When China Rules the World

By the mid nineteenth century, European supremacy over East Asia had been clearly established, most graphically in Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War in 1839- 42. But when did it start? There is a temptation to date it from considerably earlier. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that China ’s history after the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and especially after the genius of the Song dynasty (960-1279), was to blaze an altogether less innovative trail. Writing of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), for example, the historian David Landes suggests that: ‘ China had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility.’ As a result, he argues: ‘So the years passed and the decades and the centuries. Europe left China far behind.’ [49]

As China disappointed compared with its previous record, Europe, on the other hand, grew steadily more dynamic. From around 1400, parts of it began to display steady economic growth, while the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance provided some of the foundations for its later scientific and industrial revolutions. The longer-term significance of these developments, though, has probably been exaggerated by what might be described as hindsight thinking: the belief that because of the dazzling success and extraordinary domination of Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the roots of that success must date back rather longer than they actually did. The result has been a tendency — by no means universal — to believe that Europe’s lead over China, and China ’s own decline, commenced rather earlier than was in fact the case. [50]

The idea that Europe enjoyed a comfortable lead over China and Japan in 1800 has been subject to growing challenge by historians. Kaoru Sugihara has argued that, far from going into decline after 1600, over the course of the next three centuries there was an ‘East Asian miracle’ based on the intensive use of labour and market-based growth — which he describes as an ‘industri ous revolution’ — that was comparable as an economic achievement to the subsequent ‘European miracle’ of industrialization. He shows that Japanese agriculture displayed a strong capacity for innovation long before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, with major improvements in crops and productivity helping to support a growing population. [51] It is clear, as Adam Smith pointed out, that in the late eighteenth century China enjoyed a rather more developed and sophisticated market than Europe. [52] The share of the Chinese harvest that was marketed over long distances, for example, was considerably higher than in Europe. A key reason for the early development of the market in China was the absence of feudalism. In medieval Europe the serf was bound to the land and could neither leave it nor dispose of it, whereas the Chinese peasant, both legally and in reality, was free, provided he had the wherewithal, to buy and sell land and the produce of that land. [53]

In 180 °China was at least as urbanized as Western Europe, while it has been estimated that 22 per cent of Japan ’s eighteenth-century population lived in cities compared with 10–15 per cent in Western Europe. Nor did Western Europe enjoy a decisive advantage over China and Japan before 1800 in terms of capital stock or economic institutions, with plenty of Chinese companies being organized along joint-stock lines. Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain ’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round. [54] What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China. [55] For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.

Living standards in the core regions of China and Western Europe appear to have been roughly comparable in 1800, with Japan perhaps slightly ahead, while the figures for life expectancy and calorie-intake were broadly similar. [56] European life expectancy — an important measure of prosperity — did not surpass that of China until the end of the nineteenth century, except in its most affluent regions. [57] Paul Bairoch has calculated figures for per capita income which put China ahead of Western Europe in 1800, with Asia as a whole behind Western Europe but in advance of Europe. [58] In referring to China and Europe, of course, we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with huge land masses populated by very large numbers of people: in 1820, China ’s population was 381 million while that of Western Europe was 133 million, and that of Europe as a whole 169 million. Levels of economic development and standards of living inevitably varied considerably from region to region, making comparisons between the two problematic. The key point is that the most advanced regions of China, notably the Yangzi Delta, seem to have been more or less on a par with the most prosperous parts of north-west Europe, in particular Britain, at the end of the eighteenth century. [59] Given the crucial role played by the most advanced regions in pioneering industrial take-off, the decisive comparison must be that between Britain and the Yangzi Delta.

The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them. [60] In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious: instead, it would appear more likely that industrialization was, for the most part, a consequence of relatively contingent factors. [61] This still begs the question, however, as to why Western Europe, rather than Japan or China, was able to turn its fortunes around so rapidly from around 1800 and then outdistance Japan, and especially China, by such a massive margin during the nineteenth century.

