Industrial Revolutions Need Mission Driven Government
Industrial Revolutions Need Mission Driven Government
The Industrial Revolution began not in China but Britain. Understanding why teaches us a lot about the virtues of mission-driven government.
A big argument in my book, the Inequality of Wealth, is that if we’re to roll-back inequality, we need a better supply of better paid jobs. That was a big conclusion from the research we did on social mobility back in the Cabinet Office.
But how we build that kind of economy? By rolling back the state? Or by building creative states; what Keir Starmer has christened ‘mission-driven government’?
As it happens is a lot that economic history can teach us about this.
Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that what we might call mission-driven government is exactly why the industrial revolution began not in China, which was for millennia an empire both far away and far ahead - but in Britain, where we had something different: a government deep in conflict with the neighbours, and blessed with an abundance of both cheap money - and cheap coal. Warfare and windfalls, mobilised by creative states, were simply more important than ‘heroic individualism’.
This was not the story that many of us were taught at school. Indeed, as the Berlin Wall tumbled down, there was a resurgence of an old idea; that the triumph of the West owed most, in David Landes’ evocative phrase, to ‘what lay inside - culture, values, initiative’; our inheritance from the Greek traditions or democracy and Christianity which through its insistence on the soul and our personal relationship with God, encouraged a legendary individualism;
‘If we learn anything from the history of economic development’ declared Prof Landes ‘it is that culture makes all the difference.’
The FT’s John Murdoch-Jones recently added a bit of fresh life to the argument, but not with enough force to undermine a succession of breakthroughs in historical research which now reveal that it was not the ‘culture’ of heroic individualism but the invention of creative states that powered progress; states that mobilised the forces of both intellectual discovery and diffusion. And we can see this nice and clearly with a contrast of progress in both East and West down the last two millennia.
The question of why the industrial revolution did not start in China has perplexed historians for a long time.
Take a stroll through Room 33 of the British Museum, and there is a rather nice illustration of just how far ahead the empire was for thousands of years. In Room 33 sits the magnificent bronze bell featured in the BBC series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, the size of an elliptical beer barrel intricately etched with flying geese and topped with a magnificent pair of dragons.
Originally part of a set, it was played by an orchestra in a musical tradition that epitomised a Confucian ideal of harmony and order. It was cast some 2,500 years ago; that is about 1,500 years earlier than anything in Europe. And it was not just an instrument of music but a icon of philosophy 500 years older than Christianity.
This progress flowered from a rich and prosperous past.
While the British were still building iron age hill forts two and half thousand years ago, the Market Laws of the state of Qi had already specified the precise size of a marketplace, the need for walls, good sized gates and shops arranged in orderly rows by dearness of the wares and advised;
‘a kingdom of middling size profits from commerce, and a small kingdom utterly depends on it. The market is the source of the hundred goods and the measure of the resources at the ruler’s disposal.’
Two centuries before Christ, Lü Buwei’s blueprint for Qin imperial rule (291–235 BC) had already zeroed in on some fundamentals of market economies like the notion that taxes should be cut at harvest-time to encourage trade:
“In this month’ he wrote, ‘adjust the levies at the border crossings and marketplaces to induce merchants and traders to come hither bearing goods and valuables, and in so doing benefit the people’s livelihood.”
Confucians were not wild materialists but they did agree that wise rulers were guardians of smooth markets. The good ruler, wrote Xunzi (born c.310BC);
‘establishes fair rates of taxation, regulates the people’s livelihood, and disposes the myriad goods, thereby providing nourishment to all of his subjects.’
From the 3rd century AD, the father of Chinese historiography, Sima Qian was describing private entrepreneurs in industries as diverse as breweries, foodstuffs, leather, silk, dyeworks, lumberyards, potteries, bronze foundries, carriage-making, and lacquer wares.
Over the next 1,500 years, not one but two Chinese economic revolutions helped create the largest economy on earth.
During the Tang-Song transition (roughly speaking that phase in English history between King Offa of Mercia and Henry II, 755-1127) private ownership of land becomes the norm and markets, like the famous Chengdu silkworm fairs became famous, while under the Song (960-1279AD), new industries like silk, paper, lacquer, porcelain, coal and copper, iron, shipbuilding, salt processing and printing began to boom.
