Kitabı oku: «The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers», sayfa 2
Since the scope of this book is so large, it is clear that it will be read by different people for different purposes. Some readers will find here what they had hoped for: a broad and yet reasonably detailed survey of Great Power politics over the past five centuries, of the way in which the relative position of each of the leading states has been affected by economic and technological change, and of the constant interaction between strategy and economics, both in periods of peace and in the tests of war. By definition, it does not deal with small powers, nor (usually) with small, bilateral wars. By definition also, the book is heavily Eurocentric, especially in its middle chapters. But that is only natural with such a topic.
To other readers, perhaps especially those political scientists who are now so interested in drawing general rules about ‘world systems’ or the recurrent pattern of wars, this study may offer less than what they desire. To avoid misunderstanding, it ought to be made clear at this point that the book is not dealing with, for example, the theory that major (or ‘systemic’) wars can be related to Kondratieff cycles of economic upturn and downturn. In addition, it is not centrally concerned with general theories about the causes of war, and whether they are likely to be brought about by ‘rising’ or ‘falling’ Great Powers. It is also not a book about theories of empire, and about how imperial control is effected (as is dealt with in Michael Doyle’s recent book Empires), or whether empires contribute to national strength. Finally, it does not propose any general theory about which sorts of society and social/governmental organizations are the most efficient in extracting resources in time of war.
On the other hand, there obviously is a wealth of material in this book for those scholars who wish to make such generalizations (and one of the reasons why there is such an extensive array of notes is to indicate more detailed sources for those readers interested in, say, the financing of wars). But the problem which historians – as opposed to political scientists – have in grappling with general theories is that the evidence of the past is almost always too varied to allow for ‘hard’ scientific conclusions. Thus, while it is true that some wars (e.g. 1939) can be linked to decision-makers’ fears about shifts taking place in the overall power balances, that would not be so useful in explaining the struggles which began in 1776 (American Revolutionary War) or 1792 (French Revolutionary) or 1854 (Crimean War). In the same way, while one could point to Austria-Hungary in 1914 as a good example of a ‘falling’ Great Power helping to trigger off a major war, that still leaves the theorist to deal with the equally critical roles played then by those ‘rising’ Great Powers Germany and Russia. Similarly, any general theory about whether empires pay, or whether imperial control is affected by a measurable ‘power–distance’ ratio, is likely – from the conflicting evidence available – to produce the banal answer sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Nevertheless, if one sets aside a priori theories and simply looks at the historical record of ‘the rise and fall of the Great Powers’ over the past five hundred years, it is clear that some generally valid conclusions can be drawn – while admitting all the time that there may be individual exceptions. For example, there is detectable a causal relationship between the shifts which have occurred over time in the general economic and productive balances and the position occupied by individual powers in the international system. The move in trade flows from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and northwestern Europe from the sixteenth century onward, or the redistribution in the shares of world manufacturing output away from western Europe in the decades after 1890, are good examples here. In both cases, the economic shifts heralded the rise of new Great Powers which would one day have a decisive impact upon the military/territorial order. This is why the move in the global productive balances toward the ‘Pacific rim’ which has taken place over the past few decades cannot be of interest merely to economists alone.
Similarly, the historical record suggests that there is a very clear connection in the long run between an individual Great Power’s economic rise and fall and its growth and decline as an important military power (or world empire). This, too, is hardly surprising, since it flows from two related facts. The first is that economic resources are necessary to support a large-scale military establishment. The second is that, so far as the international system is concerned, both wealth and power are always relative and should be seen as such. Three hundred years ago, the German mercantilist writer von Hornigk observed that
whether a nation be today mighty and rich or not depends not on the abundance or security of its power and riches, but principally on whether its neighbours possess more or less of it.
