The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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The high-profit industries, like textiles, were built on cheap, controllable labor, so border controls became an important part of the dynamic, initially between town and countryside. Passports of various kinds became prevalent from as early as the 12th century (in the form of confession certificates), along with distinctive clothing and badges for the least favored groups (Jews, Gypsies, the unemployed), detention, expulsion and even ‘carrier’s liability’ (fines for those ‘people traffickers’ who tried to sneak vagrants into town in the backs of wagons or on barges). Controls intensified with the adoption of paper (a ‘write-once’ medium, not easily falsified) and the development of print technology in the 16th century. Johannes Gutenberg’s early career was built on the manufacture of pilgrims’ badges, and he used his press initially to mass-produce indulgence certificates (the lucrative ‘cash alternative’ to penance, against which Martin Luther was later on to rebel, in 1517). The proceeds funded production of his Bible in 1455.39
None of these restrictions applied to elites, who could go wherever they liked. Foreign elites were welcome within the charmed circle, insofar as they were helpful – just as the elites of ex-colonial countries are today, sending their children to Western universities, their money to Switzerland and attending the same elite events as their international peers.40 This pattern was established at least by the early 12th century during the ‘Northern Crusades’ (the context of Eisenstein’s film Aleksandr Nevsky), which had the economic effect of encouraging eastern-European dependence on supplying low-priced raw materials to the West. A historian of those events, Eric Christiansen, describes a very modern-sounding relationship between rulers and foreign merchants:
[Rulers] patronized foreigners who could bring them wealth, information and military skills or entertainment, and tried to create conditions which would attract them… The Russian princes insisted that, if a Russian borrower went bankrupt, his foreign creditors were to get satisfaction first, and that rates of interest for long-term loans should be low, to suit the long-distance trader… This common pursuit of wealth was the privilege of a small class of specialists, the international trading elite.41
THE FIRST MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Peripheralization led to remorseless depletion of natural resources. Two Belgian researchers, Katharina Lis and Hugo Soly, calculated that, by the beginning of the 14th century (the century of the Black Death), landowners were taking 50 per cent or more of peasants’ output but only putting 5 per cent of their incomes back into the land:
The nobility, who disposed of the necessary means to employ technological improvements, squandered the vast bulk of the extorted surplus, while the peasantry, for whom the deepening of capital was a question of life and death, could seldom accumulate sufficient reserves to take steps in that direction.42
Soil exhaustion became a general phenomenon and led to miserably low crop yields. Braudel found that:
Wherever one looks, from the 15th to the 18th century, the results were disappointing. For every grain sown, the harvest was usually no more than five and sometimes less. As the grain required for the next sowing had to be deducted, four grains were therefore produced for every one sown.43
Nothing like this happened in the world’s other economies. In the early 1900s, the deep, well-cultivated soils of China, Korea and Japan were a source of wonder to American agronomist F H King.44 In the great empires of the East, which had had huge armies, strong peasantries and sophisticated bureaucracies throughout the Middle Ages, merchants were never able to commandeer the agrarian economy as they did in Europe. Instead, general welfare sometimes acquired a major share of state resources, as demonstrated for example by the huge system of canals (which had a large famine-prevention role) constructed over many centuries in imperial China, and the ‘taccavi’ system in India, whereby rulers had a duty to help peasants financially through difficult times.
Within the capitalist polities, subsistence seldom even registered as a possible cause for concern. During the famine and plague years of the mid-1300s, cities including Florence and Milan, in desperation, reduced the tax burden on the peasantry and even initiated half-hearted irrigation schemes, but by this time the damage was done; the peasants were deserting the land and nothing could stop them.45 Immiseration and soil exhaustion gradually turned into a full-blown demographic and ecological crisis, experienced at the time, all over Europe, as a sudden exodus of impoverished peasants from the land and into towns. A dynamic had started that required constant expansion or collapse.
The difficulties became extreme during the ‘little ice age’ – the period from the early 16th till the early 19th centuries, when global temperatures fell by two whole degrees Celsius. Indeed, this has been blamed for Europe’s crisis – but the climate challenge did not affect all areas as badly, if at all. Some places, like Japan (newly unified by the Tokugawa regime), came through it with both environment and people in very much better shape than at the beginning.46
In Europe, the demographic and environmental crisis had begun long before, and continued till long after. By the beginning of the 20th century people were abandoning Europe at a rate of nearly a million a year, making Europe’s exodus the largest mass emigration in history.
AN UNEQUAL SOCIETY IS A DANGEROUS PLACE FOR POWERFUL IDEAS
This puts a different complexion on the traditional account of ‘the rise of the West’, which used to attribute Europe’s sudden expansion to the particular mindset or social structures of Europeans, or even to their higher state of evolutionary development: a view that remained fairly dominant even within living memory.
Deborah Rogers, a Stanford University researcher and now Director of the Initiative for Equality (IfE), looked at the riddle of European expansion from a different angle: given that human societies have been so characteristically and strongly egalitarian over the long run of history, why did unequal ones (and extremely unequal ones at that) end up sweeping the field?
Her team used a computer-modelling approach, which revealed (contrary to expectation) that the takeover of egalitarian societies by unequal ones had nothing to do with superior leadership or organization. Instead, it appeared that unequal societies have a short-term competitive edge over more egalitarian ones because those who take the decisions do not have to suffer their consequences. Rogers writes: ‘unequal societies are better able to survive resource shortages by sequestering mortality in the lower classes.’47 In the longer term, however, these societies can only survive by proliferation – finding fresh populations to bear the burdens they create. She concludes:
Unequal access to resources is destabilizing, and greatly raises the chance of group extinction… which creates incentive to migrate in search of further resources… leading to conquests of the more stable, egalitarian societies – exactly what we see as we look back in history.48
This fits with archeological evidence that, in the past, unequal societies were usually ‘self-extinguishing’. If an unequal society is isolated from its neighbors by forests, mountains or seas, and lacks the technology or resources to overcome them, it exhausts its resources and collapses. But when these obstacles don’t exist, or new technology becomes available that allows them to be overcome, neighboring societies can be made to ‘share the pain’. When these also become destabilized, they can ‘spill over’ in their turn into adjacent lands, and so on.
By the 1400s, intensely unequal city-states and early nation-states in western Europe had already been ‘sequestering mortality in the lower classes’ for about four centuries (as evidenced by their skeletal remains). Large areas of Europe were on the verge of ecological and demographic collapse – but its elites were acquiring new technologies such as firearms and ocean-going ships that allowed them to reach and dominate societies that were further and further away, across mountains, seas and eventually oceans until, finally, the system became global.
Western expansion was the result of a deadly combination: intense inequality, emerging