Niall Ferguson 文明 西方及其他地區

文明：西方及其他地區

作者：尼爾·弗格森 (Niall Ferguson) (作者) 2012 年 10 月 30 日

https://www.amazon.ca/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061

西方文明崛起並占據全球主導地位是過去五個世紀以來最重要的曆史現象。西方是如何超越東方競爭對手的？ 西方權力的頂峰現在已經過去了嗎？ 著名曆史學家尼爾·弗格森認為，從 15 世紀開始，西方發展了六種強大的新概念，或者說“殺手級應用”——競爭、科學、法治、現代醫學、消費主義和職業道德——而其他國家則缺乏這些概念。 使其超越所有其他競爭對手。

然而現在，弗格森展示了其他國家如何下載西方曾經壟斷的殺手級應用程序，而西方實際上已經對自己失去了信心。 《文明：西方與其他地區》記錄了帝國的興衰以及文明的衝突（和融合），用力量和智慧重塑了世界曆史。 大膽的爭論和充滿令人難忘的人物，這是弗格森的最佳狀態。

西方文明崛起並占據全球主導地位是過去五個世紀以來最重要的曆史現象。西方是如何超越東方競爭對手的？ 西方權力的頂峰現在已經過去了嗎？ 著名曆史學家尼爾·弗格森認為，從 15 世紀開始，西方發展了六種強大的新概念，或者說“殺手級應用”——競爭、科學、法治、現代醫學、消費主義和職業道德——而其他國家則缺乏這些概念。 使其超越所有其他競爭對手。
然而現在，弗格森展示了其他國家如何下載西方曾經壟斷的殺手級應用程序，而西方實際上已經對自己失去了信心。 《文明：西方與其他地區》記錄了帝國的興衰以及文明的衝突（和融合），用力量和智慧重塑了世界曆史。 大膽的爭論和充滿令人難忘的人物，這是弗格森的最佳狀態。

中國似乎長期以來一直處於停滯狀態，並且很可能很久以前就獲得了與其法律和製度的性質相一致的全部財富。 但這種補充可能遠遠低於其土壤、氣候和情況的性質所允許的其他法律和製度。 一個忽視或蔑視對外貿易、隻允許外國船隻進入其一兩個港口的國家，無法進行與不同法律和製度下相同數量的業務。 。 。 對外貿易更加廣泛。 。 。 必然會極大地增加中國的製造業，並極大地提高其製造業的生產力。 通過更廣泛的航行，中國人自然會學習使用和建造其他國家使用的所有不同機器的藝術，以及在世界各地實踐的其他藝術和工業改進。 世界。--- 亞當·斯密
 
為什麽它們雖小卻很強大？ 為什麽我們大而弱？ 。 。 。 我們要向野蠻人學習的隻是。 。 。 堅固的船隻和有效的火炮。--- 馮桂芬

文明
 
兩條河 紫禁城（故宮）是由超過一百萬工人在北京市中心建造的，所用的材料來自中華帝國各地。 紫禁城擁有近千座建築，象征著明朝的威力，它不僅是曾經世界上最偉大文明的遺跡，也是曾經世界上最偉大文明的遺跡。 這也提醒我們，沒有哪個文明能夠永遠持續下去。 直到 1776 年，亞當·斯密仍然可以將中國稱為“世界上最富有的國家之一，即世界上最肥沃、耕種最好、最勤勞和人口最多的國家之一”。 。 。 一個比歐洲任何地方都富裕得多的國家”。 然而，史密斯也認為中國“長期停滯不前”或“停滯不前”。1 在這一點上他肯定是對的。 1406年至1420年紫禁城建成後不到一個世紀，東方的相對衰落可以說已經開始。 西歐貧窮、飽受衝突蹂躪的小國開始了五百年來幾乎不可阻擋的擴張。 與此同時，東方的偉大帝國陷入停滯，並最終屈服於西方的統治。

為什麽中國衰落而歐洲卻奮進？ 斯密的主要回答是，中國未能“鼓勵對外貿易”，因此錯過了比較優勢和國際分工的好處。 但其他解釋也是可能的。 孟德斯鳩男爵夏爾·德·塞達特 (Charles de Secondat) 在 1740 年代撰文，指責“暴政的既定計劃”，他將其歸咎於中國異常龐大的人口，而這又是東亞氣候造成的：我這樣推理：亞洲已經正確地 沒有溫帶，因為氣候非常寒冷的地方會立即接觸到非常炎熱的地方，即土耳其、波斯、印度、中國、韓國和日本。 相反，在歐洲，溫帶地區非常廣闊。 。 。 因此，每個[國家]都與加入它的國家相似； 他們之間沒有什麽特別的區別。 。 。 所以亞洲是強國對弱國，強國對弱國。 好戰的、勇敢的、積極的人，直接接觸到那些懶惰、柔弱、膽怯的人。 因此，一方必須征服，另一方也必須被征服。 相反，在歐洲，強國對強國，強國對強國。 而那些加入彼此的人，有著幾乎同樣的勇氣。 這是亞洲弱、歐洲強的重要原因。 歐洲的自由和亞洲的奴役：我不記得曾經見過這個事業。

後來的歐洲作家相信，是西方技術戰勝了東方——特別是後來引發工業革命的技術。 1793 年，馬戛爾尼伯爵對中國宮廷執行了一次極其令人失望的任務（見下文），他的感受就是如此。 二十世紀流行的另一個論點是儒家哲學抑製創新。 然而，這些當代對東方成就不佳的解釋是錯誤的。 西方擁有但東方缺乏的六種獨特殺手級應用中的第一個不是商業、氣候、技術或哲學。 正如史密斯所認識到的，它首先是製度性的。
 
如果在 1420 年，您沿著泰晤士河和長江這兩條河流進行了兩次旅行，您一定會對這種對比感到震驚。 長江是龐大水道綜合體的一部分，該水道將南京與北京（北邊 500 多英裏）連接起來，南邊連接杭州。 這個係統的核心是大運河，最大時延伸超過一千英裏。 運河的曆史可以追溯到公元前七世紀，早在公元十世紀就引入了磅閘，還有像連拱寶帶這樣精美的橋梁，運河在明永樂年間得到了實質性的修複和改善。 1402–24）。 當他的總工程師白英完成黃河築壩和分流工作時，每年可以有近12,000艘糧食駁船在運河上航行。3 維護運河的人員有近50,000人。 當然，在西方，最宏偉的大運河永遠是威尼斯的。 但當勇敢的威尼斯旅行家馬可波羅在 1270 年代訪問中國時，就連他也對長江上的交通流量印象深刻：

這條大河上的船隻數量之多，讀到或聽到的人都不會相信。 上下運輸的商品數量令人難以置信。 事實上，它是如此之大，以至於它看起來像是一片海洋而不是一條河流。
 
中國的大運河不僅是國內貿易的大動脈。 它還使帝國政府能夠通過五個國家糧倉來平滑糧食價格，這些糧倉便宜時買，貴時賣。

1420 年，南京可能是世界上最大的城市，人口在 50 萬到 100 萬之間。 幾個世紀以來，它一直是繁榮的絲綢和棉花工業中心。 在永樂皇帝統治下，它也成為學術中心。 永樂這個名字的意思是“永遠幸福”； 永動機也許是一個更好的描述。 明朝最偉大的皇帝從不半途而廢。 他委托2000多名學者共同編寫的《國學綱目》，共11000多卷。 直到 2007 年，在統治了近 600 年之後，它才被維基百科超越，成為世界上最大的百科全書。

但朱棣對南京並不滿足。 就任後不久，他就決心在北方建立一座更加壯觀的新首都：北京。 到 1420 年紫禁城竣工時，明朝中國無可爭議地宣稱自己是世界上最先進的文明。
 
與長江相比，15世紀初的泰晤士河是名副其實的死水。 誠然，倫敦是一個繁忙的港口，是英格蘭與歐洲大陸貿易的主要樞紐。 該市最著名的市長理查德·惠廷頓 (Richard Whittington) 是一位著名的布料商人，他靠英國日益增長的羊毛出口發家致富。 英國首都的造船業因需要為英國經常對抗法國的戰役運輸人員和物資而得到推動。 在沙德韋爾和拉特克利夫，船隻可以被拖到泥泊位上進行改裝。 當然，還有倫敦塔，它比禁忌更令人生畏。

但對於一個來自中國的遊客來說，這一切幾乎不會留下深刻的印象。 與紫禁城的多個殿堂相比，這座塔本身的建築是簡陋的。 與寶帶橋相比，倫敦橋是一個笨拙的高蹺集市。 原始的航海技術將英國水手限製在狹窄的水域——泰晤士河和英吉利海峽——在那裏他們可以看到熟悉的河岸和海岸線。 對於英國人和中國人來說，沒有什麽比來自倫敦的船隻沿著長江航行更難以想象的了。

與南京相比，亨利五世於 1421 年戰勝法國人（其中最著名的是阿金庫爾戰役）後返回的倫敦幾乎算不上一座城鎮。 其古老的、修補的城牆綿延約 3 英裏，同樣隻是南京城牆的一小部分。 明朝的創建者花了二十多年的時間才在首都周圍修建了長城，綿延數裏，城門如此之大，一扇可以容納三千士兵。 它經久耐用。 它的大部分至今仍然矗立，而倫敦的中世紀城牆卻幾乎沒有留下任何痕跡。

按照十五世紀的標準，明代中國是一個相對宜居的地方。 明初建立的嚴格的封建秩序正因蓬勃發展的內部貿易而鬆動。5 如今，來到蘇州的遊客仍然可以在老城區中心陰暗的運河和優雅的步道中看到當年繁榮的建築成果。 英國的城市生活非常不同。 黑死病——由跳蚤傳播的鼠疫耶爾森氏菌引起的黑死病，於 1349 年到達英國——使倫敦人口減少到 4 萬左右，不到南京人口的十分之一。 除了鼠疫之外，斑疹傷寒、痢疾和天花也很流行。 而且，即使沒有流行病，糟糕的衛生條件也使倫敦成為死亡陷阱。 由於沒有任何汙水處理係統，街道臭氣熏天，而中國城市卻有係統地收集人類排泄物，並在邊遠的稻田中用作肥料。 在迪克·惠廷頓 (Dick Whittington) 擔任市長期間（從 1397 年到 1423 年去世為止四次），倫敦的街道上鋪滿了比黃金更不吸引人的東西。

學童們從小就被認為亨利五世是英國曆史上的英雄人物之一，與他的前任——衰弱的理查二世形成鮮明對比。 遺憾的是，他們的王國距離莎士比亞筆下理查二世的“權杖島”很遠——更像是一座敗壞島。 劇作家親切地稱其為“另一個伊甸園，半天堂，/這座大自然為自己建造的堡壘/抵禦感染”。 。 但從 1540 年到 1800 年間，英國人的出生時預期壽命平均隻有 37 歲，非常悲慘。 倫敦的數字是二十多歲。 大約五分之一的英國兒童在一歲內死亡； 在倫敦，這個數字接近三分之一。 亨利五世本人在二十六歲時成為國王，並在三十五歲時死於痢疾——這提醒人們，直到最近，大多數曆史都是由相當年輕、短命的人創造的。

暴力盛行。 與法國的戰爭幾乎是一個永久的條件。 當英國人不與法國人作戰時，他們就與威爾士人、蘇格蘭人和愛爾蘭人作戰。 當不與凱爾特人作戰時，他們為了爭奪王權而進行了一係列戰爭。 亨利五世的父親是通過暴力登上王位的。 他的兒子亨利六世在玫瑰戰爭的爆發中以類似的方式失去了它，四位國王失去了王位，四十名成年貴族在戰鬥中或斷頭台上喪生。 1330 年至 1479 年間，英國貴族中有四分之一的死亡是死於暴力。 普通的凶殺案也是司空見慣的。 十四世紀的數據表明，牛津每年的凶殺率超過每 10 萬居民一百起。 倫敦稍微安全一些，比率約為每 10 萬人中 50 人。 當今世界謀殺率最高的是南非（每 10 萬人中有 69 起）、哥倫比亞（每 10 萬人中有 53 起）和牙買加（每 10 萬人中有 34 起）。 即使是 20 世紀 80 年代最糟糕的底特律，每 100,000.6 人中就有 45 人死亡。

正如政治理論家托馬斯·霍布斯（Thomas Hobbes）後來所觀察到的（他所說的“自然狀態”），這一時期的英國生活確實是“孤獨、貧窮、肮髒、野蠻和短暫的”。 即使對於像帕斯頓這樣富裕的諾福克家庭來說，也沒有什麽安全感。 約翰·帕斯頓 (John Paston) 的妻子瑪格麗特 (Margaret) 在試圖維護家族對格雷沙姆莊園 (Gresham 莊園) 的合法權利時，被從住所趕了出來，該莊園由前主人的繼承人占據。 凱斯特城堡是約翰·法斯托夫爵士留給帕斯頓家族的，但在約翰·帕斯頓死後不久，它就被諾福克公爵圍困，並被占領了長達十七年之久。 7英格蘭是歐洲最繁榮、暴力較少的國家之一。 。 在法國，生活更加肮髒、殘酷、短暫——而且越往東走，情況就越糟糕。 即使在 18 世紀初，法國人平均每日攝入熱量為 1,660 卡路裏，僅略高於維持人類生命所需的最低熱量，大約是當今西方平均水平的一半。 革命前法國人的平均身高僅為 5 英尺 4.75 英寸。8 在我們掌握中世紀時期數據的所有大陸國家中，凶殺率都高於英國，其中意大利——一個以刺客而聞名的國家 對於它的藝術家來說——始終是最糟糕的。

有時有人認為，西歐的肮髒是一種隱藏的優勢。 由於高死亡率在窮人中尤其普遍，也許他們在某種程度上幫助富人變得更富。 當然，黑死病的後果之一是提高了歐洲人均收入。 由於勞動力如此稀缺，幸存下來的人可以獲得更高的工資。 確實，英國富人的孩子比窮人的孩子更有可能活到成年。9然而，歐洲人口統計的這些怪異現象似乎不太可能解釋東西方的巨大差異。 當今世界上有一些國家的生活幾乎和中世紀的英國一樣悲慘，瘟疫、饑餓、戰爭和謀殺導致平均預期壽命低得可憐，隻有富人才能長壽。 阿富汗、海地和索馬裏幾乎沒有跡象表明能從這些條件中受益。 正如我們將要看到的，歐洲盡管死亡，卻仍邁向繁榮和強國，而不是因為它。

