Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

It is clear from the experience of the last half-century, during which a growing number of countries have achieved rapid industrialization, that the processes and conditions that characterized European take-off, and particularly that of Britain, were largely peculiar to Western Europe and that there are, in fact, many ways of achieving take-off. As the historian Peter Perdue writes: ‘Industrial growth does not have to be an outcome of a centuries-long accumulation of the particular skills found in north-west Europe; there are numerous paths to economic modernity, and England followed only one of them.’ [79] [79] Perdue, China Marches West , p. 538. As a small example, the nature of class differentiation in the English countryside, including the rapid decline of the peasantry, has not been repeated in the case of China ’s industrialization nor, indeed, many others as well. [80] [80] Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 47.

This brings us to the broader political, cultural and intellectual framework of Europe ’s passage to modernity. The roots of European civilization are usually traced back to Greek democracy, Roman law and Judaeo-Christian religion. It has been commonplace to regard these as preconditions for, as well as characteristics of, European modernity. Although the impact of democracy in ancient Greece has been exaggerated, with the West not adopting it, except for small minorities, until the late nineteenth century at the earliest, there is no mistaking the broad influence that Greek civilization has exercised on European history down the ages, including the way we think about right and wrong, the tradition of debate and oratory, the notion of independent citizenship, and the idea of democracy. A more prosaic example is the constant recycling of mainly Doric but also Ionic and, via the Roman Empire, Corinthian columns as the preferred architectural style for buildings that seek to convey a sense of eternal authority, from the Bank of England to the Supreme Court. [81] [81] Charlotte Higgins, It’s All Greek to Me (London: Short Books, 2008), pp.77-8. Similarly, the development of Roman-inspired law — essentially through Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — helped to establish the concept and reality of an independent legal system, which played a significant role in the subsequent entrenchment of property rights. [82] [82] Ibid., p. 21. Also Deepak Lal, Unintended Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 73. Finally, Christianity was to imbue Europe with a powerful sense of universalism, which was to shape the continent’s attitudes towards not only itself but also other cultures and races, playing an important role in moulding the colonial mentality and the notion of a civilizing mission. [83] [83] Lal, Unintended Consequences , p. 76; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , p. 82.

It is not difficult, then, to see the lines of continuity, but it is rather more difficult to argue that they were necessary conditions for take-off. These cultural characteristics certainly helped to shape European modernity, but that is not the same as them being preconditions. Something similar can be said of Western individualism and the Western family. It would appear, with the benefit of hindsight, for example, that many different types of family are compatible with the process of industrialization. A significant area of European advantage was in the field of science, based on the growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry, spreading networks of scientific activity, and the routinization of research and its diffusion. [84] [84] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , p. 201; Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, pp. 85, 97, 102. But other intellectual traditions, notably the Chinese during the Qing dynasty and the Islamic, also gave rise to forms of debate, argument and empirical observation that stand comparison with the emerging scientific rationalism of Western Europe. The rider — and a very important one — is that in these other traditions there was still a strong tendency to seek to reconcile new arguments with those of older authorities, instead of rejecting them. [85] [85] Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , pp. 291-3.

By 1800 Europe had accumulated various cultural assets, such as the rule of law and the beginnings of parliamentary government, but these were not the key to its economic breakthrough. They should be seen as characteristics of European modernity rather than as preconditions for it. [86] [86] Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 343. There is no reason to believe that other cultures — with their own diverse characteristics — were not capable of achieving the breakthrough into modernity: this, after all, is precisely what has been happening since 1960. Fundamental to an understanding of why Europe succeeded and China failed at the end of the eighteenth century are conjunctural factors rather than long-run cultural characteristics. Christopher Bayly draws the following conclusion: ‘If, in terms of economic growth, what distinguished Europe from China before 1800 was only its intensive use of coal and the existence of a vast American hinterland to Europe, then a lot of cultural baggage about inherent European political superiorities looks ready to be jettisoned.’ [87] [87] Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , p. 469.

Far from Europe being the template of modernity which every subsequent transformation should conform to and be measured by, the European experience must be regarded — notwithstanding the fact that it was the first — as highly specific and particular. [88] [88] Ibid., p. 12; Lal, Unintended Consequences , p. 177. In practice, however, it has seen itself, and often been seen as, the defining model. This is not surprising. The extraordinary global hegemony enjoyed by Europe for almost two centuries has made the particular seem universal. What, then, have been the peculiar characteristics of Europe ’s passage to, and through, modernity?

Although European nations spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy fighting each other, the European passage to modernity from the mid sixteenth century onwards was achieved without, for the most part, a persistent threat from outside, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire in the south-east. By the seventeenth century, however, the latter was progressively being rolled back, though it was not until the nineteenth century that it was finally excluded from the Balkans. [89] [89] Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1259, 1266-7, 1282-4. Europe was the only continent to enjoy this privilege. Every subsequent aspirant for modernity — Asia, Africa, Latin America — had to confront and deal with an outside predator in the form of the modern European nations. Even the European settlers in North America had to fight the British in the American War of Independence to establish their sovereignty and thereby create the conditions for economic take-off. A consequence of this is that Europe has been little concerned in recent centuries with dealing with the Other, or seeking to understand the Other, except on very much its own, frequently colonial, terms. Only relatively recently did this begin to change.

Europe ’s colonial history, in fact, is a further distinguishing characteristic. From the sixteenth century to the 1930s European nations, in a remarkable display of expansion and conquest, almost uniquely (the only other instance being Japan) built seaborne empires that stretched around the world. The colonies, especially those in the New World and, in the case of Britain, India and the Malay Peninsula, [90] [90] Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941 - 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 33. were to be the source of huge resources and riches for the imperial powers. Without them, as we have seen, Europe could not have achieved its economic take-off in the way that it did. No non-European country, bar Japan after 1868, was to achieve take-off in the nineteenth century: as a result, a majority found themselves colonized by the European powers.