After Tamerlane (30 page)

The question becomes: why did Kiangnan (and China) fail to match the economic expansion of Europe, and check the emergence of a Europe-centred world economy? The best answer we have is that it could not surmount the classic constraints of pre-industrial growth.
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By the late eighteenth century it faced steeply rising costs for food, fuel and raw materials. Increasing population and expanding output competed for the produce of a more or less fixed land area. The demand for food throttled the increase in raw cotton production. Raw cotton prices probably doubled in the Yangtze delta between 1750 and 1800.
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The demand for fuel (in the form of wood) brought deforestation and a degraded environment. The escape route from this trap existed in theory. Kiangnan should have drawn its supplies from further away. It should have cut the costs of production by
mechanization, enlarging its market and thus its source of supply. It should have turned to coal to meet the need for fuel. In practice there was little chance for change along such lines. It faced competition from many inland centres where food and raw materials were cheaper, and which could also exploit China's well-developed system of waterway transport. The very perfection of China's commercial economy allowed new producers to enter the market with comparative ease at the same technological level. Under these conditions, mechanization – even if technologically practical – might have been stymied at birth. And, though China had coal, it was far from Kiangnan and could not be transported there cheaply. Thus, for China as a whole, both the incentive and the means to take the industrial ‘high road' were meagre or absent.

The most developed parts of Europe did not face these constraints. Even if we exclude the much debated question of whether commercial institutions, the supply of credit and capital, and the dissemination of useful knowledge were more efficiently organized than in China (making technological progress more likely), it seems clear that the rising demand for food, fuel and raw materials was more easily met. Europe's ‘resource frontier' had not been closed. New land was available (in southern Russia for instance), and agricultural improvement had raised the productivity of existing farmlands. And where the demand for fuel was at its most intense, it could be met by ample supplies of accessible coal. Europe also enjoyed the additional benefit of colonial trade, whose profits depended in part upon the fruit of slave labour. It had its windfall of ‘free' land, especially in North America. Both may have contributed (though not decisively) towards Europe's escape from the fate of Kiangnan. The result overall was that the European ‘core' had more time in hand to exploit the opportunities of technical progress, and a far better chance to make the technological leap to the use of steam power with its reliance on coal.

If this parting of ways had begun to occur, as the evidence suggests, around 1800, then a great revolution was indeed in the making. The story in fact is much more dramatic. One part of Europe experienced a supercharged version of economic change. This was in Britain, whose economic trajectory was considerably steeper than that of comparably prosperous regions on the European mainland. Here three
features were crucial. Firstly, in the eighty years after 1760 there was a huge shift of employment from agriculture to manufacturing. At the beginning of the period industry employed around 24 per cent of the male labour force; by 1840 the figure was 47 per cent. This redeployment took place without raising the cost of agricultural produce, the vital condition for industrial expansion. Instead, while one agricultural worker could feed one industrial worker in 1760, eighty years later he could feed nearly three.
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Secondly, while this massive enlargement of the industrial workforce, rather than any sharp rise in overall productivity, was a striking feature of Britain's Industrial Revolution, equally so was the great concentration on the production of textiles, especially cottons. Productivity gains were heavily concentrated in the textile industry. Machine-aided production using Arkwright's roller (1769) and Crompton's ‘Mule' (1779), adapted for water power, allowed stronger, finer yarns to be produced at far lower cost than old forms of hand spinning,
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and the industry converted in stages from skilled to unskilled labour. Yarn was exported, but it was also the raw material for the production of cloth, and brought down its cost. By 1801 cotton goods alone made up almost 40 per cent of British exports; thirty years later they were over 50 per cent. A vast new market was being carved out abroad.

Thirdly, the British pioneered the application of steam power and the use of coal on an industrial scale. Of course the principle of steam energy had long been known. Steam engines had been used since the early eighteenth century, but were of cumbersome size and gargantuan appetite. Not until 1775, when Boulton and Watt produced their model, was a more efficient version available. Steam power and coal formed a critical partnership. Steam engines pumped the water from mines, and without them coal production in Britain would have stagnated at the levels of 1700.
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With them it grew by 1800 to 11 million tons a year – the equivalent of using the annual growth of wood from half the surface area of England. Steam released Britain from the constraint on fuel that (as we saw) had afflicted China, and opened the way for industrial processes with large energy needs. Coal and coke were the indispensable means to increase the supply of pig iron, which rose more than threefold between 1788 and 1806.
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Steam and iron together produced more durable tools, artefacts and machines
than could be made from wood. They helped to create a new ‘engineering culture', whose incremental advances helped to transform the material world after 1800. Steam power was also applied to textiles by the 1790s, in the spinning of yarn, helping to drive down its cost even further. And by the 1820s it was beginning to be used for transport by water and land – an innovation that soon conferred enormous commercial and strategic advantages on its users.

These gains from steam power and coal meant an extraordinary increase in Britain's economic capability beyond that of any competitor in Eurasia. Of course, we should note that even by 1830 many of these gains had yet to be realized. The benefits of a steam- and coal-based economy may have become general only by the 1850s.
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But well before 1830 the first great phase of Britain's industrialization had already transformed the most important commercial relationship between Europe and Asia. Europe's insatiable appetite for Indian cottons, and the competitiveness of Indian cloth in third markets elsewhere, had been the central fact of East–West trade since the seventeenth century. But by 1800 British manufacturers had largely replaced Indian goods in their own market at home and surpassed India in the export of calicoes, and they soon drove its cheaper varieties from other markets abroad. More remarkably still, by 1817 Indian weavers were importing British-made yarn on an ever-increasing scale. By the 1820s India had become a net importer of cottons.
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With the arrival of power-weaving after 1830, Britain's advantage in yarns was extended to cloth. By the mid- 1830s cotton goods made up more than half of British exports to India, and India had become Britain's second largest market for cotton manufactures.
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It was an astonishing reversal. By demolishing India's long primacy in the world market for textiles, the British could drive their trade into any market in Asia whose door could be opened. India's was wedged open by British imperial power. It remained to be seen whether that power could be used on other markets as well.

