A History of the World in 100 Objects (85 page)

Credit cards do something which for most people was never possible before: they allow you to borrow while avoiding both the traditional pawnbroker and the loan-shark. Inevitably, opportunities bring risk. Easy credit undermines traditional values like thrift, because it sets you free from having to save before you spend. So it is not surprising that credit cards have drawn the attention of moralists and been categorized as dangerous, even sinful in their very nature. There is little doubt at all that paying by credit card does increase customers’ willingness to spend – often more than they can afford. So this is an area of banking that leads rapidly to debates about ethics and religion.

Perhaps surprisingly, religion is represented on our card itself. There is a decoration in the middle of it, a red fretwork, which looks like hollow stars, set in a rectangular strip. It is curiously reminiscent of an object we discussed earlier (
Chapter 94
): the Islamic patterning carved on the side of the Sudanese slit drum when it was taken to the Islamic north of Sudan, to proclaim the new world to which it belonged. Similar patterning makes the same point on our card, for this one is not just issued by HSBC but by HSBC Amanah, the Islamic banking wing of the corporation. This credit card is marketed as being compliant with Shariah law.

All Abrahamic religions have worried about the social evils of usury, lending at interest, that can all too easily result in the poor being driven into debt and eventual destitution. Both the Bible and the Qur’an have forthright things to say about usury, from the prohibitions of Leviticus – ‘Thou shalt not give him money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase’ – to the scathing words of the Qur’an: ‘Those that live on usury shall rise up before God like men whom Satan has demented by his touch.’

As a result, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all struggled with the ethics of advanced financial systems: the separation of money from goods, and cash from effort, and above all the social consequences of encouraging debt. The most recent manifestation of this millennial concern has been the rise of Shariah-compliant Islamic banking since the 1990s – Islamic banks now offer services consistent with Islamic religious belief and social behaviour in more than sixty countries. Razi Fakih, Deputy Global CEO of HSBC Amanah, explains:

Islamic finance is a very new industry. Conventional banking and finance has been around for as long as we all remember. Islamic finance started some time in the 1960s in Egypt, and I think it was only in the 1990s that it actually took off, so it’s just less than two decades old in that context.

This credit card is of course the result of the growing economic importance of the Middle East. But it is also a sign of something else, because this banking development runs counter to what, throughout the twentieth century, had become a received wisdom. Most intellectuals and economists from the French Revolution onwards – including Karl Marx – assumed that religion would steadily dwindle as a force in public life, that in the long run the forces of God would yield to the forces of Mammon. One of the striking facts of the first decade of the twenty-first century has been the return of religion to the centre of the political and economic stage in many parts of the world. Our gold credit card is a small but significant part of a growing global phenomenon.

How should this history of the world end? What single object can possibly sum up the world in 2010, embody the concerns and aspirations of humanity, speak of universal experience and at the same time be of practical, material importance to a great many of us in the world now?

With hindsight, it will of course be self-evident. The Director of the British Museum in 2110 will, I am sure, have a very clear idea of what we should have acquired to keep the story up to date, and will smile – or sneer – at what we have in fact chosen. By then it will be obvious what major events or developments shaped the first decades of the twenty-first century. But we have to decide in the ignorance of now.

We wondered if it should be an object from Antarctica – the last place on the planet where humans have settled and now live permanently, the ultimate end of the exodus from Africa. We can live there only because of equipment we are able to make, so a suit of clothing designed for living and working in Antarctica would epitomise the paradox of man the toolmaker: it is things we make that allow us to dominate our environment, and then we come to be totally dependent on them for survival. But it seems unduly perverse to present as a climax of human endeavour clothes designed for the most inhospitable place on earth, to be worn by at most a few thousand people.

One of the most striking developments of the last decades of the twentieth century has been the migration of millions of people to cities, sometimes over huge distances. These migrants have changed the demographics of the world. They have created the totally new phenomenon of the global city, with inhabitants from every continent living closely together, mostly in relative harmony. London’s residents, for example, now speak over 300 mother tongues. It is a universal fact that whatever people leave behind when they migrate, they always take with them their cooking; humanity in that respect is constant. So we thought our 100th object could be a range of cooking utensils that would give a glimpse of the astonishing variety of cultures and cuisines that now cohabit in the world’s great cities. But this history has already traced cooking, eating and drinking and the growth of cities over thousands of years, and the international array of broken pots found in Kilwa (
Chapter 60
)
reflected what even a thousand years ago was an interconnected culinary world. So no utensils.

There is one taste, however, that has become entirely global: football. The dominant flavour of 2010 was without doubt the World Cup in South Africa. Sport has long united communities, as we saw in
Chapter 38
on the ceremonial ballgame belt, but now football seems to have united the world: West African stars play for English clubs owned by Russian businessmen; copies of their team shirts are manufactured in Asia and sold and worn in South America. So we have bought a football shirt for the Museum’s collection. It speaks lightheartedly of the present – but perhaps it tells us little of the great issues of the future.