現代學者和讀者需要記住死亡曾經是什麽樣子。 《死亡的勝利》是佛蘭德斯藝術家老彼得·勃魯蓋爾（Pieter Bruegel the Elder，約 1525-69 年）的夢幻傑作，當然不是一部現實主義作品，但勃魯蓋爾當然不必完全依靠他的想象力來描繪死亡場景。 令人痛苦的死亡和破壞。 在一片由骷髏大軍統治的土地上，一位國王垂死掙紮，他的寶藏毫無用處，而一隻狗正在啃咬附近的屍體。 在背景中，我們看到絞刑架上有兩個被絞死的人，四個被輪子打碎的人，還有一個即將被斬首。 軍隊發生衝突，房屋被燒毀，船隻沉沒。 在前景中，男人和女人、年輕人和老年人、士兵和平民都被亂七八糟地趕進一條狹窄的方形隧道。 無一幸免。 即使是為情婦唱歌的遊吟詩人也注定要失敗。 藝術家本人四十出頭就去世了，比作者年輕。

一個世紀後，意大利藝術家薩爾瓦托·羅莎（Salvator Rosa）畫了一幅也許是所有死亡紀念畫中最感人的一幅，簡單地命名為“L’umana fragilità”（“人類的脆弱”）。 它的靈感來自 1655 年席卷他家鄉那不勒斯的瘟疫，這場瘟疫奪去了他年幼的兒子羅薩爾沃的生命，並帶走了他的兄弟、姐妹、她的丈夫和他們的五個孩子。 死亡天使在羅莎妻子身後的黑暗中隱隱約約地露出可怕的笑容，奪走了他們的兒子，而就在羅莎第一次嚐試寫作時。 這位傷心欲絕的藝術家的心情被銘刻在畫布上的八個拉丁詞不朽地概括了：
Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori
“受孕是罪孽，出生是痛苦，生命是辛勞，死亡是不可避免的。”對於當時歐洲的生活，還有什麽比這更簡潔的描述呢？
 
太監與獨角獸

如何理解東方的優越性？ 首先，亞洲農業的生產力遠高於歐洲。 在東亞，一英畝土地足以養活一個家庭，這就是水稻種植的效率，而在英國，平均數字接近 20 英畝。 這有助於解釋為什麽東亞人口已經比西歐多。 更先進的東方水稻種植係統可以養活更多的人。 毫無疑問，明代詩人周士修是帶著玫瑰色眼鏡看待鄉村的。 盡管如此，這裏的畫麵還是心滿意足的農村民眾：

昏暗的小路旁隱約可見簡陋的門道，一條彎曲的小巷一直通向入口。 這裏有十戶人家。 。 。 世世代代比鄰而居。 無論你往哪裏看，他們的火焰都彌漫著煙霧。 同樣，在日常生活中，人們也很合作。 一個人的兒子是西邊房子的戶主，另一個人的女兒是西邊鄰居的妻子。 秋風凜冽，吹土神祠； 小豬和米酒被獻祭給田野的祖先，老薩滿向他燒紙錢，而男孩們則敲打銅鼓。 甘蔗園裏寂靜無聲，薄霧籠罩著芋頭田，毛毛雨落在芋頭地裏，人們在儀式結束後回家，鋪著席子，閑聊著，半醉半醒。 。

但這種田園詩般的平衡場景隻講述了故事的一部分。 後世的西方人傾向於認為帝製中國是一個靜態的社會，對創新過敏。 德國社會學家馬克斯·韋伯在《儒家與道家》（1915）中將儒家理性主義定義為“對世界的理性調整”，與西方“理性掌握世界”的概念相對立。 這一觀點得到了中國哲學家馮友蘭在其《中國哲學史》（1934年）中以及劍橋大學學者李約瑟的多卷本《中國科學文明史》的大力讚同。 這種文化解釋 — — 對於像馮和李約瑟這樣在 1949 年後同情毛澤東政權的人來說總是很有吸引力 — — 很難與這樣的證據相一致：早在明朝時代之前，中國文明就一直在尋求通過統治世界來統治世界。 技術創新。

我們不確定是誰設計了第一個水鍾。 可能是埃及人、巴比倫人或中國人。 但在 1086 年，蘇宋添加了齒輪擒縱機構，創造了世界上第一台機械鍾，這是一個 40 英尺高的複雜裝置，不僅可以報時，還可以記錄太陽、月亮和行星的運動。 1272 年鍾樓建成後不久，馬可·波羅訪問中國北方的大都時，看到了一座由這種時鍾操作的鍾樓。直到一個世紀後，第一座天文鍾建成後，英國才出現了如此精確的鍾樓。 諾裏奇、聖奧爾本和索爾茲伯裏的大教堂。

傳統上，活字印刷機起源於十五世紀的德國。 事實上它是在十一世紀的中國發明的。 紙早在傳入西方之前就起源於中國。 紙幣、壁紙和衛生紙也是如此。

人們常說，英國農業先驅 Jethro Tull 在 1701 年發現了播種機。事實上，它是在中國發明的，比他的時代早了 2000 年。 帶有弧形鐵犁板的羅瑟勒姆犁是 18 世紀英國農業革命的關鍵工具，也是中國人所期待的另一項創新。 12 王震 1313 年的《農業論》充滿了當時西方未知的農具。 .13 中國也預示著工業革命。 第一座冶煉鐵礦石的高爐並不是1709年在Coalbrookdale建造的，而是在公元前200年之前在中國建造的。 世界上最古老的鐵吊橋不是英國的，而是中國的； 早在公元 65 年，在雲南省景東附近仍然可以看到它的遺跡。 14 即使遲至 1788 年，英國的鐵產量水平仍然低於 1078 年中國的鐵產量水平。 中國人首先通過紡車和繅絲機等創新技術徹底改變了紡織生產，並於 13 世紀進口到意大利。 15 中國人使用他們最著名的發明火藥隻是為了 煙花。 焦宇和劉吉於十四世紀末出版的《火龍經》一書描述了陸地和海洋地雷、火箭和裝滿炸藥的空心炮彈。

中國的其他創新包括化學殺蟲劑、漁線輪、火柴、磁羅盤、撲克牌、牙刷和獨輪車。 大家都知道高爾夫是在蘇格蘭發明的。 然而，宋代（960-1279）的東軒誌描述了一種名為“捶丸”的遊戲。 它使用十支球杆，包括篦梆、蒲梆和燒梆，大致類似於我們的一號木、二木和三木。 這些球杆鑲嵌著玉石和黃金，表明高爾夫無論在當時還是現在都是富人的運動。

這還不是全部。 1400 年新世紀來臨之際，中國準備實現另一項技術突破，這一突破有可能使永樂皇帝不僅成為中央王國的主人，而且成為世界本身的主人——字麵意思是“天下”。
 
今天在南京，您可以看到中國曆史上最著名的航海家鄭和海軍上將寶船的全尺寸複製品。 它長 400 英尺，幾乎是聖瑪麗亞號的五倍，克裏斯托弗·哥倫布於 1492 年乘該船橫渡大西洋。而這隻是由 300 多艘巨型遠洋帆船組成的船隊的一部分。 這些船擁有多個桅杆和獨立的浮力室，以防止在水線以下出現洞時沉沒，這些船比十五世紀歐洲建造的任何船都大得多。 鄭和的海軍共有 28,000 名船員，是第一次世界大戰之前西方國家規模最大的海軍。 他們的主人和指揮官是一位非凡的人。 十一歲時，他在戰場上被明朝開國皇帝朱元璋俘虜。 按照慣例，俘虜被閹割了。 然後，他被任命為皇帝第四子朱棣的仆人，朱棣將奪取並登上永樂皇帝的寶座。 為了回報鄭和的忠誠服務，永樂帝委托他一項探索世界海洋的任務。

在 1405 年至 1424 年間的一係列六次史詩般的航行中，鄭和艦隊的航程之遠和廣度令人驚歎。 淡馬錫（後來的新加坡）、馬六甲和錫蘭； 前往奧裏薩邦的克塔克； 到霍爾木茲、亞丁，再沿紅海到達吉達。 16 名義上，這些航行是為了尋找神秘失蹤的永樂前任，以及與他一起消失的皇帝印章。 （朱棣是想為他殺戮登基的行為贖罪，還是為了掩蓋他這樣做的事實？）但尋找失蹤的皇帝並不是他們的真正動機。

鄭和在最後一次下西洋之前，奉命“出使霍爾木茲等國，有大小船隻六十一艘”。 。 。 以及[攜帶]彩色絲綢。 。 。 [並]購買麻絲”。 他的軍官們還被指示“購買瓷器、鐵鍋、禮品和彈藥、紙張、油、蠟等。”17這似乎暗示著商業理由，而且中國人當然擁有印度洋商人夢寐以求的商品。 （瓷器、絲綢和麝香），以及他們希望帶回中國的商品（胡椒、珍珠、寶石、象牙和據稱具有藥用價值的犀牛角）。 18 然而，實際上，皇帝主要關心的並不是商品。 亞當·斯密後來所理解的貿易。 用當時的銘文的話來說，艦隊是“去[野蠻人]國家，向他們贈送禮物，以展示我們的力量來改造他們”。 。 .’。 永樂皇帝想要回報這些“禮物”的是外國統治者像中國的亞洲近鄰那樣向他進貢，從而承認他的霸權。 誰能拒絕向擁有如此強大艦隊的皇帝磕頭呢？

鄭和艦隊的船隻在其中三趟到達非洲東海岸。 他們沒有停留太久。 來自大約三十個非洲統治者的特使被邀請登船，以承認明朝皇帝的“宇宙優勢”。 馬林迪（今肯尼亞）蘇丹派出了一個代表團，帶來了異國情調的禮物，其中包括一隻長頸鹿。 永樂親自在南京皇宮門口迎接了這隻動物。 長頸鹿被譽為神話中的麒麟（獨角獸）——“帝國與宇宙完美美德、完美政府和完美和諧的象征”。

但後來，1424 年，這種和諧被打破了。 永樂死後，中國的海外野心也隨之埋葬。 鄭和的航行立即暫停，直到 1432-3 年最後一次印度洋探險才短暫恢複。 《海禁令》明確禁止遠洋航行。 從1500年起，中國任何人發現建造超過兩根桅杆的船隻將被判處死刑； 1551年，甚至乘坐這樣的船出海都成為犯罪。21鄭和下西洋的記錄被銷毀了。 鄭和本人也死了，幾乎可以肯定是被海葬了。

這一重大決定的背後隱藏著什麽？ 是財政問題和朝廷政治鬥爭的結果嗎？ 是因為安南（今越南）的戰爭成本出人意料地高嗎？22或者僅僅是因為儒家學者對鄭和帶回的“奇怪的東西”產生懷疑，尤其是 長頸鹿？ 我們可能永遠無法確定。 但中國轉向國內的後果似乎很明顯。

與阿波羅登月任務一樣，鄭和下西洋也是財富和技術先進性的強大展示。 1416 年，一名中國太監在東非海岸登陸，從很多方麵來說，其成就可與 1969 年美國宇航員登陸月球相媲美。

盡管永樂的繼任者進行了探索，但這一成就的經濟效益微乎其微。

但對於來自歐亞大陸另一端的歐洲小王國的一位截然不同的水手即將進行的航行來說，情況就不同了。

香料競賽 正是在聖喬治堡，裏斯本海港之上的高山上，新加冕的葡萄牙國王曼努埃爾讓瓦斯科·達·伽馬指揮四艘小船，執行一項重大使命。 所有四艘船都可以很容易地安裝在鄭和的寶船上。 他們的船員加起來隻有 170 人。 但他們的使命——“發現並尋找香料”——有可能使整個世界向西傾斜。

所討論的香料是肉桂、丁香、肉豆蔻和肉豆蔻，歐洲人無法自己種植這些香料，但他們渴望用它們來增強食物的味道。 幾個世紀以來，香料路線從印度洋一直延伸到紅海，或者從陸路穿過阿拉伯和安納托利亞。 到了十五世紀中葉，通往歐洲的利潤豐厚的最後一站被土耳其人和威尼斯人嚴格控製。 葡萄牙人意識到，如果他們能找到一條替代路線，沿著非洲西海岸，繞過好望角到達印度洋，那麽這項業務就可以屬於他們。 另一位葡萄牙水手巴托洛梅烏·迪亞斯 (Bartolomeu Dias) 於 1488 年繞過好望角，但被船員強迫返回。 九年後，達伽馬必須走到底。

曼努埃爾國王的命令告訴我們一些關於西方文明海外擴張方式的至關重要的事情。 正如我們將看到的，西方國家比其他國家擁有不止一項優勢。 但真正推動這一進程的肯定是推動探索時代的激烈競爭。 對於歐洲人來說，環遊非洲並不是為了向國內的某個高高在上的君主象征性地進貢。 這是為了在經濟和政治上領先於對手。 如果達伽馬成功了，那麽裏斯本就擊敗了威尼斯。 簡而言之，海洋探索是十五世紀歐洲的太空競賽。 或者更確切地說，是香料競賽。

1497 年 7 月 8 日，達伽馬起航。四個月後，當他和他的葡萄牙水手同伴繞過非洲最南端的好望角時，他們並沒有問自己應該為國王帶回什麽珍奇動物。 他們想知道自己是否最終成功了其他人失敗的地方——尋找新的香料路線。 他們想要貿易，而不是貢品。

