Civilization - Niall ferguson

Civilization- Niall Ferguson(2011)

The question has surely vexed generations:

How is it that Europe, a barbarian land of negligible consequence in the early 15^th  century compared to the dazzling civilizations of the Orient, suddenly became the masters of the world 500 years later?

Niall Ferguson in his ‘Civilization’ brings forth compelling arguments and  lists out six ‘killer apps’ which caused the West to pull away from the rest, namely- Competition, Science, Modern Medicine, Property, Consumerism, and Work Ethic.

One might agree or disagree at the arguments set forth in the book, but it’s really a fascinating read.

The heights attained by the Chinese civilization and the Ottoman Empire in their glory days were truly awe inspiring and hence the precipitous decline is all the more unfathomable.

The Indian civilization is acknowledged, yes, but the reasons for the decline are not really dwelled at length in the book. One reason could be that Ferguson talks more of the world in the 10^th to 15^th century, and India, had long fallen of the pedestal by then.                                                                             

In fact by the 8^th century A D, the Indian civilization had reached its zenith and invaders were creeping up the Hindu-kush mountain ranges to begin the subjugation of the subcontinent for more than a thousand years. The Mughals revived some of the old splendor, of course, but as brought out in the book, the dogma of Islamic decrees made further blossoming of the subcontinent somewhat problematic. 

But consider the glory that was China, even in the 15^th century.

'Even though, the credit for Industrial revolution is ascribed to Europe of the 17^th/18^th century, the revolution actually prefigured in China.

The first blast furnace for smelting iron ore was not built in Coalbrookdale in 1709, but in China before 200 B.C.

The oldest iron suspension bridge in the world is not British but Chinese; dating from as early as 65 AD, and remains of it can still be seen near Ching-tung in Yunnan province.

Even as late as 1788, British iron-production levels were still lower than those achieved in China in 1078.

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.

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 English Agricultural Revolution, was another innovation by the Chinese.

It was the Chinese who first revolutionized textile production with innovations like the spinning wheel and the silk reeling frame, imported to Italy in the thirteenth century.

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.'

But just how close the Chinese were to conquering the world in the 15^th century is evident when you consider the fascinating tale of the mighty Chinese navy in the 15^th century.

‘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.

The treasure ship was 400 feet long - nearly five times the size of the ‘Santa Maria’ in which Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492.

And this was a part of a fleet of more than 300 huge ocean going junks. 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 anything seen in the West until the First World War.

In a series of six epic voyages between 1405 and 1424, Zheng He's fleet ranged astoundingly far and wide. The Admiral sailed to Thailand, Sumatra, Java and the once-great port of Calicut; to Temasek (later Singapore), Malacca and Ceylon; to Cuttack in Orissa; to Hormuz, Aden and up the Red Sea to Jeddah.

When the whole world lay wide open thus for the Chinese to conquer or pillage at will, the sea explorations were suddenly ceased by the Chinese.

In 1424,Emperor Yongle died –and China's overseas ambitions were buried with him. Zheng He's voyages were immediately suspended, and only briefly revived with a final Indian Ocean expedition in 1432-33. The Emperor's decree definitively 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. The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea.'

So what lay behind this momentous decision? No one is really sure.

The same however, 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.

In Lisbon, 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.’

So why was it that the 15^th century marked the beginning of domination of European powers and not the Chinese, when they clearly had all the advantages?

Ferguson maintains that one of the key reason was the ‘fierce competition’ that existed between the European countries in the middle ages.

When Zheng He embarked on his numerous voyages, trade was not the key requirement of the Emperor. In the words of a contemporary inscription, the fleet was 'to go to countries and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power ...'. What Emperor Yongle wanted in return for the foreign rulers to pay tribute to him the way China’s immediate neighbours did, and thereby to acknowledge his supremacy.

For Europeans, however, 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 Vasco da Gama succeeded, then Lisbon trumped other European rivals.

‘Maritime exploration, was in short , was fifteenth century Europe’s space race or rather spice race.’

