A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (30 page)

Competition for the sake of competition, rather than the immediate consumption needs of the rich or poor, increasingly became the driving force of economic activity. The growth which followed was often chaotic, marked by sudden ups and downs. It was also of little benefit to a growing section of the population whose survival increasingly depended on their ability to sell their labour power to others. But it transformed the situation of the English economy and those who dominated it. What had been one of the poorer parts of Europe rapidly became the most advanced, providing its rulers with the means to build a world empire—and, in the process, helped the new capitalist form of production to begin to displace all previous forms.

Looking back today we can see that what happened in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was to transform the world. It would enable a few European powers to carve out empires which encompassed virtually the whole of Asia and Africa, and lead the whole world to be drawn into a new way of organising production, industrial capitalism.

But history had not come to a standstill for the five sixths of humanity who lived elsewhere. The empires of Mexico and Peru may have fallen almost overnight to the European colonists. But this was not true even of the rest of the Americas. In the north, only a narrow eastern seaboard was colonised by the end of the 17th century. As for Africa and Asia, European colonies in these continents were little more than trading posts at the time of the Thirty Years War and remained so long after. Dutch settlers did succeed in conquering the Khoisan hunter-gathering peoples (the so called ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen’) of the southernmost tip of Africa. But it was almost 200 years before Europeans could begin to move north by defeating agriculturists whose knowledge of steelmaking provided them with effective weaponry. The Portuguese seized Goa, a coastal enclave on the south west coast of India, in the 16th century, establishing a city
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which was impressive by the European standards of the time, and ran a trading town on the island of Macao, off the coast of southern China. But their efforts seemed puny in comparison with the great kingdoms and empires close by. The first Portuguese visitors to the capital of one of the four kingdoms of southern India, Vijayanagar,
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wrote in 1522 that it was as big as Rome, with 100,000 houses, and was ‘the best provided city in the world’ as regarded the organisation of its food supplies.
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Certainly, the remains of the city cover a much wider area than almost any early 16th century European city. Further north, the Mogul emperors who began conquering the subcontinent in 1525 built or rebuilt a series of cities—Lahore, Delhi, Agra—on a scale unmatched in Europe. The rulers of the Chinese Empire could virtually ignore the Europeans on the southern coast. The only threat to their great cities came from the pastoralist peoples to the north. Meanwhile, Ottoman Turkey was the great rising power on western Europe’s doorstep. After conquering Constantinople in 1453, it went on to take Cairo in 1517, Algiers in 1528 and Hungary in 1526, besieging Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683. The Ottoman Empire was a continual player in the diplomatic games and military coalitions of Reformation Europe, its culture much admired in the literature of the time. Between the Ottoman Empire and the Mogul Empire in India stood the Iranian Safavid Empire, centred on the new capital of Isfahan which amazed European visitors with its splendour. And off the coast of east Asia, the islands of Japan had borrowed enormously from Chinese culture and technique to establish a relatively developed civilisation which shared certain of the features of European feudalism, complete with wars between aristocratic lords using steel and gunpowder to try to establish hegemony over one another.
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Even in Europe, a great power emerged outside the area swept by the Renaissance, the Reformation and religious wars. In the east, a succession of rulers began to transform the old duchy of Muscovy into a centralised Russian state and then an empire which spread over the whole of northern Asia and encroached on Poland to the west.

These empires were not characterised by the economic backwardness in comparison with Europe which was their feature by the late 19th century. Some of the technical advances which had propelled Europe from the old feudalism of the 10th century to the very different societies of the 16th century could be found in all of them. They all used firearms of some sort—the first Mogul emperor, Babur, defeated much bigger armies in northern India in 1526 by using artillery to complement his highly competent cavalry. These societies borrowed building techniques and craft skills from one another so that, for instance, craftsmen from across Asia and Europe worked on the construction of the Taj Mahal tomb built by the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan. In all of them agriculture and diet began to change considerably with the spread of new domesticated plants from the Americas—the cultivation of chillies, sweet peppers, tomatoes, tobacco and maize in India, and of sweet potatoes, ground nuts, maize and tobacco in China.