It was, perhaps, more than just a coincidence that the European state that had played the most active role in colonizing North America, in extending the slave trade and in asserting European control in India should also have been in the vanguard of industrialization. The British had been able to extend their overseas trade on a massive
scale during the eighteenth century – by as much as five times.
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The surging demand for Caribbean sugar made the West Indies a buoyant consumer of British manufactures and of other supplies from the North American colonies. American earnings were also spent in Britain, swelling the volume of Atlantic trade. British exports to America and Africa rose ninefold between 1700 and 1774, overtaking the value of those sent to Europe.
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The Caribbean was also – and infamously – a huge market for slave labour, and in the 1780s perhaps a quarter of British cotton exports were being sent to Africa to pay for slaves.
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The importance of all this lay partly in the stimulus it gave to the networks of credit and finance in Britain, not least in Liverpool, which had become the principal port for American and West African trade. It created a ready-made network for the growth of new trades based on industrial processes: the supply of raw cotton came first from the West Indies, and cotton manufactures were sent to well-established markets. No barrier or bottleneck prevented the rapid expansion of the new manufactured exports or impeded the supply of the raw-material imports they needed. The sheer scale of Britain's foreign trade even before industrialization had other important effects. No government in Europe was more attentive to the needs of trade and manufacturing, more sensitive to the necessity to safeguard the financial system against the failure of confidence, or more willing to use its naval power in the interests of commerce. With the exception of the Netherlands, no other state had a ruling class so deeply involved in commercial investments, or so dependent for its income on commercial expansion. Finally, there is the Indian connection.

We saw earlier on that one intriguing possibility that might help to explain Europe's industrial transformation was its origins in a defensive response to Asia's global predominance in manufactured exports. Already by 1700, Indian chintzes and calicoes were all the rage among English consumers. ‘We saw our persons of quality dressed in Indian Carpets,' said Daniel Defoe in 1708.
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Imports of printed textiles from India were repeatedly banned to protect the woollens industry, but the demand was insatiable. The cotton industry in Britain began as the effort to capture this market with home-produced versions, importing plain Indian calicoes and adding coloured designs. It was
‘the child of the East Indian trade',
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and its products were called by Indian names.
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After 1770, the new machinery for the spinning of yarn made Lancashire calicoes and muslins competitive. ‘The Object they [the textile-makers] grasped at', so the London agent for Samuel Oldknow (the leading manufacture of muslins) told a government inquiry, ‘was… to establish a Manufacture in Brittain that should rival in some measure the Fabrics of Bengall.'
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But one of the results of the British conquests in India (Bengal especially) was a deluge of imported cottons by the East India Company, driving down prices and threatening to ruin the new home industry.
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Competition from India (and also from cheap-labour Scotland), says Oldknow's biographer, gave ‘a stronger impetus towards the adoption of the factory system, not only in spinning and the finishing processes, but also in weaving'.
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To keep Indian goods out, duties were raised threefold in the 1790s and ninefold in 1802–19:
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indeed, Indian imports declined sharply after 1802. Thus, in what became the leading sector for European penetration of the Asian market, imitation, protection and mechanization had been forced to advance together. Without the power to exclude competitive goods from India, while forcing open the door for British exports there, it might have been a different story.

Territorial conquest and industrial technique were the most obvious features of Europe's novel assertiveness over the rest of Eurasia. But there was a third dimension to the new disequilibrium. It was in this period that Europeans first advanced the claim that their civilization and culture were superior to all others – not theologically (that was old hat) but intellectually and materially. Whether this claim was true need not detain us. Much more important was the Europeans' willingness to act as if it were. This was shown in their eagerness to collect and categorize the knowledge they gleaned from other parts of the world. It was revealed in the confidence with which they fitted this knowledge into a structure of thought with themselves at the centre. The intellectual annexation of non-European Eurasia preceded the imposition of a physical dominance. It was expressed in the ambition
by the end of our period (earlier if we include the French invasion of Egypt) to ‘remake' parts of Afro-Asia as the ‘New World' had been ‘made'. And it ultimately rested on the extraordinary conviction that Europe alone could progress through history, leaving the rest of the world in a ‘stationary state' awaiting Europe's Promethean touch. We shall turn in a moment to look more closely at this ‘mental revolution'. But what was happening in other parts of Eurasia?

In China between the 1750s and 1820s there was to be no great change in cultural direction, no drastic reappraisal of China's place in the larger world, certainly no repudiation of the cultural past. Nor was there any obvious reason why there should have been. This was a wealthy, successful and sophisticated gentry society.
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The Ch'ien-lung (Qianlong) reign (1735–96) was one of political stability, prosperity and (in China proper) peace. In the slogan of the day, it was the ‘Flourishing Age'. Their conquests in Inner Asia, the final victory over the turbulent steppe, crowned the Ch'ing's achievement in pacifying, reunifying, consolidating and securing the Chinese realm. The perpetual threat of dynastic collapse in the face of barbarian attack – the great constant in China's long history as a unified state – had been lifted at last: confirmation, were it needed, of China's cultural and technological superiority where it mattered most. It was, after all, a triumph which, in geographical scale and geopolitical importance (if not economic value), matched Europe's in America.