These wide markets allowed different parts of China to specialise in cotton and silk handicrafts, rice and cash cropping in the lower Yangzi for example, or sugar cane, fruits, silks, cotton, ironware and oils in the Pearl river delta, fishing and salt in the hinterland of Tianjin or cash crops like cotton and tobacco in Shandong.
By the 8th century the Tang capital of Chang’an (modern day Xian) was the greatest city on earth, home to 2 million people.
By 1100, the frontiers of the Empire encircled 100 million people, while from its foundries flowed 125,000 tons of iron and steel a year, exported across South East Asia.
When Marco Polo left Quanzhou for home in 1292, it had become one of the greatest ports in the world;
“[F]or one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere destined for Christendom there comes a hundred such to this haven [Quanzhou]; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.”
Fifty years later, the Muslim traveller, Ibn Battuta recorded Chinese ships dominated the sea routes from India to China. These junks, Battuta tells us were equipped with ‘four decks with rooms, cabins, and saloons for merchants’ and ‘carried a complement of a thousand men.’
But the second revolution was greater still. Under the Ming dynasty, derided by historian David Landes, as ‘uncurious’, China’s population tripled between 1680 and 1830 in a shift ‘virtually unprecedented in the history of the pre-modern world’.
Aristocratic power was effectively dissolved, bonded labour disappeared, private enterprise flourished, and rural industry boomed as mass markets traded tea, sugar, rice wine, porcelain, silk, cotton, books, lacquer wares and furniture.
By 1600, the cotton making boom meant that almost all commoners could wear winter garments made from cotton rather than hemp. The great kilns across Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, and Jiangxi employed hundreds of artisans, producing not only for home but abroad.
Over the course of the 16th century, China’s spice trade with Southeast Asia doubled and the country became the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods; tea, silk and ceramics.
By the 17th Century, towns began to specialise in cash cropping in cotton and silk rather than merely rice, while the mighty Dutch East India Company was handling some 6 million pieces of Chinese porcelain, world-renowned for its famous ‘Mohammedan blue’ shade but a mere 16% of China’s ceramic exports.
The myth of ‘laggardly East’
The sheer scale of this development was of course, unknown to most Western thinkers, who in their ignorance, helped popularise the myth of a laggardly East hobbled by tyranny, a notion which is very old, very powerful, and very wrong. The idea was born with the Greeks, developed by the French, enshrined by the Germans and politicised by the Anglo-Americans in a line that stretches from Aeschylus to Ronald Reagan.
When Aristotle thought about the east, he of course thought not about the Chinese but the Persians, who he said had a ‘faulty constitution’ aimed exclusively at the ‘rulers' own advantage,’ in contrast to the ‘absolute justice’ of the Greek city which was ‘a partnership of free men’.
Two thousand years later, Jean Bodin advanced a similar case that Eastern political despotism was rooted in an economic tyranny. Reflecting on the Ottoman Empire, he sketched a difference between what he called totalitarian monarchie seigneuriale, where the ruler was a master over slaves, and a monarchie royale where there were limits to royal authority, divine and natural laws, and crucially property rights.
Montesquieu then redrew the map of this tyrannical ‘East’ beyond the Ottomans to include the Chinese; “missionaries speak of the vast empire of China as of an admirable government’ he wrote in his Persian Letters, ‘in whose principle intermingle fear, honour, and virtue….But I cannot conceive what this honour can be, among a people who act only through fear of being bastinaded”.
Warming to the theme, Adam Smith popularised the idea that these missing property rights explained the backward country: China, he wrote, was a land that
‘seems to have been long stationary…A country which neglects or despises foreign commerce’ where ‘the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any, but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time by the inferior mandarines’.
‘In the neighbourhood of Canton the poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe…Any carrion, the carcass of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries’.
This notion of an Asiatic "mode of production” was developed by Karl Marx, Max Weber and more recently, Karl Wittfogel who argued that China’s economy owed much to the logic for a strong, centralised authority required to build mass irrigation systems. Max Weber agreed;
‘The crucial factor which made Near Eastern development so different’ Weber wrote, ‘was the need for irrigation systems’ which required unified bureaucracy - bureaucracy which relied on ‘the subjugation of the individual.’
