Mirrors (52 page)

Later on, as Defoe’s dream came true, imperial power systematically prevented other countries, by suffocation or cannonade, from following her example.

“When it got to the top, it kicked away the ladder,” said German economist Friedrich List.

Then England invented the fairy tale of free trade: nowadays, when poor countries cannot sleep at night, rich countries still tell them that story to put them to sleep.

A STUBBORN COLONY

The English government struggled to repel an invasion of fine cotton and silk cloth from India. Starting in 1685, Indian textiles were punished with heavy tariffs. The tariffs kept rising until they became prohibitive, and there were periods when the doors were simply shut.

But barriers and prohibitions did not manage to dislodge the competition. Half a century after steamships and the British industrial revolution, Indian weavers struggled on, despite their primitive technology. Their high-quality textiles and low prices kept finding customers.

Not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire finally conquered nearly all of India by blood and by fire, and then obliged the weavers to pay astronomical taxes, was their stubborn competitiveness routed.

Later on, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the British were kind enough to dress the survivors of that hecatomb. Once India’s looms were all drowned at the bottom of the Thames, Indians became the best customers for Manchester’s textiles.

At that point, Dhaka, which the legendary Clive of India had compared to London and Manchester, was empty. Four of every five inhabitants had left. Dhaka was still the center of Bengal’s industry, but instead of cloth it produced opium. Clive, its conqueror, died of an overdose, but the poppy fields enjoyed good health in the midst of the ruin of everything else.

Today Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, a country among the poorest of the poor.

TAJ MAHAL

In the seventeenth century, Indian and Chinese workshops produced half of all the world’s manufactures.

In those days of splendor, Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Yamuna River, a home in death for his favorite wife.

That woman and her home were alike, in that both changed according to the time of day or night.

The Taj Mahal was designed by Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, a Persian architect and astrologer known by many other names as well. They say it was built by twenty thousand workers over twenty years, made of white marble, red sand, jade, and turquoise carried from afar by a thousand elephants.

They say. Who knows? Perhaps that weightless beauty, floating whiteness, was made of air.

At the end of the year 2000, before an awestruck multitude, India’s most famous magician made it disappear for two minutes.

P. C. Sorcar Jr. said it was the art of his magic:

“I made it vanish,” he said.

Did he make it vanish, or did he return it to the air?

MUSIC FOR THE HOURS

Like the Taj Mahal, ragas change depending on when and for whom. For two thousand years, India’s ragas have offered music for the day’s birth and for each step the day takes toward night, and they sound different according to the time of the year and the season of the soul.

The melodies rest on one note, repeated, and they rise and fall freely, always changing the way the colors of the world change, and the landscape of the spirit.

No two ragas are alike.

They are born and die and are reborn every time they are played.

Ragas do not like to be written down. The experts who tried to define them, codify them, classify them, all failed.

They are mysterious, like the silence from whence they come.

HOKUSAI

Hokusai, the most famous artist in the history of Japan, said his country was a floating world. With laconic elegance, he knew how to see it and how to portray it.

He was born Kawamura Tokitaro and he died Fujiwara Iitsu. Along the way he changed his name thirty times, for his thirty rebirths in art or in life, and he moved house ninety-three times.

He never shed his poverty, even though he worked from dawn to dusk and created no less than thirty thousand paintings and etchings.

About his work, he wrote:

Of all I drew prior to the age of seventy, there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish, and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. At one hundred, I shall have become truly marvelous.

He did not live beyond ninety.

ORIGIN OF MODERN JAPAN

In the middle of the nineteenth century, threatened by battleships arrayed along its coasts, Japan had agreed to suffer insufferable treaties.

To counter the humiliations imposed by the Western powers, modern Japan was born.

A new emperor inaugurated the Meiji era and founded the Japanese state, incarnated in his sacred figure,

created publicly owned factories in seventy sectors of the industrial economy and provided them with protection,

hired European technicians to train the Japanese and keep them up to date,

built a system of public trains and telegraphs,
nationalized the lands of the feudal lords,
organized a new army which defeated the samurais and obliged
them to change professions,
imposed free and mandatory public education,
and multiplied the number of shipyards and banks.

Fukuzawa Yukichi, who founded the most important university of the Meiji era, summed up the government’s approach this way:

“A country should not fear to defend its freedom against interference even though the whole world is hostile.”

And thus Japan was able to annul the harmful treaties imposed on it, and the humiliated country became a power capable of humiliating others, as China, Korea, and other neighbors soon found out.

FREE TRADE? NO THANKS

When the Meiji era was taking its first steps, Ulysses S. Grant, president of the United States, paid the emperor a visit.

Grant advised him not to fall into the trap laid by British banks, for it is not generosity that leads certain countries to be so enamored of lending money, and he congratulated him on his protectionist policies.

Before being elected president, Grant had been the general victorious in the war waged by the industrial North against the plantation South, and well he knew that customs barriers had been as much a cause of the war as slavery. It took the South four years and six hundred thousand dead before it realized that the United States had broken its links of colonial servitude with England.

As president, Grant answered Britain’s relentless pressure by saying:

“Within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protectionism all that it can offer, we too will adopt free trade.”

So it will be in 2075 that the most protectionist country in the world will adopt free trade.

WITH BLOOD, WORDS SINK IN