Civilization: The West and the Rest (56 page)

This is less esoteric than it seems, since wars are even less normally distributed than financial crises. The physicist and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson
^*
grouped ‘deadly quarrels’, ranging from homicides to world wars, according to their magnitudes, using the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terrorist act that kills 100 people has a magnitude of 2, while a war with a million victims is a magnitude-6 conflict. (Note that a war of magnitude 6 ± 0.5 could cause anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) Considering only the period from 1815 to 1945, Richardson found more than 300 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or higher (in other words, responsible for
upwards of 300 deaths). Of these, two magnitude-7 wars (the world wars) killed at least 36 million (60 per cent of the total), excluding victims of war-related famine or disease, and millions of magnitude-0 homicides (with one, two or three victims) claimed 9.7 million lives (16 per cent). These data appear at first sight to be completely random. But they, too, obey a power law.
¹⁵

If the incidence of war is as unpredictable as the incidence of forest fires, the implications for any theory of the rise and fall of civilizations are immense, given the obvious causal role played by wars in both the ascent and descent of complex social organizations. A civilization is by definition a highly complex system. Whatever nominal central authority exists, in practice it is an adaptive network of dynamic economic, social and political relations. It is not surprising, then, that civilizations of all shapes and sizes exhibit many of the characteristics of complex systems in the natural world – including the tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability.

As we saw in the last chapter, Western civilization in its first incarnation – the Roman Empire – did not decline and fall sedately. It collapsed within a generation, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders in the early fifth century. Comparably swift collapses have been a leitmotif of this book. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from their lofty Andean cities. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid-seventeenth century. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time, but it served to push French finances into a critical state. The summoning of the Estates General in May 1789 unleashed a political chain reaction and a collapse of royal legitimacy so swift that within four years the King had been decapitated by guillotine, a device invented only in 1791. At the time of the Young Turk movement, which came to power in 1908, the Ottoman Empire still seemed capable of being reformed. By 1922, when the last Sultan of the Ottoman
Empire departed Istanbul aboard a British warship, it was gone. Japan’s empire reached its maximum territorial extent in 1942, after Pearl Harbor. By 1945 it too was no more.

The sun set on the British Empire with comparable suddenness. In February 1945 Prime Minister Winston Churchill bestrode the world stage as one of the ‘Big Three’, deciding the fates of nations with US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. No sooner had the war ended than he was swept from office. Within a dozen years, the United Kingdom had conceded independence to Burma, Egypt, Ghana, India, Israel, Jordan, Malaya, Pakistan, Ceylon and Sudan. The Suez Crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire. Although it took until the 1960s for Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ to blow through sub-Saharan Africa and the remnants of colonial rule east of Suez, the United Kingdom’s age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. According to one recent account, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that ‘averted Armageddon’.
¹⁶
But this was not apparent at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA (wrongly) estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 per cent the size of the US economy. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the US stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets’ favour for most of the previous twenty years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in Central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed in 1991 by the Soviet Union itself. If ever an empire fell off a cliff – rather than gently declining – it was the one founded by Lenin.

If civilizations are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for
Western civilization today? First, we need to remind ourselves of how the West came to dominate the rest of the world after around 1500.

Recent research has demolished the fashionable view that China was economically neck and neck with the West until as recently as 1800. Per-capita gross domestic product essentially stagnated in the Ming era and was significantly lower than in pre-industrial Britain. The main reason for this was that China was still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy, with 90 per cent of GDP accounted for by low-productivity cultivation, a much higher share than in early-modern Britain. Moreover, for a century after 1520, the Chinese national savings rate was negative. There was no capital accumulation in late Ming China; rather the opposite.
¹⁷
The story of what Kenneth Pomeranz has called ‘the Great Divergence’ between East and West therefore began much earlier than Pomeranz asserted. Even the late Angus Maddison may have been over-optimistic when he argued that in 1700 the average inhabitant of China was slightly better off than the average inhabitant of the future United States. Maddison was closer to the mark when he estimated that in 1600 British per-capita GDP was already 60 per cent higher than Chinese.
¹⁸

What happened after that was that China’s output and population grew in lockstep, causing individual income to stagnate, while the English-speaking world, closely followed by North-western Europe, surged ahead. By 1820 US per-capita GDP was twice that of China; by 1870 it was nearly five times greater; by 1913 the ratio was nearly ten to one. Despite the painful interruption of the Great Depression, the United States suffered nothing so devastating as China’s wretched twentieth-century ordeal of revolution, civil war, Japanese invasion, more revolution, man-made famine and yet more (‘cultural’) revolution. In 1968 the average American was thirty-three times richer than the average Chinese, using figures calculated on the basis of purchasing-power parity (allowing for the different costs of living in the two countries). Calculated in current dollar terms the differential at its peak was more like seventy to one.