In the chapters which follow, this observation will be borne out time and again. The Netherlands in the mid-eighteenth century was richer in absolute terms than a hundred years earlier, but by that stage was much less of a Great Power because neighbours like France and Britain had ‘more … of it’ (that is, more power and riches). The France of 1914 was, absolutely, more powerful than that of 1850 – but this was little consolation when France was being eclipsed by a much stronger Germany. Britain today has far greater wealth, and its armed forces possess far more powerful weapons, than in its mid-Victorian prime; that avails it little when its share of world product has shrunk from about 25 per cent to about 3 per cent. If a nation has ‘more … of it’, things are fine; if ‘less of it’, there are problems.
This does not mean, however, that a nation’s relative economic and military power will rise and fall in parallel. Most of the historical examples covered here suggest that there is a noticeable ‘lag time’ between the trajectory of a state’s relative economic strength and the trajectory of its military/territorial influence. Once again, the reason for this is not difficult to grasp. An economically expanding power – Britain in the 1860s, the United States in the 1890s, Japan today – may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have altered. The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military alliances, perhaps bases and colonies). Other, rival powers are now economically expanding at a faster rate, and wish in their turn to extend their influence abroad. The world has become a more competitive place, and market shares are being eroded. Pessimistic observers talk of decline; patriotic statesmen call for ‘renewal’.
In these more troubled circumstances, the Great Power is likely to find itself spending much more on defence than it did two generations earlier, and yet still discover that the world is a less secure environment – simply because other powers have grown faster, and are becoming stronger. Imperial Spain spent much more on its army in the troubled 1630s and 1640s than it did in the 1580s, when the Castilian economy was healthier. Edwardian Britain’s defence expenditures were far greater in 1910 than they were at, say, the time of Palmerston’s death in 1865, when the British economy was relatively at its peak; but which Britons by the later date felt more secure? The same problem, it will be argued below, appears to be facing both the United States and the USSR today. Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on ‘security’, and thereby divert potential resources from ‘investment’ and compound their long-term dilemma.
Another general conclusion which can be drawn from the five-hundred-year record presented here is that there is a very strong correlation between the eventual outcome of the major coalition wars for European or global mastery, and the amount of productive resources mobilized by each side. This was true of the struggles waged against the Spanish-Austrian Habsburgs; one of the great eighteenth-century contests like the War of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, and the Napoleonic War; and of the two world wars of this century. A lengthy, grinding war eventually turns into a test of the relative capacities of each coalition. Whether one side has ‘more … of it’ or ‘less of it’ becomes increasingly significant as the struggle lengthens.
One can make these generalizations, however, without falling into the trap of crude economic determinism. Despite this book’s abiding interest in tracing the ‘larger tendencies’ in world affairs over the past five centuries, it is not arguing that economics determines every event, or is the sole reason for the success and failure of each nation. There simply is too much evidence pointing to other things: geography, military organization, national morale, the alliance system, and many other factors can all affect the relative power of the members of the states system. In the eighteenth century, for example, the United Provinces were the richest parts of Europe, and Russia the poorest – yet the Dutch fell, and the Russians rose. Individual folly (like Hitler’s) and extremely high battlefield competence (whether of the Spanish regiments in the sixteenth century or of the German infantry in this century) also go a long way to explain individual victories and defeats. What does seem incontestable, however, is that in a long-drawn-out Great Power (and usually coalition) war, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing productive base – or, as the Spanish captains used to say, to him who has the last escudo. Much of what follows will confirm that cynical but essentially correct judgement. And it is precisely because the power position of the leading nations has closely paralleled their relative economic position over the past five centuries that it seems worthwhile asking what the implications of today’s economic and technological trends might be for the current balance of power. This does not deny that men make their own history, but they do make it within a historical circumstance which can restrict (as well as open up) possibilities.
