Niall Ferguson 文明 西方及其他地区

文明：西方及其他地区

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

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

西方文明崛起并占据全球主导地位是过去五个世纪以来最重要的历史现象。西方是如何超越东方竞争对手的？ 西方权力的顶峰现在已经过去了吗？ 著名历史学家尼尔·弗格森认为，从 15 世纪开始，西方发展了六种强大的新概念，或者说“杀手级应用”——竞争、科学、法治、现代医学、消费主义和职业道德——而其他国家则缺乏这些概念。 使其超越所有其他竞争对手。

然而现在，弗格森展示了其他国家如何下载西方曾经垄断的杀手级应用程序，而西方实际上已经对自己失去了信心。 《文明：西方与其他地区》记录了帝国的兴衰以及文明的冲突（和融合），用力量和智慧重塑了世界历史。 大胆的争论和充满令人难忘的人物，这是弗格森的最佳状态。

西方文明崛起并占据全球主导地位是过去五个世纪以来最重要的历史现象。西方是如何超越东方竞争对手的？ 西方权力的顶峰现在已经过去了吗？ 著名历史学家尼尔·弗格森认为，从 15 世纪开始，西方发展了六种强大的新概念，或者说“杀手级应用”——竞争、科学、法治、现代医学、消费主义和职业道德——而其他国家则缺乏这些概念。 使其超越所有其他竞争对手。
然而现在，弗格森展示了其他国家如何下载西方曾经垄断的杀手级应用程序，而西方实际上已经对自己失去了信心。 《文明：西方与其他地区》记录了帝国的兴衰以及文明的冲突（和融合），用力量和智慧重塑了世界历史。 大胆的争论和充满令人难忘的人物，这是弗格森的最佳状态。

中国似乎长期以来一直处于停滞状态，并且很可能很久以前就获得了与其法律和制度的性质相一致的全部财富。 但这种补充可能远远低于其土壤、气候和情况的性质所允许的其他法律和制度。 一个忽视或蔑视对外贸易、只允许外国船只进入其一两个港口的国家，无法进行与不同法律和制度下相同数量的业务。 。 。 对外贸易更加广泛。 。 。 必然会极大地增加中国的制造业，并极大地提高其制造业的生产力。 通过更广泛的航行，中国人自然会学习使用和建造其他国家使用的所有不同机器的艺术，以及在世界各地实践的其他艺术和工业改进。 世界。--- 亚当·斯密
 
为什么它们虽小却很强大？ 为什么我们大而弱？ 。 。 。 我们要向野蛮人学习的只是。 。 。 坚固的船只和有效的火炮。--- 冯桂芬

文明
 
两条河 紫禁城（故宫）是由超过一百万工人在北京市中心建造的，所用的材料来自中华帝国各地。 紫禁城拥有近千座建筑，象征着明朝的威力，它不仅是曾经世界上最伟大文明的遗迹，也是曾经世界上最伟大文明的遗迹。 这也提醒我们，没有哪个文明能够永远持续下去。 直到 1776 年，亚当·斯密仍然可以将中国称为“世界上最富有的国家之一，即世界上最肥沃、耕种最好、最勤劳和人口最多的国家之一”。 。 。 一个比欧洲任何地方都富裕得多的国家”。 然而，史密斯也认为中国“长期停滞不前”或“停滞不前”。1 在这一点上他肯定是对的。 1406年至1420年紫禁城建成后不到一个世纪，东方的相对衰落可以说已经开始。 西欧贫穷、饱受冲突蹂躏的小国开始了五百年来几乎不可阻挡的扩张。 与此同时，东方的伟大帝国陷入停滞，并最终屈服于西方的统治。

为什么中国衰落而欧洲却奋进？ 斯密的主要回答是，中国未能“鼓励对外贸易”，因此错过了比较优势和国际分工的好处。 但其他解释也是可能的。 孟德斯鸠男爵夏尔·德·塞达特 (Charles de Secondat) 在 1740 年代撰文，指责“暴政的既定计划”，他将其归咎于中国异常庞大的人口，而这又是东亚气候造成的：我这样推理：亚洲已经正确地 没有温带，因为气候非常寒冷的地方会立即接触到非常炎热的地方，即土耳其、波斯、印度、中国、韩国和日本。 相反，在欧洲，温带地区非常广阔。 。 。 因此，每个[国家]都与加入它的国家相似； 他们之间没有什么特别的区别。 。 。 所以亚洲是强国对弱国，强国对弱国。 好战的、勇敢的、积极的人，直接接触到那些懒惰、柔弱、胆怯的人。 因此，一方必须征服，另一方也必须被征服。 相反，在欧洲，强国对强国，强国对强国。 而那些加入彼此的人，有着几乎同样的勇气。 这是亚洲弱、欧洲强的重要原因。 欧洲的自由和亚洲的奴役：我不记得曾经见过这个事业。

后来的欧洲作家相信，是西方技术战胜了东方——特别是后来引发工业革命的技术。 1793 年，马戛尔尼伯爵对中国宫廷执行了一次极其令人失望的任务（见下文），他的感受就是如此。 二十世纪流行的另一个论点是儒家哲学抑制创新。 然而，这些当代对东方成就不佳的解释是错误的。 西方拥有但东方缺乏的六种独特杀手级应用中的第一个不是商业、气候、技术或哲学。 正如史密斯所认识到的，它首先是制度性的。
 
如果在 1420 年，您沿着泰晤士河和长江这两条河流进行了两次旅行，您一定会对这种对比感到震惊。 长江是庞大水道综合体的一部分，该水道将南京与北京（北边 500 多英里）连接起来，南边连接杭州。 这个系统的核心是大运河，最大时延伸超过一千英里。 运河的历史可以追溯到公元前七世纪，早在公元十世纪就引入了磅闸，还有像连拱宝带这样精美的桥梁，运河在明永乐年间得到了实质性的修复和改善。 1402–24）。 当他的总工程师白英完成黄河筑坝和分流工作时，每年可以有近12,000艘粮食驳船在运河上航行。3 维护运河的人员有近50,000人。 当然，在西方，最宏伟的大运河永远是威尼斯的。 但当勇敢的威尼斯旅行家马可波罗在 1270 年代访问中国时，就连他也对长江上的交通流量印象深刻：

这条大河上的船只数量之多，读到或听到的人都不会相信。 上下运输的商品数量令人难以置信。 事实上，它是如此之大，以至于它看起来像是一片海洋而不是一条河流。
 
中国的大运河不仅是国内贸易的大动脉。 它还使帝国政府能够通过五个国家粮仓来平滑粮食价格，这些粮仓便宜时买，贵时卖。

1420 年，南京可能是世界上最大的城市，人口在 50 万到 100 万之间。 几个世纪以来，它一直是繁荣的丝绸和棉花工业中心。 在永乐皇帝统治下，它也成为学术中心。 永乐这个名字的意思是“永远幸福”； 永动机也许是一个更好的描述。 明朝最伟大的皇帝从不半途而废。 他委托2000多名学者共同编写的《国学纲目》，共11000多卷。 直到 2007 年，在统治了近 600 年之后，它才被维基百科超越，成为世界上最大的百科全书。

但朱棣对南京并不满足。 就任后不久，他就决心在北方建立一座更加壮观的新首都：北京。 到 1420 年紫禁城竣工时，明朝中国无可争议地宣称自己是世界上最先进的文明。
 