1498 年 4 月，即鄭和登陸八十二年後，達·伽馬抵達馬林迪。 除了一些瓷器和DNA之外，中國人幾乎沒有留下什麽——據說有20名中國水手在佩特島附近遭遇海難，他們遊上岸並留下來，娶了非洲妻子，並向當地人介紹了中國風格的籃子。 - 編織和絲綢生產。23 相比之下，葡萄牙人立即看到了馬林迪作為貿易站的潛力。 達伽馬對在那裏遇到印度商人感到特別興奮，幾乎可以肯定，在其中一位商人的幫助下，他能夠乘季風到達卡利卡特。
這種對貿易的渴望遠非葡萄牙人和中國人之間的唯一區別。 裏斯本人身上有一種冷酷無情的特質——事實上，是徹頭徹尾的殘暴——而鄭和卻很少表現出來。 當卡利卡特國王斜視葡萄牙人從裏斯本帶來的貨物時，達伽馬扣押了十六名漁民作為人質。 在他第二次前往印度的航行中，他率領十五艘船轟炸了卡利卡特，並殘忍地殘害了被俘船隻的船員。 據說還有一次，他將一艘開往麥加的船上的乘客鎖在船上並縱火焚燒。

葡萄牙人采取了堪稱典範的暴力行為，因為他們知道，開辟一條繞開普敦的新香料路線會遇到阻力。 他們顯然相信首先要受到報複。 1513 年，葡屬印度第二任總督阿方索·德·阿爾伯克基自豪地向他的王室主人報告：“聽到我們即將到來的傳言，[本土]船隻全部消失，甚至連鳥兒也不再在水麵上掠過。”針對一些敵人 可以肯定的是，大炮和短刀是無效的。 達伽馬第一次探險隊的一半人在航行中喪生，尤其是因為他們的船長試圖頂著季風返回非洲。 最初的四艘船中隻有兩艘回到了裏斯本。 1524 年，達伽馬第三次前往印度時死於瘧疾。 他的遺體被送回歐洲，現在安放在裏斯本熱羅尼莫斯修道院（現為貝倫聖瑪麗亞教堂）的一座精美墳墓中。 但其他葡萄牙探險家繼續航行，經過印度，一直到達中國。 曾經，中國人能夠以冷漠甚至蔑視的態度對待遙遠的歐洲野蠻人。 但現在香料種族已經把野蠻人帶到了中央王國的門口。 必須記住的是，盡管葡萄牙人擁有的中國人想要的珍貴商品很少，但他們確實帶來了白銀，而明朝中國對白銀的需求巨大，因為硬幣取代了紙幣和勞務作為主要支付手段。

1557年，葡萄牙人割讓了珠江三角洲的一個半島——澳門。 他們做的第一件事就是豎起一座大門——關門，上麵刻著這樣的銘文：“敬畏我們的偉大，尊重我們的美德。”到 1586 年，澳門已經成為一個足夠重要的貿易前哨，被認為是一座城市：Cidade do Nome de Deus na China（中國神名之城）。 這是中國許多此類歐洲商業飛地中的第一個。 路易斯·達·卡蒙斯（Luís da Camões）是葡萄牙海上擴張史詩《盧西亞德斯》（The Lusiads）的作者，因襲擊而被裏斯本流放後，曾在澳門生活過一段時間。 他驚歎道，像葡萄牙這樣的小王國——人口還不到中國的百分之一——怎麽會渴望主宰亞洲人口多得多的帝國的貿易呢？ 然而，他的同胞們繼續航行，建立了一個令人驚歎的貿易站網絡，就像一條全球項鏈，從裏斯本開始，繞過非洲、阿拉伯和印度海岸，穿過馬六甲海峽，到達香料群島，然後再更遠， 甚至超越了澳門。

“如果還有更多的世界有待發現，”達·卡蒙斯在談到他的同胞時寫道，“他們也會找到的！”

葡萄牙的歐洲競爭對手並沒有失去海外擴張的好處。 與葡萄牙一樣，西班牙首先搶占了新世界的主動權（見第 3 章），並在菲律賓建立了亞洲前哨基地，西班牙人能夠從那裏將大量墨西哥白銀運往中國。 25 《托德西拉斯條約》（Treaty of Tordesillas，1494年）將世界一分為二後的幾十年裏，這兩個伊比利亞強國可以以崇高的自信來看待他們的帝國成就。 但西班牙人的叛逆性和商業頭腦的荷蘭臣民開始意識到新香料路線的潛力。 事實上，到了 1600 年代中期，他們在繞海角航行的船隻數量和噸位上都超過了葡萄牙人。 法國人也進入了名單。

那麽英國人呢？他們的領土野心一度隻延伸到法國，而他們在中世紀的一個新穎的經濟理念就是向佛蘭德人出售羊毛？ 當他們的宿敵西班牙人和法國人在海外發家致富的消息傳來時，他們怎麽可能袖手旁觀呢？ 果然，沒過多久，英國人就加入了海外商業的競賽。 1496 年，約翰·卡伯特 (John Cabot) 首次嚐試從布裏斯托爾橫渡大西洋。 1553 年，休·威洛比和理查德·錢斯勒從德特福德出發，尋找通往印度的“東北航道”。 威洛比在嚐試中被凍死，但總理設法到達阿爾漢格爾，然後從陸路到達莫斯科伊凡雷帝的宮廷。 回到倫敦後，總理立即成立了莫斯科公司以發展與俄羅斯的貿易（其全名是“探索地區、領土、島嶼和未知地點的商業冒險家的神秘與公司”） ）。 在皇室的熱情支持下，類似的項目不斷湧現，不僅在大西洋彼岸，而且在香料之路沿線也是如此。 到了十七世紀中葉，從貝爾法斯特到波士頓，從孟加拉到巴哈馬，英國的貿易蓬勃發展。

世界正在激烈的殘酷競爭中被瓜分。 但問題仍然存在：為什麽歐洲人似乎比中國人更有商業熱情？ 為什麽瓦斯科·達·伽馬如此明顯地渴望金錢——渴望到為了金錢而殺人？
你可以通過查看中世紀歐洲的地圖來找到答案，這些地圖實際上顯示了數百個相互競爭的國家，從西海岸的王國到波羅的海和亞得裏亞海之間的許多城邦，從呂貝克到威尼斯。 十四世紀的歐洲大約有一千個政體。 200 年後仍然有大約 500 個左右的獨立單位。 這是為什麽？ 最簡單的答案是地理。 中國有黃河、長江和珠江三大河流，均自西向東流。26歐洲有多條河流流向多個方向，更不用說阿爾卑斯山和比利牛斯山脈等眾多山脈了。 更不用說德國和波蘭的茂密森林和沼澤了。 對於掠奪性的蒙古人來說，進入中國可能更容易一些。 歐洲不太容易被騎馬的部落滲透——因此不太需要團結。 我們無法確切地確定為什麽中亞的威脅在帖木兒之後從歐洲消失。 也許俄羅斯的防禦剛剛變得更好。 也許蒙古馬更喜歡草原草。

誠然，正如我們所看到的，衝突在歐洲可能是毀滅性的——想想 17 世紀中葉的德國三十年戰爭造成的混亂吧。 生活在十多個歐洲大國邊境的人們有禍了，這些國家在 1550 年至 1650 年間平均有三分之二以上的時間處於戰爭狀態。從 1500 年到 1799 年，西班牙與歐洲國家交戰。 81%的時間是外敵，英國為53%，法國為52%。 但這種持續不斷的戰鬥帶來了三個意想不到的好處。 一是鼓勵軍事科技創新。 在陸地上，隨著大炮的威力和機動性變得越來越強大，防禦工事也必須變得更加堅固。 德國南部塞海姆上方坦能堡的“強盜男爵”城堡廢墟的命運起到了警示作用：1399 年，它成為歐洲第一座被炸藥摧毀的防禦工事。

與此同時，在海上，船舶保持較小規模是有充分理由的。 與自羅馬時代以來其設計幾乎沒有改變的地中海廚房相比，15世紀末的葡萄牙卡拉維爾帆船擁有方帆和兩根桅杆，在速度和火力之間達到了理想的平衡。 它比鄭和的一艘巨型帆船更容易轉彎，更難擊中。

最重要的是，幾代人的自相殘殺確保了沒有人

歐洲君主曾經強大到能夠禁止海外探險。 即使土耳其人在十六世紀和十七世紀多次進軍東歐，也沒有泛歐皇帝命令葡萄牙人暫停海上探險，集中精力對付東方的敵人。 29 相反，歐洲君主都鼓勵商業、征服和殖民化，作為相互競爭的一部分。

路德宗教改革席卷德國後的一個多世紀裏，宗教戰爭一直是歐洲生活的禍根（見第二章）。 但新教徒和羅馬天主教徒之間的血腥鬥爭，以及對猶太人的周期性和局部性的迫害，也產生了有益的副作用。 1492 年，猶太人被當作宗教異端而被驅逐出卡斯蒂利亞和阿拉貢。 最初，他們中的許多人在奧斯曼帝國尋求庇護，但 1509 年之後在威尼斯建立了一個猶太社區。1566 年，隨著荷蘭人反抗西班牙統治以及新教共和國聯合省的建立，阿姆斯特丹 成為另一個寬容的避風港。 1685 年，新教胡格諾派被驅逐出法國後，他們得以在英國、荷蘭和瑞士重新定居。30 當然，宗教狂熱也為海外擴張提供了另一個動力。 葡萄牙航海家恩裏克親王鼓勵他的水手們探索非洲海岸，部分原因是希望他們能找到失落的基督教聖人普雷斯特約翰的神話王國，然後他可以幫助歐洲對抗土耳其人。 除了堅持免除印度關稅外，瓦斯科·達·伽馬還厚顏無恥地要求卡利卡特國王將所有穆斯林驅逐出他的領土，並對開往麥加的穆斯林船隻發動了有針對性的海盜活動。

簡而言之，歐洲的政治分裂特征阻礙了任何與中華帝國相類似的國家的建立。 它還推動歐洲人到遙遠的地方尋找經濟、地緣政治和宗教機會。 你可能會說這是一個分而治之的例子——但矛盾的是，歐洲人正是通過分裂自己才能夠統治世界。 在歐洲，小是美好的，因為它意味著競爭——不僅是國家之間的競爭，而且是國家內部的競爭。

亨利五世正式成為英格蘭、威爾士和法國的國王，並聲稱對這些地區擁有主權。 但在英格蘭鄉村，真正的權力掌握在大貴族、將大憲章強加給約翰國王的人的後裔、以及成千上萬的貴族地主和無數的法人團體（包括教士和俗人）手中。 直到亨利統治時期，教會才處於王室控製之下, 城鎮通常是自治的。 而且，至關重要的是，該國最重要的商業中心幾乎完全自治。 歐洲不僅由國家組成，而且由國家組成。 它也由階層組成：貴族、神職人員和城鎮居民。

倫敦金融城公司的起源和結構可以追溯到十二世紀。 值得注意的是，換句話說，市長、治安官、市議員、市議會、車夫和自由人都已經存在了 800 多年。 公司是自治商業機構最早的例子之一——在某些方麵是我們今天所知的公司的先驅，在其他方麵是民主本身的先驅。
早在 1130 年代，亨利一世就授予倫敦人“自行選擇”自己的治安官和法官的權利，並在不受王室或其他當局幹涉的情況下管理自己的司法和財政事務。 31 1191 年 理查一世在聖地十字軍東征的同時，還授予了選舉市長的權利，這一權利得到了約翰國王在1215.32年的確認，因此，這座城市從來不敬畏王室。 在該市自由民的支持下，托馬斯·菲茨·托馬斯市長支持西蒙·德·蒙福特於 1263-5 年反抗亨利三世。 1319 年，輪到愛德華二世與倫敦金融城對抗，因為商人（布商）試圖減少外國商人的特權。 當王室抵製時，“倫敦暴民”支持羅傑·莫蒂默廢黜國王。 在愛德華三世統治時期，潮流轉向反對這座城市。 意大利和漢薩商人在倫敦建立了自己的地位，尤其是通過向國王提供慷慨條件的貸款，這種做法在理查二世少數時期繼續存在。 33但倫敦人繼續挑戰王室權威，在 要麽是農民起義（1381年），要麽是上議院上訴人對理查德統治的挑戰。 

1392 年，國王取消了倫敦的特權和自由，但五年後，由惠廷頓市長談判達成的 10,000 英鎊的慷慨“禮物”確保了倫敦的特權和自由得以恢複。 向國王提供的貸款和禮物成為城市自治的關鍵。 城市越富裕，它的杠杆作用就越大。 惠廷頓借給亨利四世至少 24,000 英鎊，他的兒子亨利五世借給他約 7,500.34 英鎊.倫敦金融城不僅與國王爭奪權力。 那裏, 即使在城市內部也是競爭。 製服公司的起源都可以追溯到中世紀時期：織布廠可追溯到 1130 年，麵包師可追溯至 1155 年，魚販可追溯至 1272 年，金匠、商人泰勒和剝皮廠可追溯至 1327 年，布商可追溯至 1364 年，布商可追溯至 1384 年 雜貨商到1428年。

這些行會或“秘會”對其特定的經濟部門施加了相當大的權力，但他們也擁有政治權力。 愛德華三世在宣稱自己是亞麻製甲師行會（後來的商人泰勒行會）的“兄弟”時承認了這一點。 到 1607 年，商人泰勒家族過去和現在的名譽成員包括七位國王和一位王後、十七位王子和公爵、九位伯爵夫人、公爵夫人和男爵夫人、200 多名伯爵、領主和其他紳士以及一位大主教。 “十二大”公司——按優先順序排列：百貨商、雜貨商、布商、魚販、金匠、剝皮商、泰勒商人、服飾用品商、鹽商、五金商、葡萄酒商和布料商——提醒人們倫敦工匠和商人的力量。 他們曾經能夠發揮作用，即使他們今天的角色主要是儀式性的。 在他們競爭激烈的鼎盛時期，他們經常打架，就像一起吃飯一樣。 35
 
除其他外，這種國家之間和國家內部（甚至城市內部）的多層次競爭有助於解釋機械鍾在歐洲的快速傳播和先進技術。 早在 1330 年代，沃林福德的理查德就在聖奧爾本斯修道院南耳堂的牆上安裝了一個非常複雜的機械鍾，

