9.

WHY ONLY
THE WEST?

If it seems surprising how quickly the Europeans managed to conquer most of the world, it may, at first sight, seem even more strange that China and the Islamic nations did not come first, or at least came along simultaneously. This is actually an important part of the story, because it demonstrates, yet again, how creative societies can commit suicide like the Roman Empire did.

Let’s take the Islamosphere first. The Islamic world was, for a long while, very successful. Just four years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Muslim armies conquered Syria, and they took Jerusalem two years after that and then Alexandria in Egypt in 641. By 1715, they had conquered the North African coast and most of Spain. This was clearly a civilization in stage two (expansion) in our aforementioned model of how civilizations develop. It didn’t hurt in this connection that the Arab countries enjoyed the advantage of a central location on the threshold between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, which was extended by their access to the Atlantic and control of the strait of Gibraltar. It is thus not surprising that they experienced a 500-years period of enlightenment lasting from the middle of the eighth century until 1258, when the Mongols took Baghdad. This age is now called the Islamic Golden Age (although, it should be said, many inhabitants of what we consider to be Islamic areas didn’t actually convert to Islam until the 10th century).

Anyway, this was impressive and affected most of the Islamic nations. Anyone who wants to experience, personally, how far the Islamic nations came, should visit the gorgeous Arabian palace Alhambra in Granada, Southern Spain today; it is arguably one of Spain’s five most beautiful buildings and certainly as spectacular as the cathedral of Seville or the best of the more recent works by Antonio Gaudí and Santiago Calatrava. And yet, Alhambra was built between 889 and 1333, which means it was completed almost 700 years ago. Most of Spain was between 929 and 1031 ruled by the Caliphate of Córdoba, during which time the Spanish, in addition to numerous architectural wonders, created the library of Al-akam II in Cordoba. This is estimated to have contained at least 400,000 volumes, which was probably more literature than you could find in all the rest of Europe put together. Islam was also very tolerant at the time, and much of their construction work was actually made by Jewish stone masons, with whom the intermingled peacefully.

In this age of Islamic enlightenment, Muslims translated all known works of the Greek philosophers, and around the year 800, Baghdad was one of the world’s most advanced cities, if not the global leader – perhaps followed by Islamic Cordoba. By this time, the citizens of Bagdad introduced joint-stock companies, palaces, hospitals and schools, and a significant section of the population was literate. It was here that Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who reigned from 786 to 809, founded the House of Wisdom, which, by the middle of the ninth century had evolved into the world’s largest library and leading research centre.

During these centuries, the Muslims made a number of breakthroughs in medicine, chemistry, philosophy, geography, astronomy, optics and mathematics. Thus, it was Muslims who invented much of the first algebra and they were also leaders in anatomy and medicine. The physician al-Razi (865-925) identified smallpox and measles and appeared to be the first doctor ever to understand that fever was a defence mechanism. We can read that, and much more besides, in a 23-volume encyclopaedia of medicine, which he wrote. He was also ahead of his time in his systematic implemention of controlled experiments.

Other examples of great Muslim thinkers include Al-Farabi, who became known as “the other thinker”, alongside Aristotle. Additionally, there was the polymath Al-Biruni, who wrote 146 technical papers, totalling approximately 13,000 pages on a wide range of topics. In the year 990 this hyperactive gentleman made an estimation of the Earth’s circumference, which only deviated from the correct figure by less than 1% - far better than the estimate Columbus made 500 years later.

During this time, Muslims had two alternative conceptions of the Qur’an; that it was dictated directly by God or, alternatively, that it was formulated by the Prophet. From 813 to 833 the empire was ruled by Al- Ma’mun, who held the latter view and enforced a doctrine called Mu’tazilism, which encouraged pursuit of logic and scientific thinking; the same view Thomas Aquinas more than 400 years later introduced to Christianity.

