After Tamerlane (75 page)

This pattern of political and cultural persistence makes little sense on its own. It would be hard to explain without some account of the material conditions in which rulers and elites in different parts of Eurasia pursued their objectives. The prospects of maintaining cultural autonomy and political freedom depended in part upon economic success. They were also bound to be influenced by the magnetic attraction of external trade, and by the appeal, or otherwise, of what outsiders were selling. At all times in world history (and no less today), the rewards of commercial exchange, opening the door to foreign products and business, have been matched by the cultural and political risks. The fear of domination or absorption by commercial ‘great powers', and of being invisibly colonized by foreign-owned enterprise
and its local collaborators, has rarely been far from the surface. Nor has anxiety that newkinds of production or newforms of consumption would induce damaging social and cultural disturbance. Hence the rules of engagement in economic relations – the conditions of entry into the global economy – have always been critical.

A strong case can be made that a global economy of sorts came into existence in the sixteenth century.
⁸
Once the Americas had been connected to Eurasia and Africa, a whole new set of exchanges began to develop. American silver helped Europe to buy much larger amounts from South and East Asian producers of textiles, ceramics and tea. American sugar paid for the import of (eventually) millions of African slaves, and increased indirectly the consumption by Africans of the trade goods for which the slaves were exchanged. American foodstuffs, like cassava, maize, beans and potatoes, transformed (in places) the agrarian potential of Europe, Asia and Africa. A profitable network of long-distance sea lanes helped to turn Europe into a great maritime entrepôt ruling the oceans. But this early-modern world economy (1500–1750) gave Europe no decisive advantage over the rest of Eurasia. It increased Europe's dependence on the produce of Asia, but offered fewmeans of enlarging its share of Asian consumption.
⁹

After 1750 this pattern altered dramatically, but not all at once. The opportunistic seizure of the Bengal economy gave the British the chance to change the terms of their trade with China. India was the source of the opium supply with which and the military base from which they made their forced entry into East Asian trade. However, the critical change was the advent of mechanized production in Europe. Within a fewdecades, Asia's export market in textiles had been lost to European competition, and European cloth was even pushing its way into the textile economies of India and China. The volume of world trade nowbegan to growrapidly – by some twenty-five times in the long nineteenth century. But the terms on which Asia nowtraded with Europe gave it much less room for manoeuvre. Europeans controlled the networks of long-distance commerce, as well as supplying its most valuable items. To enter this trade and pay for Europe's manufactures, Asian economies were forced to rely on exports of rawmaterials and foodstuffs. To make matters worse,
from an Asian standpoint, they had to compete with the commodity producers of the Atlantic economy as well as with each other. American cotton and wheat rivalled Indian; Indian tea replaced China tea in the British market. With their command and control of Asia's seaborne trade, their newfound access to the Asian consumer (by conquest in India, by forced treaty in China) and their big industrial lead, the Europeans seemed to have drawn the Asian economies into a globalized market at the moment of greatest divergence in their relative strengths. The numbers are telling. Whereas in 1820 India and China had a gross domestic product per head around one half of the level in Western Europe, by 1913 it was more like one seventh.
¹⁰

This gloom-laden picture is not the whole story. Asia became part of a newglobal economy in which the volume of goods that was traded was enormously greater than before 1750. But the Europeans' control over the Asian economies was far from complete – for a number of reasons. They had too little capital to ‘colonize' Asian producers fully. They were baffled by the problems of penetrating deeper into Asia's largest economy. China's language, currency and domestic mercantile networks kept them at bay. Nor was time on their side. It was well after mid-century before railway construction, the Suez Canal, the steamship and the telegraph brought even maritime Asia into the same proximity as transatlantic economies had long had with Europe. The timing was especially significant in the case of Japan, where industrialization was well under way by the 1880s. Far from East Asia being reduced to a subaltern region, Japan's export trade to the West and the income it brought triggered a rapid expansion of trade
within
Asia and
between
Asian economies. It was soon Japanese industrialists (often in partnership with Chinese merchants) and Indian mill-owners who were meeting the region's demand for more consumer goods. By 1914 Asia's trade with Asia was growing more quickly than its trade with the West.
¹¹

The hundred years that led up to 1914 could thus be described as an age of ‘semi-globalization'. They had seen the emergence of a single world market for primary and industrial goods as well as for capital and financial services. In a number of states (though not the majority) the volume of trade compared with the state's total output had grown very significantly. The level, however, was still far below what it had
reached by the end of the twentieth century.
¹²
And, except for East Asia, manufacturing industry had been heavily concentrated in Atlantic Europe and the Old Northeast of the United States. No other part of the world could compete in those markets with industrial goods. Semi-globalization was all but stopped in its tracks by the outbreak of war in Europe. In the age of disruption that followed, the economic integration of the pre-1914 world went into reverse. After a short-lived recovery in the late 1920s, the global economy shrank. Its main entrepôt, Britain, abandoned the policies that had smoothed its exchanges: a gold-backed world currency and the commitment to free trade. The world's largest economy, the United States, retreated deeper into its cave of protection. Much of the rest of the world was divided between blocs: each under its hegemon; each aiming to shrink its trade with the others. The Soviet Union withdrew into virtual isolation. Smaller states struggled to reduce their external dependence. Primary producers sawtheir incomes collapse. The East Asian economy, within which China had been industrializing swiftly, was now cut in half, first by Japan's ‘yen bloc' and then (in 1937) by its invasion of China. By the time the world mobilized for a new total war, the great trade expansion of the previous century could no longer be seen as a guide to the future. The closed economy, self-reliance and internal development – not the promotion of trade – had become the price of survival in a segmented world.