Eastern realities
In fact, what historians now see is that China was a textbook case of ‘Smith-ian growth,’ blessed with specialisation and a wide division of labour in wide integrated markets with a well functioning price system. Richard van Glahn explained it like this:
‘The economy of 18th century China was remarkably free compared to contemporary Europe’.
There were no tariffs on foreign trade; taxes on domestic trade were very low and there were no urban guilds regulating who could work where. If anything, the freedom in markets for land, labour and capital created a sort of popular capitalism.
The peasant could adjust land holdings, by renting in and out; they could adjust labour by hiring in and out, and the they could seek loans - or credit - to cover capital needs. As Roy Wong concluded;
‘Smithian dynamics were responsible for much of the economic growth that did take place’ not least because ‘Trade was never as exhaustively exploited by Chinese rulers as it was by European ones’.
Joel Mokyr reinforced the point:
‘Using the traditional definitions of what “good” institutions do namely underpinning and supporting well-functioning markets, it is hard to see much daylight between China and the most advanced parts of Europe’.
These truths helped explain how between 1700 and 1820, overall growth in China’s economy outpaced Europe. Indeed, early-eighteenth century China may have produced around one-third of global manufacturing output compared with less than one-quarter in Europe. In terms of allocative efficiency, as late as 1750, China did not lag significantly behind Europe. And by the early 19th century, the Celestial Empire made up an extraordinary 1/3 of the global economy at which point manufacturing employed over half of male workers in Jiangnan while across the Yangtze Delta around two-fifths of the population lived in towns.
If we compare say, south east England and south East China, the region around modern day Shanghai called Jiangnan, south of the mighty Yangtse river, we can see just how institutions in both Britain and China were well developed.
China’s great internal market had been well connected for centuries. North and south transport flowed well since the opening of the Grand Canal in the 5th century BC, and the state had built bridges and roads for grain tax purposes linking North China and the Yellow River to the Yangzsi delta - the granary of the empire - since medieval times.
Foreign trade too had boomed for centuries. Under the Tang, huge markets took shape in Chang’an and Luoyang where the ‘southern market’ was a base for perhaps 3,000 shops and 400 inns. Trade with the world of the Indian Ocean and south east Asia was rich in Indian pepper, Arabian frankincense, ivory, camphor, and medicinal plants.
Nor were robust property rights, the exclusive preserve of the West. By the Tang Dynasty (which unfolded during the English Dark Ages), private land ownership and tenancy, with legally binding contracts, were already pervasive.
Professor Peter Nolan notes that under the Song Dynasty;
‘not only was a signed contract necessary for renting a plot of land, even borrowing a draft ox required a contract’.
The historian JK Fairbank underlines the point:
‘By pre-modern standards the Chinese legal codes were monuments of their kind’.
Rules were not ‘celestial’ in inspiration as they were in Europe, but divined from daily life and the moral character of the universe. Punishments were ordered by a judicial hierarchy that reached from the Emperor to the county magistrate but private disputes were resolved through a wealth of customary and informal channels.
These channels, argues historian Joel Mokyr, ‘were strong enough to create a well-functioning market economy’ as local officials proved up to the task of resolving property disputes over water, land tenure, and contracts even in the absence of a formal civil code. If anything, China’s free market markets for basic factors of production were arguably more free than they were in England, as R Bin Wong writes;.
‘Between the Tang and the Song dynasties the state gave up attempting to control land distribution and market affairs directly.’
Land ownership was ‘thoroughly privatised’ by the Song era while China’s labour market was free albeit stickier than in England; ties to the land persisted due to portable inheritance and a lack of both enclosure and serfdom and while during the 18th century, hired labourers became legally independent, urban guilds only ever acquired limited power. Nevertheless, levels of education were comparatively high. Literacy rates in 19th century Qing China were as high as 30-45%.
As in England, within these free markets a host of corporate forms took shape, but unlike England, monopolies were comparatively few.