But then something important happened which would eventually change everything. After Al-Ma’mun’s death, the prevailing view changed into the antirational Ash’ari school, which held the basic assumption that unless science and philosophy arose directly from religious doctrine, it was dangerous, as it could undermine religion and because God controlled everything anyway. In his book from the 11th century, Tahafut al-Falasifa (which translates as “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”), the Persian theologian Al- Ghazali wrote:

“The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us (…) Take for instance any two things, such as the quenching of thirst and drinking; satisfaction of hunger and eating; burning and contact with fire; light and the rise of the Sun (…) Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not to its being necessary in itself, incapable of separation.”⁹⁶

So there could be no laws of physics because everything was controlled from above, and some interpretations of the Ash’ari school went even further and regarded man as completely remote-controlled too. When people talked, it was not really them who did it, but the Almighty who made them do it; word-forword. If they felt as if they had free will, it was because God had given them this illusion. And there were no free will or human virtue; if a person seemed good or bad, it was something that God had caused for a purpose. As the philosopher Ibn Hazm Al Andalusi wrote: “You have no merit from your own virtues, they are only gifts from the Almighty”.⁹⁷

Muslims from the Ash’ari school also opposed arts. Music was not allowed, with the possible exception of singing acapella accompanied by a hand-held, one-sided drum on special occasions such as weddings. And paintings were forbidden; especially if they depicted humans.

Rather remarkably, this school would soon be described as “the middle way”, as its views were somewhere between those of the Mu’tazilites and the Hanbalites, who exhibited an even more extreme rejection of human ability and the right to think individually.⁹⁸ People should never try to assess what was good or bad, because humans were not able to do that, they said. Rather, they should only ever look at what the Qur’an wrote about any situation and then act on that basis alone.

In addition, the movement strictly forbade any attempts to seek laws of nature, for there could be no such laws since God controlled the movements of every single particle in the universe all the time – and God was not subject to any laws. Equally, any man-made legal system was a sin. One could not, therefore, support a democratic idea of “one man, one vote”, because the correct view was “one God, one vote”, and God had already said, via the Qur’an, everything that needed to be said. The overwhelming objective of education should be to learn the Qur’an by heart; not to learn about philosophy, science and independent thinking, for all of that was blasphemy.

According to the Hanbalites, you could only enter Paradise if you blindly obeyed the imams and failed to consider anything beyond the most convenient necessity yourself. Switch off your brain and obey, and you may be saved. The theologian Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who lived 780-855, made the matter clear: “Any discussion of things that the Prophet did not discuss is a mistake.”⁹⁹

In the year 885, it was therefore made punishable by Muslims to copy books on philosophy, and the death penalty was imposed on anyone considered a supporter of Mu’tazilism. Between April 892 and March 893 all bookstore owners were forced to swear that they would not sell books on theology, dialectic and philosophy and, in 1013, the Arabs destroyed their library in Cordoba. The library in Alexandria was burned by the Caliph Omar, and just 16 years later, Sutan Mahmud of Ghazni burned the library in Rayy, Persia. It didn’t stop there: in 1151 ‘Ala ad-Din Husain tourched the library in Ghazna, in 1154 Oghur tyrks burned down the library in Nishapur, and in 1193, Bakhti Khilji took the library of Nalanda down in flames.¹⁰⁰ What did remain was the library in Bagdad, but the Mongols took care of that in 1258, where they burned it down.

No, book had a limited shelf life in the Middle East, and in the 1300s, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun described how the Arabs, after they had conquered Persia in the seventh century had taken huge amounts of books and scientific articles as booty. General Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas now requested the reigning Caliph Omar for permission to distribute them to the soldiers, but the Caliph replied:

“Throw them in the water. If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance. If it is error, God has protected us against it.”¹⁰¹

The Islamic Ottoman Empire, which ruled most (and at times almost all) of the Muslim world between 1299 and 1922, was not only opposed to books (other than the Qur’an), but also to watches, experimental science, modern philosophy and modern financial systems. For this reason, Muslims did not make much progress within disciplines such as navigation, instrument making, or timekeeping, and they also failed to embark on an industrial revolution.¹⁰²

Furthermore, they did not have a banking system like the West, partly because the Qu’ran prohibited paying interest on loans or deposits. Nor did they have the same rule of law as most Western nations and, in principle, the sultan owned all land in the nation and felt free to confiscate whatever he wanted from whoever he pleased. People did not know how much tax collectors would ask for or when they might turn up. For those reasons, Muslims with assets were reluctant to invest actively and would rather hide their wealth in jewelry or gold coins, which they brought with them. Even when Ottomans went to war, they would often carry all their weath with them; after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Western victors were amazed to find huge treasures in gold in the captured Ottoman battleships. Finally, as the Ottomans were not creative, they could only raise money for imports by selling commodities and by conquering and plundering. Their economic structure became extractive and, when they could not beat the Western armies anymore, the system went into structural decline.

