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by
Ian Morris
Khitans
Tanguts,
Coal and iron took off together. One well-documented foundry, at Qicunzhen, employed three thousand workers to shovel 35,000 tons of ore and 42,000 tons of coal into furnaces each year, harvesting 14,000 tons of pig iron at the other end. By 1050 so much coal was being mined that householders were using it too, and when the government overhauled poor relief in 1098 coal was the only fuel its officials bothered to mention. Twenty new coal markets opened in Kaifeng between 1102 and 1106.
Marco Polo.
There were three big things, though, that Marco did not know when he marveled at the East. First, its lead was shrinking, from almost twelve points on the index of social development in 1100 to less than six in 1500. Second, the scenario foreseen at the end of Chapter 7—-that Eastern ironmasters and mill owners would begin an industrial revolution, unleashing the power of fossil fuels—had not come to pass. Marco admired the “black stone” that burned in Chinese hearths, but he admired China’s fat fish and translucent porcelain just as much. The land he described, for all its marvels, remained a
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In 1492 another Italian, Christopher Columbus, would land in the Americas, even if he remained convinced until his dying day that he had reached China, and in 1513 Columbus’s cousin Rafael Perestrello would correct the family’s confusion by becoming the first European who actually did sail to China.
The fall of Kaifeng and the disruption of north-south trade that followed meant that social development barely grew at all in the twelfth century. Yet while it stagnated, development did not actually collapse; Kaifeng quickly recovered from the sack, even becoming the Jurchen capital at one point, and Hangzhou grew into the metropolis that so impressed Marco Polo.
Temujin.
Yesugei,
title Genghis Khan
Ögödei
But the Yellow River had flooded plenty of times before; the big difference now was that Mongol destruction magnified nature’s cruelties. In the 1230s famine and epidemic followed the Mongol armies, carrying off a million people around Kaifeng and perhaps even more in Sichuan, and in the 1270s the death toll was even worse. Overall, the four horsemen of the apocalypse that stalked China in the thirteenth
Second Old World Exchange.
I can vouch that the Second Old World Exchange revolutionized Western energy capture.
Along with ancient technologies such as the wheelbarrow, Westerners also picked up the newest advances. The magnetic compass, first mentioned in a Chinese text in 1119, had reached Arabs and Europeans by 1180, and guns moved even faster. During the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of China, Eastern craftsmen learned how to make gunpowder oxidize quickly enough that it would explode, not just burn, and started using this nasty new trick to propel arrows from bamboo tubes. The oldest known true gun—a foot-long bronze tube found in Manchuria that could fire lead bullets—probably dates to 1288.
Little Ice Age.
The cores across which the horsemen rode during the Second Old World Exchange were very different from those they had devastated during the First Old World Exchange, which meant that the Second Exchange had very different consequences from the First.
Turks hired away the Byzantines’ top gunner, a Hungarian. This gunner made the Ottomans an iron cannon big enough to throw a thousand-pound stone ball, with a roar loud enough (chroniclers said) to make pregnant women miscarry. The gun in fact cracked on the second day and was useless by the fourth or fifth, but the Hungarian also cast smaller, more practical cannon that succeeded where the giant failed.
In January 1368, just shy of his fortieth birthday, he renamed himself Hongwu (“Vast Military Power”) and proclaimed the creation of a Ming (“Brilliant”) dynasty.
Conventional historians, Menzies suggests, have overlooked Zhou’s feats (as well as even more astonishing voyages that took Zheng’s subordinates to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Pole, Antarctica, Australia, and Italy) because Zheng’s official records disappeared in the fifteenth century; and because few historians have Menzies’s practical knowledge of navigation, they have failed to
Ming dynasty ships certainly could have sailed to America if their skippers had wanted to. A replica of a Zheng-era junk in fact managed the China–California trip in 1955 (though it could not get back again) and another, the Princess Taiping, got within twenty miles of completing a Taiwan–San Francisco round trip in 2009 before a freighter sliced it in two.* If they could do it, why didn’t Zheng?
