Why the West Rules--For Now (4 page)

Prince Albert expired just a few months after Xianfeng. Despite spending years campaigning to persuade the British government that poor drains spread disease, Albert probably died from typhoid carried through Windsor Castle’s wretched sewers. Sadder still, Victoria—as deeply enamored of modern plumbing as Albert—was in the bathroom when he passed away.

Robbed of the love of her life, Victoria sank deeper into moods and melancholy. But she was not completely alone. British officers presented her with one of the finest curiosities they had looted from the Summer Palace at Beijing: a Pekinese dog. She named him Looty.

LOCKING IN

Why did history follow the path that took Looty to Balmoral Castle, there to grow old with Victoria, rather than the one that took Albert to study Confucius in Beijing? Why did British boats shoot their way up the Yangzi in 1842, rather than Chinese ones up the Thames? To put it bluntly: Why does the West rule?

To say the West “rules” might sound a little strong; after all, however we define “the West” (a question I will return to in a few pages), Westerners have not exactly been running a world government since the 1840s, and regularly fail to get their own way. Many of us are old enough to remember America’s ignominious scramble out of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975 and the way Japanese factories drove Western rivals out of business in the 1980s. Even more of us now have the sense that everything we buy is made in China. Yet it is also obvious that in the last hundred years or so Westerners have shipped armies to Asia, not the other way around. East Asian governments have struggled with Western capitalist and Communist theories, but no Western governments have tried to rule on Confucian or Daoist lines. Easterners often communicate across linguistic barriers in English; Europeans rarely do so in Mandarin or Japanese. As a Malaysian lawyer bluntly told the British journalist Martin Jacques, “
I am wearing
your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films, and today is whatever date it is because you say so.”

The list could go on. Since Victoria’s men carried off Looty the West has maintained a global dominance without parallel in history.

My goal is to explain this.

At first glance, it might not look like I have set myself a very difficult task. Nearly everyone agrees that the West rules because the industrial revolution happened there, not in the East. In the eighteenth century British entrepreneurs unleashed the energies of steam and coal.
Factories, railroads, and gunboats gave nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans the ability to project power globally; airplanes, computers, and nuclear weapons allowed their twentieth-century successors to cement this dominance.

This did not mean that everything had to turn out exactly as it did, of course. If Captain Elliot had not forced Lord Melbourne’s hand in 1839, the British might not have attacked China that year; if Commissioner Lin had paid more attention to coastal defenses, the British might not have succeeded so easily. But it does mean that irrespective of when matters came to a head and of who sat on the thrones, won the elections, or led the armies, the West was always going to win in the nineteenth century. The British poet and politician Hilaire Belloc summed it up nicely in 1898:

Whatever happens
we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

End of story.

Except, of course, this is not the end of the story. It just prompts a new question:
Why
had the West got the Maxim gun when the rest had not? This is the first question I address, because the answer tells us why the West rules today; and, armed with the answer, we can pose a second question. One of the reasons people care about why the West rules is that they want to know whether, how long, and in what ways this will continue—that is, what will happen next.

This question grew increasingly pressing as the twentieth century wore on and Japan emerged as a major power; and in the early twenty-first it has become unavoidable. China’s economy doubles in size every half-dozen years and will probably be the world’s largest before 2030. As I write, in early 2010, most economists are looking to China, not the United States or Europe, to restart the world’s economic engine. China hosted spectacular Olympic Games in 2008 and two Chinese “taikonauts” have taken spacewalks. China and North Korea both have nuclear weapons, and Western strategists worry about how the United States will accommodate itself to China’s rising power. How long the West will stay on top is a burning question.

Professional historians are famously bad prophets, to the point that most refuse to talk about the future at all. The more I have thought
about why the West rules, though, the more I have realized that the part-time historian Winston Churchill understood things better than most professionals. “
The farther backward
you can look,” Churchill insisted, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” Following in this spirit (even if Churchill might not have liked my answers), I will suggest that knowing why the West rules gives us a pretty good sense of how things will turn out in the twenty-first century.