After the Islamic scientific and philosophical curiosity and the desire to invest actively thus had been extinguished, there still remained a tradition of technological innovation within limited areas such medicine and optics, but eventually this also withered away, and the communities became largely static. The only schools children would go to were now so-called madrasses, where they were taught almost exclusively in grammar, religion and Sharia law, and where rote learning and conformity was paramount.

And their problems just grew and grew. The German invention of the printing press in 1450 could, in principle, have contributed to the opening of the Muslim mind, but this was also blocked, as Sultan Selim of the Ottoman Empire in 1515 decreed the death penalty for use of printers in Arabic within his empire, which stretched from, and including, present Greece and around the Mediterranean and even Egypt.

The Ottoman ban on printing was abolished in 1729 and, thereafter, a publisher named Ibrahim Müteferrika was given permission to print books, but only on the condition that all manuscripts received prior approval from a panel of three religious and three legal experts. Between the years 1729 and 1743 he managed to get just 17 books through this needle’s eye, after which he abandoned his project.¹⁰³ It should be said here, that after Müteferrika gained his initial permission for book-printing, another gentleman with the name Sa’id Efendi also received such a licence, but his production became even more meagre.¹⁰⁴ To put that into perspective, by the middle of the 16th century, so 200 years earlier, the printers in the tiny city of Venice had alone produced approximately 20,000 different titles covering everything from maps to manuals, philosophical titles, debate books and even music reviews.

At that point in time, Europe was, in any case, so far ahead that the Islamic nations couldn’t have caught up. In fact, it was by no means attempted, because once the light had been extinguished in the Ottoman Empire, there were great difficulties getting back on track. By 2002, one could read in the Arab Human Development Report of the United Nations that five times as many books were translated to Greek as into Arabic, despite the fact that the Arab population was nearly 30 times as large as the not-particularly-literary Greek population.¹⁰⁵ Similarly, many globetrotters will have noticed how comparatively rare it is to see book shops in malls or markets in the Arab world or, indeed, people reading books (for example, when on public transport), as the average Arab citizen reads just four pages of literature per year (yes, four pages; not four books), which equates to spending five minutes per year or one second a day reading books.¹⁰⁶ By comparison, the average person in the US reads 11 whole books a year.

In 2007 the Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote an article in the magazine Physics Today in which he cited some astonishing figures: Less than one percent of the Muslim population are scientists, engineers or technicians, and even though the Muslim nations has 1,800 universities, the staff from just 312 of those have ever published any material in scientific journals. And over the more than 100 years in which Nobel Prizes have been granted, only two Muslims have won such an award in a scientific discipline, he pointed out.¹⁰⁷ (In 2012, Hoodbhoy was fired from his job at Islamabad University, referring to his political opinions.)

In his book The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, the former Iraqi Trade, Finance and Defence Minister Ali Allawi mentioned, in a similar vein, that the 46 Muslim nations produced only 1.17 % of the world’s scientific literature, compared to, for example. 1.48% from Spain – Islamic figures that he found so low that he believed that today’s 1.5 billion Muslims produce less scientific innovation than 32 million Muslims did in the eighth century.¹⁰⁸

Fortunately, societies can change and today there are many different interpretations of Islam, some of which are as open, literate and modern as others are closed and antiquated. The former category can be found in countries such as Turkey, Malaysia and United Arab Emirates (UAE); the UAE state of Dubai has, under the leadership of the extremely popular Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, evolved very rapidly indeed.¹⁰⁹ Afghanistan would be seen at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The overall problem in the Ottoman Empire was that its leaders during the early parts of the Medieval Age deliberately removed the tools for creativity, after which the previously highly-creative culture eroded. This didn’t happen in Christianity, partly because a majority of Christians believe in man’s free will and because the existence of natural laws was gradually completely accepted, in particular after Aquinas. The prevailing view became that natural laws existed and should be studied. Deviations from natural laws were then called “miracles” and were rare episodes where God as an exception was shown to have intervened directly in world affairs and thereby violated the laws of nature and/or someone’s free will.