An early model for the present book was the 1833 essay of the famous Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke upon die grossen Mächte (‘the great powers’), in which he surveyed the ups and downs of the international power balances since the decline of Spain, and tried to show why certain countries had risen to prominence and then fallen away. Ranke concluded his essay with an analysis of his contemporary world, and what was happening in it following the defeat of the French bid for supremacy in the Napoleonic War. In examining the ‘prospects’ of each of the Great Powers, he, too, was tempted from the historian’s profession into the uncertain world of speculating upon the future.
To write an essay upon ‘the Great Powers’ is one thing; to tell the story in book form is quite another. My original intention was to produce a brief, ‘essayistic’ book, presuming that the readers knew (however vaguely) the background details about the changing growth rates, or the particular geostrategical problems facing this or that Great Power. As I began sending out the early chapters of this book for comments, or giving trial-run talks about some of its themes, it became increasingly clear to me that that was a false presumption: what most readers and listeners wanted was more detail, more coverage of the background, simply because there was no study available which told the story of the shifts that occurred in the economic and strategical power balances. Precisely because neither economic historians nor military historians had entered this field, the story itself had simply suffered from neglect. If the abundant detail in both the text and notes which follow has any justification, it is to fill that critical gap in the history of the rise and fall of the Great Powers.
STRATEGY AND ECONOMICS IN THE PREINDUSTRIAL WORLD
1
The Rise of the Western World
In the year 1500, the date chosen by numerous scholars to mark the divide between modern and premodern times,1 it was by no means obvious to the inhabitants of Europe that their continent was poised to dominate much of the rest of the earth. The knowledge which contemporaries possessed about the great civilizations of the Orient was fragmentary and all too often erroneous, based as it was upon travellers’ tales which had lost nothing in their retelling. Nevertheless, the widely held image of extensive eastern empires possessing fabulous wealth and vast armies was a reasonably accurate one, and on first acquaintance those societies must have seemed far more favourably endowed than the peoples and states of western Europe. Indeed, placed alongside these other great centres of cultural and economic activity, Europe’s relative weaknesses were more apparent than its strengths. It was, for a start, neither the most fertile nor the most populous area in the world; India and China took pride of place in each respect. Geopolitically, the ‘continent’ of Europe was an awkward shape, bounded by ice and water to the north and west, being open to frequent landward invasion from the east, and vulnerable to strategic circumvention in the south. In 1500, and for a long time before and after that, these were not abstract considerations. It was only eight years earlier that Granada, the last Muslim region of Spain, had succumbed to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella; but that signified the end of a regional campaign, not of the far larger struggle between Christendom and the forces of the Prophet. Over much of the western world there still hung the shock of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an event which seemed the more pregnant because it by no means marked the limits of the Ottoman Turks’ advance. By the end of the century they had taken Greece and the Ionian islands, Bosnia, Albania, and much of the rest of the Balkans; and worse was to come in the 1520s when their formidable janissary armies pressed toward Budapest and Vienna. In the south, where Ottoman galleys raided Italian ports, the popes were coming to fear that Rome’s fate would soon match that of Constantinople.2
Whereas these threats seemed part of a coherent grand strategy directed by Sultan Mehmet II and his successors, the response of the Europeans was disjointed and sporadic. Unlike the Ottoman and Chinese empires, unlike the rule which the Moguls were soon to establish in India, there never was a united Europe in which all parts acknowledged one secular or religious leader. Instead, Europe was a hodge-podge of petty kingdoms and principalities, marcher lordships and city-states. Some more powerful monarchies were arising in the west, notably Spain, France, and England, but none was to be free of internal tensions and all regarded the others as rivals, rather than allies in the struggle against Islam.
