After Tamerlane (29 page)

We know, of course, that these ‘solutions' were found – though not all at once, nor with universal success. Although historians differ over precisely when (not to mention how), it is clear that from about 1800 what has been elegantly termed ‘the great divergence'
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began to set in between the economic trajectory of the Euro-Atlantic world and that of most of the rest of Eurasia and Africa. For much of the next two centuries (longer in some cases), the disparities of wealth grew wider and wider (except in privileged regions). The reason lay, so it seemed, in Europe's unique capacity to industrialize its economies, achieving increases in output far above those that pre- or non-industrial economies could manage. Europeans exploited the flow of incremental improvements to their first innovations in mechanized production, increasing the pace of technical change and steadily widening the gap between their productive efficiency and that of
non-industrial competitors. To reinforce this effect, which made Europe much richer than the rest of the world, the new industrial technologies conferred two other benefits of enormous importance. They supplied (at relatively low cost) the technological means for European domination in places where that had previously seemed hopeless, and on a scale unimaginable in the pre-industrial era. Advances in armaments (repeating rifles, machine guns, long-range artillery, steam warships) extended the radius and multiplied the impact of European or European-led armies and navies. Mechanized transport on land and sea projected military force over far greater distances and (in pre-industrial terms) at almost lightning speed, allowing comparatively small numbers of soldiers to be deployed and redeployed in campaigns that might be thousands of miles apart. British troops could be shuttled between South Africa, India, China and even New Zealand. Steam-engined troopships and ‘strategic' railways, like those built in India after 1860, economized on the size of the garrisons needed to safeguard foreign control. The electric telegraph and the submarine cable played a similar role, enabling instructions to be sent, warnings to be issued, help to be summoned in a matter of hours not weeks. Information became the invisible weapon in the European arsenal, worth thousands of troops and millions of pounds. The other great benefit that industrialism gave was also a product of speed. The extraordinary rapidity with which invaders appeared, migrants rushed in, new trade routes were traced, and new port cities were constructed – all in various ways quickened by industrial technique – lent the European expansion into the Afro-Eurasian world, slow and hesitant as it was from some points of view, a blitzkrieg-like quality. With little time to react, and often poorly informed about their intentions, it was no wonder that sometimes the Europeans' involuntary hosts found it hard to contain them.

Of course, as the idea of divergence suggests, while the symptoms of change could be sudden and violent, it was decades before the economic transformation assumed an overall shape. What had begun to appear by the end of our period (in the 1830s) was, nonetheless, a set of economic relations radically different from those that existed before
c
. 1750. Europe's industrialization was not a private affair: it altered fundamentally the exchanges it made with all other world
regions, the volume and content of long-distance trade, and the circulation of goods and people all over the globe. What emerged from this was a new division of labour as parts of Europe assumed a set of specialized functions for a market that was, at least potentially, global. Already, in fact, Europeans had a virtual monopoly of the seaborne trade between Europe and Asia. When that trade was enlarged, its ‘command and control' – shipowning, insurance, export–import and credit – was easily concentrated in European hands and reinforced further by Europeans' comparative advantage in commercial ‘intelligence' – insider knowledge. But the real revolution lay in Europe's new role as the prime source of manufactures for the world as a whole, based in the main on the huge increase in output and the huge fall in real cost that mechanization brought. By 1810, calculates Paul Bairoch, a British operative using a spinning machine produced ten to fourteen times as much cotton yarn in an hour as his Indian competitor using traditional methods, a figure that rose to as much as four hundred times for the finer qualities.
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Since textiles made up an enormous proportion of the manufactured output of non-industrial economies (perhaps 80 per cent), it is easy to see why industrial Europe became the global supplier of what was in almost every society the most widely consumed manufactured product. By the mid nineteenth century this industrial lead could also be seen in a huge variety of other consumer goods (especially metalware) that Europe could offer, as well as in the colossal expansion of machinery-making and industrial processes. To an extent inconceivable before 1800, Europe's industrial districts had become the workshop, factory and technical laboratory for the world as a whole.