How strong a position science gained within the European population could be seen when Simon Newton was buried in 1727. He was then put on lit de parade in Westminster Abbey for four days, after which his coffin was carried to his resting place in the church of the prime minister by a group of people that included five of the country’s most prominent noblemen. This display of honour towards a writer and scientist came around the same time that the poor Ibrahim Müteferrika was struggling to get a few books published in the Muslim world.

Western Europeans also supported the separation of church and state, so that each had its own leaders, even if the state financed the church, whereas Muslims overwhelmingly supported a union of the two, as we can still see exemplified in Iran today. In addition, the desire for a clear separation of church and state in Europe was strengthened by the many European religious wars, which made many state leaders realize that they could only unite their people if they took a more neutral role in religious affairs. Here it must be said that Christianity has had its own religious tyrants and its Ash’ari-like movements, such as Millenarisme and Jehovah’s Witnesses (arguably), but they remain marginal.

So the divergent evolution of people’s ideas explains why it was not the Middle Eastern people who conquered the world. By inhibiting the creative development among their people, they made their societies static, and they did this entirely deliberately. Their killing of creativity was not akin to an accidental manslaughter but rather to premeditated murder aiming to protect the current power structures and interpretation of religion.

But what about China?

The Chinese had, as previously mentioned, been ahead of the Europeans in terms of technology, and it would certainly have looked like they prepared to take over the world around year 1400. But the first indication that something was about to go wrong for them can actually been seen from the story of one of their greatest triumphs: their aforementioned gigantic expedition with 30,000 men on 300 ships between 1405 and 1433rd. To what purpose did they make this expedition? As it turns out, it was not to set up trading posts or find new pastures. No, the expedition simply returned with a lot of gifts to the emperor, and that was pretty much it.

This stood in stark contrast to Western expeditions. In Italy, for example, it was common in the Middle Ages to distribute ownership of newly-built commercial vessels in 24 or 64 shares that were purchased by private businessmen. If the project went well, they were then paid dividends in accordance with their shareholding, and the captains were offered profit-sharing as incentive. Similar commercial structures were common throughout Europe, and it is actually very similar to what is now practised in modern private equity funds, including venture capital funds.

So China was far more centralized than Europe, and from 1424 it all went horribly wrong for the Chinese. At this time, the country had a new emperor named Zhu Gaochi, who immediately put a stop to new maritime expeditions and then burned a number of ships. When he died nine months later (perhaps killed by a captain, one wonders), his successor, Xuande, set out one last expedition between 1432 and 1433 to retrieve Chinese expatriates. Shortly after that he destroyed the sea-faring ships and, in 1500, Emperor Hongzhi issued a decree that simply forbade construction of ships with more than two masts.¹¹⁰ In 1525, these rules were made even stricter, and vessels of any kind suitable for sea transport now had to be destroyed; in 1551, it was simply made illegal to sail out to sea. In 1644, the government took the restrictions further by forbidding habitation within a coastline of approximately 1,000 km to ensure that no one ever would sail out.¹¹¹ By contrast, the tiny state of Venice off the Italian coast had, around the year 1750, more than 800 commercial vessels arriving and departing each year.

So the Chinese closed the door to the world and threw away the key. The highest aspiration of Chinese people was now a job in the state, which required rote learning of the text in a number of old books. The term “Mandarin”, which we now use for the Chinese language (and for a hotel chain and a fruit), actually comes from the Chinese expression for government employees, who were the elite of a society, and to whom conformity, tradition, harmony and continuity had become the highest ideals.