Nor could it be said that Europe had pronounced advantages in the realms of culture, mathematics, engineering, or navigational and other technologies when compared with the great civilizations of Asia. A considerable part of the European cultural and scientific heritage was, in any case, ‘borrowed’ from Islam, just as Muslim societies had borrowed for centuries from China through the media of mutual trade, conquest, and settlement. In retrospect, one can see that Europe was accelerating both commercially and technologically by the late fifteenth century; but perhaps the fairest general comment would be that each of the great centres of world civilization about that time was at a roughly similar stage of development, some more advanced in one area, but less so in others. Technologically and, therefore, militarily, the Ottoman Empire, China under the Ming dynasty, a little later northern India under the Moguls, and the European states system with its Muscovite offshoot were all far superior to the scattered societies of Africa, America, and Oceania. While this does imply that Europe in 1500 was one of the most important cultural power centres, it was not at all obvious that it would one day emerge at the very top. Before investigating the causes of its rise, therefore, it is necessary to examine the strengths and the weaknesses of the other contenders.
Ming China
Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China.3 Its considerable population, 100–130 million compared with Europe’s 50–55 million in the fifteenth century; its remarkable culture; its exceedingly fertile and irrigated plains, linked by a splendid canal system since the eleventh century; and its unified, hierarchic administration run by a well-educated Confucian bureaucracy had given a coherence and sophistication to Chinese society which was the envy of foreign visitors. True, that civilization had been subjected to severe disruption from the Mongol hordes, and to domination after the invasions of Kublai Khan. But China had a habit of changing its conquerors much more than it was changed by them, and when the Ming dynasty emerged in 1368 to reunite the empire and finally defeat the Mongols, much of the old order and learning remained.
To readers brought up to respect ‘western’ science, the most striking feature of Chinese civilization must be its technological precocity. Huge libraries existed from early on. Printing by movable type had already appeared in eleventh-century China, and soon large numbers of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets. By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron industry in North China, producing around 125,000 tons per annum, chiefly for military and governmental use – the army of over a million men was, for example, an enormous market for iron goods. It is worth remarking that this production figure was far larger than the British iron output in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, seven centuries later! The Chinese were also probably the first to invent true gunpowder; and cannon were used by the Ming to overthrow their Mongol rulers in the late fourteenth century.4
Given this evidence of cultural and technological advance, it is also not surprising to learn that the Chinese had turned to overseas exploration and trade. The magnetic compass was another Chinese invention, some of their junks were as large as later Spanish galleons, and commerce with the Indies and the Pacific islands was potentially as profitable as that along the caravan routes. Naval warfare had been conducted on the Yangtze many decades earlier – in order to subdue the vessels of Sung China in the 1260s, Kublai Khan had been compelled to build his own great fleet of fighting ships equipped with projectile-throwing machines – and the coastal grain trade was booming in the early fourteenth century. In 1420, the Ming navy was recorded as possessing 1,350 combat vessels, including 400 large floating fortresses and 250 ships designed for long-range cruising. Such a force eclipsed, but did not include, the many privately managed vessels which were already trading with Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and even East Africa by that time, and bringing revenue to the Chinese state, which sought to tax this maritime commerce.
The most famous of the official overseas expeditions were the seven long-distance cruises undertaken by the admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1433. Consisting on occasions of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men, these fleets visited ports from Malacca and Ceylon to the Red Sea entrances and Zanzibar. Bestowing gifts upon deferential local rulers on the one hand, they compelled the recalcitrant to acknowledge Peking on the other. One ship returned with giraffes from East Africa to entertain the Chinese emperor; another with a Ceylonese chief who had been unwise enough not to acknowledge the supremacy of the Son of Heaven. (It must be noted, however, that the Chinese apparently never plundered nor murdered – unlike the Portuguese, Dutch, and other European invaders of the Indian Ocean.) From what historians and archaeologists can tell us of the size, power, and seaworthiness of Cheng Ho’s navy – some of the great treasure ships appear to have been around 400 feet long and displaced over 1,500 tons – they might well have been able to sail around Africa and ‘discover’ Portugal several decades before Henry the Navigator’s expeditions began earnestly to push south of Ceuta.5
But the Chinese expedition of 1433 was the last of the line, and three years later an imperial edict banned the construction of seagoing ships; later still, a specific order forbade the existence of ships with more than two masts. Naval personnel would henceforth be employed on smaller vessels on the Grand Canal. Cheng Ho’s great warships were laid up and rotted away. Despite all the opportunities which beckoned overseas, China had decided to turn its back on the world.
