. Venice is no more than a sumptuous chapter in
the history of trade with the East. Spain remains sealed off behind the Pyrenees. China timidly raises its head: in 1683 the emperor occupies Taiwan. New powers emerge: Austria rises to become a rampart against the Turks; in 1689 Peter the Great’s Russia becomes an international player. Prussia does the same in 1740 under Friedrich von Hohenzollern. In 1720, Qing China takes Tibet and then the Altai region (modern Xinjiang) — a Muslim zone. All this time seventeen million Africans, sold as slaves by Arab traders, have been deported to various European colonies by Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Frenchmen. As it has done since the inauguration of the mercantile order, the science of geopolitics develops more fruitfully alongside trade and industry than dynasties.

For the Low Countries, the eighteenth is still a triumphant century — and for its rivals a time of repeated failure. With its small population (about three hundred thousand inhabitants), it runs European politics with a masterly hand. Its navy controls all the seas; its bankers reign over exchange rates; its merchants fix the price of all products. Despite its apparent power, France — Europe’s most populous country — endures check after check: military failure at sea, diplomatic failure in the Indies, Louisiana, and Canada, financial failure with the bankruptcy of the speculator John Law. Although by 1714 it finally becomes possible for the French aristocracy to engage in trade without demeaning itself, the tiny French bourgeoisie interests itself neither in its navy nor in modern industry. France’s economy is content to vegetate in the outmoded industries of agricultural capitalism (food, leather, wool) that the daring merchants
of the United Provinces are only too happy to leave in its hands.

All this time in China, where the practice of three annual rice harvests permits the population to expand from 180 to 400 million inhabitants (far ahead of any other country on the planet), there is no response from the emperor when Dutch merchants begin to trade in Canton from their Indian Ocean bases.

And yet, around 1775, a century and a half after taking power, this fifth mercantile form declines, like its predecessors and for the same reasons. Dutch warships are no longer the most powerful, the seas are no longer their playground, defense of their commercial routes is increasingly costly, and the energy used by their industries (forest timber, also essential in shipbuilding) is close to exhaustion. Dutch dyeing and shipbuilding techniques no longer make progress; social conflicts are on the rise; wages soar; and Amsterdam’s woolen industry is becoming an increasing burden.

Lesson for the future: it may seem eternal, but no empire can last forever.

Elsewhere in Europe, the middle classes murmur and call for greater freedoms — nationalism is now a force to be reckoned with. A premonitory sign that cannot lightly be ignored: the rulers of every European court now insist that their musicians write their opera librettos in their national language and not in Italian, which had been the custom hitherto. Music — harbinger of the future.

In 1776, Britain’s colonies in America declare their independence. In 1781, the French navy, in a rare moment of effectiveness, makes it possible for the American
insurgents to win the battle of Yorktown. In Europe, hungry peoples cry out. Throughout the continent, war threatens. Shipbuilders, followed by the best Dutch financiers, leave the Low Countries for London, by now Europe’s safest and most dynamic city.

As always, a financial crisis confirms the decline of a heartland. In 1788, the Low Countries’ banks declare bankruptcy. On the eve of the French Revolution, the core of capitalism crosses the North Sea for good to settle in London, where democracy and market move forward together.

As early as the sixteenth century, England had mastered wool-spinning, coal-mining, and glassblowing technologies. Its abundant streams, serving primarily as energy sources, foster the mechanization (in Lancashire) of spinning a new raw material for the textile industry, soon to be a rival of wool — cotton, long familiar in Europe and rediscovered by the British in India.

To possess this vegetable fiber, henceforth as strategically important as Peru’s gold and silver, the British East India Company assumes control of India, large tracts of North America, and South Asia, all cotton-producing regions. The first English bridgehead in South Asia had been established in 1619 at Surat, on India’s northwest coast. A little later the British East India Company — which manages these regions solely in its own interest — sets up permanent trading counters in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. British armies do the
same in North America. England is now importing from its colonies — at rock-bottom prices — every conceivable product (wool, cotton, silk, leather, tin, tobacco, rice, indigo), which it returns to them — highly priced — in the shape of clothing and precious objects.