China’s glorious sunset

China was already recovering from its crisis of the 14th century by the early part of the 15th. One proof was a series of epic voyages by naval expeditions. Fleets of large ships carrying more than 20,000 people sailed to the west coast of India, Aden and on to east Africa, on one occasion making the 6,000 mile journey non-stop. This was three quarters of a century before Spanish or Portuguese fleets attempted comparable journeys.

Gernet calls the 16th century ‘the beginning of a new age’.
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In agriculture, he notes, there were new machines for working the soil, for irrigation, sowing seed and the treatment of products along with new methods of improving the soil and the selection of new crop strains. In industry, there was the introduction of the silk loom with three or four shuttle-winders, along with improvements in cotton looms, the development of printing from wood blocks in three or four colours and the invention of a copper-lead alloy for casting moveable character, and new ways of manufacturing white and icing sugars.
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‘Numerous works of a scientific or technical character were published’ in the first part of the 17th century, dealing with questions as diverse as agricultural techniques, weaving, ceramics, iron and steel, river transport, armaments, inks and papers, and hydraulic devices.
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This was certainly not a period of technological stagnation. Nor was it one in which intellectuals simply parroted certainties from the past. Gernet tells of thinkers such as the self educated former salt worker Wang Ken, who questioned the established view of historical figures, challenged the hypocrisies of the age and traditional morality, and defended ‘lower classes, women, ethnic minorities’.
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Gernet continues:

There was a ‘rapid increase in the number of cheap publications’, with literature ‘written in a language much closer to the spoken dialects than to classical Chinese…addressed to an urban public…not well educated, but free of the intellectual constraints indicated by a classical training’.
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If Gernet’s account is correct, then China was undergoing a technical and intellectual renaissance at more or less the same time as Europe.
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There were some similar social changes. The state increasingly commuted the old labour services of peasants and artisans into money taxes. The commercialisation of agriculture led to the production of industrial crops like cotton, dyes, vegetable oils and tobacco. Poorer peasants, driven from the land by landlords, sought a livelihood in other ways—taking up handicraft trades, emigrating to the mining areas, seeking work in the towns. Trading and craft enterprises flourished, especially in the coastal regions of the south and east. As in Europe, most production was still in artisan workshops. But there were occasional examples of something close to full-scale industrial capitalism. Small enterprises grew into big enterprises, some of which employed several hundred workers. Peasant women took jobs at Sung-chiang, south west of Shanghai, in the cotton mills.
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At the end of the 16th century there were 50,000 workers in 30 paper factories in Kiangsi.
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Some Chinese industries began producing for a worldwide, rather than a merely local, market. Silk and ceramics were exported in bulk to Japan.
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It was not long before ‘Chinese silks were being worn in the streets of Kyoto and Lima, Chinese cottons being sold in Filipino and Mexican markets and Chinese porcelain being used in fashionable homes from Sakai to London’.
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It was a period of economic growth despite continued poverty among the lower classes. After falling by almost half to around 70 million in the 14th century, the population rose to an estimated 130 million in the late 16th century and to as high as 170 million by the 1650s.
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Then the empire ran into a devastating crisis similar in many ways to those of the 4th century and the 14th century—as well as to that occurring simultaneously in much of 17th century Europe. There were a succession of epidemics, floods, droughts and other disasters. Famines devastated whole regions. The population stopped growing and even declined in some regions.
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Once-flourishing industries shut down. By the 1640s reports from northern Chekiang (the hinterland of Shanghai) spoke of ‘mass starvation, hordes of beggars, infanticide and cannibalism’.
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Historians often explain this crisis, like the earlier ones, in terms of overpopulation or harvest failures due to global changes in climate.
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But ‘rice was available in the Yangtze delta even during the terrible “famines” that plagued the country during the early 1640s…People simply lacked sufficient funds to pay for it’.
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The crises were, in fact, rooted in the organisation of Chinese society. The state and the bureaucratic class which staffed it had encouraged economic expansion in the aftermath of the crisis of the 14th century. But they soon began to fear some of the side-effects, particularly the growing influence of merchants. There was a sudden end to the great naval voyages to India and Africa in 1433 (so ensuring it was ships from Europe which ‘discovered’ China, rather than the other way round).
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‘The major concern of the Ming empire was not to allow coastal trade to disturb the social life of its agrarian society’.
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Its rulers could not stop
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overseas trade. What today would be called a ‘black economy’ grew up in coastal regions, and there were bitter armed clashes with ‘pirates’ controlling such areas. But the state measures cramped the development of the new forms of production.

