Civilization: The West and the Rest (4 page)

It wasn’t all good. No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd. As is true of all great civilizations, that of the West was Janus-faced: capable of nobility yet also capable of turpitude. Perhaps a better analogy is that the West resembled the two feuding brothers in James Hogg’s
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) or in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Master of Ballantrae
(1889). Competition and monopoly; science and superstition; freedom and slavery; curing and killing; hard work and laziness – in each case, the West was father to both the good and the bad. It was just that, as in Hogg’s or Stevenson’s novel, the better of the two brothers ultimately came out on top. We must also resist the temptation to romanticize history’s losers. The other civilizations overrun by the West’s, or more peacefully transformed by it through borrowings as much as through impositions, were not without their defects either, of which the most obvious is that they were incapable of providing their inhabitants
with any sustained improvement in the material quality of their lives. One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The French historian and statesman François Guizot said that the history of civilization is ‘the biggest of all … it comprises all the others’. It must transcend the multiple disciplinary boundaries erected by academics, with their compulsion to specialize, between economic, social, cultural, intellectual, political, military and international history. It must cover a great deal of time and space, because civilizations are not small or ephemeral. But a book like this cannot be an encyclopaedia. To those who will complain about what has been omitted, I can do no more than quote the idiosyncratic jazz pianist Thelonious Monk: ‘Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by … What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.’ I agree. Many notes and chords have been omitted below. But they have been left out for a reason. Does the selection reflect the biases of a middle-aged Scotsman, the archetypal beneficiary of Western predominance? Very likely. But I cherish the hope that the selection will not be disapproved of by the most ardent and eloquent defenders of Western values today, whose ethnic origins are very different from mine – from Amartya Sen to Liu Xiaobo, from Hernando de Soto to the dedicatee of this book.

A book that aims to cover 600 years of world history is necessarily a collaborative venture and I owe thanks to many people. I am grateful to the staff at the following archives, libraries and institutions: the AGI Archive, the musée départemental Albert Kahn, the Bridgeman Art Library, the British Library, the Charleston Library Society, the Zhongguo guojia tushuguan (National Library of China) in Beijing, Corbis, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin-Dahlem, Getty Images, the Greenwich Observatory, the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, the Irish National Library,
the Library of Congress, the Missouri History Museum, the musée du Chemin des Dames, the Museo de Oro in Lima, the National Archives in London, the National Maritime Museum, the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Ottoman Archives) in Istanbul, PA Photos, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, the Archives Nationales du Sénégal in Dakar, the South Carolina Historical Society, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Sülemaniye Manuscript Library and of course Harvard’s incomparable Widener Library. It would be wrong not to add an additional line of thanks to Google, now an incomparable resource for speeding up historical research, as well as Questia and Wikipedia, which also make the historian’s work easier.

I have had invaluable research assistance from Sarah Wallington, as well as from Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, Manny Rincon-Cruz, Jason Rockett and Jack Sun.

As usual, this is a Penguin book on both sides of the Atlantic, edited with customary skill and verve by Simon Winder in London and Ann Godoff in New York. The peerless Peter James did more than copy-edit the text. Thanks are also due to Richard Duguid, Rosie Glaisher, Stefan McGrath, John Makinson and Pen Vogler, and many others too numerous to mention.

Like four of my last five books,
Civilization
was from its earliest inception a television series as well as a book. At Channel 4 Ralph Lee has kept me from being abstruse or plain incomprehensible, with assistance from Simon Berthon. Neither series nor book could have been made without the extraordinary team of people assembled by Chimerica Media: Dewald Aukema, a prince among cinematographers, James Evans, our assistant producer for films 2 and 5, Alison McAllan, our archive researcher, Susannah Price, who produced film 4, James Runcie, who directed films 2 and 5, Vivienne Steel, our production manager, and Charlotte Wilkins, our assistant producer for films 3 and 4. A key role was also played in the early phase of the project by Joanna Potts. Chris Openshaw, Max Hug Williams, Grant Lawson and Harrik Maury deftly handled the filming in England and France. With their patience and generosity towards the author, my fellow Chimericans Melanie Fall and Adrian Pennink have ensured that we remain a pretty good advertisement for the triumvirate as a
form of government. My friend Chris Wilson once again ensured that I missed no planes.

Among the many people who helped us film the series, a number of fixers also helped with the research that went into the book. My thanks go to Manfred Anderson, Khadidiatou Ba, Lillian Chen, Tereza Horska, Petr Janda, Wolfgang Knoepfler, Deborah McLauchlan, Matias de Sa Moreira, Daisy Newton-Dunn, José Couto Nogueira, Levent Öztekin and Ernst Vogl.

I would also like to thank the many people I interviewed as we roamed the world, in particular Gonzalo de Aliaga, Nihal Bengisu Karaca, Pastor John Lindell, Mick Rawson, Ryan Squibb, Ivan Touška, Stefan Wolle, Hanping Zhang and – last but by no means least – the pupils at Robert Clack School, Dagenham.

I am extremely fortunate to have in Andrew Wylie the best literary agent in the world and in Sue Ayton his counterpart in the realm of British television. My thanks also go to Scott Moyers, James Pullen and all the other staff in the London and New York offices of the Wylie Agency.