Originally concentrated in salt and later tea, by the time of the Qing dynasty (1636-1912) monopolies only infested the salt and copper trade. In the early days, Buddhist monastries became great centres of commercial activity - much as they did in Europe and like the mighty Chatmah dockyards of the East India Company, vast state workshops in China were huge employers; the Kaifeng state armoury employed some 13,000 people sweltering away making swords, armour, lances, saws, hammers, stoves, nails, boilers, locks, lamps, and needles.
Meanwhile, the silk business created huge chains of contractors connecting the cottage industry of the country side to the markets. And like the cotton industry of early Lancashire, there was a very strong persistence of rural organisation not least because from an early stage, households were required to pay a fraction of their taxes in cloth. Around Suzhou for instance, cotton calendaring employed some 10,000 workers overseen by 300 contractors.
In this gigantic marketplace science and technology had steadily transformed the nation; from the Tang era, when water and ox powered mills for grinding corn and pressing oil multiplied, to the Fuzhou ships of the Song era, to stern-post rudders, mariner’s compasses, canal lock-gates, water powered double-acting piston bellows in blast furnaces, porcelain, movable type, textile machinery, gunpowder and tubular iron weapons, deep mining, and deep drilling technology (for brine and natural gas).
In a remarkable study, Russian historians Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev pinpoint this long history of invention. Before 1450, Europe was certainly the laggard, but even by 1600 Europeans may have been ahead in building machines, clocks, screws, levers but Europe still sought from China the secrets of silk making, textile weaving, porcelain and tea production.
The West pulls ahead
So, given this story how do we answer the ‘Needham question’, named after Harvard’s extraordinary historian of Chinese science? Why, if China had shown such incredible dynamism up to 1600 CE, did modern science - and modern progress - not arise in China?
The answer is very little to do with some ‘culture of heroic individualism’ and owes almost everything to the combination of windfalls and warfare that created in Britain the conditions for a creative state to help spark the Industrial Revolution.
The argument for the West’s ‘superior culture’ has of course been a long time in the making. Not only was the glorious West, goes the argument, blessed with hard and fast property rights, it boasted hard-working Protestants too.
In his masterpiece, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that Western leadership owed everything to the cult of hard work that was so;
‘characteristic of many of the most important churches and sects in the history of Protestantism. Especially Calvinism'.
For the Puritans, Sir William Petty observed Labour and Industry 'is their duty towards God'. A place in heaven was best secured not by chanting in the monastery but by profiting in the marketplace. The summum bonum of this ethic argued Weber, entailed earning more and enjoying less. It was the lesson drummed in the young Benjamin Franklin whose father taught him;
'seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings'.
Success was not simply permitted but encouraged. It was the sign of one's ‘calling' to heaven; both a badge that one was 'chosen' and a moral instruction to accumulate. As Calvin himself put it;
‘If God shows you a way in which you may lawfully get more...if you refuse this and choose the less gainful way...you refuse to be God’s steward and to accept his gifts’.
Calvinism argued Richard Tawney, had become a great dissolver of medieval notions of a social order where everyone knew their place, accepted it, and prayed merely for 'neither riches nor poverty, but enough for my sustenance'.
More practically, Calvinism relaxed the moral veto on usury. The profits of trade and finance becameas virtuous as the labourers' wages or the landlords’ rents.
'What reason is there,' wrote Calvin 'why the income from business should not be larger than that from landowning? Whence do the merchant profits come, except from his own diligence and industry?’.
Warfare and windfalls
I do not think culture is irrelevant.
But much more important, in my book is the simple fact that states like Britain and Holland held two distinguishing characteristics that in turn were key to triggering the industrial revolution;
Europe was cockpit of violence and
It was ten times closer to the silver mines of the New World from which creative European politicians burgled a lottery win of silver, that allowed them to mobilise capital on unprecedented scale into defence spending, which in turn triggered a military revolution that galvanised a transformation of science and industry.
It was this combination of abundant capital and incessant conflict that gave birth to the creative state and the European’s brief moment of advantage between 1750 and 2030 when once again China becomes the largest economy on earth.
Let’s take a look at the sheer contrast between capital markets in South East China and north west Europe.
In China, capital was very expensive. China’s annualised interest rates declined from roughly 30 percent in the seventeenth century to 20 percent by the nineteenth century, and perhaps as low as 10–12 percent in 18th century Jiangsin
By contrast, interest rates in England less than a third of this level because quite simply early modern Europe had won the lottery of geography.
