Civilization: The West and the Rest Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Niall Ferguson
Tags: General History
It had taken the founder of the Ming dynasty more than twenty years to build the wall around his capital and it extended for as many miles, with gates so large that a single one could house 3,000 soldiers. And it was built to last. Much of it still stands today, whereas scarcely anything remains of London’s medieval wall.
By fifteenth-century standards, Ming China was a relatively pleasant place to live. The rigidly feudal order established at the start of the Ming era was being loosened by burgeoning internal trade. 5 The visitor to Suzhou today can still see the architectural fruits of that prosperity in the shady canals and elegant walkways of the old town centre. Urban life in England was very different. The Black Death – the bubonic plague caused by the flea-borne bacterium
Yersinia pestis
, which reached England in 1349 – had reduced London’s population to around 40,000, less than a tenth the size of Nanjing’s. Besides the plague, typhus, dysentery and smallpox were also rife. And, even in the absence of epidemics, poor sanitation made London a death-trap. Without any kind of sewage system, the streets stank to high heaven, whereas human excrement was systematically collected in Chinese cities and used as fertilizer in outlying paddy fields. In the days when Dick Whittington was lord mayor – four times between 1397 and his death in 1423 – the streets of London were paved with something altogether less appealing than gold.
Schoolchildren used to be brought up to think of Henry V as one of the heroic figures of English history, the antithesis of his predecessor but one, the effete Richard II. Sad to relate, their kingdom was very far from the ‘sceptr’d isle’ of Shakespeare’s
Richard II
– more of a septic isle. The playwright fondly called it ‘this other Eden,demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection …’ But English life expectancy at birth was on average a miserable thirty-seven years between 1540 and 1800; the figure for London was in the twenties. Roughly one in five English children died in the first year of life; in London the figure was nearly one in three. Henry V himself became king at the age of twenty-six and was dead from dysentery at the age of thirty-five – a reminder that most history until relatively recently was made by quite young, short-lived people.
Violence was endemic. War with France was almost a permanent condition. When not fighting the French, the English fought the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. When not fighting the Celts, they fought one another in a succession of wars for control of the crown. Henry V’s father had come to the throne by violence; his son Henry VI lost it by similar means with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, which saw four kings lose their thrones and forty adult peers die in battle or on the scaffold. Between 1330 and 1479 a quarter of deaths in the English aristocracy were violent. And ordinary homicide was commonplace. Data from the fourteenth century suggest an annual homicide rate in Oxford of above a hundred per 100,000 inhabitants. London was somewhat safer with a rate of around fifty per 100,000. The worst murder rates in the world today are in South Africa (sixty-nine per 100,000), Colombia (fifty-three) and Jamaica (thirty-four). Even Detroit at its worst in the 1980s had a rate of just forty-five per 100,000. 6
English life in this period truly was, as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes later observed (of what he called ‘the state of nature’), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Even for a prosperous Norfolk family like the Pastons, there could be little security. John Paston’s wife Margaret was ejected bodily from her lodgings when she sought to uphold the family’s rightful claim to the manor of Gresham, occupied by the previous owner’s heir. Caister Castle had been left to the Pastons by Sir John Fastolf, but it was besieged by the Duke of Norfolk shortly after
By fifteenth-century standards, Ming China was a relatively pleasant place to live. The rigidly feudal order established at the start of the Ming era was being loosened by burgeoning internal trade. 5 The visitor to Suzhou today can still see the architectural fruits of that prosperity in the shady canals and elegant walkways of the old town centre. Urban life in England was very different. The Black Death – the bubonic plague caused by the flea-borne bacterium
Yersinia pestis
, which reached England in 1349 – had reduced London’s population to around 40,000, less than a tenth the size of Nanjing’s. Besides the plague, typhus, dysentery and smallpox were also rife. And, even in the absence of epidemics, poor sanitation made London a death-trap. Without any kind of sewage system, the streets stank to high heaven, whereas human excrement was systematically collected in Chinese cities and used as fertilizer in outlying paddy fields. In the days when Dick Whittington was lord mayor – four times between 1397 and his death in 1423 – the streets of London were paved with something altogether less appealing than gold.
Schoolchildren used to be brought up to think of Henry V as one of the heroic figures of English history, the antithesis of his predecessor but one, the effete Richard II. Sad to relate, their kingdom was very far from the ‘sceptr’d isle’ of Shakespeare’s
Richard II
– more of a septic isle. The playwright fondly called it ‘this other Eden,demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection …’ But English life expectancy at birth was on average a miserable thirty-seven years between 1540 and 1800; the figure for London was in the twenties. Roughly one in five English children died in the first year of life; in London the figure was nearly one in three. Henry V himself became king at the age of twenty-six and was dead from dysentery at the age of thirty-five – a reminder that most history until relatively recently was made by quite young, short-lived people.
Violence was endemic. War with France was almost a permanent condition. When not fighting the French, the English fought the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. When not fighting the Celts, they fought one another in a succession of wars for control of the crown. Henry V’s father had come to the throne by violence; his son Henry VI lost it by similar means with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, which saw four kings lose their thrones and forty adult peers die in battle or on the scaffold. Between 1330 and 1479 a quarter of deaths in the English aristocracy were violent. And ordinary homicide was commonplace. Data from the fourteenth century suggest an annual homicide rate in Oxford of above a hundred per 100,000 inhabitants. London was somewhat safer with a rate of around fifty per 100,000. The worst murder rates in the world today are in South Africa (sixty-nine per 100,000), Colombia (fifty-three) and Jamaica (thirty-four). Even Detroit at its worst in the 1980s had a rate of just forty-five per 100,000. 6
English life in this period truly was, as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes later observed (of what he called ‘the state of nature’), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Even for a prosperous Norfolk family like the Pastons, there could be little security. John Paston’s wife Margaret was ejected bodily from her lodgings when she sought to uphold the family’s rightful claim to the manor of Gresham, occupied by the previous owner’s heir. Caister Castle had been left to the Pastons by Sir John Fastolf, but it was besieged by the Duke of Norfolk shortly after