I am not, of course, the first person to speculate on why the West rules. The question is a good 250 years old. Before the eighteenth century the question rarely came up, because it frankly did not then make much sense. When European intellectuals first started thinking seriously about China, in the seventeenth century, most felt humbled by the East’s antiquity and sophistication; and rightly so, said the few Easterners who paid the West any heed. Some Chinese officials admired Westerners’ ingenious clocks, devilish cannons, and accurate calendars, but they saw little worth emulating in these otherwise unimpressive foreigners. If China’s eighteenth-century emperors had known that French philosophers such as Voltaire were writing poems praising them, they would probably have thought that that was exactly what French philosophers ought to be doing.

Yet from almost the first moment factories filled England’s skies with smoke, European intellectuals realized that they had a problem. As problems went, it was not a bad one: they appeared to be taking over the world, but did not know why.

Europe’s revolutionaries, reactionaries, romantics, and realists went into a frenzy of speculation on why the West was taking over, producing a bewildering mass of hunches and theories. The best way to begin asking why the West rules may be by separating these into two broad schools of thought, which I will call the “long-term lock-in” and “short-term accident” theories. Needless to say, not every idea fits neatly into one camp or the other, but this division is still a useful way to focus things.

The unifying idea behind long-term lock-in theories is that from time immemorial some critical factor made East and West massively and unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West. Long-termers disagree—fiercely—on what that factor was and when it began to operate. Some emphasize material forces, such as climate, topography, or natural resources; others point
to less tangible matters, such as culture, politics, or religion. Those who favor material forces tend to see “the long term” as being very long indeed. Some look back fifteen thousand years to the end of the Ice Age; a few go back even further. Those who emphasize culture usually see the long term as being a bit shorter, stretching back just one thousand years to the Middle Ages or two and a half thousand to the age of the Greek thinker Socrates and China’s great sage Confucius. But the one thing long-termers can agree on is that the Britons who shot their way into Shanghai in the 1840s and the Americans who forced Japan’s harbors open a decade later were merely the unconscious agents of a chain of events that had been set in motion millennia earlier. A long-termer would say that by beginning this book with a contrast between Albert-in-Beijing and Looty-in-Balmoral scenarios, I was just being silly. Queen Victoria was always going to win: the result was inevitable. It had been locked in for generations beyond count.

Between roughly 1750 and 1950 nearly all explanations for why the West ruled were variations on the long-term lock-in theme. The most popular version was that Europeans were simply culturally superior to everyone else. Since the dying days of the Roman Empire most Europeans had identified themselves first and foremost as Christians, tracing their roots back to the New Testament, but in trying to explain why the West was now coming to rule, some eighteenth-century intellectuals imagined an alternative line of descent for themselves. Two and a half thousand years ago, they argued, the ancient Greeks created a unique culture of reason, inventiveness, and freedom. This set Europe on a different (better) trajectory than the rest of the world. The East had its learning too, they conceded, but its traditions were too muddled, too conservative, and too hierarchical to compete with Western thought. Many Europeans concluded that they were conquering everyone else because culture made them do it.

By 1900 Eastern intellectuals, struggling to come to terms with the West’s economic and military superiority, often bought into this theory, though with a twist. Within twenty years of Commodore Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay a “Civilization and Enlightenment” movement was translating the classics of the French Enlightenment and British liberalism into Japanese and advocating catching up with the West through democracy, industrialism, and the emancipation of women. Some even wanted to make English be the national language. The
problem, intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi insisted in the 1870s, was long-term: China had been the source of much of Japan’s culture, and China had gone terribly wrong in the distant past. As a result, Japan was only “semicivilized.” But while the problem was long-term, Fukuzawa argued, it was not locked in. By rejecting China, Japan could become fully civilized.