Perhaps implicit in this, but as yet (in 1830) barely visible, was Europe's third global function. Industrial Europe (and above all Britain) became the world's main supplier of capital. The networks of trade and mercantile credit, the profits of industry and the gains to be made by constructing an industrial infrastructure (such as railways and harbours) to increase the volume of traffic made this a natural progression when savings had reached an adequate level. Once they had done so, Europe's commanding position in long-distance trade, industrial production and the export of capital became an
almost
irresistible force, combining systemically to reshape the whole pattern
of global exchanges. Industrial Europe possessed, so it seemed, the transformative power to create a new global economy that turned most of the world into suppliers of raw products, consumers of manufactures and borrowers of capital. In this great reconstruction, Asian producers of artisanal manufactures for export (cloth above all) would go to the wall. Instead, the future of non-Europe would be emphatically rural: hard-working peasants growing raw materials for export, and buying (for example) cotton cloth in exchange. The commercial production of a huge range of commodities – cotton, silk, tea, sugar, coffee, tobacco, opium, cacao, rice, cinchona, jute, rubber, gutta percha, palm oil, gum Arabic, pepper, vanilla, indigo, gamboge, ivory, shellac, guano, hides, gambier – shipped in large volume to be processed in Europe, would be
their
engine of wealth, the means to improvement, and the vital incentive to social order and discipline. Or so ran the theory. In 1830 most of this lay in the future. As we shall see, its advance was resisted and was often slow and erratic. But the die had been cast.

This was the ‘great divergence' that transformed the relative fortunes of the wealthiest societies in Europe and Asia. But how was it to be explained? What had happened to allow the richest parts of Europe to draw so far ahead of the richest parts of Asia? The favourite answer among Western historians has been to invoke the ‘Industrial Revolution'. It was the unique capacity of certain European communities to invent and apply technological solutions that gave them the breakthrough. As a simple statement this is undeniable. But almost immediately the questions pile up. What made Europeans so technologically precocious? After all, in inventive capacity (as we have seen already) they had often trailed behind China. Nor was it obvious that the institutional setting for technological change was much more favourable in Europe than it was elsewhere – in China, for instance. Moreover, Europe's industrial transformation was not the result of a single ‘big bang'. The growth of Britain's economy was relatively slow, suggesting a path of cumulative change, not a jackpot win in the technological lottery.
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One influential account, drawing inspiration partly from Weber, stresses the unpredictable, almost random, conjunction of the crucial ingredients that allowed Europe to evade what had hitherto been the iron law of diminishing returns and resource
exhaustion. The competition between states (allowing dissent and free thought), the restraints on state power (making property safer), a market economy that rewarded efficiency, a benign natural environment with ample reserves of food and fuel, and a staggering windfall (in the Americas) on which Europe could draw made up the elements of the ‘European miracle' – unique and unrepeatable.
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An alternative view radically shifts the balance of the argument. Here there is little to choose between North West Europe and the most advanced economies elsewhere in Eurasia, down to 1800. Europe's advantage lay not in its social or political structures, or even its progress in scientific thought. It derived instead from its dowry of coal (the result of geological chance) and colonies (the fruit of predation): they alone allowed its escape from the invariable fate of pre-industrial growth.
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A third line of inquiry sees Europe's ‘divergence' less as a result of its peculiar endowments (in resources, mentality or institutions) than as a reaction to global forces and trends. In this perspective, Europe's industrialization can even be seen as a defensive tactic with extraordinary unintended consequences.
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We might begin by acknowledging that in late-eighteenth-century Eurasia two regions stood out. One was in Europe. Of course not all Europe, since much of the continent in the south and east was poor and backward even by contemporary standards. Primitive agricultural technique, the lack of ‘improvements' (like fencing and draining), bad roads or none, the shortage of artisan skills, very low levels of literacy, the absence of financial institutions to offer credit or capital, insecurity of person and property, the persistence of serfdom: conditions like these were still to be found in large parts of Europe's rural interior. The most prosperous regions could be seen in France, mainland Britain, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, northern Italy and parts of Catalonia, and among the commercial towns of southern and eastern Germany and the Austrian Empire. These were the places where an advanced commercial economy of the kind that Adam Smith described in
The Wealth of Nations
had taken firm root. Economic growth was driven by increased specialization and the division of labour, allowing productivity to rise and the market to grow in a virtuous circle. Incremental improvements in manufacturing technique and the use of the land pushed in the same direction. Added to this were the benefits
derived from trade, both intra-European and also intercontinental. Though they are hard to measure, the effects of long-distance trade may have accelerated progress towards a mass consumer society (by promoting the taste for tropical products like sugar, coffee and tea) and stimulated innovation in marketing, management and the collection and use of commercial information. However, many if not most of these favourable conditions could also be found in China. Kiangnan (the Yangtze delta) was a great manufacturing region, producing cotton cloth for ‘export' to the rest of China. With a dense population (a thousand people to the square mile)
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of over 30 million, numerous cities, and a thick web of water communications connecting it with the middle and upper Yangtze (a colossal hinterland), as well as the rest of China (via the Grand Canal), Kiangnan was comparable to Europe's commercial heartland. A powerful case can be made that as a market economy it was as wealthy and productive as North West Europe. Textile production was similar,
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while the consumption of items like sugar and tea may well have been higher. Technical ingenuity was widespread. Moreover, China benefited from laws that made buying and selling land easier than in Europe, and from a labour market in which serfdom had practically vanished (unlike in Europe). In an orderly, well-regulated society, with low levels of taxation and a state that actively promoted better practice (usually in agriculture), there seemed no obvious reason why material progress along Adam Smith's lines (what economists call ‘Smithian growth') should not continue indefinitely, on a scale comparable with Europe.