Why so?
Because Europe had the good fortune to lie ten times closer to the New World than did China. Crossing the Pacific would have required Chinese seamen to navigate 5,000 miles of ocean, sailing with the Kuro Sion drift from Japan to reach Northern California.
By contrast, the Vikings sailing via the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland only had to cross 500 miles of open sea. The ‘Colombian Exchange’ which commenced after Colombus made landfall and the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English moved in, entailed the burglary of an bounty of silver - and slave grown sugar with which, as historian Andre Frank put it, Europeans could ‘buy a ticket on the Asian train’ and ‘muscle in on and benefit from Asian production, markets, trade’.
Europe was already blessed with plenty of silver. The German silver mining boom of the mid-16th century had multiplied Europe’s silver output by five fold. At its peak in the 1540s, output totalled around 52-55 tons a year.
But by the 1560s, a similar quantity was arriving on the quaysides of Europe from the New World, and in a decade New World silver matched the output of European mines.
When the great mines of Potosi and Zacatecas in Colombia and Mexico came online, the river of silver became a flood.
In the years up to 1800, 86,000 tons of silver and 1,700 tons of gold - equivalent to 70-80-% of the world silver stock and 40% of the worlds’ gold stock were stolen from South America.
By 1810, it totalled more than 3,400 billion coins, which Europeans used to finance their Eastern trade to India and China;
In fact, foreign silver made up 90-93% of the European cargo values to China, oiling the wheels of the mighty firms like the East India Company.
This, argues Eric Jones, was an ‘unprecedented ecological windfall’ in silver and the profits of slavery. And as Professor Ian Morris argues, it produced challenges and questions that helped provoke the science of Newton and Leibniz, which in turn helped entrepreneurs unlock the power of fossil fuels which then became the real motor of industrial progress. It was a movement, in which England was well-placed to profit, for as E A Wrigley and Ken Pomeranz illuminate, for more important than England’s culture was its coal and colonialism that allowed the country to tap scare supplies of both land and energy in ‘an epochal turn to fossil fuels’ and ‘the fruits of overseas exploitation.’
It was this capital that Britain’s new creative state mobilised in conflict. Which was a contrast to China. Aside from the occasional revolution, China had enjoyed centuries of peace.
From the Zhou Bronze Age, when city states gave way to the Qin Empire, great metropolis flourished, trade multiplied, markets boomed safe behind giant gates walls, and rules proliferated.
As the Warring States period gave way to the Tang-Song transition, war-lords were forced to bow the knee to the Emperor, and village life and autonomy flourished.
Despite the occasional regime changes that punctuated Chinese dynastic history - and the centuries of intermittent warfare with the nomads of the far Western steppe, China was far less consumed by war than Europe, and indeed the Qing conquests rather sealed this border in what Peter Perdue has quite rightly labelled China’s great march West.
By contrast, the failure of any one great leader to put the West back together after the fall of Rome and Byzantium, left a continent of madhouse brothers, a frenzy of fighting countries, duchies, noble houses, classes and churches. Napoleon came closest, assembling the largest territory for centuries. But his achievement was modest compared to China’s emperors - and of course, momentary. And so:
Between 1550 and 1713, Europe’s major powers spent between 80-100% of the time at war with each other and few were more fractious than the British.
For more than 125 years, between 1688 and 1815, Britain was in a state of more or less constant conflict.
Indeed, Britain was involved in major military operations for eighty-seven of the years between 1688 and 1815, declaring war against foreign powers no fewer than eight times.
It was this almost perpetual warfare required the creation of the what has now been christened the ‘fiscal-military state’. By the second half of the 18th century, Britain was spending an extraordinary 9% of GDP on warfare - 16% if we include repayment on earlier war debts - and held spending at around those levels (between seven and eleven per cent of the economy) until 1800.
Between 1750 and 1850, war costs consumed as much as three quarters of all government expenditure; the spending for instance, of around £1 billion between 1793 and 1815 - compared to the £20 million of accumulated capital in the canal system and £0.4 million spent on fixed capital in the entire cotton industry in 1809-10 which totalled less than 1% of the military spend that year.