与长江相比，15世纪初的泰晤士河是名副其实的死水。 诚然，伦敦是一个繁忙的港口，是英格兰与欧洲大陆贸易的主要枢纽。 该市最著名的市长理查德·惠廷顿 (Richard Whittington) 是一位著名的布料商人，他靠英国日益增长的羊毛出口发家致富。 英国首都的造船业因需要为英国经常对抗法国的战役运输人员和物资而得到推动。 在沙德韦尔和拉特克利夫，船只可以被拖到泥泊位上进行改装。 当然，还有伦敦塔，它比禁忌更令人生畏。

但对于一个来自中国的游客来说，这一切几乎不会留下深刻的印象。 与紫禁城的多个殿堂相比，这座塔本身的建筑是简陋的。 与宝带桥相比，伦敦桥是一个笨拙的高跷集市。 原始的航海技术将英国水手限制在狭窄的水域——泰晤士河和英吉利海峡——在那里他们可以看到熟悉的河岸和海岸线。 对于英国人和中国人来说，没有什么比来自伦敦的船只沿着长江航行更难以想象的了。

与南京相比，亨利五世于 1421 年战胜法国人（其中最著名的是阿金库尔战役）后返回的伦敦几乎算不上一座城镇。 其古老的、修补的城墙绵延约 3 英里，同样只是南京城墙的一小部分。 明朝的创建者花了二十多年的时间才在首都周围修建了长城，绵延数里，城门如此之大，一扇可以容纳三千士兵。 它经久耐用。 它的大部分至今仍然矗立，而伦敦的中世纪城墙却几乎没有留下任何痕迹。

按照十五世纪的标准，明代中国是一个相对宜居的地方。 明初建立的严格的封建秩序正因蓬勃发展的内部贸易而松动。5 如今，来到苏州的游客仍然可以在老城区中心阴暗的运河和优雅的步道中看到当年繁荣的建筑成果。 英国的城市生活非常不同。 黑死病——由跳蚤传播的鼠疫耶尔森氏菌引起的黑死病，于 1349 年到达英国——使伦敦人口减少到 4 万左右，不到南京人口的十分之一。 除了鼠疫之外，斑疹伤寒、痢疾和天花也很流行。 而且，即使没有流行病，糟糕的卫生条件也使伦敦成为死亡陷阱。 由于没有任何污水处理系统，街道臭气熏天，而中国城市却有系统地收集人类排泄物，并在边远的稻田中用作肥料。 在迪克·惠廷顿 (Dick Whittington) 担任市长期间（从 1397 年到 1423 年去世为止四次），伦敦的街道上铺满了比黄金更不吸引人的东西。

学童们从小就被认为亨利五世是英国历史上的英雄人物之一，与他的前任——衰弱的理查二世形成鲜明对比。 遗憾的是，他们的王国距离莎士比亚笔下理查二世的“权杖岛”很远——更像是一座败坏岛。 剧作家亲切地称其为“另一个伊甸园，半天堂，/这座大自然为自己建造的堡垒/抵御感染”。 。 但从 1540 年到 1800 年间，英国人的出生时预期寿命平均只有 37 岁，非常悲惨。 伦敦的数字是二十多岁。 大约五分之一的英国儿童在一岁内死亡； 在伦敦，这个数字接近三分之一。 亨利五世本人在二十六岁时成为国王，并在三十五岁时死于痢疾——这提醒人们，直到最近，大多数历史都是由相当年轻、短命的人创造的。

暴力盛行。 与法国的战争几乎是一个永久的条件。 当英国人不与法国人作战时，他们就与威尔士人、苏格兰人和爱尔兰人作战。 当不与凯尔特人作战时，他们为了争夺王权而进行了一系列战争。 亨利五世的父亲是通过暴力登上王位的。 他的儿子亨利六世在玫瑰战争的爆发中以类似的方式失去了它，四位国王失去了王位，四十名成年贵族在战斗中或断头台上丧生。 1330 年至 1479 年间，英国贵族中有四分之一的死亡是死于暴力。 普通的凶杀案也是司空见惯的。 十四世纪的数据表明，牛津每年的凶杀率超过每 10 万居民一百起。 伦敦稍微安全一些，比率约为每 10 万人中 50 人。 当今世界谋杀率最高的是南非（每 10 万人中有 69 起）、哥伦比亚（每 10 万人中有 53 起）和牙买加（每 10 万人中有 34 起）。 即使是 20 世纪 80 年代最糟糕的底特律，每 100,000.6 人中就有 45 人死亡。

正如政治理论家托马斯·霍布斯（Thomas Hobbes）后来所观察到的（他所说的“自然状态”），这一时期的英国生活确实是“孤独、贫穷、肮脏、野蛮和短暂的”。 即使对于像帕斯顿这样富裕的诺福克家庭来说，也没有什么安全感。 约翰·帕斯顿 (John Paston) 的妻子玛格丽特 (Margaret) 在试图维护家族对格雷沙姆庄园 (Gresham 庄园) 的合法权利时，被从住所赶了出来，该庄园由前主人的继承人占据。 凯斯特城堡是约翰·法斯托夫爵士留给帕斯顿家族的，但在约翰·帕斯顿死后不久，它就被诺福克公爵围困，并被占领了长达十七年之久。 7英格兰是欧洲最繁荣、暴力较少的国家之一。 。 在法国，生活更加肮脏、残酷、短暂——而且越往东走，情况就越糟糕。 即使在 18 世纪初，法国人平均每日摄入热量为 1,660 卡路里，仅略高于维持人类生命所需的最低热量，大约是当今西方平均水平的一半。 革命前法国人的平均身高仅为 5 英尺 4.75 英寸。8 在我们掌握中世纪时期数据的所有大陆国家中，凶杀率都高于英国，其中意大利——一个以刺客而闻名的国家 对于它的艺术家来说——始终是最糟糕的。

有时有人认为，西欧的肮脏是一种隐藏的优势。 由于高死亡率在穷人中尤其普遍，也许他们在某种程度上帮助富人变得更富。 当然，黑死病的后果之一是提高了欧洲人均收入。 由于劳动力如此稀缺，幸存下来的人可以获得更高的工资。 确实，英国富人的孩子比穷人的孩子更有可能活到成年。9然而，欧洲人口统计的这些怪异现象似乎不太可能解释东西方的巨大差异。 当今世界上有一些国家的生活几乎和中世纪的英国一样悲惨，瘟疫、饥饿、战争和谋杀导致平均预期寿命低得可怜，只有富人才能长寿。 阿富汗、海地和索马里几乎没有迹象表明能从这些条件中受益。 正如我们将要看到的，欧洲尽管死亡，却仍迈向繁荣和强国，而不是因为它。

现代学者和读者需要记住死亡曾经是什么样子。 《死亡的胜利》是佛兰德斯艺术家老彼得·勃鲁盖尔（Pieter Bruegel the Elder，约 1525-69 年）的梦幻杰作，当然不是一部现实主义作品，但勃鲁盖尔当然不必完全依靠他的想象力来描绘死亡场景。 令人痛苦的死亡和破坏。 在一片由骷髅大军统治的土地上，一位国王垂死挣扎，他的宝藏毫无用处，而一只狗正在啃咬附近的尸体。 在背景中，我们看到绞刑架上有两个被绞死的人，四个被轮子打碎的人，还有一个即将被斩首。 军队发生冲突，房屋被烧毁，船只沉没。 在前景中，男人和女人、年轻人和老年人、士兵和平民都被乱七八糟地赶进一条狭窄的方形隧道。 无一幸免。 即使是为情妇唱歌的游吟诗人也注定要失败。 艺术家本人四十出头就去世了，比作者年轻。

