The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [86]
Yet the Chinese people were bursting to trade with the world. In the 1500s Portuguese carracks took silk from Macao to Japan in exchange for silver. In the 1600s junks that had slipped unofficially from the coast of Fujian arrived in Manila laden with silk, cotton, porcelain, gunpowder, mercury, copper, walnuts and tea. There they met a large Spanish galleon stuffed with silver from the Potosi mine in Peru, which had crossed the Pacific from Acapulco. It is no accident that when the Ming dynasty fell, weakened by the silver drought caused by the loss of three Acapulco galleons in three years, it fell to Manchu traders who financed their conquest by the profitable exchange of goods with Korea and Japan.
Part of the problem was that a Chinese artisan could not flee to work under a more tolerant ruler or in a more congenial republic, as Europeans did routinely. Because of its peninsulas and mountain ranges, Europe is much harder to unify than China: ask Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon or Hitler. For a while the Romans achieved a sort of European unity, and the result was just like the Ming: stagnation and bureaucracy. Under the emperor Diocletian (just as under the emperor Yong-Le) ‘tax collectors began to outnumber taxpayers’, said Lactantius, and ‘a multitude of governors and hordes of directors oppressed every region – almost every city; and to these were added countless collectors and secretaries and assistants to the directors.’
Since then, Europe had been fragmented among warring states. So Europeans took to their heels all the time, sometimes fleeing from cruel rulers as French Huguenots and Spanish Jews did, sometimes drawn to ambitious ones, sometimes seeking republican freedom. The Italian Christopher Columbus gave up on Portugal and tried Spain instead. The Sforzas lured engineers to Milan; Louis XI enticed Italian silk makers to set up in Lyon; Johann Gutenberg moved from Mainz to Strasbourg in search of investors; Gustavus Adolphus started the Swedish iron industry by bringing in a Walloon named Louis de Geer; John Kay, English inventor of the flying shuttle, was paid 2,500 livres a year by the French authorities to tour Normandy demonstrating his machine. In one especially bizarre case of industrial poaching in the early 1700s, Augustus the Strong of Saxony got a monopoly on the manufacture of porcelain by the cunning ploy of imprisoning a passing charlatan who claimed to be able to make gold – lest any other state get him. The man in question, Johann Friedrich Bottger, made no gold, but perfected a colleague’s technique for making fine porcelain in the hope that this would win him back his freedom. So Augustus locked him even more securely in a hilltop castle at Meissen and put him to work churning out teapots and vases. In short, competition was a grand incentive to European industrialisation, and a brake on bureaucratic suffocation, at the national as well as the corporate level.
Repeal the corn laws again
The greatest beneficiaries of European political fragmentation were the Dutch. By 1670, uncommanded by emperors and even fragmented among themselves, the Dutch so dominated European international trade that their merchant marine was bigger than that of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal – combined. They brought grain from the Baltic, herrings from the North Sea, whale blubber