That is some five times the level of defence spending today. It was far higher than military spending in Spain, and by way of contrast, British per capita spending on its army and navy was roughly ten times the scale of China's. Substantially debt financed, Britain national debt in 1821 per capita was eleven times the earnings of the average Chinese.
Masterminding this colossal investment were Britain’s new commercial classes. In the wake of the English Civil War, the nation’s merchants literally acquired control of the state. The Puritan Parliamentary leaders were united in both faith and fortune; their early years together were spent building the New World colony companies like the Virginia Company and the Provident Island company, partly for profit but partly as bases from which to prosecute their holy war on Catholic Spain.
With the English Revolution, these traders achieved what their Dutch cousins had failed to win; the power to run the country and so began the business of building a worldwide Protestant empire (beginning in Jamaica), served by an English fleet protected by an English navy financed by the largest tax take in the world. From 1649, the Commons Committee of the Navy was dominated by the radical Parliamentarians which created a permanent navy funded by higher customs rates.84
‘The government of the Commonwealth and that of its trade’, wrote the Venetian ambassador to Cromwell’s court, ‘[is] being exercised by the same individuals.’
In June 1651, he added that;
‘owing to the care of Parliament, [the English] have 80 men of war, which are certainly the finest fleet now afloat... they can increase their numbers with incredible facility to 150, 200 or more sail’.
By the time of the Restoration, the English commercial classes were so strong that under William III, who they helped put on the throne, they summited their ascent, and assembled the first modern tax system to finance the largest naval fleet on earth.
Before the Glorious Revolution, royal spending was perhaps £2 million per annum. Between 1689 and 1702 it spiralled to £72 million as the Nine Years’ War – the first of seven major Anglo-French wars between 1689 and 1815 – gathered pace. To pay for this, England’s leaders imported wholesale the tried-and-tested techniques of Dutch high finance; short-term loans gave way to long-term debt backed by the statutory pledges of the king, Lords and Commons and a tax system capable of collecting taxes with certainty to pay the interest.
‘Let any gentleman but look into the statute books lying upon our table,’ railed William Pulteney, pointing, ‘[and] he will there see to what a vast bulk, to what a number of volumes, our statutes relating to taxes have swelled since the Revolution’.
Tax revenue doubled between 1688 and 1697, and as the author Jonathan Swift wrote,
‘Few of this generation can remember anything but war and taxes... ’tis certain we are the most undone people in Europe.’
The Excise man and the Customs official became ubiquitous up and down the country enforcing a multiplicity of money-raising duties. By the 1760's there were 20,000 officials working for the central government; 80% of them were tax officers.
The system gave Britain the decisive edge in defeating France and electrified the nation’s industry in the epicentre of the industrial revolution in Birmingham.
‘Growing state demand’ writes Princeton historian Satia Priya, ‘had turned greater Birmingham into a government factory by the end of the century. The entire Midlands metallurgical world became invested in mass production for war’.
Four great ‘factory districts’ soon emerged across the country turbo-charged by the twenty-three year French fight which poured hundreds of millions of pounds into the economy.
A quarter of all iron production went for armaments, ballast for the fleet or gun metal for cities like Birmingham, which churned out an incredible 8 million weapons between 1804 and 1815, employing as it happens, generations of my family.
The navy doubled in size, multiplying demand for guns, uniforms, boots, sails for ships and balls for the cannon, and the merchant navy it helped guard was even bigger.
By 1810, the merchant navy boasted 12,198 vessels, sixteen times the size of the Royal Navy flushing new business through the country's shipyards.
Thus, when Sir George Head set out on a tour of the ‘Factory Districts’ in the year after Waterloo, he discovered a revolution in progress, including the great arsenals of war like the great foundries of Wibsey Low Moor, 'massive piles of brickwork' with huge furnaces boiling 'a glowing lake of fire', churning out cannon balls, one of hundreds of new iron-works.
Now, it is true that animating this progress was not simply armaments but ideas. And we cannot deny a contrast between European intellectual pluralism and the strength of Chinese orthodoxy.