一个世纪后，意大利艺术家萨尔瓦托·罗莎（Salvator Rosa）画了一幅也许是所有死亡纪念画中最感人的一幅，简单地命名为“L’umana fragilità”（“人类的脆弱”）。 它的灵感来自 1655 年席卷他家乡那不勒斯的瘟疫，这场瘟疫夺去了他年幼的儿子罗萨尔沃的生命，并带走了他的兄弟、姐妹、她的丈夫和他们的五个孩子。 死亡天使在罗莎妻子身后的黑暗中隐隐约约地露出可怕的笑容，夺走了他们的儿子，而就在罗莎第一次尝试写作时。 这位伤心欲绝的艺术家的心情被铭刻在画布上的八个拉丁词不朽地概括了：
Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori
“受孕是罪孽，出生是痛苦，生命是辛劳，死亡是不可避免的。”对于当时欧洲的生活，还有什么比这更简洁的描述呢？
 
太监与独角兽

如何理解东方的优越性？ 首先，亚洲农业的生产力远高于欧洲。 在东亚，一英亩土地足以养活一个家庭，这就是水稻种植的效率，而在英国，平均数字接近 20 英亩。 这有助于解释为什么东亚人口已经比西欧多。 更先进的东方水稻种植系统可以养活更多的人。 毫无疑问，明代诗人周士修是带着玫瑰色眼镜看待乡村的。 尽管如此，这里的画面还是心满意足的农村民众：

昏暗的小路旁隐约可见简陋的门道，一条弯曲的小巷一直通向入口。 这里有十户人家。 。 。 世世代代比邻而居。 无论你往哪里看，他们的火焰都弥漫着烟雾。 同样，在日常生活中，人们也很合作。 一个人的儿子是西边房子的户主，另一个人的女儿是西边邻居的妻子。 秋风凛冽，吹土神祠； 小猪和米酒被献祭给田野的祖先，老萨满向他烧纸钱，而男孩们则敲打铜鼓。 甘蔗园里寂静无声，薄雾笼罩着芋头田，毛毛雨落在芋头地里，人们在仪式结束后回家，铺着席子，闲聊着，半醉半醒。 。

但这种田园诗般的平衡场景只讲述了故事的一部分。 后世的西方人倾向于认为帝制中国是一个静态的社会，对创新过敏。 德国社会学家马克斯·韦伯在《儒家与道家》（1915）中将儒家理性主义定义为“对世界的理性调整”，与西方“理性掌握世界”的概念相对立。 这一观点得到了中国哲学家冯友兰在其《中国哲学史》（1934年）中以及剑桥大学学者李约瑟的多卷本《中国科学文明史》的大力赞同。 这种文化解释 — — 对于像冯和李约瑟这样在 1949 年后同情毛泽东政权的人来说总是很有吸引力 — — 很难与这样的证据相一致：早在明朝时代之前，中国文明就一直在寻求通过统治世界来统治世界。 技术创新。

我们不确定是谁设计了第一个水钟。 可能是埃及人、巴比伦人或中国人。 但在 1086 年，苏宋添加了齿轮擒纵机构，创造了世界上第一台机械钟，这是一个 40 英尺高的复杂装置，不仅可以报时，还可以记录太阳、月亮和行星的运动。 1272 年钟楼建成后不久，马可·波罗访问中国北方的大都时，看到了一座由这种时钟操作的钟楼。直到一个世纪后，第一座天文钟建成后，英国才出现了如此精确的钟楼。 诺里奇、圣奥尔本和索尔兹伯里的大教堂。

传统上，活字印刷机起源于十五世纪的德国。 事实上它是在十一世纪的中国发明的。 纸早在传入西方之前就起源于中国。 纸币、壁纸和卫生纸也是如此。

人们常说，英国农业先驱 Jethro Tull 在 1701 年发现了播种机。事实上，它是在中国发明的，比他的时代早了 2000 年。 带有弧形铁犁板的罗瑟勒姆犁是 18 世纪英国农业革命的关键工具，也是中国人所期待的另一项创新。 12 王震 1313 年的《农业论》充满了当时西方未知的农具。 .13 中国也预示着工业革命。 第一座冶炼铁矿石的高炉并不是1709年在Coalbrookdale建造的，而是在公元前200年之前在中国建造的。 世界上最古老的铁吊桥不是英国的，而是中国的； 早在公元 65 年，在云南省景东附近仍然可以看到它的遗迹。 14 即使迟至 1788 年，英国的铁产量水平仍然低于 1078 年中国的铁产量水平。 中国人首先通过纺车和缫丝机等创新技术彻底改变了纺织生产，并于 13 世纪进口到意大利。 15 中国人使用他们最著名的发明火药只是为了 烟花。 焦宇和刘吉于十四世纪末出版的《火龙经》一书描述了陆地和海洋地雷、火箭和装满炸药的空心炮弹。

中国的其他创新包括化学杀虫剂、渔线轮、火柴、磁罗盘、扑克牌、牙刷和独轮车。 大家都知道高尔夫是在苏格兰发明的。 然而，宋代（960-1279）的东轩志描述了一种名为“捶丸”的游戏。 它使用十支球杆，包括篦梆、蒲梆和烧梆，大致类似于我们的一号木、二木和三木。 这些球杆镶嵌着玉石和黄金，表明高尔夫无论在当时还是现在都是富人的运动。

这还不是全部。 1400 年新世纪来临之际，中国准备实现另一项技术突破，这一突破有可能使永乐皇帝不仅成为中央王国的主人，而且成为世界本身的主人——字面意思是“天下”。
 
今天在南京，您可以看到中国历史上最著名的航海家郑和海军上将宝船的全尺寸复制品。 它长 400 英尺，几乎是圣玛丽亚号的五倍，克里斯托弗·哥伦布于 1492 年乘该船横渡大西洋。而这只是由 300 多艘巨型远洋帆船组成的船队的一部分。 这些船拥有多个桅杆和独立的浮力室，以防止在水线以下出现洞时沉没，这些船比十五世纪欧洲建造的任何船都大得多。 郑和的海军共有 28,000 名船员，是第一次世界大战之前西方国家规模最大的海军。 他们的主人和指挥官是一位非凡的人。 十一岁时，他在战场上被明朝开国皇帝朱元璋俘虏。 按照惯例，俘虏被阉割了。 然后，他被任命为皇帝第四子朱棣的仆人，朱棣将夺取并登上永乐皇帝的宝座。 为了回报郑和的忠诚服务，永乐帝委托他一项探索世界海洋的任务。

在 1405 年至 1424 年间的一系列六次史诗般的航行中，郑和舰队的航程之远和广度令人惊叹。 淡马锡（后来的新加坡）、马六甲和锡兰； 前往奥里萨邦的克塔克； 到霍尔木兹、亚丁，再沿红海到达吉达。 16 名义上，这些航行是为了寻找神秘失踪的永乐前任，以及与他一起消失的皇帝印章。 （朱棣是想为他杀戮登基的行为赎罪，还是为了掩盖他这样做的事实？）但寻找失踪的皇帝并不是他们的真正动机。