Yes, a Mandarain was what you wanted to be, and a conservative Mandarin was a good Mandarin. In order to get such a job, you needed to pass a very difficult exam, which required an excellent memory, but no creative skills. This exam remained largely unchanged from 124 BC until 1368 AD, where it was somewhat modified, after which it hardly changed at all until 1905. Creativity was simply not wanted in this society and, as historian Toby Huff has noted, “Chinese authorities neither created nor tolerated independent institutions of higher learning within which disinterested scholars could pursue their insights.”¹¹² When Europeans first met the Chinese, their extreme conservatism astounded the visitors. An example of their attitude was observed by the British statesman George Macartney, who spent the 1792-1793 trying to establish diplomatic relations with China. He brought with him 600 boxes of gifts from King George III with content that he hoped would show the Chinese how interesting the Europeans were to trade with. These included a planetarium, mathematical instruments, globes, measuring instruments, telescopes, chemical sample collections, works of art and, of course, watches. As this was presented to the local leader in the province, Macartney became astonishing by the response, he received:

“We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.”¹¹³

If by “we” he ment “the Chinese” then “never” was actually wrong, because they had once valued innovation and been excellent at it. The problem was, therefore, not that the Chinese were incapable of innovating, because they had already demonstrated this ability to the full over many centuries. The problem was that they no longer wanted to.

And they didn’t want to trade either. The only harbour where the giant Chinese empire allowed trade was Kanton (now Guangzhou), and Macartney’s request to open more harbours and to set up a warehouse in Beijing was rejected.

Societies that stagnate will sooner or later also decay, and this is exactly what happened to China. Slowly, year-after-year, China began to decline. When Marco Polo visited the country in the 1200s, he was very impressed with their deep, ingenious and partially-mechanized coal mines. This was when China was still a very creative nation. In the 1800s, however, such mines were replaced by primitive and manual excavation from the surface without any mechanization. A similar decline in their technological prowess was seen across many fields, and a parallel destruction of their culture also happened, culminating in Mao Zedong’s final attempts to wipe out the little that was left (remember the Mao shirts). In parallel with this, their economy declined until at the time of Mao, it had come from being perhaps the richest nation on Earth to being on a par with Somalia; one of the very poorest.¹¹⁴

Of course, there had been attempts to reverse the decline. Eventually the Chinese had repealed their sailing restrictions and, in 1851, a Chinese ship arrived for the first time to Europe, but this happened a full 585 years after Marco Polo had visited China in 1266. The race for global dominance was now entirely over since, in the meantime, the Europeans had colonized the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, much of Asia, a large number of small islands between the continents and, for good measure, had also laid claim to the polar regions and taken control of the seas.

The story of how the West became so extremely creative will not be complete unless we investigate the peculiar role that Great Britain and our aforementioned Anglo-Saxons ultimately came to play. Just consider this for a moment: England doesn’t really seem to have a national folk costume like most other nations. But it actually did have one once. It was called a jacket and a tie and, today, businessmen, politicians, diplomats or gentlemen around the world will routinely put on this English folk costume, when they have to look presentable.

In 1876, 25 years after the Chinese first arrived in Europe, the British Queen Victoria had just been named the Queen of India, and is was then said, with pride, that the sun never set on her empire, as it had gained possessions on all continents and from the North to the South Pole. In fact, this tiny country now controlled about a fifth of the planet’s land masses.

Great Britain could then look back on a remarkable period. In 1785, London had 650 companies that produced or sold books, and it had countless art fairs, theatre plays and concerts that attracted huge crowds.¹¹⁵ The country had also been home to many of the world’s leading thinkers and artists such as Smith, Newton, and Purcell. Likewise, it had caught up with Spain and Portugal in terms of colonization and then overtaken them.

But why was it United Kingdom that ended up as Europe’s premier colonial power, and why did the countries that received large migrations from United Kingdom become some of the most successful nations on Earth - countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? Why did the same not happen to countries which other Europeans colonized? Or let’s put it more simply: Why did the Spanish colonies become far less successful than the English?

To understand why, we can start by comparing how England colonized its territories in North America to how the Spaniards managed theirs in Latin America. Unlike the mini-states in the creative core, Spain had, after the fall of Rome, quickly become a highly-centralized and authoritarian nation, and the purpose of its ventures were to secure land for the monarchy, which of course offered rewards for the conquistadors; those who did the dirty work. This reward could be gold and silver but was often land with attached right to use the locals living on it as slaves - a system reminiscent of what we saw in the late Roman Empire.