它顯示了月球、潮汐和某些天體的運動。 憑借其獨特的報時鍾（因此得名：clock、clokke、Glocke、cloche），機械鍾和十五世紀取代機械鍾的發條鍾不僅比中國水鍾更準確。 它們的目的也是為了傳播，而不是被皇帝的天文學家壟斷。 因此，如果一個城鎮的大教堂在其塔樓上安裝了一個精美的新表盤，那麽它最接近的競爭對手很快就會覺得有必要效仿。 如果說 1685 年之後新教製表師在法國不受歡迎，那麽瑞士人很樂意接納他們。而且，就像軍事技術一樣，競爭孕育著進步，因為工匠們不斷地對產品的準確性和優雅性進行微小但累積的改進。 當耶穌會傳教士利瑪竇在 16 世紀末將歐洲鍾表帶到中國時，它們比東方同行先進得多，以至於人們對它們感到沮喪。 36 1602 年，應萬曆皇帝的要求，利瑪竇製作了一個 美麗的宣紙世界地圖，將中國描繪在地球的中心。 但他一定知道，在技術方麵，中國現在正在向全球邊緣漂移。

由於它在測量和協調行動方麵具有更高的精確性，時鍾和後來的便攜式手表的興起（可以說）與歐洲的崛起和西方文明的傳播齊頭並進。 文明。 每一枚單獨的時計都為東方卓越的時代所剩無幾。
 
與歐洲拚湊而成的被子相比，東亞——至少從政治角度來說——是一張巨大的單色毯子。 中央王國的主要競爭對手是北方的掠奪性蒙古人和東方的海盜日本。 自秦始皇時代（通常被稱為中國“第一個皇帝”（公元前 221-210 年））以來，來自北方的威脅就更大了，因此需要對我們今天所知的帝國防禦進行大規模投資。 長城。 從哈德良時代到埃裏希·昂納克時代，歐洲從未建造過類似的建築。 規模相當的還有灌溉中國耕地的運河和溝渠網絡，馬克思主義漢學家卡爾·維特福格爾（Karl Wittfogel）將其視為“水利官僚”東方專製主義最重要的產物。

北京紫禁城是中國整體權力的又一座紀念碑。 為了感受其巨大的規模和獨特的氣質，參觀者應該穿過太和門到太和殿，裏麵有龍座本身，然後到中和殿，皇帝的私人房間， 然後前往保和殿，這是科舉考試最後階段的地點（見下文）。 顯然，“和”與帝國權威不可分割的觀念有著千絲萬縷的聯係。 

與長城一樣，紫禁城在 15 世紀的西方根本沒有對應物，尤其是在倫敦，權力在皇室、世俗和精神上議院、下議院以及城市公司之間進行細分。 倫敦和製服公司。 每個國家都有自己的宮殿和大廳，但按照東方標準來看，它們都非常小。 同樣地，中世紀的歐洲王國是由世襲的地主和神職人員聯合管理的，他們是根據王室的恩惠而選擇的（而且常常被無情地拋棄），而中國則是由儒家官僚機構自上而下地統治， 也許是曆史上最嚴格的考試製度的基礎。 那些渴望在帝國服務的人必須接受三個階段的艱苦考試，這些考試在專門建造的考試中心進行，就像今天在南京仍然可以看到的那樣——一個巨大的圍牆院落，裏麵有數千個比大學稍大的小細胞。 火車上的廁所：

這些微小的磚砌隔間（一位歐洲旅行者寫道）大約深 1.1 米、寬 1 米、高 1.7 米。 他們有兩個石架，一個用作桌子，另一個用作座位。 在考試持續的兩天裏，駐守瞭望塔的士兵監視著考生。 。 。 唯一允許的活動是仆人補充食物和水或清除人類排泄物的通道。 當候選人累了的時候，他可以鋪開被褥，在狹小的空間裏休息一下。 但隔壁牢房的明亮光線可能會迫使他再次拿起畫筆。 。 。 有些候選人在壓力下完全瘋了。

毫無疑問，經過三天兩夜的鞋盒考驗，通過考試的都是最有能力、當然也是最有幹勁的考生。 但由於其重點強調儒家四書五經，需要背誦令人眼花繚亂的 431,286 個漢字，以及 1487 年推出的僵化的八足文，這是一次獎勵從眾和謹慎的考試。 39 毫無疑問，競爭非常激烈，但這種競爭並不能促進創新，更不能激發變革的欲望。 中華文明核心的書麵語言是為產生保守派精英並將大眾排除在他們的活動之外而設計的。 與歐洲的競爭方言——意大利語、法語和卡斯蒂利亞語以及葡萄牙語和英語——形成鮮明對比，這些語言可用於精英文學，但通過相對簡單和易於擴展的教育，很容易為更廣泛的公眾所接受。 

正如孔子自己所說：“平常人驚歎不尋常的事物。” 智者驚歎於平凡。”但是，明朝中國的運作方式中，有太多司空見慣的東西，而很少有新鮮的東西。
 
平庸的王國文明是複雜的東西。 幾個世紀以來，它們可以在權力和繁榮的最佳位置蓬勃發展。 但隨後，通常會突然間，它們就會陷入混亂。

中國的明朝於1368年誕生，當時軍閥元章自號洪武，意為“強大的軍事力量”。 正如我們所見，在接下來三個世紀的大部分時間裏，無論以何種標準衡量，明代中國都是世界上最先進的文明。 但到了 17 世紀中葉，一切都發生了翻天覆地的變化。 這並不是誇大其早期的穩定性。 畢竟，永樂皇帝是在經曆了一段時間的內戰並廢黜了合法的繼承人——他的長兄的兒子之後才繼承了他父親洪武的王位。 但十七世紀中葉的危機無疑是一次更大的破壞。 財政危機加劇了白銀購買力的下降，侵蝕了稅收的實際價值。41 惡劣的天氣、饑荒和流行病為內部叛亂和外部入侵打開了大門。42 1644 年，北京淪陷。 叛軍首領李自成。 明朝末代皇帝羞愧自縊身亡。 從儒家的均衡到無政府狀態的戲劇性轉變隻用了不到十年的時間。

明朝崩潰的結果是毀滅性的。 1580年至1650年間，衝突和流行病使中國人口減少了35%至40%。 出了什麽問題？ 答案是，向內轉向是致命的，尤其是對於中國這樣一個複雜且人口稠密的社會。 明朝的製度創造了一種高度的平衡——表麵上令人印象深刻，但內在卻很脆弱。 農村可以養活相當多的人口，但前提是基本靜態的社會秩序，實際上已經停止創新。 這是一種陷阱。 當出現一點小問題時，陷阱就會突然關閉。 沒有外部資源可以利用。 誠然，相當多的學者試圖將明代中國描述為一個繁榮的社會，擁有大量的內部貿易和充滿活力的奢侈品市場。 43 然而，中國最近的研究表明，人均收入在 2008 年停滯不前。 明朝時代，資本存量實際上是萎縮的。

相比之下，隨著英國人口在 17 世紀末加速增長，海外擴張在推動該國擺脫托馬斯·馬爾薩斯 (Thomas Malthus) 指出的陷阱方麵發揮了至關重要的作用。 跨大西洋貿易帶來了土豆和糖等新營養物質的湧入——一英畝甘蔗產生的能量相當於 12 英畝小麥的能量45——以及大量的鱈魚和鯡魚。 殖民化允許剩餘人口移民。 隨著時間的推移，其效果是提高生產力、收入、營養甚至身高。

考慮一下另一個島民的命運，他們的處境與歐亞海岸附近群島上的英國人很相似。 英國人積極向外轉向，為所謂的“全球化”奠定了基礎，而日本人卻采取了相反的道路，德川幕府在 1640 年之後實行了嚴格的閉關鎖國政策。與外界的所有形式的接觸都受到限製。 被禁止。 結果，日本完全錯過了全球貿易和移民水平迅速上升所帶來的好處。 結果是驚人的。 到 18 世紀末，英國農場工人 28% 以上的飲食由動物產品組成； 他的日本同行的飲食結構單一，95%都是穀物，其中大部分是大米。 這種營養差異解釋了 1600 年後身高的顯著差距。18 世紀英國囚犯的平均身高為 5 英尺 7 英寸。

毫無疑問，經過三天兩夜的鞋盒考驗，通過考試的都是最有能力、當然也是最有幹勁的考生。 但由於其重點強調儒家四書五經，需要背誦令人眼花繚亂的 431,286 個漢字，以及 1487 年推出的僵化的八足文，這是一次獎勵從眾和謹慎的考試。 39 毫無疑問，競爭非常激烈，但這種競爭並不能促進創新，更不能激發變革的欲望。 中華文明核心的書麵語言是為產生保守派精英並將大眾排除在他們的活動之外而設計的。 與歐洲的競爭方言——意大利語、法語和卡斯蒂利亞語以及葡萄牙語和英語——形成鮮明對比，這些語言可用於精英文學，但通過相對簡單和易於擴展的教育，很容易為更廣泛的公眾所接受。 

正如孔子自己所說：“平常人驚歎不尋常的事物。” 智者驚歎於平凡。”但是，明朝中國的運作方式中，有太多司空見慣的東西，而很少有新鮮的東西。
 
平庸的王國文明是複雜的東西。 幾個世紀以來，它們可以在權力和繁榮的最佳位置蓬勃發展。 但隨後，通常會突然間，它們就會陷入混亂。

中國的明朝於1368年誕生，當時軍閥元章自號洪武，意為“強大的軍事力量”。 正如我們所見，在接下來三個世紀的大部分時間裏，無論以何種標準衡量，明代中國都是世界上最先進的文明。 但到了 17 世紀中葉，一切都發生了翻天覆地的變化。 這並不是誇大其早期的穩定性。 畢竟，永樂皇帝是在經曆了一段時間的內戰並廢黜了合法的繼承人——他的長兄的兒子之後才繼承了他父親洪武的王位。 但十七世紀中葉的危機無疑是一次更大的破壞。 財政危機加劇了白銀購買力的下降，侵蝕了稅收的實際價值。41 惡劣的天氣、饑荒和流行病為內部叛亂和外部入侵打開了大門。42 1644 年，北京淪陷。 叛軍首領李自成。 明朝末代皇帝羞愧自縊身亡。 從儒家的均衡到無政府狀態的戲劇性轉變隻用了不到十年的時間。

明朝崩潰的結果是毀滅性的。 1580年至1650年間，衝突和流行病使中國人口減少了35%至40%。 出了什麽問題？ 答案是，向內轉向是致命的，尤其是對於中國這樣一個複雜且人口稠密的社會。 明朝的製度創造了一種高度的平衡——表麵上令人印象深刻，但內在卻很脆弱。 農村可以養活相當多的人口，但前提是基本靜態的社會秩序，實際上已經停止創新。 這是一種陷阱。 當出現一點小問題時，陷阱就會突然關閉。 沒有外部資源可以利用。 誠然，相當多的學者試圖將明代中國描述為一個繁榮的社會，擁有大量的內部貿易和充滿活力的奢侈品市場。 43 然而，中國最近的研究表明，人均收入在 2008 年停滯不前。 明朝時代，資本存量實際上是萎縮的。

相比之下，隨著英國人口在 17 世紀末加速增長，海外擴張在推動該國擺脫托馬斯·馬爾薩斯 (Thomas Malthus) 指出的陷阱方麵發揮了至關重要的作用。 跨大西洋貿易帶來了土豆和糖等新營養物質的湧入——一英畝甘蔗產生的能量相當於 12 英畝小麥的能量45——以及大量的鱈魚和鯡魚。 殖民化允許剩餘人口移民。 隨著時間的推移，其效果是提高生產力、收入、營養甚至身高。

考慮一下另一個島民的命運，他們的處境與歐亞海岸附近群島上的英國人很相似。 英國人積極向外轉向，為所謂的“全球化”奠定了基礎，而日本人卻采取了相反的道路，德川幕府在 1640 年之後實行了嚴格的閉關鎖國政策。與外界的所有形式的接觸都受到限製。 被禁止。 結果，日本完全錯過了全球貿易和移民水平迅速上升所帶來的好處。 結果是驚人的。 到 18 世紀末，英國農場工人 28% 以上的飲食由動物產品組成； 他的日本同行的飲食結構單一，95%都是穀物，其中大部分是大米。 這種營養差異解釋了 1600 年後身高的顯著差距。18 世紀英國囚犯的平均身高為 5 英尺 7 英寸。

同一時期日本士兵的平均身高僅為 5 英尺 21⁄2 英寸。46 當東方與西方相遇時，他們再也無法直視對方的眼睛。

換句話說，早在工業革命之前，小英國就憑借商業和殖民的物質優勢領先於東方偉大文明。 中國和日本的路線——放棄對外貿易並加強水稻種植——意味著隨著人口增長，收入下降，營養、身高和生產力也下降。 當農作物歉收或耕作中斷時，後果將是災難性的。 英國人在毒品方麵也比較幸運：長期習慣於飲酒，17世紀的美國煙草、阿拉伯咖啡和中國茶使他們從醉酒中清醒過來。 他們受到了咖啡館的刺激，一半是咖啡館，一半是證券交易所，一半是聊天室；47中國人最終在鴉片館裏昏昏欲睡，他們的煙鬥裏裝滿的不是別人，正是英國東印度公司。 

並非所有歐洲評論家都像亞當·斯密那樣承認中國的“靜止狀態”。 1697 年，德國哲學家和數學家戈特弗裏德·萊布尼茨 (Gottfried Leibniz) 宣布：“我必須在我的門上貼一張告示：中國知識信息局。”在他的《中國最新消息》一書中，他建議“中國傳教士應該 派到我們這裏來教授自然神學的目標和實踐，就像我們派傳教士到他們那裏指導他們天啟宗教一樣。”法國哲學家伏爾泰在 1764 年宣稱，“人們不必沉迷於中國人的優點”。 去辨認 。 。 。 兩年後，重農主義者弗朗索瓦·魁奈出版了《中國的專製主義》，讚揚了農業在中國經濟政策中的首要地位。

