War: What is it good for? (35 page)

We should not exaggerate the scale and speed of changes. Eighteenth-century governments remained tiny by twenty-first-century standards; the “better sort” expected, and generally received, deference; and almost everywhere, “democracy” was a dirty word. But all the same, ordinary people's interests began to matter more to rulers. The price of representation, however, was taxation, and more money meant that governments needed more managers—who, little by little, extended Leviathan's reach deeper into civil society. In England, which led the way in open access, the number of government pen pushers tripled between 1690 and 1782 and the tax take grew sixfold. “Let any gentleman but look into the Statute Books lying
upon our Table,” the Earl of Bath harrumphed in 1743. “It is monstrous, it is even frightful to look into the Indexes, where for several Columns together we see nothing but Taxes, Taxes, Taxes.”

Despite the grumbling, by Smith's day it was clear that governments that laid bets on open access were doing better than those that did not. From Madrid to Constantinople, rulers carried on defending royal, aristocratic, and clerical prerogatives against merchants. They limited who could trade, they set up monopolies, and they went on seizing their subjects' goods. The payoffs: hunger, misery, and want as economies grew more slowly than people reproduced. In northwestern Europe, by contrast, rulers were far more willing to take a chance on the new ways of doing things. Holding their noses, they made deals with the moneymen. The payoff: economies that grew even faster than people could breed (
Figure 4.10
).

Even so, Smith saw, reordering relationships within nations was only the beginning. Rulers also needed to reorder the relations between nations. By forcing Asia, Africa, and America into a vastly expanded market, Smith acknowledged, European governments had added greatly to the world's wealth, but now the market had grown so big, he argued, that Europe “should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war, as they might think proper.” The Assyrian, Roman, or any other earlier empire would have been insane to abandon its provinces and rely
on trade to make it rich, but now, said Smith, freeing colonies to truck and barter as they saw fit would be a net gain for rulers.

“Such a measure,” Smith admitted, “never was, and never will be, adopted by any nation in the world,” but in 1776—the very year that
The Wealth of Nations
was published—Britain's American colonists relieved their motherland of the need to decide whether to follow Smith's advice by rebelling. Traditional-minded politicians assumed that losing the colonies would ruin Britain's Atlantic trade, but events soon showed that they were wrong and Smith was right. Anglo-American commerce regained its prewar level in 1789 and just kept growing.

Explaining this became, in many ways,
the
burning question of the late eighteenth century, and it has never really gone away since then. In a sense, it is the same question that I am trying to answer in this book. I have been arguing that in the ten thousand years since farming began, productive war has been the motor that made the world safer and richer, by creating Leviathans that in turn created bigger societies, pacified them internally, and allowed economies to grow. But the American Revolution seems to point in the opposite direction. By breaking a big chunk off the British Empire, the revolution was very much a counterproductive war (in the sense I have been using that expression), but instead of leading back to the kinds of calamities that we saw in
Chapter 3
, it made both Britain and the new United States richer than ever before. Perhaps what the American Revolution teaches us is that the whole argument of this book is wrong. Perhaps the real secret to a safer, richer world is just to set everyone free to pursue their own interests, without governments setting rules and enforcing them with violence.

This was certainly the conclusion that many intellectuals reached in the late eighteenth century. These were the years in which Rousseau challenged Hobbes, arguing that before governments had begun bothering them, people had lived in a peaceful and happy natural state. They were also the years in which Thomas Paine, in his bestselling pamphlet
Common Sense,
assured Americans that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” Some of America's revolutionaries—above all a group around Thomas Jefferson, known as Republicans—tried to put the new theory into practice. Others—above all a group around Alexander Hamilton, known as Federalists—pushed back against the idea that “government itself will become useless, and Society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles.” The reality, the Federalist (and soon-to-be president) John Adams told Jefferson, was that men were slaves to their violent
passions and that “Nothing but Force, and Power and Strength can restrain them.”

Smith himself took a middle course. Just look, he said, at the Navigation Acts, which England passed in 1651. These laws, designed largely to exclude Dutch rivals from English colonial trade, were disastrous in purely economic terms. Shutting out the Dutch shrank England's markets and made everyone poorer. In strategic terms, however, the laws were vital, because growing Dutch power threatened England's very survival. “As defence,” Smith pointed out, “is of much more importance than opulence, the act of navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.”

The Navigation Acts threw into sharp relief the fundamental problem of the Atlantic economy—a problem that it shared with every other part of the open-access order. Markets could not work well unless governments got out of them, but markets could not work at all unless governments got into them, using force to pacify the world and keep the Beast at bay. Violence and commerce were two sides of the same coin, because the invisible hand needed an invisible fist to smooth the way before it could work its magic.