Here the fortuitous or chance factor, while by no means the sole reason, played a critical role. Around 1800 the most heavily populated regions of the Old World, including China and Europe, were finding it increasingly difficult to sustain rising populations. The basic problem was that food, fibre, fuel and building supplies were all competing for what was becoming increasingly scarce land and forest. This was particularly serious in China because its heartland, which lay between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, had always supported a very large population as a result of its fertility; now, however, it became increasingly exhausted through overuse. [62] This, combined with the fact that new land brought under cultivation was not of a high quality, posed an increasingly acute problem. [63] For two crucial reasons, Europe — or rather specifically Britain — was able to break this crucial land constraint in a way that was to elude China. First, Britain discovered large quantities of accessible coal that helped to ease the growing shortage of wood and fuel the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, although China also had very considerable deposits of coal, they lay a long way from its main centres of population, the largest being in the north-west, far from the textile industries and canals of the lower Yangzi Valley. Second, much more importantly, the colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America, was to provide huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labour in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials: the early growth of Manchester, for example, would have been impossible without cheap and plentiful supplies of cotton from the slave plantations. Raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain ’s New World cotton imports would have required huge quantities of land (almost 9 million acres in 1815 and over 23 million acres by 1830). Overall, it is estimated that the land required in order to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been between 25 and 30 million acres — or more than Britain ’s total arable and pasture land combined. [64] The role played by colonization, in this context, is a reminder that European industrialization was far from an endogenous process. [65] The New World — together with the discovery of large quantities of coal in Britain — removed the growing pressure on land that was endangering Britain ’s economic development. China was to enjoy no such good fortune. The consequences were to be far-reaching: ‘England avoided becoming the Yangzi Delta,’ argues the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘and the two came to look so different that it became hard to see how recently they had been quite similar.’ [66]

The fact that the New World colonies proved a vital source of raw materials for Britain at such a critical time was a matter of chance, but there was nothing fortuitous about the way that Britain had colonized the New World over most of the two previous centuries. Colonization also provided Europe with other long-term advantages. Rivalry over colonies, as well as the many intra-European wars — combined with their obvious economic prowess — helped to hone European nation-states into veritable fighting machines, as a result of which, during the course of the nineteenth century, they were able to establish a huge military advantage over every other region in the world, which thereby became vulnerable to European imperial expansion. The scale of this military expenditure should not be underestimated. HMS Victory, commanded by Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafal gar in 1805, cost five times as much as Abraham Crowley’s steelworks, one of the flagship investments of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. [67] Colonial trade also provided fertile ground for innovations in both company organization and systems of financing, with the Dutch, for example, inventing the joint-stock company for this purpose. Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did. It is true that China also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World. [68] South-East Asia, which was abundant in resources, would have been a more likely candidate to play the role of China’s New World. Admiral Zheng’s exploits in the early fifteenth century, with ships far larger than anything that Europe could build at the time, show that China was not lacking the technical ability or financial means, but the attitude of the Chinese state towards overseas interests and possessions was quite different from that of Europe. Although large numbers of Chinese migrated to South-East Asia, the Chinese state, unlike the European nations, showed no interest in providing military or political backing for its subjects’ overseas endeavours: in contrast, the Qing dynasty displayed great concern for its continental lands in the north and west, reflecting the fact that China saw itself as a continental rather than maritime civilization.

This raises the wider question of the extent to which the contrasting attitudes of the European and Chinese states, and their respective elites, were a factor in China ’s failure to make the breakthrough that Europe achieved. The capacity of the Chinese state was certainly not in question: as we shall see in Chapter 4, it was able to achieve quite extraordinary feats when it came to the mobilization of economic and natural resources. [69] The highly developed granary system, the government-built 1,400-mile-long Grand Canal and the land settlement policies on the frontiers all demonstrated a strong interventionist spirit. The imperial Chinese state also had the experience and ability to transport bulk commodities over long distances, though its priority here was not coal but grain, salt and copper, since these were crucial for maintaining the stability, cohesion and subsistence of the population, always an overriding Chinese concern. [70] Herein, in fact, lay a significant difference: the priorities of the imperial state tended to be focused on the maintenance of order and balanced development rather than narrow profit-making and industrialization. The state was resistant to excessive income differentiation and marked displays of extravagance, which were seen as inimical to Confucian values of harmony. [71] The state did not block market activities and commerce — on the contrary, it strongly supported the development of an agrarian market economy — but it did not, for the most part, promote commercial capitalism, except for those merchants engaged in the monopolies for salt and foreign trade. In contrast, the European state, especially the British, tended to be more responsive to the new industrial possibilities. [72] Likewise, the imperial state did not believe in pitting one province against another, which would clearly have made for instability, whereas in Europe such competition took the form of nation-state rivalry. The main reason for the different mentalities of the Chinese and Western European states was that while the rising merchant classes were eventually incorporated, in one form or another, into European governance, in China they remained firmly outside, as they have remained to this day. [73] Rather than enjoying an independent power base, the merchants depended on official patronage and support to promote and protect large-scale commercial undertakings. Western European states, and in the first instance the British, were more favourably orientated towards industrial development than China, where the administrative class and landed interest still predominated. [74]

