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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian Morris
The first working Western pump, the “Miner’s Friend,” was patented in England in 1698. It burned coal to boil water and then condensed the steam into a vacuum, whereupon operators opened a valve and the vacuum sucked water up from the mine. Now closing the valve, workers stoked the fires to boil this water, too, into steam; and then repeated the gravity-defying process of boiling and condensing over and over again.
names—Hargreaves’s jenny, Arkwright’s throstle, Crompton’s mule—were doing the same work in three hours (Roberts’s self-acting mule, invented in 1824, took just an hour and twenty minutes). The
Geography made cotton the perfect industry for Britain. Because its raw materials grew overseas, they did not compete for land at home. Instead Americans, eager for British cash, turned millions of acres into cotton plantations and put hundreds of thousands of slaves to work on them.
Boulton and his competitors had taken the lid off energy capture. Even though their revolution took several decades to unfold (in 1800, British manufacturers still generated three times as much power from waterwheels as from steam engines), it was nonetheless the biggest and fastest transformation in the entire history of the world. In three generations technological change shattered the hard ceiling. By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times
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The industrial revolution was unique in how much and how fast it drove up social development, but otherwise it was very like all the upswings in earlier history. Like all those earlier episodes of (relatively) rapidly rising development, it happened in an area that had until recently been rather peripheral to the main story. Since the origins of agriculture, the major cores had expanded through various combinations of colonization and imitation, with populations on the peripheries adopting what worked in the core and sometimes adapting it to very different environments at the margins.
Western Europeans succeeded where the Romans and Song failed because three things had changed. First, technology had gone on accumulating. Some skills were lost each time social development collapsed, but most were not, and over the centuries new ones were added. The same-river-twice principle thus kept working: each society that pressed against the hard ceiling between the first century and the eighteenth was different from its predecessors. Each knew and could do more than those that had gone before.
Second, in large part because technology had accumulated, agrarian empires now had effective guns, allowing the Romanovs and Qing to close the steppe highway. Consequently, when social development pressed against the hard ceiling in the seventeenth century, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse—migration—did not ride. It was a struggle, but the cores managed to cope with the other four horsemen and averted collapse. Without this change, the eighteenth century might have been as disastrous as the third and thirteenth.
Third, again largely because technology had accumulated, ships could now sail almost anywhere they wanted, allowing western Europeans to create an Atlantic economy unlike anything seen before. Neither the Romans nor the Song had been in a position to build such a vast engine of commercial growth, so neither had had to confront the kinds of problems that f...
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With labor so cheap in China and Japan (and southern Europe), the incentives for the local equivalents of Boulton to invest in machinery were weak. As late as 1880 the up-front costs to open a mine with six hundred Chinese laborers were estimated as $4,272—roughly the price of a single steam pump. Even when they had the option, savvy Chinese investors often preferred cheap muscles to expensive steam.
Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer grew by more than 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent.
By turning men into mere “hands,” flesh-and-blood cogs in mills and factories, capitalists were also giving them common cause and making them revolutionaries. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,” Marx and Engels concluded, “are its own gravediggers … Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.
Rich landlords did not drive country folk off the land; sex did. The nineteenth century’s intensive agriculture actually needed more field hands, not fewer, and the real reason people exchanged farms for cities was reproduction. Life expectancy increased by about three years between 1750 and 1850, and although historians cannot agree why this happened (Fewer outbreaks of plague? More nutritious foods? Better water supplies and sewers? Smarter child-rearing practices? Cotton underwear? Something else completely?), those extra childbearing years meant that unless women married later, had sex in
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By about 1830 these investments were making the mechanically augmented labor of each dirty, malnourished, ill-educated “hand” so profitable that bosses often preferred cutting deals with strikers to firing them and competing with other bosses to find new ones. For the next fifty years wages grew as fast as profits, and in 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, British workers’ pay was finally regaining the heights it had reached after the Black Death.
These early Victorian reformers can seem hypocritical today, but the very idea of taking practical steps to improve the lives of the poor was revolutionary.
Hong Liangji
Gong Zizhen
engineering—the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), the San Francisco–New York railroad (completed the same year), and the Bombay–Calcutta train line† (finished in 1870).
More than 5 million Britons (out of a population of 27 million) emigrated between 1851 and 1880, mostly to the ultimate new frontier in North America.
In 1860 Britain was still the only thoroughly industrial economy, producing half the world’s iron and textiles, but first in Belgium (which had good coal and iron) and then along an arc from northern France through Germany and Austria, the age of steam and coal took off.
Selling shares to raise money for huge modern enterprises effectively separated owners from hired managers, who felt free to experiment with time-and-motion studies, assembly lines, and the new science of management. All this book-learning struck Britons as rather ridiculous, but in new, high-tech industries such as optics and chemistry, knowing a little science and management theory produced better results than going by feel.