In 1689 a political bombshell bursts over London. The country’s ruling monarchs, Mary and William of Orange (raised to the throne by Parliament following the execution of their grandfather, Charles I), are back on the throne following Cromwell’s dictatorship. They grant Parliament, freely elected by the country’s middle classes, the right to look into public affairs. Thus, after its sketchy Dutch beginnings, the birth certificate of modern democracy is officially promulgated. Parliament enacts laws, guarantees individual freedoms, and authorizes the king to raise troops and make war. England is the first market democracy.

That same year, in London, John Locke publishes a
Treatise of Government
, in which he expounds his theory of democratic government, proclaiming individual freedom a natural and inalienable right. Still in the same year, Montesquieu is born in France, where he will later meditate on the separation of powers and political freedom. Henceforth nations will structure themselves around the ideal of equality: disparities, frowned upon by democracy, will remain necessary to the market. The influence of the Judeo-Greek ideal will go on expanding.

In the eighteenth century, Great Britain’s wealth increases and projects itself into the world. Its external trade increases sixfold. The share of exports in its national revenue triples, generating a surplus that finances
the modernization of its industry and gives birth to a new creative, bourgeois, and industrial class.

As with the preceding cores, this assumption of world power by British merchants is staggeringly single-minded. Following a competition sponsored by Parliament, an English clockmaker-carpenter named John Harrison perfects the first marine chronometer in 1734. It weighs 77.6 pounds. This major invention, willed into being by the political powers, leads to a dramatic shortening of transoceanic voyages. The chronometer thus gives Great Britain mastery of the seas and facilitates a systematic exploitation of the rest of the world. In 1757 the troops of the British East India Company take control of Bengal and force Bengali craftsmen to accept such low prices for their cotton that starvation kills more than ten million people. After three wars with Holland, the English finally take total control of the seas — and in particular, control of the trade in precious metals from the Americas, which the Dutch had wrested from Spain 150 years earlier.

In 1776, the year Adam Smith publishes the first reference book on market economies (
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
), Britain is forced to relinquish sovereignty over part of North America, but it continues to buy vast quantities of cotton from its former colonies in the South until the American Civil War. William Pitt’s government restores health to the nation’s economic situation by applying Adam Smith’s doctrine: in 1786, it even signs a free trade agreement with its archrival, France.

Apparently unchanging, England is in fact in a state
of subterranean turmoil. The countryside is aflame with the vexed question of enclosures; highways become safer thanks to new poor laws; the old elites collapse. A new innovative class, the gentry (landless nobility), takes over the controls, leaving a tiny aristocracy in command of the totality of its landowning income. Every Englishman now pays indirect taxes, whereas in France the
taille
, a direct tax freely translated as “slice,” is paid only by the Third Estate.

England now boasts a fighting navy as powerful as France’s, despite a population three times smaller, and a per capita income still only equal to a half of its cross-Channel neighbor and one-fifth that of Amsterdam.

As the eighteenth century draws to a close, the bulk of English wool is still dyed in Flanders or the United Provinces. Trade in English products is still under partial Dutch control.

And yet, in the twenty years from 1790 to 1810 — with continental Europe wallowing in fire and blood — London takes control of the world. Once again, while one country seeks to overturn another, the market gives power to a third party. Once again, conflict brutally settles a succession widely deemed impossible. Once again, as with the five preceding transformations, this handover of power from one port to another is first of all played out in the countryside.

For the land still supplies all needs: food, clothing, timber for energy and for shipbuilding. The country-side also provides the landowning income that finances industry and generates the first profits. In 1768 Richard Arkwright invents a new spinning machine. Powered by
swift-flowing streams, it hoists textile-industry productivity to ever more towering heights.

But energy remains in short supply in England, even more cruelly than in the Netherlands. The few forests it still possesses must be jealously conserved for its strategically crucial shipping activities. And its modest mountains mean that the country lacks the waterfalls that might have met its energy needs.

To find the energy they lack, Britain turns to the technical innovation of a Frenchman, Denis Papin (ignored in Paris because of France’s enormous forest resources) — the steam engine. Patented by the Scotsman James Watt, it will first of all help the British extract coal from their soil and use it to feed new spinning machines invented in 1785 by Richard Cartwright. Productivity of cotton spinning rises tenfold in ten years. The concept of the machine now triumphs: in 1812, England actually mandates capital punishment for anyone destroying industrial machinery.