然而，海峽對岸的那些更關心商業和工業的人 — — 並且也不太願意將中國理想化，以此間接批評本國政府 — — 看到了中國經濟停滯的現實。 1793年，第一代馬戛爾尼伯爵率領遠征軍覲見乾隆皇帝，試圖說服中國人重新開放他們的帝國進行貿易，但徒勞無功。 盡管馬戛爾尼斷然拒絕磕頭，但他帶來了充足的貢品：一座德國製造的天文儀，“可能是有史以來製造的最大、最完美的玻璃透鏡”，以及望遠鏡、經緯儀、氣泵、電機 以及“幫助解釋和說明科學原理的廣泛裝置”。 然而，古代皇帝（他已經八十多歲了）和他的爪牙們對西方文明的這些奇跡並不感興趣：

人們很快發現，[對科學的]興趣，如果曾經存在的話，現在已經完全消失了。 。 。 [全部]是。 。 。 迷失並被無知的中國人拋棄。 。 。 據說，大使離開後，他們立即將這些物品堆放在圓明園的雜物間裏。 英國製造商精選的各種優雅和藝術典範也同樣取得了成功。 朝臣們對這些文章的思考似乎隻留下了嫉妒的印象。 。 。 這種行為可能歸因於一種不鼓勵引入新奇事物的國家政策。 。 。

皇帝隨後向喬治三世國王發出了一份不屑一顧的法令：“我們一無所缺，”他宣稱。 “我們從來沒有太重視奇怪或精巧的物品，我們也不再需要貴國的製造品。”49

馬嘎爾尼對中國開放的失敗完美地象征著自1500年以來全球權力從東方向西方的轉移。曾經的發明之母的中央王國現在是一個平庸的王國，故意敵視其他人的創新。 中國巧妙的創造——時鍾——已經回歸故鄉，但以歐洲形式進行了修改和改進，配備了由彈簧和齒輪組成的更加精確的機構。 如今，紫禁城裏有一整間房間，用於收藏大量皇家計時機器。 與不屑一顧的乾隆皇帝不同，他的前任皇帝都癡迷於收集鍾表。 幾乎所有產品都是在歐洲製造的，或者是由駐中國的歐洲工匠製造的。

1842 年 6 月，當皇家海軍炮艇沿長江航行至大運河，以報複一位熱心的中國官員銷毀鴉片庫存時，西方的優勢得到了證實。 中國必須支付2100萬銀元的賠款，向英國開放五個貿易港口，並割讓香港島。 具有諷刺意味的是，第一個所謂的“不平等條約”是在南京的靜海寺簽署的，靜海寺最初是為了紀念鄭和海軍上將和守護他的海神天妃而建的。 他的艦隊早在四個多世紀前就已經存在了。
 
他們再次在中國造船——這些巨輪能夠環球航行，滿載中國製造的集裝箱離開，並帶回滿足該國不斷增長的工業經濟所需的原材料。 2010年6月，當我參觀上海最大的造船廠時，我對在建船舶的龐大規模感到震驚。 這一幕讓我童年時的格拉斯哥碼頭變得黯然失色。 在溫州的工廠裏，工人們生產出數十萬套西裝和數百萬支塑料筆。 無數堆滿煤炭、水泥和礦石的駁船不斷攪動長江水。 競爭、公司、市場、貿易——這些都是中國曾經拒絕的東西。 不再。 如今，長期被遺忘的中國擴張主義的化身鄭和海軍上將是中國的英雄。 用後毛澤東時代最偉大的經濟改革家鄧小平的話來說：

今天任何一個國家想要發展起來，就不可能搞閉關鎖國。 我們嚐過這種苦澀的滋味，我們的祖先也嚐過。 明初永樂年間，鄭和下西洋，我國已開放。 永樂死後，王朝走向衰落。 中國被侵略了。 從明朝中葉到鴉片戰爭，中國經曆了三百多年的閉關鎖國，變得貧窮、落後，陷入黑暗和愚昧之中。 不敞開大門不是一個選擇。

這是對曆史的一種看似合理的解讀（而且與亞當·斯密的解讀非常接近）。

三十年前，如果你預測中國將在半個世紀內成為世界最大經濟體，你會被視為幻想家。 但如果早在 1420 年，你就預測西歐有一天會比整個亞洲生產更多，並且在 500 年內，英國人的平均財富將是中國人的平均財富的九倍，你會被認為是不現實的 。 這就是西歐競爭的動態效應 — — 以及東亞政治壟斷的阻礙效應。

Civilization: The West and the Rest 

by Niall Ferguson (Author) Oct 30, 2012 

https://www.amazon.ca/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061

Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.

How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors.
Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

Publisher ‏ ‎ Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (Oct. 30 2012) ‎ 

English ‎ 464 pages ‎ 13.46 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm

• Best Sellers Rank: #161,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in History & Philosophy of Anthropology
  • #381 in History of Early Civilization (Books)
  • #393 in Geography (Books)

 

Review

“[Ferguson] uses his powerful narrative talents in these pages to give the reader a highly tactile sense of history. … The author [has a] knack for making long-ago events as vivid and visceral as the evening news, for weaving anecdotes and small telling details together with a wide-angled retrospective vision.”—New York Times

“A dazzling history of Western ideas.”—The Economist

“Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.”—Wall Street Journal

“[W]ritten with vitality and verve… a tour de force.”—Boston Globe

“This is sharp. It feels urgent. Ferguson, with a properly financially literate mind, twists his knife with great literary brio…Ferguson ends by suggesting the biggest threat is not China but ourselves – our cowardice, drawn from ignorance, even stupidity, about our past. He is right. But as he shows himself, that can be fixed.”—The Financial Times

“The author boldly takes on 600 years of world events… so that the history lesson remains fresh and compelling… A richly informed, accessible history lesson.”—Kirkus (starred)

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

China seems to have been long stationary, and had probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is con- sistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of. A country which neglects or despises foreign commerce, and which admits the vessels of foreign nations into one or two of its ports only, cannot transact the same quantity of business which it might do with different laws and institutions . . . A more extensive foreign trade . . . could scarce fail to increase very much the manufactures of China, and to improve very much the productive powers of its manufactur- ing industry. By a more extensive navigation, the Chinese would naturally learn the art of using and constructing them- selves all the different machines made use of in other countries, as well as the other improvements of art and industry which are practised in all the different parts of the world.
Adam Smith
 
Why are they small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet weak? . . . What we have to learn from the barbarians is only . . . solid ships and effective guns.
Feng Guifen

中國似乎長期以來一直處於停滯狀態，並且很可能很久以前就獲得了與其法律和製度的性質相一致的全部財富。 但這種補充可能遠遠低於其土壤、氣候和情況的性質所允許的其他法律和製度。 一個忽視或蔑視對外貿易、隻允許外國船隻進入其一兩個港口的國家，無法進行與不同法律和製度下相同數量的業務。 。 。 對外貿易更加廣泛。 。 。 必然會極大地增加中國的製造業，並極大地提高其製造業的生產力。 通過更廣泛的航行，中國人自然會學習使用和建造其他國家使用的所有不同機器的藝術，以及在世界各地實踐的其他藝術和工業改進。 世界。--- 亞當·斯密
 
為什麽它們雖小卻很強大？ 為什麽我們大而弱？ 。 。 。 我們要向野蠻人學習的隻是。 。 。 堅固的船隻和有效的火炮。--- 馮桂芬

Civilization
 
Two rivers The Forbidden City (Gugong) was built in the heart of Beijing by more than a million workers, using materials from all over the Chin- ese Empire. With nearly a thousand buildings arranged, constructed and decorated to symbolize the might of the Ming dynasty, the For- bidden City is not only a relic of what was once the greatest civilization in the world; it is also a reminder that no civilization lasts for ever. As late as 1776 Adam Smith could still refer to China as ‘one of the rich- est, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world . . . a much richer country than any part of Europe’. Yet Smith also identified China as ‘long sta- tionary’ or ‘standing still’.1 In this he was surely right. Within less than a century of the Forbidden City’s construction between 1406 and 1420, the relative decline of the East may be said to have begun. The impoverished, strife-torn petty states of Western Europe embarked on half a millennium of almost unstoppable expansion. The great empires of the Orient meanwhile stagnated and latterly succumbed to Western dominance.

Why did China founder while Europe forged ahead? Smith’s main answer was that the Chinese had failed to ‘encourage foreign com- merce’, and had therefore missed out on the benefits of comparative advantage and the international division of labour. But other explana- tions were possible. Writing in the 1740s, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, blamed the ‘settled plan of tyranny’, which he traced back to China’s exceptionally large population, which in turn was due to the East Asian weather: I reason thus: Asia has properly no temperate zone, as the places situ- ated in a very cold climate immediately touch upon those which are exceedingly hot, that is, Turkey, Persia, India, China, Korea, and Japan. In Europe, on the contrary, the temperate zone is very extensive . . . it thence follows that each [country] resembles the country joining it; that there is no very extraordinary difference between them . . . Hence it comes that in Asia, the strong nations are opposed to the weak; the war- like, brave, and active people touch immediately upon those who are indolent, effeminate, and timorous; the one must, therefore, conquer, and the other be conquered. In Europe, on the contrary, strong nations are opposed to the strong; and those who join each other have nearly the same courage. This is the grand reason of the weakness of Asia, and of the strength of Europe; of the liberty of Europe, and of the slavery of Asia: a cause that I do not recollect ever to have seen remarked.2

Later European writers believed that it was Western technology that trumped the East – in particular, the technology that went on to pro- duce the Industrial Revolution. That was certainly how it appeared to the Earl Macartney after his distinctly disappointing mission to the Chinese imperial court in 1793 (see below). Another argument, popular in the twentieth century, was that Confucian philosophy inhibited innovation. Yet these contemporary explanations for Oriental under- achievement were mistaken. The first of the six distinct killer applications that the West had but the East lacked was not commercial, nor climatic, nor technological, nor philosophical. It was, as Smith discerned, above all institutional.
 
If, in the year 1420, you had taken two trips along two rivers – the Thames and the Yangzi – you would have been struck by the contrast. The Yangzi was part of a vast waterway complex that linked Nanjing to Beijing, more than 500 miles to the north, and Hangzhou to the south. At the core of this system was the Grand Canal, which at its maximum extent stretched for more than a thousand miles. Dat- ing back as far as the seventh century BC, with pound locks introduced as early as the tenth century AD and exquisite bridges like the multi- arched Precious Belt, the Canal was substantially restored and improved in the reign of the Ming Emperor Yongle (1402–24). By the time his chief engineer Bai Ying had finished damming and diverting the flow of the Yellow River, it was possible for nearly 12,000 grain barges to sail up and down the Canal every year.3 Nearly 50,000 men were employed in maintaining it. In the West, of course, the grandest of grand canals will always be Venice’s. But when the intrepid Ven- etian traveller Marco Polo had visited China in the 1270s, even he had been impressed by the volume of traffic on the Yangzi:
The multitude of vessels that invest this great river is so great that no one who should read or hear would believe it. The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief. In fact it is so big, that it seems  to be a sea rather than a river.
 
China’s Grand Canal not only served as the principal artery of internal trade. It also enabled the imperial government to smooth the price of grain through the five state granaries, which bought when grain was cheap and sold when it was dear.4
Nanjing was probably the largest city in the world in 1420, with a population of between half a million and a million. For centuries it had been a thriving centre of the silk and cotton industries. Under the Yongle Emperor it also became a centre of learning. The name Yongle means ‘perpetual happiness’; perpetual motion would perhaps have been a better description. The greatest of the Ming emperors did noth- ing by halves. The compendium of Chinese learning he commissioned took the labour of more than 2,000 scholars to complete and filled more than 11,000 volumes. It was surpassed as the world’s largest encyclopaedia only in 2007, after a reign of almost exactly 600 years, by Wikipedia.

But Yongle was not content with Nanjing. Shortly after his acces- sion, he had resolved to build a new and more spectacular capital to the north: Beijing. By 1420, when the Forbidden City was completed, Ming China had an incontrovertible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world.
 
By comparison with the Yangzi, the Thames in the early fifteenth cen- tury was a veritable backwater. True, London was a busy port, the main hub for England’s trade with the continent. The city’s most fam- ous Lord Mayor, Richard Whittington, was a leading cloth merchant who had made his fortune from England’s growing exports of wool. And the English capital’s shipbuilding industry was boosted by the need to transport men and supplies for England’s recurrent campaigns against the French. In Shadwell and Ratcliffe, the ships could be hauled up on to mud berths to be refitted. And there was, of course, the Tower of London, more forbidding than forbidden.
But a visitor from China would scarcely have been impressed by all this. The Tower itself was a crude construction compared with the multiple halls of the Forbidden City. London Bridge was an ungainly bazaar on stilts compared with the Precious Belt Bridge. And primi- tive navigation techniques confined English sailors to narrow stretches of water – the Thames and the Channel – where they could remain within sight of familiar banks and coastlines. Nothing could have  been more unimaginable, to Englishmen and Chinese alike, than the idea of ships from London sailing up the Yangzi.

By comparison with Nanjing, the London to which Henry V returned in 1421 after his triumphs over the French – the most fam- ous of them at Agincourt – was barely a town. Its old, patched-up city walls extended about 3 miles – again, a fraction the size of Nanjing’s.  It had taken the founder of the Ming dynasty more than twenty years to build the wall around his capital and it extended for as many miles, with gates so large that a single one could house 3,000 soldiers. And  it was built to last. Much of it still stands today, whereas scarcely any- thing remains of London’s medieval wall.

By fifteenth-century standards, Ming China was a relatively pleas- ant place to live. The rigidly feudal order established at the start of the Ming era was being loosened by burgeoning internal trade.5 The visitor to Suzhou today can still see the architectural fruits of that prosperity in the shady canals and elegant walkways of the old town centre. Urban life in England was very different. The Black Death – the bubonic plague caused by the flea-borne bacterium Yersinia pestis, which reached England in 1349 – had reduced London’s population to around 40,000, less than a tenth the size of Nanjing’s. Besides the plague, typhus, dysentery and smallpox were also rife. And, even in the absence of epidemics, poor sanitation made London a death-trap. Without any kind of sewage system, the streets stank to high heaven, whereas human excrement was systematically collected in Chinese cities and used as fertilizer in outlying paddy fields. In the days when Dick Whittington was lord mayor – four times between 1397 and his death in 1423 – the streets of London were paved with something altogether less appealing than gold.
Schoolchildren used to be brought up to think of Henry V as one   of the heroic figures of English history, the antithesis of his predeces- sor but one, the effete Richard II. Sad to relate, their kingdom was very far from the ‘sceptr’d isle’ of Shakespeare’s Richard II  – more    of a septic isle. The playwright fondly called it ‘this other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infec- tion . . .’ But English life expectancy at birth was on average a miserable thirty-seven years between 1540 and 1800; the figure for London was in the twenties. Roughly one in five English children died in the first year of life; in London the figure was nearly one in three. Henry V himself became king at the age of twenty-six and was dead from dys- entery at the age of thirty-five – a reminder that most history until relatively recently was made by quite young, short-lived people.