郑和在最后一次下西洋之前，奉命“出使霍尔木兹等国，有大小船只六十一艘”。 。 。 以及[携带]彩色丝绸。 。 。 [并]购买麻丝”。 他的军官们还被指示“购买瓷器、铁锅、礼品和弹药、纸张、油、蜡等。”17这似乎暗示着商业理由，而且中国人当然拥有印度洋商人梦寐以求的商品。 （瓷器、丝绸和麝香），以及他们希望带回中国的商品（胡椒、珍珠、宝石、象牙和据称具有药用价值的犀牛角）。 18 然而，实际上，皇帝主要关心的并不是商品。 亚当·斯密后来所理解的贸易。 用当时的铭文的话来说，舰队是“去[野蛮人]国家，向他们赠送礼物，以展示我们的力量来改造他们”。 。 .’。 永乐皇帝想要回报这些“礼物”的是外国统治者像中国的亚洲近邻那样向他进贡，从而承认他的霸权。 谁能拒绝向拥有如此强大舰队的皇帝磕头呢？

郑和舰队的船只在其中三趟到达非洲东海岸。 他们没有停留太久。 来自大约三十个非洲统治者的特使被邀请登船，以承认明朝皇帝的“宇宙优势”。 马林迪（今肯尼亚）苏丹派出了一个代表团，带来了异国情调的礼物，其中包括一只长颈鹿。 永乐亲自在南京皇宫门口迎接了这只动物。 长颈鹿被誉为神话中的麒麟（独角兽）——“帝国与宇宙完美美德、完美政府和完美和谐的象征”。

但后来，1424 年，这种和谐被打破了。 永乐死后，中国的海外野心也随之埋葬。 郑和的航行立即暂停，直到 1432-3 年最后一次印度洋探险才短暂恢复。 《海禁令》明确禁止远洋航行。 从1500年起，中国任何人发现建造超过两根桅杆的船只将被判处死刑； 1551年，甚至乘坐这样的船出海都成为犯罪。21郑和下西洋的记录被销毁了。 郑和本人也死了，几乎可以肯定是被海葬了。

这一重大决定的背后隐藏着什么？ 是财政问题和朝廷政治斗争的结果吗？ 是因为安南（今越南）的战争成本出人意料地高吗？22或者仅仅是因为儒家学者对郑和带回的“奇怪的东西”产生怀疑，尤其是 长颈鹿？ 我们可能永远无法确定。 但中国转向国内的后果似乎很明显。

与阿波罗登月任务一样，郑和下西洋也是财富和技术先进性的强大展示。 1416 年，一名中国太监在东非海岸登陆，从很多方面来说，其成就可与 1969 年美国宇航员登陆月球相媲美。

尽管永乐的继任者进行了探索，但这一成就的经济效益微乎其微。

但对于来自欧亚大陆另一端的欧洲小王国的一位截然不同的水手即将进行的航行来说，情况就不同了。

香料竞赛 正是在圣乔治堡，里斯本海港之上的高山上，新加冕的葡萄牙国王曼努埃尔让瓦斯科·达·伽马指挥四艘小船，执行一项重大使命。 所有四艘船都可以很容易地安装在郑和的宝船上。 他们的船员加起来只有 170 人。 但他们的使命——“发现并寻找香料”——有可能使整个世界向西倾斜。

所讨论的香料是肉桂、丁香、肉豆蔻和肉豆蔻，欧洲人无法自己种植这些香料，但他们渴望用它们来增强食物的味道。 几个世纪以来，香料路线从印度洋一直延伸到红海，或者从陆路穿过阿拉伯和安纳托利亚。 到了十五世纪中叶，通往欧洲的利润丰厚的最后一站被土耳其人和威尼斯人严格控制。 葡萄牙人意识到，如果他们能找到一条替代路线，沿着非洲西海岸，绕过好望角到达印度洋，那么这项业务就可以属于他们。 另一位葡萄牙水手巴托洛梅乌·迪亚斯 (Bartolomeu Dias) 于 1488 年绕过好望角，但被船员强迫返回。 九年后，达伽马必须走到底。

曼努埃尔国王的命令告诉我们一些关于西方文明海外扩张方式的至关重要的事情。 正如我们将看到的，西方国家比其他国家拥有不止一项优势。 但真正推动这一进程的肯定是推动探索时代的激烈竞争。 对于欧洲人来说，环游非洲并不是为了向国内的某个高高在上的君主象征性地进贡。 这是为了在经济和政治上领先于对手。 如果达伽马成功了，那么里斯本就击败了威尼斯。 简而言之，海洋探索是十五世纪欧洲的太空竞赛。 或者更确切地说，是香料竞赛。

1497 年 7 月 8 日，达伽马起航。四个月后，当他和他的葡萄牙水手同伴绕过非洲最南端的好望角时，他们并没有问自己应该为国王带回什么珍奇动物。 他们想知道自己是否最终成功了其他人失败的地方——寻找新的香料路线。 他们想要贸易，而不是贡品。

1498 年 4 月，即郑和登陆八十二年后，达·伽马抵达马林迪。 除了一些瓷器和DNA之外，中国人几乎没有留下什么——据说有20名中国水手在佩特岛附近遭遇海难，他们游上岸并留下来，娶了非洲妻子，并向当地人介绍了中国风格的篮子。 - 编织和丝绸生产。23 相比之下，葡萄牙人立即看到了马林迪作为贸易站的潜力。 达伽马对在那里遇到印度商人感到特别兴奋，几乎可以肯定，在其中一位商人的帮助下，他能够乘季风到达卡利卡特。
这种对贸易的渴望远非葡萄牙人和中国人之间的唯一区别。 里斯本人身上有一种冷酷无情的特质——事实上，是彻头彻尾的残暴——而郑和却很少表现出来。 当卡利卡特国王斜视葡萄牙人从里斯本带来的货物时，达伽马扣押了十六名渔民作为人质。 在他第二次前往印度的航行中，他率领十五艘船轰炸了卡利卡特，并残忍地残害了被俘船只的船员。 据说还有一次，他将一艘开往麦加的船上的乘客锁在船上并纵火焚烧。

葡萄牙人采取了堪称典范的暴力行为，因为他们知道，开辟一条绕开普敦的新香料路线会遇到阻力。 他们显然相信首先要受到报复。 1513 年，葡属印度第二任总督阿方索·德·阿尔伯克基自豪地向他的王室主人报告：“听到我们即将到来的传言，[本土]船只全部消失，甚至连鸟儿也不再在水面上掠过。”针对一些敌人 可以肯定的是，大炮和短刀是无效的。 达伽马第一次探险队的一半人在航行中丧生，尤其是因为他们的船长试图顶着季风返回非洲。 最初的四艘船中只有两艘回到了里斯本。 1524 年，达伽马第三次前往印度时死于疟疾。 他的遗体被送回欧洲，现在安放在里斯本热罗尼莫斯修道院（现为贝伦圣玛丽亚教堂）的一座精美坟墓中。 但其他葡萄牙探险家继续航行，经过印度，一直到达中国。 曾经，中国人能够以冷漠甚至蔑视的态度对待遥远的欧洲野蛮人。 但现在香料种族已经把野蛮人带到了中央王国的门口。 必须记住的是，尽管葡萄牙人拥有的中国人想要的珍贵商品很少，但他们确实带来了白银，而明朝中国对白银的需求巨大，因为硬币取代了纸币和劳务作为主要支付手段。