The Great Divergence manifested itself in various ways. In 1500 the world’s ten biggest cities had nearly all been in the East, with Beijing by far the biggest (more than ten times the size of wretched little London). In 1900 the biggest cities were nearly all in the West, with
London more than four times the size of Tokyo, Asia’s largest conurbation. Divergence had a geopolitical dimension, too. In 1500, as we have seen, the ten European kingdoms that would become the modern era’s global empires accounted for a tenth of the world’s territory, 16 per cent of its population and a little more than two-fifths of its output. By 1913 these same states, plus the United States, controlled 58 per cent of the world’s land surface, 57 per cent of its population and 79 per cent of global GDP – of which only 18 per cent went to their colonial possessions. The world by this time was characterized by a yawning gap between the West and the Rest, which manifested itself in assumptions of white racial superiority and numerous formal and informal impediments to non-white advancement. This was the ultimate global imbalance.

I began this book with Rasselas’s question: ‘By what means … are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes?’ Imlac’s answer was that knowledge was power, but why European knowledge was superior to everyone else’s he had no idea. Now it is possible to give Rasselas a better answer. Why did the West dominate the Rest and not vice versa? I have argued that it was because the West developed six killer applications that the Rest lacked. These were:

1. Competition, in that Europe itself was politically fragmented and that within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities

2. The Scientific Revolution, in that all the major seventeenth-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology happened in Western Europe

3. The rule of law and representative government, in that an optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private property rights and the representation of property-owners in elected legislatures

4. Modern medicine, in that nearly all the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century breakthroughs in healthcare, including the control of tropical diseases, were made by Western Europeans and North Americans

5.
The consumer society, in that the Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments

6. The work ethic, in that Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labour with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

Those six killer apps were the key to Western ascendancy. The story of our time, which can in fact be traced back to the reign of the Meiji Emperor in Japan (1867–1912), is that the Rest finally began to download them. It was far from a smooth process. The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions were the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from Western clothes and hairstyles to the European practice of colonizing foreign peoples. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the costs of imperialism began to exceed the benefits. Other Asian powers – notably India – wasted decades on the erroneous premise that the socialist institutions pioneered in the Soviet Union were superior to the market-based institutions of the United States. However, beginning in the 1950s, a growing band of East Asian countries followed Japan in mimicking the West’s industrial model, beginning with textiles and steel and moving up the value chain from there. The downloading of Western applications was now more selective. Internal competition and representative government were less important features of Asian development; science, medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic (less Protestant than Max Weber had thought) were all more important. Today Singapore is ranked third by the World Economic Forum in its most recent competitiveness league table (meaning competitiveness with other countries). Hong Kong is eleventh, followed by Taiwan (thirteenth), South Korea (twenty-second) and China (twenty-seventh).
¹⁹
This is roughly the order in which these countries Westernized their economies.

Patents Granted by Country of Origin of Applicant, 1995–2008

Today per-capita GDP in China is 19 per cent that of the United States, compared with 4 per cent when economic reform began just over thirty years ago. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore were already there as early as 1950, Taiwan got there in 1970 and South Korea got
there in 1975. According to the Conference Board, Singapore’s per-capita GDP is currently 21 per cent higher than that of the US, Hong Kong’s is about the same, Japan’s and Taiwan’s are about 25 per cent lower and South Korea’s 36 per cent lower.
²⁰
It would be a brave man who bet against China following the same trajectory in the decades ahead. China’s is the biggest and fastest of all the industrial revolutions. In the space of twenty-six years, its GDP grew by a factor of ten. It took the UK seventy years after 1830 to grow by a factor of four. According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s share of global GDP (measured in current prices) will pass the 10 per cent mark in 2013. Before the financial crisis, economists at Goldman Sachs forecast that China would overtake the United States in terms of GDP in 2027.
²¹
But the financial crisis reduced US growth more than Chinese. If present rates persist, China’s economy could surpass America’s in 2014 in terms of domestic purchasing power and by 2020 in current dollar terms.
²²
Indeed, in some ways the Asian century has already arrived. China is on the brink of surpassing the American share of
global manufacturing, having overtaken Germany and Japan since the new century began. China’s biggest city, Shanghai, is already far larger than any American city and sits atop a new league table of non-Western megacities. In sheer numbers, of course, Asia has long been the world’s most populous region. But the rapid growth of Africa’s population makes the decline of the West a near certainty. In 1950 the West as defined by Samuel Huntington – Western Europe, North America and Australasia – accounted for 20 per cent of the world’s population. By 2050, according to the United Nations, the figure will be 10 per cent.
²³
Huntington’s own data point to Western decline in a number of different dimensions: language (Western share down by 3 percentage points between 1958 and 1992); religion (down by just under 1 percentage point between 1970 and 2000); territory controlled (down fractionally between 1971 and 1993); population (down by 3 percentage points since 1971); gross domestic product (down by more than 4 percentage points between 1970 and 1992);
^*
and military manpower (down by nearly 6 percentage points between 1970 and 1991). In most cases, the relative decline is much more marked if measured from 1913 or 1938.
²⁴