Meanwhile, the ever-growing unproductive expenditure of the state was an enormous drain on the economy. Under emperor Wanli, for instance, there were 45 princes of the first rank, each receiving incomes equal to 600 tons of grain a year, and 23,000 nobles of lesser rank. More than half the tax revenues of the provinces of Shansi and Honan went on paying these allowances. A war with Japan for control of Korea ‘completely exhausted the treasury’.
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Acute hardship led to social discontent. Almost every year between 1596 and 1626 saw urban riots by ‘workmen’ in the most economically developed parts of the country.
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In 1603 the miners from private mines marched on Beijing, the 1620s saw rebellions by the non-Chinese peoples in the south west, and there were major peasant rebellions in the north of the country in the 1630s. A sort of opposition also emerged at the top of society among intellectuals and former mandarins which was crushed by a secret police network.
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Political collapse followed in 1644. The last Ming emperor strangled himself as a former shepherd leader of a peasant army proclaimed a new dynasty. A month later Manchu invaders from the north took Beijing.

The economic and political crisis bore many similarities to that in Europe in the same period. But there was a difference. The merchant and artisan classes did not begin to pose an alternative of their own to the old order. They did not even do what the Calvinist merchants and burghers in France did when they exerted some influence on the dissident wing of the aristocracy. They certainly did not remould the whole of society in their own image, as the merchant bourgeoisie of the northern Netherlands and the ‘middling classes’ in England did. As in the previous great crises in Chinese society, the trading and artisan classes were too dependent on the state bureaucracy to provide an alternative.

The immediate chaos lasted only a few years. The Manchus had long before absorbed many aspects of Chinese civilisation, and by restoring internal peace and stability to the imperial finances they provided a framework for economic recovery—for a period. There was further agricultural advance as crops from the Americas made their full impact and industrial crops expanded. The peasant was ‘in general much better and happier than his equivalent in the France of Louis XV’, with the better-off peasants even able to pay for their children to receive a formal education.
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There was a resumption of trade and craft production until it outstripped anything before. There were 200,000 full time textile workers in the region south west of Shanghai, and tens of thousands of porcelain craftsmen turned out products for the court and for export to as far away as Europe. Tea output grew rapidly, with the leaves processed in workshops employing hundreds of wage workers and exported by sea. One estimate suggests half the silver carried from Latin America to Europe between 1571 and 1821 ended up paying for goods from China. The population grew by leaps and bounds as people saw hope for the future, perhaps reaching 260 million in 1812.
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The country was ‘the richest and biggest state in the world’.
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The sheer strength of the empire bred complacency in its ruling circles, and complacency led to intellectual stagnation. The early Manchu years saw a flourishing of intellectual inquiry, a wave of ‘free thought and a radical criticism and questioning of the institutions and intellectual foundations of the authoritarian empire’.
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Art, literature, philosophy and history all seem to have been marked by a spirit of vitality. Accounts of the period remind one of the ‘Enlightenment’ in Europe.
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But the critical spirit subsided as the ‘educated classes rallied to the new regime’.
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There was a decline in popular literature for the urban middle classes,
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and a ban on anything that might be construed as mildly critical of the regime. In the years 1774-89 more than 10,000 works were prohibited and 2,320 destroyed. Dissident authors and their relatives faced exile, forced labour, confiscation of property and even execution.
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Intellectuals could flourish, but only if they avoided dealing with real issues. The literature which thrived was ‘written in a classical style more difficult to access, full of literary reminiscences and allusions…The novel became subtly ironical, psychological…or erudite’.
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