There was, to be sure, a plausible strategical reason for this decision. The northern frontiers of the empire were again under some pressure from the Mongols, and it may have seemed prudent to concentrate military resources in this more vulnerable area. Under such circumstances a large navy was an expensive luxury, and in any case, the attempted Chinese expansion southward into Annam (Vietnam) was proving fruitless and costly. Yet this quite valid reasoning does not appear to have been reconsidered when the disadvantages of naval retrenchment later became clear: within a century or so, the Chinese coastline and even cities on the Yangtze were being attacked by Japanese pirates, but there was no serious rebuilding of an imperial navy. Even the repeated appearance of Portuguese vessels off the China coast did not force a reassessment.* Defence on land was all that was required, the mandarins reasoned, for had not all maritime trade by Chinese subjects been forbidden in any case?
Apart from the costs and other disincentives involved, therefore, a key element in China’s retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy6 – a conservatism heightened in the Ming period by resentment at the changes earlier forced upon them by the Mongols. In this ‘Restoration’ atmosphere, the all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce. According to the Confucian code, warfare itself was a deplorable activity and armed forces were made necessary only by the fear of barbarian attacks or internal revolts. The mandarins’ dislike of the army (and the navy) was accompanied by a suspicion of the trader. The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying cheap and selling dear, the ostentation of the nouveau riche merchant, all offended the elite, scholarly bureaucrats – almost as much as they aroused the resentments of the toiling masses. While not wishing to bring the entire market economy to a halt, the mandarins often intervened against individual merchants by confiscating their property or banning their business. Foreign trade by Chinese subjects must have seemed even more dubious to mandarin eyes, simply because it was less under their control.
This dislike of commerce and private capital does not conflict with the enormous technological achievements mentioned above. The Ming rebuilding of the Great Wall of China and the development of the canal system, the ironworks, and the imperial navy were for state purposes, because the bureaucracy had advised the emperor that they were necessary. But just as these enterprises could be started, so also could they be neglected. The canals were permitted to decay, the army was periodically starved of new equipment, the astronomical clocks (built c. 1090) were disregarded, the ironworks gradually fell into desuetude. These were not the only disincentives to economic growth. Printing was restricted to scholarly works and not employed for the widespread dissemination of practical knowledge, much less for social criticism. The use of paper currency was discontinued. Chinese cities were never allowed the autonomy of those in the West; there were no Chinese burghers, with all that that term implied; when the location of the emperor’s court was altered, the capital city had to move as well. Yet without official encouragement, merchants and other entrepreneurs could not thrive; and even those who did acquire wealth tended to spend it on land and education, rather than investing in protoindustrial development. Similarly, the banning of overseas trade and fishing took away another potential stimulus to sustained economic expansion; such foreign trade as did occur with the Portuguese and Dutch in the following centuries was in luxury goods and (although there were doubtless many evasions) controlled by officials.
In consequence, Ming China was a much less vigorous and enterprising land than it had been under the Sung dynasty four centuries earlier. There were improved agricultural techniques in the Ming period, to be sure, but after a while even this more intensive farming and the use of marginal lands found it harder to keep pace with the burgeoning population; and the latter was only to be checked by those Malthusian instruments of plague, floods, and war, all of which were very difficult to handle. Even the replacement of the Mings by the more vigorous Manchus after 1644 could not halt the steady relative decline.
One final detail can summarize this tale. In 1736 – just as Abraham Darby’s ironworks at Coalbrookdale were beginning to boom – the blast furnaces and coke ovens of Honan and Hopei were abandoned entirely. They had been great before the Conqueror had landed at Hastings. Now they would not resume production until the twentieth century.