Violence was endemic. War with France was almost a permanent condition. When not fighting the French, the English fought the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. When not fighting the Celts, they fought one another in a succession of wars for control of the crown. Henry V’s father had come to the throne by violence; his son Henry VI lost it    by similar means with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, which saw four kings lose their thrones and forty adult peers die in battle  or on the scaffold. Between 1330 and 1479 a quarter of deaths in    the English aristocracy were violent. And ordinary homicide was commonplace. Data from the fourteenth century suggest an annual homicide rate in Oxford of above a hundred per 100,000 inhabitants. London was somewhat safer with a rate of around fifty per 100,000. The worst murder rates in the world today are in South Africa (sixty- nine per 100,000), Colombia (fifty-three) and Jamaica (thirty-four). Even Detroit at its worst in the 1980s had a rate of just forty-five per 100,000.6

English life in this period truly was, as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes later observed (of what he called ‘the state of nature’), ‘soli- tary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Even for a prosperous Norfolk family like the Pastons, there could be little security. John Paston’s wife Margaret was ejected bodily from her lodgings when she sought to uphold the family’s rightful claim to the manor of Gresham, occu- pied by the previous owner’s heir. Caister Castle had been left to the Pastons by Sir John Fastolf, but it was besieged by the Duke of Nor- folk shortly after John Paston’s death and held for seventeen long years.7 And England was among the more prosperous and less violent countries in Europe. Life was even nastier, more brutal and shorter in France – and it got steadily worse the further east you went in Europe. Even in the early eighteenth century the average Frenchman had a daily caloric intake of 1,660,  barely  above  the  minimum  required to sustain human life and about half the average in the West today. The average pre-revolutionary Frenchman stood just 5 feet 4¾ inches tall.8 And in all the continental countries for which we have data for the medieval period, homicide rates were higher than in England, with Italy – a land as famous for its assassins as for its artists – consistently the worst.

It is sometimes argued that Western Europe’s very nastiness was a kind of hidden advantage. Because high mortality rates were espe- cially common among the poor, perhaps they somehow helped the rich to get richer. Certainly, one consequence of the Black Death was to give European per-capita income a boost; those who survived could earn higher wages because labour was so scarce. It is also true that the children of the rich in England were a good deal more likely to survive into adulthood than those of the poor.9 Yet it seems unlikely that these quirks of European demography explain the great diver- gence of West and East. There are countries in the world today where life is almost as wretched as it was in medieval England, where pesti- lence, hunger, war and murder ensure average life expectancy stays pitifully low, where only the rich live long. Afghanistan, Haiti and Somalia show little sign of benefiting from these conditions. As we shall see, Europe leapt forward to prosperity and power despite death, not because of it.

Modern scholars and readers need to be reminded what death used to be like. The Triumph of Death, the visionary masterwork of the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–69), is not of course a work of realism, but Bruegel certainly did not have to rely entirely on his imagination to depict a scene of stomach-wrenching death and destruction. In a land ruled by an army of skeletons, a king lies dying, his treasure of no avail, while a dog gnaws on a nearby corpse. In the background we see two hanged men on gibbets, four men broken on wheels and another about to be beheaded. Armies clash, houses burn, ships sink. In the foreground, men and women, young and old, sol- diers and civilians are all driven pell-mell into a narrow, square tunnel. No one is spared. Even the troubadour singing to his mistress is surely doomed. The artist himself died in his early forties, a younger man than this author.

A century later the Italian artist Salvator Rosa painted perhaps the most moving of all memento mori, entitled simply L’umana fragilità (‘Human Frailty’). It was inspired by the plague that had swept his native Naples in 1655, claiming the life of his infant son, Rosalvo, as well as carrying off his brother, his sister, her husband and five of their children. Grinning hideously, the angel of death looms from the dark- ness behind Rosa’s wife to claim their son, even as he makes his first attempt to write. The mood of the heartbroken artist is immortally summed up in just eight Latin words inscribed on the canvas:
Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori
‘Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable.’ What more succinct description could be devised of life in the Europe of that time?
 
THE EUNUCh AND THE UNICORN
How can we understand the pre-eminence of the East? For a start, Asian agriculture was considerably more productive than European. In East Asia an acre of land was enough to support a family, such was the efficiency of rice cultivation, whereas in England the average figure was closer to 20 acres. This helps explain why East Asia was already more populous than Western Europe. The more sophisticated Orien- tal system of rice cultivation could feed many more mouths. No doubt the Ming poet Zhou Shixiu saw the countryside through rose-tinted spectacles; still, the picture here is of a contented rural populace:
Humble doorways loom by the dark path, a crooked lane goes way down to the inlet. Here ten families . . . have been living side by side for generations. The smoke from their fires intermingles wherever you look; so too, in their routines, the people are cooperative. One man’s son heads the house on the west, while another’s daughter is the west- ern neighbour’s wife. A cold autumn wind blows at the soil god’s shrine; piglets and rice-beer are sacrificed to the Ancestor of the Fields, to whom the old shaman burns paper money, while boys pound on a bronze drum. Mist drapes the sugar cane garden in silence, and driz- zling rain falls on the taro fields, as the people come home after the rites, spread mats, and chat, half drunk . . .10
But such scenes of bucolic equipoise tell only part of the story. Later generations of Westerners tended to think of imperial China as a static society, allergic to innovation. In Confucianism  and  Taoism  (1915) the German sociologist Max Weber defined Confucian rationalism as meaning ‘rational adjustment to the world’, as opposed to the West- ern concept of ‘rational mastery of the world’. This was a view largely endorsed by the Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan in his History of Chinese Philosophy (1934), as well as by the Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham’s multi-volume history of Science and Civilization in China. Such cultural explanations – always attractive to those, like Feng and Needham, who sympathized with the Maoist regime after 1949 – are hard to square with the evidence that, long before the Ming era, Chin- ese civilization had consistently sought to master the world through technological innovation.

We do not know for certain who designed the first water clock. It may have been the Egyptians, the Babylonians or the Chinese. But in 1086 Su Song added a gear escapement to create the world’s first mechanical clock, an intricate 40-foot-tall contraption that not only told the time but also charted the movements of the sun, moon and planets. Marco Polo saw a bell tower operated by such a clock when he visited Dadu in northern China, not long after the tower’s con- struction in 1272. Nothing remotely as accurate existed in England until a century later, when the first astronomical clocks were built for cathedrals in Norwich, St Alban’s and Salisbury.

The printing press with movable type is traditionally credited to fifteenth-century Germany. In reality it was invented in eleventh-century China. Paper too originated in China long before it was introduced in the West. So did paper money, wallpaper and toilet paper.11
It is often asserted that the English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull discovered the seed drill in 1701. In fact it was invented in China 2,000 years before his time. The Rotherham plough which, with its curved iron mouldboard, was a key tool in the eighteenth-century Eng- lish Agricultural Revolution, was another innovation anticipated by the Chinese.12 Wang Zhen’s 1313 Treatise on Agriculture was full of implements then unknown in the West.13 The Industrial Revolution was also prefigured in China. The first blast furnace for smelting iron ore was not built in Coalbrookdale  in  1709  but  in  China  before  200 BC. The oldest iron suspension bridge in the world is not British but Chinese; dating from as early as AD 65, remains of it can still be seen near Ching-tung in Yunnan province.14 Even as late as 1788 Brit- ish iron-production levels were still lower than those achieved in China in 1078. It was the Chinese who first revolutionized textile production with innovations like the spinning wheel and the silk reel- ing frame, imported to Italy in the thirteenth century.15 And it is far from true that the Chinese used their most famous invention, gun- powder, solely for fireworks. Jiao Yu and Liu Ji’s book Huolongjing, published in the late fourteenth century, describes land and sea mines, rockets and hollow cannonballs filled with explosives.


Other Chinese innovations include chemical insecticide, the fishing reel, matches, the magnetic compass, playing cards, the toothbrush and the wheelbarrow. Everyone knows that golf was invented in Scotland. Yet the Dongxuan Records from the Song dynasty (960–1279) describe a game called chuiwan. It was played with ten clubs, including a cuan- bang, pubang and shaobang, which are roughly analogous to our driver, two-wood and three-wood. The clubs were inlaid with jade and gold, suggesting that golf, then as now, was a game for the well-off.
And that was not all. As a new century dawned in 1400, China was poised to achieve another technological breakthrough, one that had the potential to make the Yongle Emperor the master not just of the Middle Kingdom, but of the world itself – literally ‘All under heaven’.
 
In Nanjing today you can see a full-size replica of the treasure ship of Admiral Zheng He, the most famous sailor in Chinese history. It  is 400 feet long – nearly five times the size of the Santa María, in which Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492. And this  was only part of a fleet of more than 300 huge ocean-going junks. With multiple masts and separate buoyancy chambers to prevent them from sinking in the event of a hole below the waterline, these ships were far larger than anything being built in fifteenth-century Europe. With a combined crew of 28,000, Zheng He’s navy was bigger than anything seen in the West until the First World War. Their master and commander was an extraordinary man. At the age of eleven, he had been captured on the field of battle by the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang. As was customary, the captive was castrated. He was then assigned as a servant to the Emperor’s fourth son, Zhu Di, the man who would seize and ascend the imperial throne as Yongle. In return for Zheng He’s loyal service, Yongle entrusted him with a task that entailed exploring the world’s oceans.

In a series of six epic voyages between 1405 and 1424, Zheng He’s fleet ranged astoundingly far and wide.* The Admiral sailed to Thai- land, Sumatra, Java and the once-great port of Calicut (today’s Kozhikode in Kerala); to Temasek (later Singapore), Malacca and Ceylon; to Cuttack in Orissa; to Hormuz, Aden and up the Red Sea to Jeddah.16 Nominally, these voyages were a search for Yongle’s prede- cessor, who had mysteriously disappeared, as well as for the imperial seal that had vanished with him. (Was Yongle trying to atone for kill- ing his way to the throne, or to cover up for the fact that he had done so?) But to find the lost emperor was not their real motive.

Before his final voyage, Zheng He was ordered ‘on imperial duty to Hormuz and other countries, with ships of different sizes numbering sixty-one . . . and [to carry] coloured silks . . . [and] buy hemp-silk’. His officers were also instructed to ‘buy porcelain, iron cauldrons, gifts and ammunition, paper, oil, wax, etc.’.17 This might seem to sug- gest a commercial rationale, and certainly the Chinese had goods coveted by Indian Ocean merchants (porcelain, silk and musk), as well as commodities they wished to bring back to China (peppers, pearls, precious stones, ivory and supposedly medicinal rhinoceros horns).18 In reality, however, the Emperor was not primarily con- cerned with trade as Adam Smith later understood it. In the words of a contemporary inscription, the fleet was ‘to go to the [barbarians’] coun- tries and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power . . .’. What Yongle wanted in return for these ‘presents’ was for foreign rulers to pay tribute to him the way China’s immediate Asian neighbours did, and thereby to acknowledge his supremacy. And who could refuse to kowtow to an emperor possessed of so mighty a fleet?19

On three of the voyages, ships from Zheng He’s fleet reached the east coast of Africa. They did not stay long. Envoys from some thirty African rulers were invited aboard to acknowledge the ‘cosmic ascend- ancy’ of the Ming Emperor. The Sultan of Malindi (in present-day Kenya) sent a delegation with exotic gifts, among them a giraffe. Yongle personally received the animal at the gateway of the imper-  ial palace in Nanjing. The giraffe was hailed as the mythical qilin (unicorn) – ‘a symbol of perfect virtue, perfect government and perfect harmony in the empire and the universe’.20
But then, in 1424, this harmony was shattered. Yongle died – and China’s overseas ambitions were buried with him. Zheng He’s voy- ages were immediately suspended, and only briefly revived with a final Indian Ocean expedition in 1432–3. The haijin decree defini- tively banned oceanic voyages. From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He’s journeys were destroyed. Zheng He him- self died and was almost certainly buried at sea.
What lay behind this momentous decision? Was it the result of fiscal problems and political wrangles at the imperial court? Was it because the costs of war in Annam (modern-day Vietnam) were prov- ing unexpectedly high?22 Or was it simply because of Confucian scholars’ suspicion of the ‘odd things’ Zheng He had brought back with him, not least the giraffe? We may never be sure. But the conse- quences of China’s turn inwards seem clear.
Like the Apollo moon missions, Zheng He’s voyages had been a formidable demonstration of wealth and technological sophistication. Landing a Chinese eunuch on the East African coast in 1416 was in many ways an achievement comparable with landing an American astronaut on the moon in 1969. But by abruptly cancelling oceanic
exploration, Yongle’s successors ensured that the economic benefits of this achievement were negligible.
The same could not be said for the voyages that were about to be undertaken by a very different sailor from a diminutive European kingdom at the other end of the Eurasian landmass.
 
the  spice race It was in the Castelo de São Jorge, high in the hills above the wind- swept harbour of Lisbon, that the newly crowned Portuguese King Manuel put Vasco  da Gama in command of four small ships with a    big mission. All four vessels could quite easily have fitted inside Zheng He’s treasure ship. Their combined crews were just 170 men. But their mission – ‘to make discoveries and go in search of spices’ – had the potential to tilt the whole world westwards.
The spices in question were the cinnamon, cloves, mace and nut- meg which Europeans could not grow for themselves but which they craved to enhance the taste of their food. For centuries the spice route had run from the Indian Ocean up the Red Sea, or overland through Arabia and Anatolia. By the middle of the fifteenth century its lucra- tive final leg leading into Europe was tightly controlled by the Turks and the Venetians. The Portuguese realized that if they could find an alternative route, down the west coast of Africa and round the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, then this business could be theirs. Another Portuguese mariner, Bartolomeu Dias, had rounded the Cape in 1488, but had been forced by his crew to turn back. Nine years later, it was up to da Gama to go all the way.