Nor was this view to be dispelled completely after the Second World War. The post-war recovery, when it eventually came, mirrored the divisions that peace left unsolved. The vision of global free trade that had inspired the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had to face the reality of global cold war. The autarkic empire of the Soviet Union was hugely expanded in Eastern and Central Europe. The Communist triumph in China entrenched even more deeply the prewar partition of the East Asian economy. China, like Stalinist Russia, withdrew into planned isolation. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore followed Japan's path and became its trade partners. The European Community, the vehicle for Western Europe's recovery, formed a protectionist bloc. Its economic arrangements reflected its primary purpose: to secure a permanent end to Franco-German
antagonism, not to promote an open global economy. When the European overseas empires broke up into a mass of newstates, most favoured a closed, state-managed, economy in their drive to build an industrial base, and leveraged diplomatic alignment against aid and investment from the superpower rivals. But perhaps the most significant feature of this age of recovery was the scale of American power. It was the Second World War that made the United States not just the world's largest economy, but also its strongest. It was the global cold war that made it the world's greatest military power. These were the assets with which America entered the ‘globalized' world at the end of the century.

Perhaps enough has been said to make an obvious point. The economic regime to which we have grown used in the last decade and a half represents an extraordinary moment in the turbulent history of the global economy. It was produced by an earthquake as dramatic as anything in the world's modern history. It required the combination of geopolitical change – the sudden collapse of Soviet power and China's decision to embrace a market economy – and a technological revolution in communications and transport. The turn to the market in the People's Republic and the former Soviet bloc brought a massive enlargement of productive capacity and an enormous newmarket. It coincided with the growth of much cheaper air travel, the ‘container revolution' in the shipment of goods, and, above all, the commercial application of Internet technology. Hard on the heels of the financial ‘liberalization' of the 1980s that brought much greater freedom for financial services and capital transfers between Western countries, the conditions were met for a phase of exceptional growth in the volume of trade and an intense integration of economic activities on a global scale far beyond the limited promise of the pre- 1914 world. The ‘great divergence' in wealth and economic performance between the Euro-Atlantic West and most of the rest of Eurasia has given way instead to the ‘great convergence', which should, if it continues, restore the balance to the rough equilibrium of half a millennium ago in the next fifty years.

Yet the world that ‘globalization' is in process of remaking has largely been formed under very different conditions. For most of the period covered in this book, economic relations between different
parts of the world have done little to hinder (and quite a lot to encourage) the building of empires, states and cultures with distinctive values, attitudes, institutions and ideologies. Economic interdependence, the main constraint upon cultural diversity, has been too short-lived, too quickly aborted and too blunt in its impact to reverse this trend. It is widely assumed that this long era is ending: that vernacular cultures and the nation state cannot withstand the invasive effects of the world of free movement in information, people and goods. So far the run of free movement has been short. We will have to see.

Perhaps this is the point. It might well be true that we are now on the brink of a great transformation – in geopolitics, economics and culture – at least as far-reaching as the Eurasian Revolution of the late eighteenth century. If this is so, it can hardly be doubted that its impacts in different parts of the world will vary enormously. The history of Eurasia suggests that, while new methods of warfare and government, newtechniques of production, newcultural practices and new religious beliefs were diffused from one end of the Old World to the other (and from every direction), they failed to induce a common view of modernity or of what it was to be ‘modern'. The past patterns of trade and conquest, diaspora and migration that have pushed and pulled distant regions together and shaped their cultures and politics have been exceptionally complex. Their effect has been not to homogenize the world, but to keep it diverse. By contrast, the magnetic force of the global economy has been too erratic thus far, and too unevenly felt, to impose the cooperative behaviour and cultural fusion to which theorists of free trade have often looked forward. What we call globalization today might be candidly seen as flowing from a set of recent agreements, some tacit, some formal, between the four great economic ‘empires' of the contemporary world: America, Europe, Japan and China. For them, and for all other states and societies, the challenge will be to reconcile their internal cohesion with the disturbing effects of free competition. The strain will be great; the outcome uncertain. But if there is one continuity that we should be able
to glean from a long viewof the past, it is Eurasia's resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules. In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane's shadow – or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadowof his failure.

1
. Frederick Teggart,
Rome and China
(Berkeley, 1939), p. 245.

1
. For Ibn Khaldun, Y. Lacoste,
Ibn Khaldun
(Paris, 1969);
Encylopaedia of Islam
(Leiden, 1999).

2
. The authoritative study is B. F. Manz,
The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane
(Cambridge, 1989).

3
. For a recent study stressing the exchanges across Mongol Eurasia, Thomas T. Allsen,
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia
(Cambridge, 2001). See also John Masson Smith, ‘The Mongols and the Silk Road',
Silk Road Foundation Newsletter
vol. 1, no. 1 at http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/volumeonenumberone/mongols.html.

4
. Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India' (1853), repr. in E. Kamenka (ed.),
The Portable Karl Marx
(Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 334–5.

5
. Lenin's
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
was published in Zurich in 1916.

6
. See I. Wallerstein,
Historical Capitalism
(London, 1983) for an elegant outline of this school of thought.

7
. M. Weber,
The Sociology of Religion
(1922; Eng. trans. London, 1965), p. 270. Weber also stressed the effects of the caste system and hostility of the Confucian literati to innovation. See H. H. Girth and C. Wright Mills (eds.),
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
(pbk edn, London, 1974), chs. 16, 17.