In 1800, therefore, Britain enjoyed two long-term — as opposed to contingent — advantages over China. The British state (and, in varying degrees, other Western European states) was more favourably disposed towards industrialization than the Chinese state, while colonization and persistent intra-European wars had furnished Western Europe with various strategic assets, notably raw materials and military capacity. The fact that colonization was to provide Britain with the means by which to side-step its growing land and resource problem towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, was entirely fortuitous. The point remains, therefore, that in 180 °China (and, indeed, Japan) found itself in a rather similar economic position to Western Europe and possessed a not dissimilar potential for economic take-off. What made the decisive difference were those contingent factors — New World resources and, to a lesser extent, accessible supplies of coal — that enabled Britain to deal with its resource constraints, together with the supportive attitude of the British state towards industrialization. China enjoyed no such contingent salvation and, as a result, found itself in a hole from which it was unable to extricate itself, a situation that was to be exacerbated within less than half a century by the growing incursions of the European powers, especially Britain, beginning with the Opium Wars. The historical consequences were to be enormous: China was at least as agrarian in 1850 as it was in 1750 and not much less so even in 1950. According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, China ’s GDP in 1820 was $228.6 billion — almost four times greater than in 1600 — but had barely increased at all by 1913, by which time it had nudged up to $241.3 billion, and actually fell to $239.9 billion in 1950. [75]

If the root cause of China’s catastrophic performance between 1800 and 1950 lay not circa 1600 but circa 1800, then the antecedents of China’s present economic dynamism, rather than being lost in the mists of time, are, on the contrary, relatively recent. [76] This makes China ’s remarkable economic transformation since 1978 rather more explicable. [77] Far from being a basket-case, the Chinese economy in 1800 remained, in many respects, very dynamic; society continued to be highly competitive, the peasantry displayed a powerful capacity to adapt and innovate, and merchants possessed considerable commercial acumen. While these characteristics may have remained relatively dormant in the inclement intervening period, after 1978 they have once again come to the fore. [78] To this we might add a further contemporary point. In 1800, rather than being Eurocentric, the global economy was, in fact, polycentric, economic power being shared between Asia, Europe and the Americas, with China and India the two largest economies. The global economy is now once more becoming increasingly multipolar. Rather than regarding this as unusual, perhaps instead we should see the last two centuries, in which economic power became concentrated in the hands of a relatively small part of the world’s population, namely Europe and North America, as something of an historical aberration. Colonization, furthermore, was to play a crucial role in this outcome, by providing some of the preconditions for Europe to break into Prometh ean growth while at the same time also bestowing on it the power and opportunity to stifle and distort the economic development of much of the rest of the world for a century or more.

Figure 3. The fall and rise of China and India: changing shares of global GDP, 1820–2001.

PRECONDITIONS OR CHARACTERISTICS?

If, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Western Europe was in a rather similar position to China, the implications for our understanding of history and subsequent events are far-reaching. It suggests that the explanation for the rise of Europe was in large part to do with relatively short-term factors rather than preordained by its slow but steady transformation over previous centuries; in other words, we need to rethink the idea that the ensemble of characteristics which Europe had been acquiring over centuries, and enjoyed on the eve of economic take-off, were, as has often been assumed, also preconditions for that take-off. They might have been desirable, they could have been advantageous, but were they also conditions without which the process would never have happened at all? Japan, China and India were not too far away from achieving a similar economic breakthrough but their political and cultural histories contrasted sharply with that of Europe. If they had succeeded and Europe failed, then the characteristics of their subsequent paths of development, and the institutions and values they would have spawned, would certainly have looked very different from those we have come to associate with Europe. Indeed, as we shall see later, as these countries have modernized they have diverged markedly from the European template.

It is clear from the experience of the last half-century, during which a growing number of countries have achieved rapid industrialization, that the processes and conditions that characterized European take-off, and particularly that of Britain, were largely peculiar to Western Europe and that there are, in fact, many ways of achieving take-off. As the historian Peter Perdue writes: ‘Industrial growth does not have to be an outcome of a centuries-long accumulation of the particular skills found in north-west Europe; there are numerous paths to economic modernity, and England followed only one of them.’ [79] As a small example, the nature of class differentiation in the English countryside, including the rapid decline of the peasantry, has not been repeated in the case of China ’s industrialization nor, indeed, many others as well. [80]