Some argue this dates back to the Greeks; ‘where Greek inquirers strove to make a reputation for themselves as new style Masters of the Truth’ writes Nathan Sivin, ‘most Chinese Possessors of the Way had a very different program, namely to advise and guide rulers’. Greeks - ‘had to make a name for themselves and aggressive innovation was a way to do it’ and tended to focus on nature and elements; Chinese focused on tao, ch’i and yin-yang and the five phases, a synthesis in which heaven, earth, society and the human body all interacted to form a single resonant universe’.
By contrast, European intellectual life was riven with a triple division not present in China; between states, between state and church and within Christianity itself, and the long process of resolution bitterly contested in the wars of religion settled a decision to tolerate a degree of difference creating conditions of diversity in which it was arguably easier for science to thrive.
China's experience was different. The early Han state incorporated elites into a power structure that put peasants under the Emperor’s direct control and in the wake of the brutal An Lushan rebellion (755 AD) which cost the lives of perhaps 13 million people, China's state-craft constantly sought ideological unity most successfully through the system of civil service exams.
‘In China’ noted David Hume, ‘The authority of any teacher, such as Confucius, was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to the other. None had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion. And posterity was not bold enough to dispute what had been universally received by their ancestors”.
It was group-think on an imperial scale. The 10th century destruction of China’s aristocracy destroyed independent patronage. Elites were those that passed their civil service exams. And those that did not were in the process of trying, deeply immersed in Confucian culture acquired during their preparations.
To succeed, aspiring mandarins spent years of life ensnared in a Confucian curriculum of histories, commentaries and classics, that European leaders did not attempt until they took new positions as head of the Protestant state churches. As R Bin Wong notes, ‘There is no early modern European government equivalent to the late Chinese state’s efforts at dictating moral and intellectual orthodoxy’ like the Emperor’s edicts rich in advice on working the land, respecting social hierarchy and paying taxes.
But we mustn’t overdo the contrast.
Modern Europe was not some ‘free-thinking’ Elysium;
Europe was executing witches as late as 1782
The last of the Holy Inquisition’s sanctified murders was as late as 1826
Isaac Newton himself was forced to hide his true beliefs for fear of losing his place at Cambridge.
English life was not an intellectual free for all. The early days of Cromwell's free-wheeling republic had soon given way to Puritan zeal and the return of the Stuarts brought above all, a very Hobbesian concern for social order. The Clarendon Code - the Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle Act (1662), the Five Mile Act (1665), and the Test Acts (1661, 1663) - introduced a host of constraints on anyone not judged a proper Anglican.
Yet reason flourished as faith retreated and with the Glorious Revolution of 1689 came a decisive change of climate; a fear of Catholicism, France, Rome sparked a constitutional settlement that enshrined a liberalism with limits.
The stage, the newspaper, parks, markets, the Royal Exchange, the bustling wharves of the Thames, and above all the coffee houses now became the new arena for news, gossip, scandal, ideas - and energy - providing the space and place for ideas to be weighed, surveyed and applied. Here was the fusion of a society that would remain recognizable to the Victorians more than a century later.
No longer was the Court the prime mover in the sponsorship of ideas and the very concept of the monarch’s Divine Right was slowly dismantled and supplanted with a theory of social contract set out with eloquence by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (1689).
When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he was carried from Jerusalem Chamber where he had lain in state to his grave in Westminster Abbey by the Lord Chancellor, the Dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh, and the Earls of Pembroke, Sussex and Macclesfield, ‘being Fellows of the Royal Society’.
‘What a nation’ wrote a French observer ‘that buries its scientists with its kings’.
But that is the hallmark of a creative state that believes in progress, and the ideal in the right hands is a powerful case for progressive politics.
It reminds us that down the centuries, we cannot simply encourage free markets of adventurous entrepreneurs and rely on them to make history by inventing the future. In fact, the biggest ‘lever of riches’ has been a well-organised state prepared to mobilise investment in innovation.
Once upon a time, the motive for that mobilisation was warfare. And let’s by honest, (as David Edgerton reminds us), the ‘warfare state’ has been important source of British growth for a long time.
But, today there are new motivations: fostering an economy of knowledge intensive jobs (the white heat/ Apollo mission approach to progress), and above all, the decarbonisation of our economy. We should rest assured that the lesson of history is that wisely guided, mission-driven government can be pretty good for progress.