A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (8 page)

Lesson for the future: scarcity forces men to seek new wealth. Scarcities are a blessing for the ambitious. Second lesson: it does not matter who invents a technology; the important thing is to be situated, culturally and politically, to put it into action.

For once again France could have become Britain’s rival. Around 1780, it boasts engineers, markets, advanced techniques, intellectual freedom. But although it harps to the world about liberty, it does not possess a major port, an effective navy, any proclivity for foreign elites, curiosity about industrial machinery. Despite the Enlightenment, France is still dominated by a
landowning and bureaucratic caste that monopolizes agricultural income and fails to push it toward innovation. The French monarchy prefers to irritate its British counterpart by supporting one part of its American colonies rather than devote its resources to creating an industry for itself. In 1778, France is already exhausted by its wars, and soon by massive drought, when a financial crisis and then a food crisis burst over Paris.

From 1789 on — zealous in its goal of liberating Europe from its emperors — the French Revolution drives away the country’s few merchants. In 1797, as the last of Venice’s 120 doges abdicates on the orders of General Bonaparte, the last of France’s financiers take ship for London.

Once again, adversity presents the future core with an opportunity. By shutting Britain off from the continental market, the French Revolution incites its merchants to look offshore. Although scarcely more populous than Ireland and almost as poor, this small country throws itself wholeheartedly (like all the cores that have gone before it) into an ambitious project — that of producing for every market in the world with the greatest fleet in the world. Henceforth, London, sheltered from wars, manages most European capital. In twenty years the pound replaces the Dutch florin as the major medium of world trade.

Meanwhile, the new United States of America welcomes millions of immigrants fleeing a war-torn Europe for a land without memory, a land gradually being cleared of its natives — the ideal situation for creating a market democracy, with neither lords nor landowners, entirely at the service of the merchant class.

In 1803, while preparing for the invasion of England, Napoleon sets France on a war economy and sells Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars. In 1804, the emperor rejects an innovation presented to him by an American mechanic, Robert Fulton — the use of steam to move a ship’s paddle. He sees no military application for it. In 1807, with the battles of Eylau and Friedland raging in Europe, Fulton returns to America and constructs the first steamship — the
Clermont
— there. The English immediately leap on the invention. In 1814, at the height of their war against a dying French empire, George Stephenson builds the first steam locomotive in London. Irony of history: the world’s leading naval power is about to revolutionize land transport.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars reopens the European continent to English products. London is now a huge city, sheltering around a quarter of the country’s inhabitants. It is there, in 1815, that the first financial structure (originating in Frankfurt with the Rothschild bank) imposes its market skills and makes possible the financing — through European investment in the steel industry — of English railroads and ironclad ships. In 1821, the first passenger railroad enters service not far from London.

In 1825, for the first time in the world, the industrial added value of a country — Great Britain — outstrips that of its agriculture. (This shift will not take place until 1865 in Prussia, 1869 in the United States, 1875 in France.) At the beginning of the nineteenth century, food consumption represented more than 90 percent of total British consumer spending, but in 1855 it
represents only two-thirds — while in the same period the share of clothing doubles.

From 1800 to 1855 the cost price of English cotton is reduced fivefold while their production increases fiftyfold. Cottons, which in 1800 represent a third of English exports, make up one-half in 1855.

But industrial employment remains a marginal activity: in 1855, factory workers represent only the third group — trailing farm labor and domestic employment — of English workers. Although three-quarters of English textile workers are women or children, most Englishwomen earn no wages. They simply look after their homes, thus abetting the relative continuity of the rural lifestyle in the cities. Looking after the home: a major, strategic role — a dead weight on the profitability of the economy, and only partially industrialized a century later.

The core is now so efficient that British taxes can be lowered to the point where they represent only 10 percent of the national revenue in 1860, as compared with one-third forty years earlier.

Like its five predecessors, this sixth form of the mercantile order transforms new services into industrial products and new peasants into poorly paid wage-earners. It concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands, procures greater freedoms for consumers and citizens, and imposes further alienation on workers.

The proletarianization of the peasantry, which had begun with England’s eighteenth-century enclosures of communal lands, now intensifies. Identity papers see the day, their role the surveillance and supervision of workers and revolutionaries. Jobholders will soon be as dangerous as the unemployed. The working conditions of
laborers are worse than those of peasants and craftsmen. In the cities, more than one in three children dies of starvation or disease before the age of five. Among them are three of the six children of a German political refugee, newly arrived in London after the failure of the 1848 revolution — Karl Marx.

Progress is also at work in the speeding up of travel: by 1850, steam begins to replace the sail for transporting travelers, goods, and information. The telegraph speeds up the transmission of the latter. One and the other accelerate globalization, under way since the beginning of the mercantile order. Round-the-world travel is henceforth within reach of armies, traders, and even the earliest tourists.

Democracy progresses alongside the market. In Great Britain, as in France and a few European and American countries, the proportion of middle-class Englishmen with the right to vote gradually increases. Lesson for the future: the authoritarian state creates the market, which in its turn creates democracy,

For the first time, the core of the mercantile order is also the capital of the world’s dominant political and military empire. The Low Countries sink. France and Germany wedge themselves into the “middle,” to be joined by the United States after the discovery of California’s gold mines. From 1857, British armies replace the forces of the East India Company and assume direct control of India. In 1860, they set China afire in order to sell opium there, and acquire Hong Kong and other “concessions.” Eight years later Japan — anxious to avoid the same fate — decides to emulate the West and brutally transforms its serfs into urban laborers.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 provides British soldiers (followed by merchants) with a much swifter route to the Orient — where they even more swiftly destroy the Indian textile industry and impose upon India (in the name of free trade and democracy) what is good for British industry.