This brings us to the broader political, cultural and intellectual framework of Europe ’s passage to modernity. The roots of European civilization are usually traced back to Greek democracy, Roman law and Judaeo-Christian religion. It has been commonplace to regard these as preconditions for, as well as characteristics of, European modernity. Although the impact of democracy in ancient Greece has been exaggerated, with the West not adopting it, except for small minorities, until the late nineteenth century at the earliest, there is no mistaking the broad influence that Greek civilization has exercised on European history down the ages, including the way we think about right and wrong, the tradition of debate and oratory, the notion of independent citizenship, and the idea of democracy. A more prosaic example is the constant recycling of mainly Doric but also Ionic and, via the Roman Empire, Corinthian columns as the preferred architectural style for buildings that seek to convey a sense of eternal authority, from the Bank of England to the Supreme Court. [81] Similarly, the development of Roman-inspired law — essentially through Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — helped to establish the concept and reality of an independent legal system, which played a significant role in the subsequent entrenchment of property rights. [82] Finally, Christianity was to imbue Europe with a powerful sense of universalism, which was to shape the continent’s attitudes towards not only itself but also other cultures and races, playing an important role in moulding the colonial mentality and the notion of a civilizing mission. [83]

It is not difficult, then, to see the lines of continuity, but it is rather more difficult to argue that they were necessary conditions for take-off. These cultural characteristics certainly helped to shape European modernity, but that is not the same as them being preconditions. Something similar can be said of Western individualism and the Western family. It would appear, with the benefit of hindsight, for example, that many different types of family are compatible with the process of industrialization. A significant area of European advantage was in the field of science, based on the growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry, spreading networks of scientific activity, and the routinization of research and its diffusion. [84] But other intellectual traditions, notably the Chinese during the Qing dynasty and the Islamic, also gave rise to forms of debate, argument and empirical observation that stand comparison with the emerging scientific rationalism of Western Europe. The rider — and a very important one — is that in these other traditions there was still a strong tendency to seek to reconcile new arguments with those of older authorities, instead of rejecting them. [85]

By 1800 Europe had accumulated various cultural assets, such as the rule of law and the beginnings of parliamentary government, but these were not the key to its economic breakthrough. They should be seen as characteristics of European modernity rather than as preconditions for it. [86] There is no reason to believe that other cultures — with their own diverse characteristics — were not capable of achieving the breakthrough into modernity: this, after all, is precisely what has been happening since 1960. Fundamental to an understanding of why Europe succeeded and China failed at the end of the eighteenth century are conjunctural factors rather than long-run cultural characteristics. Christopher Bayly draws the following conclusion: ‘If, in terms of economic growth, what distinguished Europe from China before 1800 was only its intensive use of coal and the existence of a vast American hinterland to Europe, then a lot of cultural baggage about inherent European political superiorities looks ready to be jettisoned.’ [87]

EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Far from Europe being the template of modernity which every subsequent transformation should conform to and be measured by, the European experience must be regarded — notwithstanding the fact that it was the first — as highly specific and particular. [88] In practice, however, it has seen itself, and often been seen as, the defining model. This is not surprising. The extraordinary global hegemony enjoyed by Europe for almost two centuries has made the particular seem universal. What, then, have been the peculiar characteristics of Europe ’s passage to, and through, modernity?

Although European nations spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy fighting each other, the European passage to modernity from the mid sixteenth century onwards was achieved without, for the most part, a persistent threat from outside, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire in the south-east. By the seventeenth century, however, the latter was progressively being rolled back, though it was not until the nineteenth century that it was finally excluded from the Balkans. [89] Europe was the only continent to enjoy this privilege. Every subsequent aspirant for modernity — Asia, Africa, Latin America — had to confront and deal with an outside predator in the form of the modern European nations. Even the European settlers in North America had to fight the British in the American War of Independence to establish their sovereignty and thereby create the conditions for economic take-off. A consequence of this is that Europe has been little concerned in recent centuries with dealing with the Other, or seeking to understand the Other, except on very much its own, frequently colonial, terms. Only relatively recently did this begin to change.

Europe ’s colonial history, in fact, is a further distinguishing characteristic. From the sixteenth century to the 1930s European nations, in a remarkable display of expansion and conquest, almost uniquely (the only other instance being Japan) built seaborne empires that stretched around the world. The colonies, especially those in the New World and, in the case of Britain, India and the Malay Peninsula, [90] were to be the source of huge resources and riches for the imperial powers. Without them, as we have seen, Europe could not have achieved its economic take-off in the way that it did. No non-European country, bar Japan after 1868, was to achieve take-off in the nineteenth century: as a result, a majority found themselves colonized by the European powers.