1557年，葡萄牙人割让了珠江三角洲的一个半岛——澳门。 他们做的第一件事就是竖起一座大门——关门，上面刻着这样的铭文：“敬畏我们的伟大，尊重我们的美德。”到 1586 年，澳门已经成为一个足够重要的贸易前哨，被认为是一座城市：Cidade do Nome de Deus na China（中国神名之城）。 这是中国许多此类欧洲商业飞地中的第一个。 路易斯·达·卡蒙斯（Luís da Camões）是葡萄牙海上扩张史诗《卢西亚德斯》（The Lusiads）的作者，因袭击而被里斯本流放后，曾在澳门生活过一段时间。 他惊叹道，像葡萄牙这样的小王国——人口还不到中国的百分之一——怎么会渴望主宰亚洲人口多得多的帝国的贸易呢？ 然而，他的同胞们继续航行，建立了一个令人惊叹的贸易站网络，就像一条全球项链，从里斯本开始，绕过非洲、阿拉伯和印度海岸，穿过马六甲海峡，到达香料群岛，然后再更远， 甚至超越了澳门。

“如果还有更多的世界有待发现，”达·卡蒙斯在谈到他的同胞时写道，“他们也会找到的！”

葡萄牙的欧洲竞争对手并没有失去海外扩张的好处。 与葡萄牙一样，西班牙首先抢占了新世界的主动权（见第 3 章），并在菲律宾建立了亚洲前哨基地，西班牙人能够从那里将大量墨西哥白银运往中国。 25 《托德西拉斯条约》（Treaty of Tordesillas，1494年）将世界一分为二后的几十年里，这两个伊比利亚强国可以以崇高的自信来看待他们的帝国成就。 但西班牙人的叛逆性和商业头脑的荷兰臣民开始意识到新香料路线的潜力。 事实上，到了 1600 年代中期，他们在绕海角航行的船只数量和吨位上都超过了葡萄牙人。 法国人也进入了名单。

那么英国人呢？他们的领土野心一度只延伸到法国，而他们在中世纪的一个新颖的经济理念就是向佛兰德人出售羊毛？ 当他们的宿敌西班牙人和法国人在海外发家致富的消息传来时，他们怎么可能袖手旁观呢？ 果然，没过多久，英国人就加入了海外商业的竞赛。 1496 年，约翰·卡伯特 (John Cabot) 首次尝试从布里斯托尔横渡大西洋。 1553 年，休·威洛比和理查德·钱斯勒从德特福德出发，寻找通往印度的“东北航道”。 威洛比在尝试中被冻死，但总理设法到达阿尔汉格尔，然后从陆路到达莫斯科伊凡雷帝的宫廷。 回到伦敦后，总理立即成立了莫斯科公司以发展与俄罗斯的贸易（其全名是“探索地区、领土、岛屿和未知地点的商业冒险家的神秘与公司”） ）。 在皇室的热情支持下，类似的项目不断涌现，不仅在大西洋彼岸，而且在香料之路沿线也是如此。 到了十七世纪中叶，从贝尔法斯特到波士顿，从孟加拉到巴哈马，英国的贸易蓬勃发展。

世界正在激烈的残酷竞争中被瓜分。 但问题仍然存在：为什么欧洲人似乎比中国人更有商业热情？ 为什么瓦斯科·达·伽马如此明显地渴望金钱——渴望到为了金钱而杀人？
你可以通过查看中世纪欧洲的地图来找到答案，这些地图实际上显示了数百个相互竞争的国家，从西海岸的王国到波罗的海和亚得里亚海之间的许多城邦，从吕贝克到威尼斯。 十四世纪的欧洲大约有一千个政体。 200 年后仍然有大约 500 个左右的独立单位。 这是为什么？ 最简单的答案是地理。 中国有黄河、长江和珠江三大河流，均自西向东流。26欧洲有多条河流流向多个方向，更不用说阿尔卑斯山和比利牛斯山脉等众多山脉了。 更不用说德国和波兰的茂密森林和沼泽了。 对于掠夺性的蒙古人来说，进入中国可能更容易一些。 欧洲不太容易被骑马的部落渗透——因此不太需要团结。 我们无法确切地确定为什么中亚的威胁在帖木儿之后从欧洲消失。 也许俄罗斯的防御刚刚变得更好。 也许蒙古马更喜欢草原草。

诚然，正如我们所看到的，冲突在欧洲可能是毁灭性的——想想 17 世纪中叶的德国三十年战争造成的混乱吧。 生活在十多个欧洲大国边境的人们有祸了，这些国家在 1550 年至 1650 年间平均有三分之二以上的时间处于战争状态。从 1500 年到 1799 年，西班牙与欧洲国家交战。 81%的时间是外敌，英国为53%，法国为52%。 但这种持续不断的战斗带来了三个意想不到的好处。 一是鼓励军事科技创新。 在陆地上，随着大炮的威力和机动性变得越来越强大，防御工事也必须变得更加坚固。 德国南部塞海姆上方坦能堡的“强盗男爵”城堡废墟的命运起到了警示作用：1399 年，它成为欧洲第一座被炸药摧毁的防御工事。

与此同时，在海上，船舶保持较小规模是有充分理由的。 与自罗马时代以来其设计几乎没有改变的地中海厨房相比，15世纪末的葡萄牙卡拉维尔帆船拥有方帆和两根桅杆，在速度和火力之间达到了理想的平衡。 它比郑和的一艘巨型帆船更容易转弯，更难击中。

最重要的是，几代人的自相残杀确保了没有人

欧洲君主曾经强大到能够禁止海外探险。 即使土耳其人在十六世纪和十七世纪多次进军东欧，也没有泛欧皇帝命令葡萄牙人暂停海上探险，集中精力对付东方的敌人。 29 相反，欧洲君主都鼓励商业、征服和殖民化，作为相互竞争的一部分。

路德宗教改革席卷德国后的一个多世纪里，宗教战争一直是欧洲生活的祸根（见第二章）。 但新教徒和罗马天主教徒之间的血腥斗争，以及对犹太人的周期性和局部性的迫害，也产生了有益的副作用。 1492 年，犹太人被当作宗教异端而被驱逐出卡斯蒂利亚和阿拉贡。 最初，他们中的许多人在奥斯曼帝国寻求庇护，但 1509 年之后在威尼斯建立了一个犹太社区。1566 年，随着荷兰人反抗西班牙统治以及新教共和国联合省的建立，阿姆斯特丹 成为另一个宽容的避风港。 1685 年，新教胡格诺派被驱逐出法国后，他们得以在英国、荷兰和瑞士重新定居。30 当然，宗教狂热也为海外扩张提供了另一个动力。 葡萄牙航海家恩里克亲王鼓励他的水手们探索非洲海岸，部分原因是希望他们能找到失落的基督教圣人普雷斯特约翰的神话王国，然后他可以帮助欧洲对抗土耳其人。 除了坚持免除印度关税外，瓦斯科·达·伽马还厚颜无耻地要求卡利卡特国王将所有穆斯林驱逐出他的领土，并对开往麦加的穆斯林船只发动了有针对性的海盗活动。

简而言之，欧洲的政治分裂特征阻碍了任何与中华帝国相类似的国家的建立。 它还推动欧洲人到遥远的地方寻找经济、地缘政治和宗教机会。 你可能会说这是一个分而治之的例子——但矛盾的是，欧洲人正是通过分裂自己才能够统治世界。 在欧洲，小是美好的，因为它意味着竞争——不仅是国家之间的竞争，而且是国家内部的竞争。

亨利五世正式成为英格兰、威尔士和法国的国王，并声称对这些地区拥有主权。 但在英格兰乡村，真正的权力掌握在大贵族、将大宪章强加给约翰国王的人的后裔、以及成千上万的贵族地主和无数的法人团体（包括教士和俗人）手中。 直到亨利统治时期，教会才处于王室控制之下, 城镇通常是自治的。 而且，至关重要的是，该国最重要的商业中心几乎完全自治。 欧洲不仅由国家组成，而且由国家组成。 它也由阶层组成：贵族、神职人员和城镇居民。