King Manuel’s orders tell us something crucially important about the way Western civilization expanded overseas. As we shall see, the West had more than one advantage over the Rest. But the one that really started the ball rolling was surely the fierce competition that drove the Age of Exploration. For Europeans, sailing round  Africa was not about exacting symbolic tribute for some high and mighty potentate back home. It was about getting ahead of their rivals, both economically and politically. If da Gama succeeded, then Lisbon trumped Venice. Maritime exploration, in short, was fifteenth-century Europe’s space race. Or, rather, its spice race.

Da Gama set sail on 8 July 1497. When he and his fellow Portu- guese sailors rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost tip of Africa four months later, they did not ask themselves what exotic animals they should bring back for their King. They wanted to know  if they had finally succeeded where others had failed – in finding a new spice route. They wanted trade, not tribute.
In April 1498, fully eighty-two years after Zheng He had landed there, da Gama arrived at Malindi. The Chinese had left little behind aside from some porcelain and DNA – that of twenty Chinese sailors who are said to have been shipwrecked near the island of Pate, to have swum ashore and stayed, marrying African wives and introducing the locals to Chinese styles of basket-weaving and silk production.23 The Portuguese, by contrast, immediately saw Malindi’s potential as a trading post. Da Gama was especially excited to encounter Indian merchants there and it was almost certainly with assistance from one of them that he was able to catch the monsoon winds to Calicut.
This eagerness to trade was far from being the only difference between the Portuguese and the Chinese. There was a streak of ruthlessness – indeed, of downright brutality – about the men from Lisbon that Zheng He only rarely evinced. When the King of Calicut looked askance at the goods the Portuguese had brought with them from Lisbon, da Gama seized sixteen fishermen as hostages. On his second voyage to India, at the head of fifteen ships, he bombarded Calicut and horribly mutilated the crews of captured vessels. On another occasion, he is said to have locked up the passengers aboard a ship bound for Mecca and set it ablaze.

The Portuguese engaged in exemplary violence because they knew that their opening of a new spice route round the Cape would meet resistance. They evidently believed in getting their retaliation in first. As Afonso de Albuquerque, the second Governor of Portuguese India, proudly reported to his royal master in 1513: ‘At the rumour of our coming the [native] ships all vanished and even the birds ceased to skim over the water.’ Against some foes, to be sure, cannons and cut- lasses were ineffective. Half of the men on da Gama’s first expedition did not survive the voyage, not least because their captain attempted to sail back to Africa against the monsoon wind. Only two of the original four ships made it back to Lisbon. Da Gama himself died of malaria during a third trip to India in 1524; his remains were returned to Europe and are now housed in a fine tomb in the Jerónimos Mon- astery (now the church of Santa Maria de Belém) in Lisbon. But other Portuguese explorers sailed on, past India, all the way to China. Once, the Chinese had been able to regard the distant barbarians of Europe with indifference, if not contempt. But now the spice race had brought the barbarians to the gates of the Middle Kingdom itself. And it must be remembered that, though the Portuguese had precious few goods the Chinese wanted, they did bring silver, for which Ming China had an immense demand as coins took the place of paper money and labour service as the principal means of payment.

In 1557 the Portuguese were ceded Macau, a peninsula on the Pearl River delta. Among the first things they did was to erect a gate – the Porta do Cerco – bearing the inscription: ‘Dread our greatness and respect our virtue.’ By 1586 Macau was an important enough trading outpost to be recognized as a city: Cidade do Nome de Deus na China (City of the Name of God in China). It was the first of many such European commercial enclaves in China. Luís da Camões, author of The Lusiads, the epic poem of Portuguese maritime expansion, lived  in Macau for a time, after being exiled from Lisbon for assault. How was it, he marvelled, that a kingdom as small as Portugal – with a population less than 1 per cent of China’s – could aspire to dominate the trade of Asia’s vastly more populous empires? And yet on his countrymen sailed, establishing an amazing network of trading posts that stretched like a global necklace from Lisbon, round the coast of Africa, Arabia and India, through the Straits of Malacca, to the spice islands themselves and then on still further, beyond even Macau. 

‘Were there more worlds still to discover,’ as da Camões wrote of his countrymen, ‘they would find them too!’24

The benefits of overseas expansion were not lost on Portugal’s European rivals. Along with Portugal, Spain had been first off the mark, seizing the initiative in the New World (see Chapter 3) and also establishing an Asian outpost in the Philippines, whence the Spaniards were able to ship immense quantities of Mexican silver to China.25 For decades after the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had split the world between them, the two Iberian powers could regard their imperial achievements with sublime self-confidence. But the Spaniards’ rebellious and commer- cially adept Dutch subjects came to appreciate the potential of the new spice route; indeed, by the mid-1600s they had overtaken the Portuguese in terms of both number of ships and tonnage sailing round the Cape. The French also entered the lists.
And what of the English, whose territorial ambitions had once extended no further than France and whose one novel economic idea in the Middle Ages had been selling wool to the Flemish? How could they possibly sit on the sidelines with news coming in that their arch- foes the Spaniards and French were making their fortunes overseas? Sure enough, it was not long before the English joined in the race for overseas commerce. In 1496 John Cabot made his first attempt to cross the Atlantic from Bristol. In 1553 Hugh Willoughby and Rich- ard Chancellor set off from Deptford to seek a ‘North-east Passage’ to India. Willoughby froze to death in the attempt, but Chancellor man- aged to get to Archangel and then made his way overland to the court of Ivan the Terrible in Moscow. On his return to London, Chancellor lost no time in setting up the Muscovy Company to develop trade with Russia (its full name was ‘The Mystery and Company of Mer- chant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown’). Similar projects proliferated with enthusiastic royal support, not only across the Atlantic but also along the spice route. By the middle of the seventeenth century England’s trade was flourishing from Belfast to Boston, from Bengal to the Bahamas.
The world was being carved up in a frenzy of cut-throat competition. But the question still remains: why did the Europeans seem to have so much more commercial fervour than the Chinese? Why was Vasco da Gama so clearly hungry for money – hungry enough to kill for it?
You can find the answer by looking at maps of medieval Europe, which show literally hundreds of competing states, ranging from the kingdoms of the western seaboard to the many city-states that lay between the Baltic and the Adriatic, from Lübeck to Venice. There were roughly a thousand polities in fourteenth-century Europe; and still around 500 more or less independent units 200 years later. Why was this? The simplest answer is geography. China had three great rivers, the Yellow, the Yangzi and the Pearl, all flowing from west to east.26 Europe had multiple rivers flowing in multiple directions, not to men- tion a host of mountain ranges like the Alps and the Pyrenees, to say nothing of the dense forests and marshes of Germany and Poland. It may just have been easier for marauding Mongols to access China; Eur- ope was less readily penetrable by a horde on horseback – and therefore had less need of unity. We cannot be sure exactly why the Central Asian threat receded from Europe after Timur. Perhaps Russian defences just got better. Perhaps the Mongol horses preferred steppe grass.
True, as we have seen, conflict could be devastating in Europe – think only of the mayhem caused by the Thirty Years’ War in mid-seventeenth-century Germany. Woe betide those who lived at the frontiers between the dozen or so bigger European states, which were at war on average more than two-thirds of the time between 1550 and 1650. In all the years from 1500 to 1799, Spain was at war with foreign enemies 81 per cent of the time, England 53 per cent and France 52 per cent. But this constant fighting had three unintended benefits. First, it encouraged innovation in military technology. On land, fortifications had to grow stronger as cannon grew more power- ful and manoeuvrable. The fate of the ruined ‘robber baron’s’ castle on the Tannenberg above Seeheim in southern Germany served as a warning: in 1399 it became the first European fortification to be destroyed using explosives.
At sea, meanwhile, ships stayed small for good reasons. Compared with the Mediterranean galley, the design of which had scarcely changed since Roman times, the late fifteenth-century Portuguese cara- vel, with its square-rig sails and two masts, struck an ideal balance between speed and firepower. It was much easier to turn and much harder to hit than one of Zheng He’s giant junks. 

In 1501 the French device of putting rows of cannon in special bays along both sides of a ship turned European ‘men of war’ into floating fortresses.27 If it could somehow have come to a naval encounter between Zheng He and Vasco da Gama, it is possible that the Portuguese would have sent the lumbering Chinese hulks to the bottom, just as they made short work of the smaller but nimbler Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean – though at Tamao in 1521 a Ming fleet did sink a Portuguese caravel.

The second benefit of Europe’s almost unremitting warfare was that the rival states grew progressively better at raising the revenue to pay for their campaigns. Measured in terms of grams of silver per head, the rulers of England and France were able to collect far more in taxation than their Chinese counterpart throughout the period from 1520 to 1630.28 Beginning in thirteenth-century Italy, Europeans also began to experiment with unprecedented methods of government borrowing, planting the seeds of modern bond markets. Public debt was an institution wholly unknown in Ming China and only intro- duced under European influence in the late nineteenth century. Another fiscal innovation of world-changing significance was the Dutch idea of granting monopoly trading rights to joint-stock companies in return for a share of their profits and an understanding that the companies would act as naval subcontractors against rival powers. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, and its eponymous English imitator were the first true capitalist corporations, with their equity capital divided into tradable shares paying cash dividends at the discretion of their directors. Nothing resembling these astoundingly dynamic institutions emerged in the Orient. And, though they increased royal revenue, they also diminished royal prerogatives by creating new and enduring stakeholders in the early-modern state: bankers, bond-holders and company directors.
Above all, generations of internecine conflict ensured that no one
European monarch ever grew strong enough to be able to prohibit overseas exploration. Even when the Turks advanced into Eastern Europe, as they did repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries, there was no pan-European emperor to order the Portuguese to suspend their maritime explorations and focus on the enemy to the east.29 On the contrary, the European monarchs all encouraged com- merce, conquest and colonization as part of their competition with one another.

Religious war was the bane of European life for more than a century after the Lutheran Reformation swept through Germany (see Chapter 2). But the bloody battles between Protestants and Roman Catholics, as well as the periodic and localized persecution of Jews, also had beneficial side-effects. In 1492 the Jews were expelled from Castile and Aragon as religious heretics. Initially, many of them sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire, but a Jewish community was established in Venice after 1509. In 1566, with the revolt of the Dutch against Spanish rule and the establishment of the United Provinces as a Prot- estant republic, Amsterdam became another haven of tolerance. When the Protestant Huguenots were expelled from France in 1685, they were able to resettle in England, Holland and Switzerland.30 And, of course, religious fervour provided another incentive to expand over- seas. The Portuguese Prince Henrique the Navigator encouraged his sailors to explore the African coast partly in the hope that they might find the mythical kingdom of the lost Christian saint Prester John, and that he might then lend Europe a hand against the Turks. In addition to insisting on exemption from Indian customs duties, Vasco da Gama brazenly demanded that the King of Calicut expel all Muslims from  his realm and waged a campaign of targeted piracy against Muslim shipping bound for Mecca.

In short, the political fragmentation that characterized Europe precluded the creation of anything remotely resembling the Chinese Empire. It also propelled Europeans to seek opportunities – economic, geopolitical and religious – in distant lands. You might say it was a case of divide and rule – except that, paradoxically, it was by being divided themselves that Europeans were able to rule the world. In Europe small was beautiful because it meant competition – and com- petition not just between states, but also within states.

Officially, Henry V was king of England, Wales and indeed France, to which he laid claim. But on the ground in rural England real power was in the hands of the great nobility, the descendants of the men who had imposed Magna Carta on King John, as well as thousands of gen- try landowners and innumerable corporate bodies, clerical and lay. The Church was not under royal control until the reign of Henry VIII. Towns were often self-governing. And, crucially, the most important commercial centre in the country was almost completely autonomous. Europe was not only made up of states; it was also made up of estates: aristocrats, clergymen and townsfolk.

The City of London Corporation can trace its origin and structure back as far as the twelfth century. Remarkably, in other words, the Lord Mayor, the sheriffs, the aldermen, Common Council, liverymen and freemen have all been around for more than 800 years. The Corporation is one of the earliest examples of an autonomous commercial institution – in some ways the forerunner of the corpora- tions we know today, in other ways the forerunner of democracy itself.
As early as the 1130s, Henry I granted Londoners the right to choose as their own sheriff and justice ‘whom they will of themselves’, and to administer their judicial and financial affairs without interfer- ence from the Crown or other authorities.31 In 1191, while Richard I was crusading in the Holy Land, the right to elect a mayor was also granted, a right confirmed by King John in 1215.32  As a result, the  City was never in awe of the Crown. With the support of the City’s freemen, Mayor Thomas fitz Thomas supported Simon de Montfort’s revolt against Henry III in 1263–5. In 1319 it was the turn of Edward II to confront the City as the mercers (cloth dealers) sought to reduce the privileges of foreign merchants. When the Crown resisted, the ‘London mob’ supported Roger Mortimer’s deposition of the King. In the reign of Edward III, the tide turned against the City; Italian and Hanseatic merchants established themselves in London, not least by providing the Crown with loans on generous terms, a practice which continued during Richard II’s minority.33 But the Londoners con- tinued to challenge royal authority, showing little enthusiasm for the Crown’s cause during either the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) or the chal- lenge to Richard’s rule by the Lords Appellant. In 1392 the King revoked London’s privileges and liberties, but five years later a gener- ous ‘gift’ of £10,000 – negotiated by Mayor Whittington – secured their restoration. Loans and gifts to the Crown became the key to urban autonomy. The wealthier the City became, the more such lever- age it had. Whittington lent Henry IV at least £24,000 and his son Henry V around £7,500.