Although the passage through modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to a service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all) — with Britain, Belgium and Germany (in that order) at the head — are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. [91] In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 per cent of the total labour force: by way of contrast, the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 per cent in 1967 and for Japan 37.1 per cent in 1973. It was the sheer weight of industrial society that was to lend modern Europe many of its most distinctive characteristics, notably the centrality of class conflict and importance of trade unions. From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to a mainly service society, without a predominantly industrial phase, a route that has been followed by the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea. [92]

Although the pace of European industrialization was extremely rapid by the standards of previous economic change, it was slow compared with subsequent take-offs, the United States included, but especially East Asia. [93] The transformation of Western Europe was a long and protracted affair: it took Britain, after all, over two centuries to get where it is now. One consequence has been that the conflict between modernity and tradition has been relatively muted. The European city neatly illustrates this point: it is like a geological formation, one era of architecture existing cheek by jowl with another, a living museum embracing centuries of history, in contrast to North America, where cities were newly created, and East Asia, where little survives from the past in places like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.

Another peculiar characteristic of Europe has been a succession of intra-continental conflicts or what might be described as internal wars. [94] Perhaps this was in part due to the relative lack of an external threat, which meant that the dominant fault lines were national or intra-European rather than to do with the outside, as was to be the case, in varying degrees, with colonized societies. The initial cause of these internal wars was religious conflict, starting in 1054 with the struggle between eastern and western Christianity followed, after 1517, by the division between Catholicism and Protestantism, which was to split the continent largely on a north-south axis. The persistence of these religious conflicts was to lend Europe a strongly doctrinal way of thinking which was initially expressed in theological and then later ideological forms. This was to be a far more pronounced characteristic than in any other continent: most of the major non-religious ‘isms’ — for example, liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism, republicanism, monarchism, Protestantism and fascism — were European in origin. [95] From the 1540s to the 1690s Europe ’s internal wars were largely concerned with the consolidation of the early modern states. After the French Revolution, class assumed growing importance, and from the early nineteenth century until the late twentieth century it formed the overarching language of European politics and society in a way that was never to be the case anywhere else in the world. From 1792 through to around 1870 the establishment of nation-states was to play a fundamental role in Europe ’s internal wars. By the late nineteenth century these national rivalries were to be increasingly transposed on to the global stage, with the struggle over colonies, notably in Africa, contributing to the First World War. The Second World War started as a further instalment of Europe’s internal wars but rapidly spread to engulf most of the world, although its heartland remained in Europe. This penchant for internal war found global projection in the very European phenomenon of the Cold War, in which the fundamental divide was ideological, with the two great ‘isms’ of the time — capitalism and communism — ranged against each other. Ultimately, this appetite for internal war was to prove near-fatal for Europe: it fought itself to a standstill in the two world wars of the twentieth century and thereby rendered itself both exhausted and, in terms of global power, largely a spent force. [96]

Finally, the transformation of Europe has also been differentiated by individualism. The historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has described individualism as ‘the view that society is constituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals, and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constituent group.’ [97] This is very different from East and South Asian cultures, where group rather than individual identity is central. Take the family, for example. The English family system had its origins in the thirteenth century and, courtesy of the Pilgrims, it also became the basis of the family system in North America. This individualistic system, with its emphasis on the nuclear family, stands in stark contrast to the traditional extended-household, arranged-marriage, kinship-based systems to be found in societies like China and India, whose values and distinctive characteristics persist to this day, notwithstanding urbanization and a dramatic fall in the size of the nuclear family. [98] Thus, while marriage in the West is essentially a union of two individuals, in Chinese and Indian culture it involves the conjoining of two families.

Europe’s journey to and through modernity took highly specific and unique forms — the relative absence of an external threat, colonialism, the preponderance of industry, relatively slow growth, a pattern of intra-European conflict (or what I have termed ‘internal wars’), and individualism. We should not therefore be surprised that the characteristics of its modernity are also more distinctive than is often admitted. Since Europe has enjoyed such a huge influence on the rest of the world, however, distinguishing between the specific and the universal is often difficult and elusive. Europeans, unsurprisingly, have long believed that what they have achieved must be of universal application, by force if necessary. It is only with the rise of a range of new modernities that it is becoming possible to distinguish between what is universal and what is specific about the European experience.

THE DOMINANCE OF EUROPE

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, GDP per head in Western Europe and on the North American seaboard was perhaps twice that of South Asia and roughly on a par with Japan and the southern and eastern seaboard of China. By 1900, income per head in Western Europe and the North American seaboard dwarfed that of China by a margin of at least ten times. China was to pay dearly for its inability to overcome the economic constraints that began to bear down on it during the late eighteenth century; in contrast, Europe luxuriated in its good fortune. The key to Europe ’s transformation was the Industrial Revolution. Britain ’s was well under way before 1800; by the second half of the nineteenth century, it had been joined by much of Western Europe. Previously economic growth was of a glacial speed; now compound rates of growth ensured that Western Europe far outdistanced every other part of the world, the United States being the most important exception. Apart from North America, the old white settler colonies [99] and Japan after 1868, Europe enjoyed a more or less total monopoly of industrialization during the nineteenth century, a scenario with profound consequences for everyone else.