So why did the Europeans seem to have so much more commercial fervour than the Chinese?

Ferguson maintains that it was because of the ‘disunity’ in Europe.

The  map of medieval Europe, show literally hundreds of competing states. There were roughly a thousand polities in fourteenth-century Europe; and still around 500 more or less independent units 200 years later.

The constant fighting between these states encouraged innovation in military technology. On land, fortifications had to grow stronger as cannon grew more powerful and maneuverable.At sea, meanwhile, ships stayed small for good reasons- to strike 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.

So in China when the central authorities decided that there will be no more deep sea voyages, the decree was implicitly accepted by the gentry.

However, generations of internecine conflict ensured that no European monarch ever grew strong enough to be able to prohibit overseas exploration.

On the contrary, the European monarchs all encouraged commerce, conquest and colonization as part of their competition with one another.

Another reason was that the religious fervour provided another incentive to expand over seas, whereas a proselytizing religion did not exist in China.

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.

The Ming empire had collapsed in the 15^th/16^th century as the turning inwards proved to be  fatal, especially for a complex and densely populated society like China's.

There were no external resources to draw upon. And that proved to be the death knell of the Chinese culminating in the ‘Century of humiliation’ beginning 1850 to 1950.

Similarly Japan too missed the bus of Industrialization due to the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of strict seclusion (sakoku) after 1640. All forms of contact with the outside world were proscribed. As a result, Japan missed out entirely on the benefits associated with a rapidly rising level of global trade and migration.

So the European powers were 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 and productivity. When crops failed or their cultivation was disrupted, the results were catastrophic.

This theory of intense competition does not explain why the Indian civilization also did not forge ahead in the 15^th century. India was perhaps more or less as fragmented as Europe of the 15^th /16^th century. There were petty rivalries amongst numerous principalities.

Possibly the ossification of the caste based society and the Islamic domination prevented any positive fallout in the medieval period in the subcontinent.

Similar to the dazzling heights achieved by the Chinese civilization in the 15^th / 16^th century, the Ottoman empire had also flourished in the 9^th /10^th century.

'The caliphate established by the middle of  eighth century, extended from Spain, right across North Africa, through its Arabian heartland, north through Syria and into the Caucasus then eastwards across Persia and into Afghanistan.

The Abbasid caliphate was at the cutting edge of science. In the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) founded in ninth-century Baghdad by Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Greek texts by Aristotle and other authors were translated into Arabic.

The caliphate also produced what some regard as the first true hospitals, such as the Bimaristan established at Damascus by Caliph al-Waleed bin Abdel Malek in 707, which was designed to cure rather than merely house the sick.

It was home to what some regard as the first true institution of higher education, the University of Al-Karaouine founded in Fez in 859.

Building on Greek and especially Indian foundations, Muslim mathematicians established algebra as a discipline distinct from arithmetic and geometry. The first algebraic textbook was The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing (Hisab al-Jabr Wal-Musqabalah) written in Arabic by the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi in around 820.

The first truly experimental scientist was a Muslim: Abu 'All al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (965-c. 1039), whose seven-volume Book of Optics overthrew a host of ancient misconceptions, notably the idea that we are able to see objects because our eyes emit light.

The West owes a debt to the medieval Muslim world, for both its custodianship of classical wisdom and its generation of new knowledge in cartography, medicine and philosophy as well as in mathematics and optics.

The English thinker Roger Bacon acknowledged it: ‘Philosophy is drawn from the muslims’

So what caused the decline of the Caliphate from being leaders in innovation and scientific progress?

‘The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world.'

Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.Indeed, it was blasphemous to suggest that man might be able to discern the divine mode of operation, which God might in any case vary at will.

Under clerical influence, the study of ancient philosophy was curtailed books burned and so-called freethinkers persecuted; increasingly, 'the madrasas became focused exclusively on theology at a time when Europe universities were broadening the scope of their scholarship.