伦敦金融城公司的起源和结构可以追溯到十二世纪。 值得注意的是，换句话说，市长、治安官、市议员、市议会、车夫和自由人都已经存在了 800 多年。 公司是自治商业机构最早的例子之一——在某些方面是我们今天所知的公司的先驱，在其他方面是民主本身的先驱。
早在 1130 年代，亨利一世就授予伦敦人“自行选择”自己的治安官和法官的权利，并在不受王室或其他当局干涉的情况下管理自己的司法和财政事务。 31 1191 年 理查一世在圣地十字军东征的同时，还授予了选举市长的权利，这一权利得到了约翰国王在1215.32年的确认，因此，这座城市从来不敬畏王室。 在该市自由民的支持下，托马斯·菲茨·托马斯市长支持西蒙·德·蒙福特于 1263-5 年反抗亨利三世。 1319 年，轮到爱德华二世与伦敦金融城对抗，因为商人（布商）试图减少外国商人的特权。 当王室抵制时，“伦敦暴民”支持罗杰·莫蒂默废黜国王。 在爱德华三世统治时期，潮流转向反对这座城市。 意大利和汉萨商人在伦敦建立了自己的地位，尤其是通过向国王提供慷慨条件的贷款，这种做法在理查二世少数时期继续存在。 33但伦敦人继续挑战王室权威，在 要么是农民起义（1381年），要么是上议院上诉人对理查德统治的挑战。 

1392 年，国王取消了伦敦的特权和自由，但五年后，由惠廷顿市长谈判达成的 10,000 英镑的慷慨“礼物”确保了伦敦的特权和自由得以恢复。 向国王提供的贷款和礼物成为城市自治的关键。 城市越富裕，它的杠杆作用就越大。 惠廷顿借给亨利四世至少 24,000 英镑，他的儿子亨利五世借给他约 7,500.34 英镑.伦敦金融城不仅与国王争夺权力。 那里, 即使在城市内部也是竞争。 制服公司的起源都可以追溯到中世纪时期：织布厂可追溯到 1130 年，面包师可追溯至 1155 年，鱼贩可追溯至 1272 年，金匠、商人泰勒和剥皮厂可追溯至 1327 年，布商可追溯至 1364 年，布商可追溯至 1384 年 杂货商到1428年。

这些行会或“秘会”对其特定的经济部门施加了相当大的权力，但他们也拥有政治权力。 爱德华三世在宣称自己是亚麻制甲师行会（后来的商人泰勒行会）的“兄弟”时承认了这一点。 到 1607 年，商人泰勒家族过去和现在的名誉成员包括七位国王和一位王后、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、领主和其他绅士以及一位大主教。 “十二大”公司——按优先顺序排列：百货商、杂货商、布商、鱼贩、金匠、剥皮商、泰勒商人、服饰用品商、盐商、五金商、葡萄酒商和布料商——提醒人们伦敦工匠和商人的力量。 他们曾经能够发挥作用，即使他们今天的角色主要是仪式性的。 在他们竞争激烈的鼎盛时期，他们经常打架，就像一起吃饭一样。 35
 
除其他外，这种国家之间和国家内部（甚至城市内部）的多层次竞争有助于解释机械钟在欧洲的快速传播和先进技术。 早在 1330 年代，沃林福德的理查德就在圣奥尔本斯修道院南耳堂的墙上安装了一个非常复杂的机械钟，

它显示了月球、潮汐和某些天体的运动。 凭借其独特的报时钟（因此得名：clock、clokke、Glocke、cloche），机械钟和十五世纪取代机械钟的发条钟不仅比中国水钟更准确。 它们的目的也是为了传播，而不是被皇帝的天文学家垄断。 因此，如果一个城镇的大教堂在其塔楼上安装了一个精美的新表盘，那么它最接近的竞争对手很快就会觉得有必要效仿。 如果说 1685 年之后新教制表师在法国不受欢迎，那么瑞士人很乐意接纳他们。而且，就像军事技术一样，竞争孕育着进步，因为工匠们不断地对产品的准确性和优雅性进行微小但累积的改进。 当耶稣会传教士利玛窦在 16 世纪末将欧洲钟表带到中国时，它们比东方同行先进得多，以至于人们对它们感到沮丧。 36 1602 年，应万历皇帝的要求，利玛窦制作了一个 美丽的宣纸世界地图，将中国描绘在地球的中心。 但他一定知道，在技术方面，中国现在正在向全球边缘漂移。

由于它在测量和协调行动方面具有更高的精确性，时钟和后来的便携式手表的兴起（可以说）与欧洲的崛起和西方文明的传播齐头并进。 文明。 每一枚单独的时计都为东方卓越的时代所剩无几。
 
与欧洲拼凑而成的被子相比，东亚——至少从政治角度来说——是一张巨大的单色毯子。 中央王国的主要竞争对手是北方的掠夺性蒙古人和东方的海盗日本。 自秦始皇时代（通常被称为中国“第一个皇帝”（公元前 221-210 年））以来，来自北方的威胁就更大了，因此需要对我们今天所知的帝国防御进行大规模投资。 长城。 从哈德良时代到埃里希·昂纳克时代，欧洲从未建造过类似的建筑。 规模相当的还有灌溉中国耕地的运河和沟渠网络，马克思主义汉学家卡尔·维特福格尔（Karl Wittfogel）将其视为“水利官僚”东方专制主义最重要的产物。

北京紫禁城是中国整体权力的又一座纪念碑。 为了感受其巨大的规模和独特的气质，参观者应该穿过太和门到太和殿，里面有龙座本身，然后到中和殿，皇帝的私人房间， 然后前往保和殿，这是科举考试最后阶段的地点（见下文）。 显然，“和”与帝国权威不可分割的观念有着千丝万缕的联系。 

与长城一样，紫禁城在 15 世纪的西方根本没有对应物，尤其是在伦敦，权力在皇室、世俗和精神上议院、下议院以及城市公司之间进行细分。 伦敦和制服公司。 每个国家都有自己的宫殿和大厅，但按照东方标准来看，它们都非常小。 同样地，中世纪的欧洲王国是由世袭的地主和神职人员联合管理的，他们是根据王室的恩惠而选择的（而且常常被无情地抛弃），而中国则是由儒家官僚机构自上而下地统治， 也许是历史上最严格的考试制度的基础。 那些渴望在帝国服务的人必须接受三个阶段的艰苦考试，这些考试在专门建造的考试中心进行，就像今天在南京仍然可以看到的那样——一个巨大的围墙院落，里面有数千个比大学稍大的小细胞。 火车上的厕所：

这些微小的砖砌隔间（一位欧洲旅行者写道）大约深 1.1 米、宽 1 米、高 1.7 米。 他们有两个石架，一个用作桌子，另一个用作座位。 在考试持续的两天里，驻守瞭望塔的士兵监视着考生。 。 。 唯一允许的活动是仆人补充食物和水或清除人类排泄物的通道。 当候选人累了的时候，他可以铺开被褥，在狭小的空间里休息一下。 但隔壁牢房的明亮光线可能会迫使他再次拿起画笔。 。 。 有些候选人在压力下完全疯了。