The economic chasm that opened up between Europe and nearly everywhere else greatly enhanced its ability to dominate the world. [100] The colonial era had started in the seventeenth century, but from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, with the progressive acquisition of India, it rapidly expanded. In the name of Christianity, civilization and racial superiority, and possessed of armies and navies without peer, the European nations, led by Britain and France, subjugated large swathes of the world, culminating in the scramble for Africa in the decades immediately prior to 1914. [101] Savage wars took place between whites and non-whites as Chinese, Indians and native peoples in North America, Australasia and southern Africa made their last stand against European assaults on their religions, rulers, land and resources. [102] Niall Ferguson writes:

Western hegemony was one of the great asymmetries of world history. Taken together, the metropoles of all the Western empires — the American, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish — accounted for 7 % of the world’s land surface and just 18 % of its population. Their possessions, however, amounted to 37 % of global territory and 28 % of mankind. And if we regard the Russian empire as effectively another European empire extending into Asia, the total share of these Western empires rises to more than half the world’s area and population. [103]

As the world’s leading power, Britain sought to shape the new global trading system according to its interests. Its national wealth depended on exporting its manufacturing products to as many markets as possible while importing food and raw materials at the lowest possible prices. Laissez-faire was not simply an abstract principle or a disinterested policy. It was the means by which Britain tried to take advantage of its overwhelming advantage in manufacturing and prevent others from seeking to erect tariffs to protect their nascent industries. The international free trade regime championed by Britain had a stifling effect on much of the rest of the world outside north-west Europe and North America. Industrial development in the colonial world was for the most part to prove desperately slow, or non-existent, as the European powers tried to prevent or forestall direct competition for their domestic producers. ‘Whatever the official rhetoric,’ writes Eric Hobsbawm, ‘the function of colonies and informal dependencies was to complement metropolitan economies and not to compete with them.’ [104] The urban population — a key measure of industrialization — in the British and French empires in Asia and North Africa remained stuck at around 10 per cent of the total in 1900, which was barely different from the pre-colonial period, while standards of living may even have fallen over the course of the nineteenth century. [105] India — by far Britain ’s most important colony (it was colonized by the East India Company from the mid eighteenth century, and formally annexed by Britain in 1857) [106] — had a per capita GDP of $550 in 1700, $533 in 1820, and $533 in 1870. In other words, it was lower in 1870 than it had been in 1700, or even 1600. It then rose to $673 in 1914 but fell back to $619 in 1950. Over a period of 250 years, most of it under some form of British rule, India’s per capita GDP increased by a mere 5.5 per cent. Compare that with India ’s fortunes after independence: by 1973 its per capita GDP had risen to $853 and by 2001 to $1,957. [107]

Map 3. The Overseas Empires of the European Powers, 1914

Not only did Europe take off in a manner that eluded Asia after 1800, but it forcibly sought to prevent — by a combination of economic and military means — Asia from taking the same route. China was a classic case in point. The British fought the Chinese in the First Opium War of 1839-42 over the right to sell Indian-grown opium to the Chinese market, which proved a highly profitable trade both for Britain and its Indian colony. The increasingly widespread sale and use of opium following China ’s defeat predict-ably had a debilitating effect on the population, but in the eyes of the British the matter of ‘free trade’ was an altogether higher principle. China ’s ensuing inability to prevent the West from prising open the Chinese market hastened the decline of the Qing dynasty, which by the turn of the century was hopelessly enfeebled. When European and American expeditionary forces invaded China in 1900 to crush the Boxer Uprising, it was evident that little, other than imperial rivalry, stood in the way of China being partitioned in a similar manner to Africa. [108]