A number of eminent historians generously read all or part of the manuscript in draft, as did a number of friends as well as former and current students: Rawi Abdelal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bryan Averbuch, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Jeremy Catto, J. C. D. Clark, James Esdaile, Campbell Ferguson, Martin Jacques, Harold James, Maya Jasanoff, Joanna Lewis, Charles Maier, Hassan Malik, Noel Maurer, Ian Morris, Charles Murray, Aldo Musacchio, Glen O’Hara, Steven Pinker, Ken Rogoff, Emma Rothschild, Alex Watson, Arne Westad, John Wong and Jeremy Yellen. Thanks are also due to Philip Hoffman, Andrew Roberts and Robert Wilkinson. All surviving errors are my fault alone.

At Oxford University I would like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, their counterparts at Oriel College and the librarians of the Bodleian. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford, I owe debts to John Raisian, the Director, and his excellent staff. This book has been finished at the London School of Economics IDEAS centre, where I have been very well looked after as the Philippe Roman Professor for the academic year 2010–11. My biggest debts, however, are to my colleagues at Harvard. It would take too long to thank every
member of the Harvard History Department individually, so let me confine myself to a collective thank-you: this is not a book I could have written without your collegial support, encouragement and intellectual inspiration. The same goes for my colleagues at Harvard Business School, particularly the members of the Business and Government in the International Economy Unit, as well as for the faculty and staff at the Centre of European Studies. Thanks are also due to my friends at the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, the Workshop in Economic History and Lowell House. But most of all I thank all my students on both sides of the Charles River, particularly those in my General Education class, Societies of the World 19. This book started life in your presence, and greatly benefited from your papers and feedback.

Finally, I offer my deepest thanks to my family, particularly my parents and my oft-neglected children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan, not forgetting their mother Susan and our extended kinship group. In many ways, I have written this book for you, children.

It is dedicated, however, to someone who understands better than anyone I know what Western civilization really means – and what it still has to offer the world.

London
December 2010

He would not admit
civilization
[to the fourth edition of his dictionary], but only
civility
. With great deference to him, I thought
civilization
, from
to civilize
, better in the sense opposed to
barbarity
, than
civility
.

James Boswell

All definitions of civilization … belong to a conjugation which goes: ‘I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.’

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

When Kenneth Clark defined civilization in his television series of that name, he left viewers in no doubt that he meant the civilization of the West – and primarily the art and architecture of Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. The first of the thirteen films he made for the BBC was politely but firmly dismissive of Byzantine Ravenna, the Celtic Hebrides, Viking Norway and even Charlemagne’s Aachen. The Dark Ages between the fall of Rome and the twelfth-century Renaissance simply did not qualify as civilization in Clark’s sense of the word. That only revived with the building of Chartres cathedral, dedicated though not completed in 1260, and was showing signs of fatigue with the Manhattan skyscrapers of his own time.

Clark’s hugely successful series, which was first broadcast in Britain when I was five years old, defined civilization for a generation in the English-speaking world. Civilization was the chateaux of the
Loire. It was the palazzi of Florence. It was the Sistine Chapel. It was Versailles. From the sober interiors of the Dutch Republic to the ebullient façades of the baroque, Clark played to his strength as an historian of art. Music and literature made their appearances; politics and even economics occasionally peeked in. But the essence of Clark’s civilization was clearly High Visual Culture. His heroes were Michelangelo, da Vinci, Dürer, Constable, Turner, Delacroix.
¹

In fairness to Clark, his series was subtitled
A Personal View
. And he was not unaware of the implication – problematic already in 1969 – that ‘the pre-Christian era and the East’ were in some sense
un
civilized. Nevertheless, with the passage of four decades, it has become steadily harder to live with Clark’s view, personal or otherwise (to say nothing of his now slightly grating
de haut en bas
manner). In this book I take a broader, more comparative view, and I aim to be more down and dirty than high and mighty. My idea of civilization is as much about sewage pipes as flying buttresses, if not more so, because without efficient public plumbing cities are death-traps, turning rivers and wells into havens for the bacterium
Vibrio cholerae
. I am, unapologetically, as interested in the price of a work of art as in its cultural value. To my mind, a civilization is much more than just the contents of a few first-rate art galleries. It is a highly complex human organization. Its paintings, statues and buildings may well be its most eye-catching achievements, but they are unintelligible without some understanding of the economic, social and political institutions which devised them, paid for them, executed them – and preserved them for our gaze.

‘Civilisation’ is a French word, first used by the French economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1752, and first published by Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, father of the great revolutionary, four years later.
²
Samuel Johnson, as the first epigraph to this Introduction makes clear, would not accept the neologism, preferring ‘civility’. If barbarism had an antonym for Johnson, it was the polite (though sometimes also downright rude) urban life he enjoyed so much in London. A civilization, as the etymology of the word suggests, revolves around its cities, and in many ways it is cities that are the heroes of this book.
³
But a city’s laws (civil or otherwise) are as important as its walls; its constitution and customs – its inhabitants’ manners (civil or
otherwise) – as important as its palaces.
⁴
Civilization is as much about scientists’ laboratories as it is about artists’ garrets. It is as much about forms of land tenure as it is about landscapes. The success of a civilization is measured not just in its aesthetic achievements but also, and surely more importantly, in the duration and quality of life of its citizens. And that quality of life has many dimensions, not all easily quantified. We may be able to estimate the per-capita income of people around the world in the fifteenth century, or their average life expectancy at birth. But what about their comfort? Cleanliness? Happiness? How many garments did they own? How many hours did they have to work? What food could they buy with their wages? Artworks by themselves can offer hints, but they cannot answer such questions.