The fifty years that followed the American Revolution gradually showed how to solve this conundrum—not by ridding the world of Leviathan, but by making a Leviathan that reached across the world. This Leviathan would be a novel kind of stationary bandit, one that stood above the fray and impartially umpired an international open-access order, preventing any lesser Leviathans from interfering with the invisible hand. What the new, business-friendly rulers of northwestern Europe were doing within their countries, a new, business-friendly super-Leviathan would do between countries. It would act as a globocop, an impartial policeman providing security for all and leaving economic self-interest to bring people together in larger and larger markets. In return for giving up plunder and monopolies, the globocop would become the most privileged player in a hugely expanded market, and if all went well, it would end up much richer than traditional Leviathans had ever been.

Once again, war was reaching a culminating point. Since reinventing productive war in the fifteenth century, Europeans had conquered more of the planet and created bigger markets than anyone had done before, but the strategies that had brought them so much success were now leading toward disaster. To thrive in the new world of global trade that productive war had made, governments had to embrace the open-access order. As
Smith foresaw, no nation in the world was ready to adopt such measures wholeheartedly, and even after its defeat in North America, Britain went on aggressively extending its control of India. However, Britain's governments did begin to see that they did not have to rule North America to get the benefits of a bigger society; they just had to rule the waves (it is no coincidence that “Rule, Britannia!”—the soundtrack to this chapter—was first sung in 1740). Britain edged, little by little, toward being a globocop, using its invisible fist to police the sea-lanes, clearing the way for the invisible hand of the market to do its job.

Productive war and Leviathans had not become obsolete. Rather, they were just evolving into new and more powerful forms. Unfortunately, it would take another generation of killing before the world learned this lesson.

War and Perpetual Peace

“In 1793, a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people.”

This, thought Clausewitz (who lived through the events), was the real legacy of the late eight eenth century. Not for nothing did the United States' Founding Fathers open their draft constitution in 1787 with the words “We the People”: it was the people in arms, not paid professionals or mercenaries, who rose against the British. Lacking their enemies' wealth and organization, the American revolutionaries had raised armies by enthusing them with patriotism instead of paying them and had run rings around the rigid, ponderous professionals. The open-access order was now opening war, as well as markets and politics, to the energies of the masses. A new revolution in military affairs was beginning.

This was not well understood at first, although it should have been. Many European observers insisted that there had in fact been nothing special about the American Revolution. Far from being a people united, they pointed out, Americans had actually been deeply divided over rebelling, and the rebels might well have lost without interventions by French and Spanish fleets and the Baron von Steuben, a German officer who trained the Continental Army to fight more like professionals.

Even when Europeans did recognize that the Americans had waged a novel kind of people's war, they rarely thought that it mattered much. The postrevolutionary United States, they observed, was a puny military power. As late as 1791, the outnumbered Miami Indians annihilated an American army near the headwaters of the Wabash River. They killed six hundred
white soldiers and stuffed their mouths with soil to satisfy their land hunger. If this was what people's war brought, many Europeans concluded, they could do without it.

When Europeans
were
impressed by the American Revolution, it was more for its outpouring of announcements that the new republic had transcended war than for the way it had fought. Even George Washington, who knew more about battles than most men, felt able to tell a French correspondent that “it is time for the age of Knight-Errantry and mad-heroism to be at an end,” because “the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; … as the Scripture expresses it, ‘the nations learn war no more.'”

By the mid-1790s, Europe's literary salons were awash with proposals for world peace, often explicitly inspired by the American example. None, though, had quite the impact of Immanuel Kant's little pamphlet
Perpetual Peace
. Kant was probably Europe's most famous philosopher, renowned almost as much for his austere lifestyle (he liked to end his single meal of the day with laughter, he said, not because he enjoyed laughing, but because it was good for his digestion) as for his brilliant, closely argued monographs (even other philosophers initially found his eight-hundred-page
Critique of Pure Reason
impenetrable).
Perpetual Peace,
however, was neither austere nor dense. Kant even opened it with a little joke: his title, he said, came from the “satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted.”

Despite the gallows humor, Kant's point was that perpetual peace was also possible in the here and now. The reason, he said, was that open-access republics were better at commerce than closed-access monarchies, and “if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared,” as it is in republics, then “nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game.” And as republics renounced war, each “may and should for the sake of its own security demand that the others enter with it into a constitution similar to the civil constitution, for under such a constitution each can be secure in his right. This would be a league of nations.” War would be no more.

Perpetual Peace
remains hugely influential, regularly assigned (sometimes along with
Coming of Age in Samoa
) in college classes. But by the time it came out, in 1795, it was already clear that something was wrong with the argument. Far from ushering in perpetual peace, republicanism had plunged Europe into war.

In one of the eighteenth century's greater ironies, the catalyst was the
military aid Louis XVI of France had lavished on the American revolutionaries in order to weaken Britain. He had borrowed heavily and by 1789 could no longer meet the interest payments. His efforts to raise cash set off a taxpayers' revolt, which quickly turned violent. The revolutionaries locked up the king and his wife, Marie Antoinette, and then sent both of them plus 16,592 of their fellow citizens to the guillotine.