毫无疑问，经过三天两夜的鞋盒考验，通过考试的都是最有能力、当然也是最有干劲的考生。 但由于其重点强调儒家四书五经，需要背诵令人眼花缭乱的 431,286 个汉字，以及 1487 年推出的僵化的八足文，这是一次奖励从众和谨慎的考试。 39 毫无疑问，竞争非常激烈，但这种竞争并不能促进创新，更不能激发变革的欲望。 中华文明核心的书面语言是为产生保守派精英并将大众排除在他们的活动之外而设计的。 与欧洲的竞争方言——意大利语、法语和卡斯蒂利亚语以及葡萄牙语和英语——形成鲜明对比，这些语言可用于精英文学，但通过相对简单和易于扩展的教育，很容易为更广泛的公众所接受。 

正如孔子自己所说：“平常人惊叹不寻常的事物。” 智者惊叹于平凡。”但是，明朝中国的运作方式中，有太多司空见惯的东西，而很少有新鲜的东西。
 
平庸的王国文明是复杂的东西。 几个世纪以来，它们可以在权力和繁荣的最佳位置蓬勃发展。 但随后，通常会突然间，它们就会陷入混乱。

中国的明朝于1368年诞生，当时军阀元章自号洪武，意为“强大的军事力量”。 正如我们所见，在接下来三个世纪的大部分时间里，无论以何种标准衡量，明代中国都是世界上最先进的文明。 但到了 17 世纪中叶，一切都发生了翻天覆地的变化。 这并不是夸大其早期的稳定性。 毕竟，永乐皇帝是在经历了一段时间的内战并废黜了合法的继承人——他的长兄的儿子之后才继承了他父亲洪武的王位。 但十七世纪中叶的危机无疑是一次更大的破坏。 财政危机加剧了白银购买力的下降，侵蚀了税收的实际价值。41 恶劣的天气、饥荒和流行病为内部叛乱和外部入侵打开了大门。42 1644 年，北京沦陷。 叛军首领李自成。 明朝末代皇帝羞愧自缢身亡。 从儒家的均衡到无政府状态的戏剧性转变只用了不到十年的时间。

明朝崩溃的结果是毁灭性的。 1580年至1650年间，冲突和流行病使中国人口减少了35%至40%。 出了什么问题？ 答案是，向内转向是致命的，尤其是对于中国这样一个复杂且人口稠密的社会。 明朝的制度创造了一种高度的平衡——表面上令人印象深刻，但内在却很脆弱。 农村可以养活相当多的人口，但前提是基本静态的社会秩序，实际上已经停止创新。 这是一种陷阱。 当出现一点小问题时，陷阱就会突然关闭。 没有外部资源可以利用。 诚然，相当多的学者试图将明代中国描述为一个繁荣的社会，拥有大量的内部贸易和充满活力的奢侈品市场。 43 然而，中国最近的研究表明，人均收入在 2008 年停滞不前。 明朝时代，资本存量实际上是萎缩的。

相比之下，随着英国人口在 17 世纪末加速增长，海外扩张在推动该国摆脱托马斯·马尔萨斯 (Thomas Malthus) 指出的陷阱方面发挥了至关重要的作用。 跨大西洋贸易带来了土豆和糖等新营养物质的涌入——一英亩甘蔗产生的能量相当于 12 英亩小麦的能量45——以及大量的鳕鱼和鲱鱼。 殖民化允许剩余人口移民。 随着时间的推移，其效果是提高生产力、收入、营养甚至身高。

考虑一下另一个岛民的命运，他们的处境与欧亚海岸附近群岛上的英国人很相似。 英国人积极向外转向，为所谓的“全球化”奠定了基础，而日本人却采取了相反的道路，德川幕府在 1640 年之后实行了严格的闭关锁国政策。与外界的所有形式的接触都受到限制。 被禁止。 结果，日本完全错过了全球贸易和移民水平迅速上升所带来的好处。 结果是惊人的。 到 18 世纪末，英国农场工人 28% 以上的饮食由动物产品组成； 他的日本同行的饮食结构单一，95%都是谷物，其中大部分是大米。 这种营养差异解释了 1600 年后身高的显着差距。18 世纪英国囚犯的平均身高为 5 英尺 7 英寸。

毫无疑问，经过三天两夜的鞋盒考验，通过考试的都是最有能力、当然也是最有干劲的考生。 但由于其重点强调儒家四书五经，需要背诵令人眼花缭乱的 431,286 个汉字，以及 1487 年推出的僵化的八足文，这是一次奖励从众和谨慎的考试。 39 毫无疑问，竞争非常激烈，但这种竞争并不能促进创新，更不能激发变革的欲望。 中华文明核心的书面语言是为产生保守派精英并将大众排除在他们的活动之外而设计的。 与欧洲的竞争方言——意大利语、法语和卡斯蒂利亚语以及葡萄牙语和英语——形成鲜明对比，这些语言可用于精英文学，但通过相对简单和易于扩展的教育，很容易为更广泛的公众所接受。 

正如孔子自己所说：“平常人惊叹不寻常的事物。” 智者惊叹于平凡。”但是，明朝中国的运作方式中，有太多司空见惯的东西，而很少有新鲜的东西。
 
平庸的王国文明是复杂的东西。 几个世纪以来，它们可以在权力和繁荣的最佳位置蓬勃发展。 但随后，通常会突然间，它们就会陷入混乱。

中国的明朝于1368年诞生，当时军阀元章自号洪武，意为“强大的军事力量”。 正如我们所见，在接下来三个世纪的大部分时间里，无论以何种标准衡量，明代中国都是世界上最先进的文明。 但到了 17 世纪中叶，一切都发生了翻天覆地的变化。 这并不是夸大其早期的稳定性。 毕竟，永乐皇帝是在经历了一段时间的内战并废黜了合法的继承人——他的长兄的儿子之后才继承了他父亲洪武的王位。 但十七世纪中叶的危机无疑是一次更大的破坏。 财政危机加剧了白银购买力的下降，侵蚀了税收的实际价值。41 恶劣的天气、饥荒和流行病为内部叛乱和外部入侵打开了大门。42 1644 年，北京沦陷。 叛军首领李自成。 明朝末代皇帝羞愧自缢身亡。 从儒家的均衡到无政府状态的戏剧性转变只用了不到十年的时间。

明朝崩溃的结果是毁灭性的。 1580年至1650年间，冲突和流行病使中国人口减少了35%至40%。 出了什么问题？ 答案是，向内转向是致命的，尤其是对于中国这样一个复杂且人口稠密的社会。 明朝的制度创造了一种高度的平衡——表面上令人印象深刻，但内在却很脆弱。 农村可以养活相当多的人口，但前提是基本静态的社会秩序，实际上已经停止创新。 这是一种陷阱。 当出现一点小问题时，陷阱就会突然关闭。 没有外部资源可以利用。 诚然，相当多的学者试图将明代中国描述为一个繁荣的社会，拥有大量的内部贸易和充满活力的奢侈品市场。 43 然而，中国最近的研究表明，人均收入在 2008 年停滞不前。 明朝时代，资本存量实际上是萎缩的。

相比之下，随着英国人口在 17 世纪末加速增长，海外扩张在推动该国摆脱托马斯·马尔萨斯 (Thomas Malthus) 指出的陷阱方面发挥了至关重要的作用。 跨大西洋贸易带来了土豆和糖等新营养物质的涌入——一英亩甘蔗产生的能量相当于 12 英亩小麦的能量45——以及大量的鳕鱼和鲱鱼。 殖民化允许剩余人口移民。 随着时间的推移，其效果是提高生产力、收入、营养甚至身高。