Elsewhere in Eurasia, the barriers to material progress were higher. In the Ottoman Empire and Iran, no ‘core' regions emerged along the lines of Kiangnan. With the exception of Egypt (where much of the Nile delta was still to be drained), the areas of dense and productive cultivation were scattered and few. Huge areas remained the preserve of nomads, in Anatolia and Iran. Population was scanty in a relatively harsh environment, sometimes subjected, like mid-century Iran, to violent disruption. The bulk carriage of goods, except in maritime zones, was extremely difficult. This helped to protect local suppliers of manufactured items from outside competition. But by the mid eighteenth century Europe's proximity had already begun to push the Ottoman lands towards the exchange of agricultural commodities for
manufactured imports.
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Iran's exports of silk had fallen away: it had few export commodities, let alone manufactures.
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In India the position was different. Indian manufacturing was highly productive. Perhaps 60 per cent of global manufactured exports in the eighteenth century were produced in India, the textile workshop of the world. India's muslins and calicoes were in huge demand as luxury items in contemporary Europe, while its cheaper cottons were re-exported to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves.
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Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and Bengal were commercial regions with strong international links. Cultivable land was abundant. But, unlike in China and Europe, the scope for building a large integrated economy was severely limited. In much of the subcontinent, inland transport was hampered by lack of navigable waterways. Trade routes in North India were badly disrupted by Mughal decline. Of course trade and traders survived, and perhaps even flourished, but the unstable geography of political power – shifting elite demand and protection from place to place – worked against the emergence of a stable ‘core'.
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The diffusion of technical skills – a crucial element in technological progress – suffered from the barriers of an occupation-based caste system. An unforgiving ecology discouraged long-term investment, as did the political turbulence that set in generally after 1750. It may also be true that Indian society at the level of peasants and weavers was too unruly and mobile to accept the ‘labour discipline' imposed, for example, upon factory workers in Britain.