In the end, though, we decided that the 100th object must in some sense be technological, as new devices are almost year by year changing how human beings relate to each other and how we manage our affairs. The mobile phone, or more precisely the smartphone, is a good example. It is roughly the same size as the Mesopotamian clay tablets that were humanity’s first attempt to communicate at a distance, and it has transformed the skill of writing, making textspeak the new cuneiform. It links millions instantaneously across the globe, can summon huge crowds more effectively than any war-drum and, where internet access is available, opens up realms of knowledge far beyond the Enlightenment’s dreams. In advanced societies life without mobile phones is now scarcely thinkable. But they depend on electricity being always available. Without electricity mobile phones are useless.

So, for our 100th object we have chosen a generator of electricity that could give the 1.6 billion people without access to an electrical grid the power they need to join this global conversation. But it does much more. It gives them a quite new level of control over their environment and could transform the way in which they can live. It is a solar-powered lamp.

The lamp that the British Museum has acquired for its collection is in fact a little kit, consisting of a plastic light containing a rechargeable six-volt battery and a separate, small photovoltaic panel. The lamp has a handle and is about the size of a large coffee mug, and the solar panel looks like a smallish silver photo frame – the sort you see on a desk or a bedside table. When the solar panel is exposed to eight hours of bright Sun, the lamp can provide up to 100 hours of even, white light. At its strongest it can illuminate an entire room – enough to allow a family with no electricity to live in a quite new way. The whole kit sells for about 2,250 rupees ($45), although a simple lantern costs as little as 499 rupees ($10). But once paid for, it requires only Sun.

Solar photovoltaic panels convert sunlight into electricity. If we could do this more efficiently, all our power problems would be solved. The Earth receives more solar energy in one hour than the world population consumes in an entire year. Solar panels are one of the simplest and most practical ways of harnessing the limitless energy of the Sun to provide clean, reliable and cheap power.

The panels are composed of solar cells made from silicon, which are wired together and encased in plastic and glass. When exposed to sunlight, the cells generate electricity which can charge and recharge a battery. This kit uses a range of new technologies that have recently transformed our lives: it is largely made of plastic; its photovoltaic cell depends on the silicon-chip technology that made possible personal computers and mobile phones, and the rechargeable batteries are also recent innovations. This seemingly low-tech source of energy has some astoundingly high-tech elements.

At the level of our lamp, this is a cheap and cheerful solution to basic energy needs. This technology is an economical and long-lasting source of modest energy. The ‘modest’ is important, because although silicon is cheap and sunshine is free, solar panels big enough to generate the huge amounts of electricity devoured every hour by rich countries would be prohibitively expensive: so, paradoxically, this technology which is costly for the rich is cheap for the poor.

Many of the world’s poorest people live in the sunniest latitudes, which is why this new energy source is so important in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and tropical America. In a poor household a small number of volts can make a very big difference. If you live in the tropics without electricity, your day ends early. Light at night is supplied by candles or by kerosene lamps. Candles are dim and don’t last. Kerosene is expensive – it consumes on average around 20 per cent of African rural income – and gives off toxic fumes. Kerosene lanterns and cooking stoves cause up to three million deaths every year, most of the dead being women, because the fumes are especially dangerous in enclosed spaces where most cooking is done. Homes are usually made of wood or other natural materials, and so are highly inflammable – at constant risk from kerosene spills.

Photovoltaic solar panels change almost every aspect of this domestic existence. Freely available light at home means that children – and adults – can study at night, improving their education and therefore their futures. Home becomes a safer place. Larger panels can provide the heat for cooking, freeing everybody from the dangers of fumes and fire. They are also able to power fridges, televisions, computers and water pumps. Many of the defining amenities of towns can now be available to villages.

Our simple lamp kit doesn’t of course do all this, but as well as light it offers something of enormous significance. Next to the socket is a symbol that is universally recognized – the outline of a mobile phone. The mobile has transformed rural Africa and Asia – putting communities in touch, giving access to information about jobs and markets and providing the basis for informal and highly effective banking networks, so local businesses can start up with virtually no investment.

A recent study of sardine fishermen in the state of Kerala in India showed the kind of changes mobile-phone access can make. It gave them weather information to make fishing safer and market information that reduced waste and increased profit by an average of 8 per cent. Another study, of mobile use in South Asia, reported that day labourers, farmers, prostitutes, rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers all said that their income gets a big boost when they have access to a mobile. And solar panels are making this access more and more common in the poorest rural communities of the world.

There is surely something miraculous about this technology which brings such benefits in terms of health and safety, education, communication and business. Solar panels circumvent the need for massively expensive infrastructure, and although they carry an initial cost, micro-credit schemes are increasingly available to allow the spread of payments so that lamps like ours can be paid for in instalments over one to two years from savings on kerosene. As this low-cost, clean, green technology is made available to greater numbers, it could bring enormous opportunities to the poorest people in the world.

It might also help stabilize our environment: solar power may one day be a part of the answer to our current dependence on fossil fuels and their contribution to climate change. This possibility was articulated nearly a hundred years ago by the man who more than any other deserves the credit, or the blame, for our electricity-dependent way of life – Thomas Edison. This man, who developed the light bulb and other electricity-consuming devices, was an unexpected visionary for renewable energy. In 1931 he observed to his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, ‘I’d put my money on the Sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.’