Not only did the City compete with the Crown for power. There
was competition even within the City. The livery companies can all trace their origins back to the medieval period: the weavers to 1130, the bakers to 1155, the fishmongers to 1272, the goldsmiths, mer- chant taylors and skinners to 1327, the drapers to 1364, the mercers to 1384 and the grocers to 1428. These guilds or ‘misteries’ exerted considerable power over their particular sectors  of  the  economy,  but they had political power too. Edward III acknowledged  this  when he declared himself to be ‘a brother’ of the Linen-Armourers’ (later Merchant Taylors’) Guild. By 1607 the Merchant Taylors could count as past and present honorary members seven kings and a queen, seventeen princes and dukes, nine countesses, duchesses and baron- esses, over 200 earls, lords and other gentlemen and an archbishop. The ‘great twelve’ companies – in order of precedence: mercers, gro- cers, drapers, fishmongers, goldsmiths, skinners, merchant taylors, haberdashers, salters, ironmongers, vintners and clothworkers – are a reminder of the power that London’s craftsmen and merchants were once able to wield, even if their role today is largely ceremonial. In their competitive heyday they were as likely to fight as to dine with one another.35
 
Among other things, this multi-level competition, between states and within states – even within cities – helps to explain the rapid spread and advancing technology of the mechanical clock in Europe. Already in the 1330s Richard of Wallingford had installed a remarkably sophisticated mechanical clock in the wall of the south transept of St Albans Abbey, which showed the motion of the moon, of the tides and of certain celestial bodies. With their distinctive hourly bells (hence the name: clock, clokke, Glocke, cloche), the mechanical clock and the spring-driven clock that supplanted it in the fifteenth century were not only more accurate than Chinese waterclocks. They were also intended to be disseminated, rather than monopolized by the Emperor’s astronomers. Thus, if one town’s cathedral installed a fine new dial in its tower, its nearest rival soon felt obliged to follow suit. If Protestant watchmakers were unwelcome in France after 1685, the Swiss gladly took them in. And, as with military technology, competi- tion bred progress as craftsmen tinkered to make small but cumula- tive improvements to the accuracy and elegance of the product. By the time the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci brought European clocks to China in the late sixteenth century, they were so much superior to their Oriental counterparts that they were greeted with dismay.36 In 1602, at the request of the Wanli Emperor, Ricci produced a beautiful rice-paper map of the world, which depicted China at the centre of the earth. He must have known, however, that in terms of technology China was now drifting to the global periphery.

Because of the greater precision it permitted in measurement and in the co-ordination of action, the rise of the clock and later the port- able watch went (it might be said) hand in hand with the rise of Europe and the spread of Western civilization. With every individual timepiece, a little bit more time ran out for the age of Oriental pre- eminence.
 
By comparison with the patchwork quilt of Europe, East Asia was – in political terms, at least – a vast monochrome blanket. The Middle King- dom’s principal competitors were the predatory Mongols to the north and the piratical Japanese to the east. Since the time of Qin Shihuangdi – often referred to as the ‘First Emperor’ of China (221–210 BC) – the threat from the north had been the bigger one – the one that necessitated the spectacular investment in imperial defence we know today as the Great Wall. Nothing remotely like it was constructed in Europe from the time of Hadrian to the time of Erich Honecker. Comparable in scale was the network of canals and ditches that irrigated China’s arable land, which the Marxist Sinologist Karl Wittfogel saw as the most important products of a ‘hydraulic-bureaucratic’ Oriental despotism.
The Forbidden City in Beijing is another monument to monolithic Chinese power. To get a sense of its immense size and distinctive ethos, the visitor should walk through the Gate of Supreme Harmony to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, which contains the Dragon Throne itself, then to the Hall of Central Harmony, the emperor’s private room, and then to the Hall of Preserving Harmony, the site of the final stage of the imperial civil service examination (see below). Harmony (和), it seems clear, was inextricably bound up with the idea of undivided imperial authority.

Like the Great Wall, the Forbidden City simply had no counterpart in the fifteenth-century West, least of all in London, where power was subdivided between the Crown, the Lords Temporal and Spiritual and the Commons, as well as the Corporation of the City of London and the livery companies. Each had their palaces and halls, but they were all very small by Oriental standards. In the same way, while medieval European kingdoms were run by a combination of hereditary land- owners and clergymen, selected (and often ruthlessly discarded) on the basis of royal favour, China was ruled from the top down by a Confucian bureaucracy, recruited on the basis of perhaps the most demanding examination system in all history. Those who aspired to a career in the imperial service had to submit to three stages of gruelling tests conducted in specially built exam centres, like the one that can still be seen in Nanjing today – a huge walled compound containing thousands of tiny cells little larger than the lavatory on a train:

These tiny brick compartments [a European traveller wrote] were about 1.1 metres deep, 1 metre wide and 1.7 metres high. They pos- sessed two stone ledges, one servicing as a table, the other as a seat. During the two days an examination lasted the candidates were observed by soldiers stationed in the lookout tower . . . The only move- ment allowed was the passage of servants replenishing food and water supplies, or removing human waste. When a candidate became tired, he could lay out his bedding and take a cramped rest. But a bright light in the neighbouring cell would probably compel him to take up his brush again . . . some candidates went completely insane under the pressure.38

No doubt after three days and two nights in a shoebox, it was the most able – and certainly the most driven – candidates who passed the examination. But with its strong emphasis on the Four Books  and Five Classics of Confucianism, with their bewildering 431,286 char- acters to be memorized, and the rigidly stylized eight-legged essay introduced in 1487, it was an exam that rewarded conformity and caution.39 It was fiercely competitive, no doubt, but it was not  the kind of competition that promotes innovation, much less the appetite for change. The written language at the heart of Chinese civilization was designed for the production of a conservative elite and the exclu- sion of the masses from their activities. The contrast could scarcely be greater with the competing vernaculars of Europe – Italian, French and Castilian as well as Portuguese and English – usable for elite lit- erature but readily accessible to a wider public with relatively simple and easily scalable education.

As Confucius himself said: ‘A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.’ But there was too much that was commonplace in the way Ming China worked, and too little that was new.
 
The mediocre kingdom Civilizations are complex things. For centuries they can flourish in a sweet spot of power and prosperity. But then, often quite suddenly, they can tip over the edge into chaos.

The Ming dynasty in China had been born in 1368, when the war- lord Yuanzhang renamed himself Hongwu, meaning ‘vast military power’. For most of the next three centuries, as we have seen, Ming China was the world’s most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure. But then, in middle of the seventeenth century, the wheels came flying off. This is not to exaggerate its early stability. Yongle had, after all, succeeded his father Hongwu only after a period of civil war and the deposition of the rightful successor, his eldest brother’s son. But the mid-seventeenth-century crisis was unquestionably a bigger disruption. Political factionalism was exacerbated by a fiscal crisis as the falling purchasing power of silver eroded the real value of tax revenues.41 Harsh weather, famine and epidemic disease opened the door to rebellion within and incursions from without.42 In 1644 Beijing itself fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng. The last Ming Emperor hanged himself out of shame. This dramatic transition from Confu- cian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

The results of the Ming collapse were devastating. Between 1580 and 1650 conflict and epidemics reduced the Chinese population by between 35 and 40 per cent. What had gone wrong? The answer is that turning inwards was fatal, especially for a complex and densely populated society like China’s. The Ming system had created a high- level equilibrium – impressive outwardly, but fragile inwardly. The countryside could sustain a remarkably large number of people, but only on the basis of an essentially static social order that literally ceased to innovate. It was a kind of trap. And when the least little thing went wrong, the trap snapped shut. There were no external resources to draw on. True, a considerable body of scholarship has sought to represent Ming China as a prosperous society, with consid- erable internal trade and a vibrant market for luxury goods.43 The most recent Chinese research, however, shows that per-capita income stagnated in the Ming era and the capital stock actually shrank.
By contrast, as England’s population accelerated in the late seven- teenth century, overseas expansion played a vital role in propelling the country out of the trap identified by Thomas Malthus. Transatlantic trade brought an influx of new nutrients like potatoes and sugar – an acre of sugar cane yielded the same amount of energy as 12 acres of wheat45 – as well as plentiful cod and herring. Colonization allowed the emigration of surplus population. Over time, the effect was to raise productivity, incomes, nutrition and even height.

Consider the fate of another island people, situated much like the English on an archipelago off the Eurasian coast. While the English aggressively turned outwards, laying the foundations of what can justly be called ‘Anglobalization’, the Japanese took the opposite path, with the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy of strict seclusion (sakoku) after 1640. All forms of contact with the outside world were pro- scribed. As a result, Japan missed out entirely on the benefits associated with a rapidly rising level of global trade and migration. The results were striking. By the late eighteenth century, more than 28 per cent of the English farmworker’s diet consisted of animal products; his Japa- nese counterpart lived on a monotonous intake, 95 per cent cereals, mostly rice. This nutritional divergence explains the marked gap in stature that developed after 1600. The average height of English convicts in the eighteenth century was 5 feet 7 inches. The average height  of  Japanese  soldiers  in  the  same  period  was  just  5  feet  21⁄2 inches.46 When East met West by that time, they could no longer look one another straight in the eye.

In other words, long before the Industrial Revolution, little England was pulling ahead of the great civilizations of the Orient because of the material advantages of commerce and colonization. The Chinese and Japanese route – turning away from foreign trade and intensifying rice cultivation – meant that with population growth, incomes fell, and so did nutrition, height and productivity. When crops failed or their cul- tivation was disrupted, the results were catastrophic. The English were luckier in their drugs, too: long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea. They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part café, part stock exchange, part chat-room;47 the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den, their pipes filled by none other than the British East India Company.48
 
Not all European commentators recognized, as Adam Smith did, China’s ‘stationary state’. In 1697 the German philosopher and math- ematician Gottfried Leibniz announced: ‘I shall have to post a notice on my door: Bureau of Information for Chinese Knowledge.’ In his book The Latest News from China, he suggested that ‘Chinese missionaries should be sent to us to teach the aims and practice of natural theology, as we send missionaries to them to instruct them in revealed religion.’ ‘One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese,’ declared the French philosophe Voltaire in 1764, ‘to recognize . . . that their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen.’ Two years later the Physiocrat François Quesnay published The Despotism of China, which praised the primacy of agriculture in Chinese economic policy.

Yet those on the other side of the Channel who concerned them- selves more with commerce and industry – and who were also less inclined to idealize China as a way of obliquely criticizing their own government – discerned the reality of Chinese stagnation. In 1793 the 1st Earl Macartney led an expedition to the Qianlong Emperor, in a vain effort to persuade the Chinese to reopen their empire to trade. Though Macartney pointedly declined to kowtow, he brought with him ample tribute: a German-made planetarium, ‘the largest and most perfect glass lens that perhaps was ever fabricated’, as well as tele- scopes, theodolites, air-pumps, electrical machines and ‘an extensive apparatus for assisting to explain and illustrate the principles of sci- ence’. Yet the ancient Emperor (he was in his eighties) and his minions were unimpressed by these marvels of Western civilization:

it was presently discovered that the taste [for the sciences], if it ever existed, was now completely worn out . . . [All] were . . . lost and thrown away on the ignorant Chinese . . . who immediately after the departure of the embassador [sic] are said to have piled them up in lumber rooms of Yuen-min-yuen [the Old Summer Palace]. Not more successful were the various specimens of elegance and art displayed in the choicest examples of British manufactures. The impression which the contemplation of such articles seemed to make on the minds of the courtiers was that alone of jealousy . . . Such conduct may probably be ascribed to a kind of state policy, which discourages the introduction of novelties . . .

The Emperor subsequently addressed a dismissive edict to King George III: ‘There is nothing we lack,’ he declared. ‘We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.’49

Macartney’s abortive opening to China perfectly symbolized the shift of global power from East to West that had taken place since 1500. The Middle Kingdom, once the mother of inventions, was now the mediocre kingdom, wilfully hostile to other people’s innovations. That ingenious Chinese creation, the clock, had come home, but in its modified and improved European form, with ever more accurate mechanisms composed of springs and cogs. Today there is an entire room in the Forbidden City given over to a vast imperial collection of timekeeping machines. Unlike the dismissive Qianlong Emperor, his predecessors had obsessively collected clocks. Nearly all were made in Europe, or by European craftsmen based in China.

The West’s ascendancy was confirmed in June 1842, when Royal Naval gunboats sailed up the Yangzi to the Grand Canal in retaliation for the destruction of opium stocks by a zealous Chinese official. China had to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, open five ports to British trade and cede the island of Hong Kong. It was ironic but appropriate that this first of the so-called ‘Unequal Treaties’ was signed in Nanjing, at the Jinghai Temple  – originally built in honour  of Admiral Zheng He and Tianfei, the Goddess of the Sea, who had watched over him and his fleet more than four centuries before.
 
They are building ships again in China – vast ships capable of circum- navigating the globe, leaving with containers full of Chinese manufac- tures and bringing back the raw materials necessary to feed the country’s insatiably growing industrial economy. When I visited the biggest shipyard in Shanghai in June 2010, I was staggered by the sheer size of the vessels under construction. The scene made the Glasgow docks of my boyhood pale into insignificance. In the factories of Wenzhou, workers churn out suits by the hundred thousand and plastic pens by the million. And the waters of the Yangzi are constantly churned by countless barges piled high with coal, cement and ore. Competition, companies, markets, trade – these are things that China once turned its back on. Not any more. Today, Admiral Zheng He, the personifica- tion of Chinese expansionism and for so long forgotten, is a hero in China. In the words of the greatest economic reformer of the post- Mao era, Deng Xiaoping:

No country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed- door policies. We have tasted this bitter experience and our ancestors have tasted it. In the early Ming Dynasty in the reign of Yongle when Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open. After Yon- gle died the dynasty went into decline. China was invaded. Counting from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the Opium Wars, through 300 years of isolation China was made poor, and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance. No open door is not an option.

It is a plausible reading of history (and one remarkably close to Adam Smith’s).
Thirty years ago, if you had predicted that within half a century China’s would be the world’s biggest economy, you would have been dismissed as a fantasist. But if back in 1420 you had predicted that Western Europe would one day be producing more than the whole of Asia, and that within 500 years the average Briton would be nine times richer than the average Chinese, you would have been regarded as no more realistic. Such was the dynamic effect of competition in Western Europe – and the retarding effect of political monopoly in East Asia.