Paradoxically, nothing serves to illustrate the overwhelming power of Europe more vividly than the rise of Japan. Stalked by the threat of Western invasion and fearful that it might meet the same fate as China, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868 Japan embarked on a carefully calculated process of rapid modernization. It sent teams of specialists to study the European systems of education, their armies and navies, railways, postal systems and much else. It rejected the idea that it was any longer a meaningful part of Asia and instead coveted acceptance as a Western power. It even emulated the Western model of colonialism, occupying Taiwan, Korea and part of China. The Meiji project of modernization was testament to the comprehensive character of European hegemony. Every other country lived in the shadow of Europe and was obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to adapt and adopt some of its characteristics, or face the threat of colonization. The rise of Europe changed the rules of the game for everyone else. The consequences were by no means exclusively negative: above all, Europe demonstrated what was possible through industrialization and thereby confronted the world with the ineluctable choice of modernization. Although imperial powers saw their colonies as the servant of their needs, and prohibited them from competing with their masters, some, nonetheless, acquired from their colonizers a few of the building blocks of their subsequent development. India obtained a widely shared language in English, Taiwan inherited the Japanese education system, and the Chinese in the treaty ports, especially Shanghai, learnt about Western commerce. [109] But the balance of outcome was largely negative, as reflected in the economic evidence presented earlier as well as the profound popular hostility towards what was perceived by the great majority in the colonial world, then and now, as alien rule; in some cases, notably Africa, moreover, it was almost entirely negative. The one great exception was the white settler colonies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand: these were always treated entirely differently — for straightforward racial and ethnic reasons — and prospered greatly as a consequence. [110]

The high-point of European power was probably just before the First World War, although as late as the 1930s Italy still managed to annex Abys sinia. By then, however, the United States had begun to emerge as the successor power, enjoying not only great economic strength but also growing cultural and intellectual influence. The full impact of its rise, though, continued to be obscured by a combination of its isolationism and its obvious affinity with Europe. This latter perception was reinforced by the huge scale of migration from Europe to the United States between 1850 and 1930, amounting to 12 per cent of Europe’s own population by 1900. [111] The decline of Europe became manifest after 1945 with the rapid and dramatic collapse of its empires, with the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, much of Africa, IndoChina and Malaysia, for example, all gaining independence. The number of nation-states grew by three times. [112] The global map was once again redrawn, as it had been in the nineteenth century — but this time far more rapidly and in the opposite direction. Independence opened up new possibilities, although these proved to be extremely diverse and uneven. India’s performance was transformed, as the figures cited earlier for its economic growth illustrate, but Africa was left debilitated by the experience of the slave trade and then colonialism. It has been estimated that the slave trade may have reduced Africa’s population by up to a half as a result of the forcible export of people combined with deaths on the continent itself. [113]In contrast East Asia, which was far less affected by colonialism and never suffered slavery (though it did experience indentured labour), was much less disadvantaged. In the light of the economic transformation of so many former colonies after 1950, it is clear that the significance of decolonization and national liberation in the first two decades after the Second World War has been greatly underestimated in the West, especially Europe. Arguably it was, bar none, the most important event of the twentieth century, creating the conditions for the majority of the world’s population to become the dominant players of the twenty-first century. As Adam Smith wrote presciently of the European discovery of the Americas and the so-called East Indies:

To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned… At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. [114]

THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES

Although American and European modernity are often conflated into a single Western modernity, they are in fact rather different. [115]The point of commonality was that the settlers, who first arrived in 1607, were Europeans. By 1790 the total population of the United States was 3,929,000, of whom 698,000 were slaves and thereby not regarded as part of American society: of the white population, 80 per cent were British (the rest being largely German and Dutch). [116] Successive waves of European settlers brought with them the values, beliefs, customs, knowledge and culture with which they had grown up. Their intention was to re-create the Old World in the New World. [117] In contrast to Europe, however, where capitalism was shaped by its feudal antecedents, the settlers were not constrained by pre-existing social structures or customs. In effect, they could start afresh, unencumbered by the past. This, of course, entailed the destruction of the native population of Amerindians in what we would now describe as a most brutal act of ethnic cleansing. [118] While Europe was mired in time-worn patterns of land tenure, the American settlers faced no such constraints and, with the decimation of the native population, enjoyed constantly expanding territory as the mythical frontier moved ever westwards. Where Europeans possessed a strong sense of place and territory, the Americans, in contrast, formed no such attachment because they had no need of it. The fact that the United States started as a blank piece of paper enabled it to write its own rules and design its own institutions: from the outset, steeped in Protestant doctrine, Americans were attracted to the idea of abstract principles, which was to find expression in the Constitution and, subsequently, in a strong sense of a universalizing and global mission.