Like preceding cores, London becomes the meeting place of all the world’s innovators, creators, industrialists, explorers, financiers, intellectuals, and artists, from Dickens to Marx, Darwin to Turner.

But London grows weary of its own domination. The country seems first to have taken fright at speed by land: the Locomotive Act of 1865 reduces the authorized speed of trains to two miles per hour in cities and four in the countryside. Much more serious: by liberating the nation’s slaves, the American Civil War raises the price of the cotton purchased by the English from America’s southern states. London’s City, the world’s financial center since 1790, is also threatened by the proliferation of new banks in the United States. And the pound is menaced by the dollar. To retain its leading position and maintain profit levels, the English financial world must resort to speculation.

From 1880 onward, Prussian, French, and American rivals are breathing more hotly than ever down England’s neck. New technologies and major discoveries fuel stock market speculation in London (“bubble” is the name attached to it), triggering bank failures in the City. Lesson for the future: once again, breakdown in the dominant financial market is the signal for a core’s downfall.

For the first time, no European port or nation is in
a position to take the reins from London — even though Prussia has become a great power by uniting the whole of Germany around it, and even if France continues to aspire to that status.

The core continues its westward drift (begun in the thirteenth century) and finally crosses the Atlantic. After its century-long domination, London yields the battle-field to Boston.

The horse gave Central Asia power over Mesopotamia; the stern rudder brought it back to Europe; the galley delivered victory over Bruges to Venice; the printing press was the foundation of Antwerp’s triumph; the caravel made possible the discovery of America; the steam engine was the key to London’s ascent. A new source of energy (petroleum), a new motor (internal combustion), and a new industrial artifact (the automobile) confer power to the East Coast of America and its then dominant port, Boston.

The means of transport of energy and information, whose mutations have already speeded up the course of history, henceforward appears in the form of a machine, a mass-produced industrial product destined for private use — substitute for the horse, carriage, stagecoach, and even the railroad.

For the third time, France seems to have an opportunity of becoming the core. It possesses in fact an excellent highway network bequeathed by the monarchy. Above all, it is on the cutting edge of technical
innovation. It is a Frenchman, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, who invents the self-propelled vehicle equipped with an internal combustion engine.

Yet it is in America that the new core settles. Europe, and especially France, only sees the automobile as an ill-conceived substitute for the carriage. But American settlers — on wheels ever since the conquest of the West began — are obsessed with reducing the duration of their internal migrations. Extreme individualists, entrepreneurs by nature, unable to accept the train, they are best placed to turn the automobile into a product manufactured on a massive scale.

Thus Boston will be the first center of American capitalism.

As early as the seventeenth century, a group of Puritans from England decree that succeeding materially is a way of proving to oneself that one belongs to the elect of God, with rights of entry to paradise. In other words, making a fortune is noble — and it is even morally honorable to boast of one’s wealth.

Boston now becomes America’s leading port, exporting rum, fish, salt, and tobacco. At the start of the nineteenth century, the northeastern United States is the continent’s biggest manufacturing center. Clothing is produced there; leather is worked; machines are produced. It is here too that the fishing industry is concentrated: by 1855, northeasterners are worried about a shortage of oil following the disappearance of the whales. The region now acquires everything needed for a new core — banking in New York, shipping and industry between Boston and Chicago (via Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia). Countless other major
innovations, most of them from Europe, are further developed here. They include Thomas Edison’s electric light and the gramophone. The telephone, invented by an Italian immigrant, is commercially exploited in the United States in 1877, two years before France.

Unlike all the other potential great powers and all the previous cores, the United States has no credible rival on its own continent. It is thus free to intervene globally, without risk or threat to its territory. It quickly takes control of the whole of Latin America — via the Monroe Doctrine and establishing a long string of puppet governments — and parts of Asia, from the Philippines to Korea.

Here again, this development is perfectly in step with the history of the mercantile order. It spreads wherever a sedentary past does not impede the mobility it demands — wherever a middle class can assume power without decapitating its nobility.

From 1880 onward, a terrible recession, moving in lockstep with England’s decline, ravages northern Europe from Iceland to Poland. It triggers the most massive movement of population in history. From 1880 to 1914, fifteen million Europeans (a quarter of the continent’s population and a third of the world’s savings) migrate to the American continent. A little bit as though, today, over a thirty-five-year period the entire population of France, Belgium, and the Low Countries left Europe.

Following prolonged and violent social conflict, the new American working class wins less niggardly wages, allowing it to buy basic food and textile goods — which as an aftereffect enriches the middle classes,
who become customers of the fledgling automobile industry.

Everything will now revolve around this new industry, the instrument of a new individual freedom. And the whole will construct itself around a new Bostonian middle class, so well described by Henry James, and whose values are so perfectly brought to life by Whistler’s paintings.

The internal combustion engine is in use in America from 1880 on, twenty-one years after its invention in France (1859). At first it is used primarily for the making of machine tools. Then, around 1890, it is employed in what is to become the automobile, as well as in the first airplanes. North America’s first subway is introduced in Boston in 1897. By 1898 there are already fifty automobile manufacturers in the United States. Between 1904 and 1908, a further 241 makes of car see the light of day, including the one created in 1903 by Henry Ford. This engineer, who started out working in Thomas Edison’s electric light company, will sell seventeen hundred of them in his first year.