考虑一下另一个岛民的命运，他们的处境与欧亚海岸附近群岛上的英国人很相似。 英国人积极向外转向，为所谓的“全球化”奠定了基础，而日本人却采取了相反的道路，德川幕府在 1640 年之后实行了严格的闭关锁国政策。与外界的所有形式的接触都受到限制。 被禁止。 结果，日本完全错过了全球贸易和移民水平迅速上升所带来的好处。 结果是惊人的。 到 18 世纪末，英国农场工人 28% 以上的饮食由动物产品组成； 他的日本同行的饮食结构单一，95%都是谷物，其中大部分是大米。 这种营养差异解释了 1600 年后身高的显着差距。18 世纪英国囚犯的平均身高为 5 英尺 7 英寸。

同一时期日本士兵的平均身高仅为 5 英尺 21⁄2 英寸。46 当东方与西方相遇时，他们再也无法直视对方的眼睛。

换句话说，早在工业革命之前，小英国就凭借商业和殖民的物质优势领先于东方伟大文明。 中国和日本的路线——放弃对外贸易并加强水稻种植——意味着随着人口增长，收入下降，营养、身高和生产力也下降。 当农作物歉收或耕作中断时，后果将是灾难性的。 英国人在毒品方面也比较幸运：长期习惯于饮酒，17世纪的美国烟草、阿拉伯咖啡和中国茶使他们从醉酒中清醒过来。 他们受到了咖啡馆的刺激，一半是咖啡馆，一半是证券交易所，一半是聊天室；47中国人最终在鸦片馆里昏昏欲睡，他们的烟斗里装满的不是别人，正是英国东印度公司。 

并非所有欧洲评论家都像亚当·斯密那样承认中国的“静止状态”。 1697 年，德国哲学家和数学家戈特弗里德·莱布尼茨 (Gottfried Leibniz) 宣布：“我必须在我的门上贴一张告示：中国知识信息局。”在他的《中国最新消息》一书中，他建议“中国传教士应该 派到我们这里来教授自然神学的目标和实践，就像我们派传教士到他们那里指导他们天启宗教一样。”法国哲学家伏尔泰在 1764 年宣称，“人们不必沉迷于中国人的优点”。 去辨认 。 。 。 两年后，重农主义者弗朗索瓦·魁奈出版了《中国的专制主义》，赞扬了农业在中国经济政策中的首要地位。

然而，海峡对岸的那些更关心商业和工业的人 — — 并且也不太愿意将中国理想化，以此间接批评本国政府 — — 看到了中国经济停滞的现实。 1793年，第一代马戛尔尼伯爵率领远征军觐见乾隆皇帝，试图说服中国人重新开放他们的帝国进行贸易，但徒劳无功。 尽管马戛尔尼断然拒绝磕头，但他带来了充足的贡品：一座德国制造的天文仪，“可能是有史以来制造的最大、最完美的玻璃透镜”，以及望远镜、经纬仪、气泵、电机 以及“帮助解释和说明科学原理的广泛装置”。 然而，古代皇帝（他已经八十多岁了）和他的爪牙们对西方文明的这些奇迹并不感兴趣：

人们很快发现，[对科学的]兴趣，如果曾经存在的话，现在已经完全消失了。 。 。 [全部]是。 。 。 迷失并被无知的中国人抛弃。 。 。 据说，大使离开后，他们立即将这些物品堆放在圆明园的杂物间里。 英国制造商精选的各种优雅和艺术典范也同样取得了成功。 朝臣们对这些文章的思考似乎只留下了嫉妒的印象。 。 。 这种行为可能归因于一种不鼓励引入新奇事物的国家政策。 。 。

皇帝随后向乔治三世国王发出了一份不屑一顾的法令：“我们一无所缺，”他宣称。 “我们从来没有太重视奇怪或精巧的物品，我们也不再需要贵国的制造品。”49

马嘎尔尼对中国开放的失败完美地象征着自1500年以来全球权力从东方向西方的转移。曾经的发明之母的中央王国现在是一个平庸的王国，故意敌视其他人的创新。 中国巧妙的创造——时钟——已经回归故乡，但以欧洲形式进行了修改和改进，配备了由弹簧和齿轮组成的更加精确的机构。 如今，紫禁城里有一整间房间，用于收藏大量皇家计时机器。 与不屑一顾的乾隆皇帝不同，他的前任皇帝都痴迷于收集钟表。 几乎所有产品都是在欧洲制造的，或者是由驻中国的欧洲工匠制造的。

1842 年 6 月，当皇家海军炮艇沿长江航行至大运河，以报复一位热心的中国官员销毁鸦片库存时，西方的优势得到了证实。 中国必须支付2100万银元的赔款，向英国开放五个贸易港口，并割让香港岛。 具有讽刺意味的是，第一个所谓的“不平等条约”是在南京的静海寺签署的，静海寺最初是为了纪念郑和海军上将和守护他的海神天妃而建的。 他的舰队早在四个多世纪前就已经存在了。
 
他们再次在中国造船——这些巨轮能够环球航行，满载中国制造的集装箱离开，并带回满足该国不断增长的工业经济所需的原材料。 2010年6月，当我参观上海最大的造船厂时，我对在建船舶的庞大规模感到震惊。 这一幕让我童年时的格拉斯哥码头变得黯然失色。 在温州的工厂里，工人们生产出数十万套西装和数百万支塑料笔。 无数堆满煤炭、水泥和矿石的驳船不断搅动长江水。 竞争、公司、市场、贸易——这些都是中国曾经拒绝的东西。 不再。 如今，长期被遗忘的中国扩张主义的化身郑和海军上将是中国的英雄。 用后毛泽东时代最伟大的经济改革家邓小平的话来说：

今天任何一个国家想要发展起来，就不可能搞闭关锁国。 我们尝过这种苦涩的滋味，我们的祖先也尝过。 明初永乐年间，郑和下西洋，我国已开放。 永乐死后，王朝走向衰落。 中国被侵略了。 从明朝中叶到鸦片战争，中国经历了三百多年的闭关锁国，变得贫穷、落后，陷入黑暗和愚昧之中。 不敞开大门不是一个选择。

这是对历史的一种看似合理的解读（而且与亚当·斯密的解读非常接近）。

三十年前，如果你预测中国将在半个世纪内成为世界最大经济体，你会被视为幻想家。 但如果早在 1420 年，你就预测西欧有一天会比整个亚洲生产更多，并且在 500 年内，英国人的平均财富将是中国人的平均财富的九倍，你会被认为是不现实的 。 这就是西欧竞争的动态效应 — — 以及东亚政治垄断的阻碍效应。

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

中国似乎长期以来一直处于停滞状态，并且很可能很久以前就获得了与其法律和制度的性质相一致的全部财富。 但这种补充可能远远低于其土壤、气候和情况的性质所允许的其他法律和制度。 一个忽视或蔑视对外贸易、只允许外国船只进入其一两个港口的国家，无法进行与不同法律和制度下相同数量的业务。 。 。 对外贸易更加广泛。 。 。 必然会极大地增加中国的制造业，并极大地提高其制造业的生产力。 通过更广泛的航行，中国人自然会学习使用和建造其他国家使用的所有不同机器的艺术，以及在世界各地实践的其他艺术和工业改进。 世界。--- 亚当·斯密
 
为什么它们虽小却很强大？ 为什么我们大而弱？ 。 。 。 我们要向野蛮人学习的只是。 。 。 坚固的船只和有效的火炮。--- 冯桂芬

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.