Printing too, was resisted in the Muslim world. For the Ottomans, script was sacred: there was a religious reverence for the pen, a preference for the art of calligraphy over the business of printing. 'Scholar's ink', it was said, 'is holier than martyr's blood.'In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim 1, had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.

This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research.

If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.

The only Western book translated into a Middle Eastern language until the late eighteenth century was a medical book on the treatment of syphilis.

Nothing better illustrates this divergence than the fate of the observatory built in Istanbul in the 1570s for the renowned polymath Takiyiiddln al-Rasid (Taqi al-Din). In the mid-1570s, as chief astronomer to the Sultan, he successfully lobbied for the construction of an observatory.

Prying into secrets of the heavens was however considered  blasphemous and in 1580, barely five years after its completion  Sultan ordered the demolition of Takiyiiddin's observatory. there would not be another observatory in Istanbul until 1868.

By such methods, the Muslim clergy effectively snuffed the chance of Ottoman scientific advance - at the very moment  the Christian Churches of Europe were relaxing their grip on free enquiry.

European advances were dismissed in Istanbul as mere 'vanity’. The legacy of Islam's once celebrated House of Wisdom vanished in a 

cloud of piety.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, while the heirs of Osman slumbered, rulers all across Europe were actively promoting science, largely regardless of clerical qualms.

The Ottomans knew by this time that they had to learn from the West. In 1732 Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official posed the question that has haunted Muslims ever since:

'Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?'

So it was the turning back on science and innovation that finally caused the downfall of the Islamic civilization.

It explains the backwardness even today of the Islamic world, and the sliver of a state ,Israel, holding out against its hostile Arab neighbors is not really a mystery, considering that Israel is at the cutting edge of scientific and technological innovation.

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone Israeli inventors applied to register 9,591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was fifty and for all majority Muslim countries in the world 5,657.

Another fascinating conundrum is as to why it was the Anglo Saxons that has effectively dominated the world in the 19^th and 20^th century and not the Spanish and the Portuguese.

When the conquest and colonization of the Americas began in the medieval period, it was one of history's biggest natural experiments:

Take two Western cultures, export them and impose them on a wide range of different peoples and lands - the British in the North, the Spanish and Portuguese in the South. Then see which does better.

It was no contest. Looking at the world today, four centuries on, no one could possibly doubt that the dominant force in Western civilization is the United States of America. Until very recently, Latin America has lagged far behind Anglo-America.

How and why did that happen?

 The Spanish Empire - or the Portuguese – were not afflicted with the defects of the great Oriental empires. Unlike the Chinese, the Spaniards were early participants in the global trade boom after I500. Unlike the Ottomans, they were early participants in the Scientific Revolution.

Instead, it was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America - an idea about the way people govern themselves.

The idea was this:

Establishment of rule of law with the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.

In 1532 when 200 Spaniards landed in Ecuador, their ambition was to conquer the Inca Empire for the King of Spain and to secure a large share of its reputed wealth of precious metal for themselves. Whereas when another ship reached the New World 138 years later, in 1670, at  an island off the coast of what today is South Carolina among their modest ambition was to find a better life than the grinding poverty they had left behind in England.

The two ships symbolized this tale of two Americas. On one, conquistadors; on the other indentured servants. One group dreamt of  instant plunder - of mountains of Mayan gold, there for the taking. The others knew that they had years of toil ahead of them, but also that they would be rewarded with one of the world's most attractive  assets - prime North American land - plus a share in the process of law-making. Real estate plus representation: that was the North American dream.

So in Latin America you have the problem of unequal distribution of property itself.  For instance in post-independence Venezuela, nearly all the land was owned by a creole elite of just 10,000 people - 1.1 per cent of the population. Whereas in America, the percentage of rural property ownership, is close to 75 %.

So while it was democracy that flourished in America, it was dictatorship that took root in Latin America.

A fascinating read, it is almost a follow up to another great book 'Guns,germs and steel' by Jared Diamond which also examines the rise and fall of civilizations.