Second Industrial Revolution,
In 1885 Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz figured out how to burn gasoline (hitherto a low-value by-product of the kerosene used in lamps) efficiently in an internal combustion engine, and in the very same year British mechanics perfected the bicycle.
Communications were changing just as quickly. In 1800 the quickest way to send a message around the world was to put a letter on a boat, but by 1851 Britons and Frenchmen could exchange messages using electrical signals sent down an underwater cable. In 1858 the British queen and American president telegraphed across the Atlantic, and more than once in Around the World in Eighty Days everything hinged on a timely telegram.
British manufacturers were exporting trains, ships, and machines, and British financiers were lending foreigners the money to buy them. Britain was, in effect, building up foreign industries that would challenge its economic dominance. To free traders, however, there was method in the madness. By selling and lending everywhere, even to rivals, Britain created such a big market that it could concentrate on those industrial (and increasingly financial) skills that made the biggest profits.
but by the 1870s the Western core was effectively tied into a single financial system.
The West’s corrosive, liberal acid ate away the barriers within societies and those between them, and no amount of custom, tradition, or imperial edicts could preserve the kind of ancient order that so oppressed Shen Fu. It was one world, ready or not.
Globalization revealed the secret of the age—that in this new world, to talk of the West merely leading the world in social development was to talk nonsense. For millennia the original agricultural cores had expanded largely independently in several parts of the planet, but the upward movement of social development steadily transformed geography, linking the world’s cores together.
In 1839 he declared war on drugs.
In 1842 the British ships closed the Grand Canal, bringing Beijing to the verge of famine. Governor-General Qiying, charged with negotiating peace, assured his emperor that he could still “pass over these small matters and achieve our larger scheme,” but in reality he handed the British—then the Americans, then the French, then other Westerners—the access to Chinese ports that they demanded.
Matthew Perry
Japan granted Americans the right to trade in two ports; Britain and Russia promptly demanded—and received—the same.
In 1860 Britain and France occupied Beijing, burned the Summer Palace, and sent Looty back to Balmoral. Not to be outdone in renegotiation, America’s consul general bullied Japan into a new treaty by threatening that the alternative was for British ships to open the country to opium.
John Maynard Keynes
Joseph Conrad
European weapons flooded Japan, where a British-backed faction overthrew the legitimate government in 1868.
In China civil war cost 20 million lives before Western financiers decided that regime change would hurt returns, whereupon an “Ever-Victorious Army” with American and British officers and gunboats helped save the Qing.
The first is that those regions that had relatively high social development before Western rule, like the Eastern core, tended to industrialize themselves faster than those that had relatively low development scores; the second, that those regions that avoided direct European colonization tended to industrialize faster than those that did become colonies. Japan had high social development before 1853 and was not colonized; its modernization took off in the 1870s. China had high development and was partly colonized; its modernization took off in the 1950s. India had moderate development and was
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blundered into war with France in 1884
Guangxu tried to rush through a hundred-day reform program in 1898 (streamlining the civil service, updating the examinations, creating modern schools and colleges, coordinating tea and silk production for export, promoting mining and railroads, and Westernizing the army and navy), Cixi announced that Guangxu had asked her to come back as regent, then locked him in the palace and executed his modernizing ministers. Guangxu remained a reformer to his bitter end, poisoned by arsenic as Cixi lay on her own deathbed in 1908.
Boxers United in Righteousness
soldiers—though you would not know it from Western accounts (particularly the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster 55 Days in Peking)—were Japanese.
Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin
World War I strengthened Western rule by sweeping away Europe’s archaic dynastic empires and leaving China weaker than ever.
Britain, who not only gobbled up German colonies and pushed their oceanic empires still farther into Africa, the Pacific, and the oil fields of the old Ottoman Empire, but also bullied their Eastern ally Japan into handing over most of the German colonies it had captured. By 1919 more than a third of the world’s landmass and almost a third of its population were ruled from either London or Paris.
The United States had turned itself into a new kind of organization, one we might call a subcontinental empire.
By 1929 Americans held more than $15 billion in foreign investments, almost as much as Britons had owned in 1913, and their global trade was worth almost 50 percent more.
Yet Stalin was clearly doing something right, for while capitalist industry collapsed between 1928 and 1937, Soviet output quadrupled. “I have seen the future, and it works,” the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously told his fellow Americans after visiting the Soviet Union.
so America simply gave them $13.5 billion, one-twentieth of its entire 1948 production.
Mutual Assured Destruction
By making Israel a client, Washington drove Arab governments toward the Soviets; and when Israel repulsed Arab invasions in 1973, Arab oil embargoes and price hikes set