The fact that the European settlers brought with them a powerful body of values and religious beliefs but were devoid of the class attitudes of their ancestral homes lent the white American population a feeling of homogeneity. The exclusion of African slaves from American society together with the destruction of the Amerindians imbued their identity with a strongly racial dimension. The boundless opportunities presented by a huge and well-endowed territory and a constantly moving frontier instilled the nation with a powerful sense of optimism and a restless commitment to change. The domestic market was unconstrained by the local and regional preferences and the class and status distinctions that prevailed in Europe and, being relatively homogeneous, was much more receptive to standardized products. [119] The relative scarcity of labour stimulated a constant desire to introduce labour-saving machinery and improve productivity. Unlike in Europe, there was little resistance to the process of deskilling and the routinization of tasks. The result was an economy which showed a far greater proclivity for technological innovation, mechanization, the standardization of products, constant improvement in the labour process, economies of scale and mass production than was the case in Europe. The American model was distinguished by a new kind of mass market and mass consumer, with all the attendant innovations in areas such as advertising. As a result, from the late nineteenth century American capitalism was to prove far more dynamic and innovative than its European counterparts.

In 1820, the US economy accounted for a mere 1.8 % of world GDP compared with 5.2 % and 3.9 % for the UK and Germany respectively. As indicated in the last chapter, by 1870, the US share of world GDP had risen to 8.8 % while the equivalent figures for the UK and Germany were 9.0 % and 6.5 % respectively. By 1914, the US had pulled well ahead with a share of 18.9 % compared with 8.2 % for the UK and 8.7 % for Germany. In 1950, America’s economic high noon, its share of world GDP was 27.3 %, compared with 6.5 % for the UK, 5.0 % for Germany and 26.2 % for the whole of Western Europe. [120] The damage wrought by two world wars notwithstanding, the American economy hugely outperformed the European economies in the period 1870–1950 and this underpinned the emergence of the United States as the premier global power after 1945. Largely eschewing the formal colonies which had been the characteristic form of European global influence, [121] the United States became the first truly global power: the dollar was enshrined as the world’s currency, a new constellation of global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and GATT, gave expression to the US’s economic hegemony, while its military superiority, based on airpower, far exceeded anything that had previously been seen. The United States succeeded in creating a world system of which it was the undisputed hegemon but which was also open and inclusive, finally reaching fruition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and with the progressive inclusion of China. [122] By 1960, if not earlier, the United States had supplanted Europe as the global exemplar to which other societies and peoples aspired. It demonstrated a new kind of cultural power and influence, through Hollywood and its television soaps, and also through such icons of its consumer industry as Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. Its universities increasingly became magnets for the best scholars and students from all over the world. It dominated the list of Nobel Prize winners. And it was the power and appeal of the United States that lay behind the rise of English as the world’s first true lingua franca.

The United States became the new metaphor for modernity: untrammelled by the baggage of the past, gravity-free, in perpetual motion, and possessed of the spirit of the new frontier. It was born in the present and has never grown old, its lodestar an abstract set of principles enshrined in a constitution, the whole society committed to a non-stop process of reinvention, a flow of immigration constantly shifting the composition and identity of the population. The rise of Silicon Valley, the penchant for cosmetic surgery and the growing importance of the Hispanic minority are all, in their different ways, but the latest expressions of the American psyche. This is so different from Europe as to be quite alien; and yet the fact that modern America literally comes from Europe has meant that the bond between the two, that sense of affinity, particularly in the global context, has always been very powerful and is likely to remain so. Ancestry, race, history, culture, religion, beliefs and a sense of shared interest have prevailed over profound differences, as evinced by the pervasiveness of the term ‘West’, whose meaning is not simply geopolitical but more importantly cultural, racial and ethnic, as personified in the word ‘Westerner’. [123] Whatever the differences between Europe and the United States, the West is likely to retain a powerful sense of meaning and identity: indeed, it may be that the rise of non-Western countries and cultures will serve to reinforce that sense of affinity. [124] It is true, of course, that the growth of new ethnic minorities in Europe and the increasing importance of non-white minorities in the United States, epitomized by Barack Obama’s election, is steadily changing these societies, but the extent of this process should not be exaggerated. It will be a very long time, if ever, before the still overwhelming white majorities on either side of the Atlantic cease to dominate their societies.

The West has shaped the world we live in. Even now, with signs of a growing challenge from China, the West remains the dominant geopolitical and cultural force. Such has been the extent of Western influence that it is impossible to think of the world without it, or imagine what the world would have been like if it had never happened. We have come to take Western hegemony for granted. It is so deeply rooted, so ubiquitous, that we think of it as somehow natural. The historian J. M. Roberts wrote, in a somewhat triumphalist vein: ‘What seems to be clear is that the story of western civilisation is now the story of mankind, its influence so diffused that old oppositions and antitheses are now meaningless.’ [125] Not quite. Western hegemony is neither a product of nature nor is it eternal. On the contrary, at some point it will come to an end.