Erasmus
renaissance
The odd thing about the Renaissance was that this apparently reactionary struggle to re-create antiquity in fact produced a wildly untraditional culture of invention and open-ended inquiry. There certainly were conservative voices, banishing some of the more radical thinkers (such as Machiavelli) to drain the bitter cup of exile and intimidating others (such as Galileo) into silence, but they barely blunted the thrust of new ideas.
Rome—even in 1500, Western social development was still a full ten points lower than the Roman peak a millennium and a half earlier.
Shen Kuo,
Zhu Xi
The notorious practice of footbinding—deforming little girls’ feet by wrapping them tightly in gauze, twisting and breaking their toes in the interest of daintiness—probably began around 1100, thirty years before Zhu was born. A couple of poems seem to refer to it around then, and soon after 1148 a scholar observed that “women’s footbinding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras.”
By 1700 both were pushing the hard ceiling around forty-three points; by 1750 both had passed it.
In 1773, according to the index, the West regained the lead.
The government effectively lost control of the coast in the 1550s. Smugglers turned into pirate kings, controlling twenty cities and even threatening to loot the royal tombs at Nanjing.
Franco-Turkish fleet bombarded the French Riviera (then under Charles’s control) in 1542—all of which, of course, forced Charles to try even harder to shepherd Christendom.
Spain was not decisively defeated until 1639 (at sea) and 1643 (on land), but when Philip died in 1598 the empire was already ruined, its debt fifteen times its annual revenue.
the years 1645–1715 were bitterly cold across much of the Old World. From London to Guangdong, diarists and officials complained about snow, ice, and cool summers.
by 1550 the average Londoner was already burning nearly a quarter of a ton of coal each year. By 1610 that had tripled, and by 1650 more than half of Britain’s fuel energy came from coal.
the mandate of heaven. Rebels increasingly felt that no act was too extreme. The country dissolved into warlordism in the 1630s; in 1644 Beijing fell. The last Ming emperor hanged himself from a lonely tree behind the palace.
Historians long assumed that stories like these were religious propaganda, too awful to be true, but recent research suggests otherwise. More than 2 million died violently
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the agrarian empires—above all, Romanov Russia and Qing China—effectively killed one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Because of this, the pressure of social development against the hard ceiling did not trigger waves of steppe migration the way it had done in the second and twelfth centuries; and because of that, it seems, even the combined weight of state failure, famine, disease, and climate change was not enough to drive the cores into collapse. The steppe highway had been closed, and with it closed an entire chapter of Old World history.
Potosí,
The Chinese were not just servile, they argued: they were a different kind of human. Carolus Linnaeus, the founding father of genetics, claimed to recognize four races of humans—white Europeans, yellow Asians, red Americans, and black Africans; and in the 1770s the philosopher David Hume decided that only the white race was capable of real civilization. Kant even wondered whether yellow people were a proper race at all. Perhaps, he mused, they were merely bastard offspring of interbreeding between Indians and Mongols.
Joseph Needham,
Kangxi
All this cost money, and the advances in organization depended on even greater advances in finance. No government could actually afford to feed, pay, and supply soldiers and sailors year-round, but the Dutch again found the solution: credit. It takes money to make money, and because the Netherlands had such steady income from trade and such solid banks to handle its cash, its merchant rulers could borrow bigger sums, faster, at lower interest rates, and pay them back over longer periods than spendthrift rivals. Once more England followed the Dutch lead. By 1700
There was daring and treachery enough to fill many a book, yet the real story was told in pounds, shillings, and pence. Credit constantly replenished Britain’s armies or fleets, but France could not pay its bills. “Our bells are threadbare with ringing of victories,” one well-placed Briton bragged in 1759, and in 1763 the exhausted French had no option but to sign away most of their overseas empire (Figure 9.8
Political economy had proved scientifically that nothing could ever really change.
Adam Smith
Edward Gibbon’s
James Boswell—Ninth
Matthew Boulton
When Boswell and Boulton met in 1776, Western social development had clawed its way up just forty-five points since Ice Age hunter-gatherers had prowled the tundra in search of a meal; within the next hundred years it soared another hundred points.