Chinese intellectuals, by contrast, had no one to reject but themselves. In the 1860s a “Self-Strengthening” movement argued that Chinese traditions remained fundamentally sound; China just needed to build a few steamships and buy some foreign guns. This, it turned out, was mistaken. In 1895 a modernized Japanese army surprised a Chinese fortress with a daring march, seized its foreign-made guns, and turned them on China’s steamships. The problem clearly went deeper than having the right weapons. By 1900 Chinese intellectuals were following the Japanese lead, translating Western books on evolution and economics. Like Fukuzawa, they concluded that Western rule was long-term but not locked in; by rejecting its own past China could catch up too.

But some Western long-termers thought there was simply nothing the East could do. Culture made the West best, they claimed, but was not the ultimate explanation for Western rule, because culture itself had material causes. Some believed that the East was too hot or too diseased for people to develop a culture as innovative as the West’s; or perhaps there were just too many bodies in the East—consuming all the surplus, keeping living standards low, and preventing anything like the liberal, forward-looking Western society from emerging.

Long-term lock-in theories come in every political coloring, but Karl Marx’s version has been the most important and influential. In the very days that British troops were liberating Looty, Marx—then writing a China column for the
New York Daily Tribune
—suggested that politics was the real factor that had locked in Western rule. For thousands of years, he claimed, Oriental states had been so centralized and so powerful that they had basically stopped the flow of history. Europe progressed from antiquity through feudalism to capitalism, and proletarian revolutions were about to usher in communism, but the East was sealed in the amber of despotism and could not share in the progressive Western trajectory. When history did not turn out exactly as Marx had predicted, later Communists (especially Lenin and his followers)
improved on his theories by claiming that a revolutionary vanguard might shock the East out of its ancient slumber. But that would only happen, Leninists insisted, if they could shatter the old, fossilized society—at whatever cost. This long-term lock-in theory is not the only reason why Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and the Kims of North Korea unleashed such horrors on their people, but it bears a heavy burden of responsibility.

Right through the twentieth century a complicated dance went on in the West as historians uncovered facts that did not seem to fit the long-term lock-in stories, and long-termers adjusted their theories to accommodate them. For instance, no one now disputes that when Europe’s great age of maritime discovery was just beginning, Chinese navigation was far more advanced and Chinese sailors already knew the coasts of India, Arabia, East Africa, and perhaps Australia.
*
When the eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed from Nanjing for Sri Lanka in 1405 he led nearly three hundred vessels. There were tankers carrying drinking water and huge “Treasure Ships” with advanced rudders, watertight compartments, and elaborate signaling devices. Among his 27,000 sailors were 180 doctors and pharmacists. By contrast, when Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz in 1492, he led just ninety men in three ships. His biggest hull displaced barely one-thirtieth as much water as Zheng’s; at eighty-five feet long it was shorter than Zheng’s mainmast, and barely twice as long as his rudder. Columbus had no freshwater tankers and no real doctors. Zheng had magnetic compasses and knew enough about the Indian Ocean to fill a twenty-one-foot-long sea chart; Columbus rarely knew where he was, let alone where he was going.

This might give pause to anyone assuming that Western dominance was locked in in the distant past, but several important books have argued that Zheng He does, after all, fit into long-term lock-in theories: we just need more sophisticated versions. For example, in his magnificent book
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
, the economist David Landes renews the idea that disease and demography always gave Europe a decisive edge over China, but adds a new twist by suggesting that dense population favored centralized government in China and reduced rulers’ incentives to exploit Zheng’s voyages. Because they had no rivals, most Chinese emperors worried more about how trade might enrich undesirable groups like merchants than they did about getting more riches for themselves; and because the state was so powerful, they could stamp out this alarming practice. In the 1430s they banned oceanic voyages, and in the 1470s perhaps destroyed Zheng’s records, ending the great age of Chinese exploration.