The effect was also the same as in the late Rome. The slaves were sent into the mines and fields while the owners stayed as much as possible in their villas. Since no-one had voting rights, they felt no particular responsibility for the state’s well-being, and as they weren’t involved in much of the practical work either, they were not particular innovative.

All this was in sharp contrast to the processes of the British colonization of North America. Here the immigrants were offered an opportunity to work, typically for four years for an established farmer family for food and shelter, but without salary, after which they were given their own plot of land plus voting rights. Democracy thus became vibrant and experimental, and since almost everyone soon owned their own land and did their own work, productivity increased dramatically and continuously, driven by dedication and innovation. A study of patents filed between 1820 and 1845 showed, for instance, that a large proportion were filed by people whose parents were neither professionally-trained nor larger landowners, and 40% of patent applicants had only primary school education or less.¹¹⁶

It also contributed to the creativity that through the Declaration of Independence, the US’s founding fathers built on ideas that led back to Athens rather than to Sparta. And they demonstrated clear understanding of Montesquieu’s principles of separation of powers as well as of John Locke’s emphasis on personal freedom, equality and sovereignty and therefore on protection of private property. In fact, Locke himself contributed to the drafting of the first Constitution of the state of Ohio, which became a major inspiration for the US’s future Constitution. This Constitution was largely written by Thomas Jefferson, who emphasized not only private property and personal freedom, but also equality (except for women and slaves, it must be said), and the right of everyone to seek his own happiness, by which the Constitution implicitly said that individual rights should always be a priority. This protection of the individual was in contrast to typical existing standards elsewhere stressing obligations to others, such as to God, king or country. Indeed, Jefferson was very worried about bringing too much centralization as this would “invite the public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.” And he also feared the consequences of democracy, even though he wrote it into the constitution, because, as he said, “Democracy is nothing but mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the 49%. Benjamin Franklin, another of the founding fathers raised the same concern, when he said that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting about what they are going to have for lunch.”

So respect for the individual was a high priority (Franklin continued his statement with the words: “Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”), and it should be noted in this connection that the Anglo-Saxon nations and former Anglo-Saxon colonies such as the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, and India were all structured as federations and intended to remain decentralized and with respect for individuals, even though many of them have since consolidated. In fact, the only exceptions to the pattern of federalism are New Zealand and the (partly) the UK. The Spanish colonies, in contrast, were centralized.

So here is food for thought: The Anglo-Saxons who came from Scandinavia and England have, in modern times, never been particularly attracted by totalitarian regimes such as communism, fascism or Nazism. In the middle decades of the 1900s, Germany, Russia, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Latvia , Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Romania all had totalitarian regimes, but none of the Scandinavian countries, nor the UK, US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand has ever had strong fascist or communist movements – not even during severe recessions or depressions. Out of the 600 MPs who have been elected to the UK Parliament’s House of Commons through its history, for example, only six revolutionary socialists were ever elected. The tradition for individualism and freedom is simply too ingrained.

Another difference is between what scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called “inclusive” and ”extractive” organisations, respectively. The former are pluralistic and ensure the rule of law, property rights, and individual rewards, whereas the latter are elitist and focused on extracting economic assets through monopoly, coercion, expropriation and taxation. The Anglo-Saxon nations tended to have more inclusive institutions whereas the Spanish had more extractive institutions. The latter was also illustrated by the infamous Spanish Inquisition, where 150,000 people between the years 1478 and 1834 were arrested, interrogated and often tortured, and probably 3,000-5,000 were executed. When not killed, the victims’ fortunes were often confiscated, and many contemporary sources reported that the Church, as far as they could see, overwhelmingly pursued people with money and for their money. This meant that many of Spain’s most enterprising people left the country for fear of having their assets seized.

The Spanish government also managed to enforce centralized tax collection, which had previously been decentralized. Given that the royal family thereby controlled massive cash-flows, they could also centralize power, which gave them a free hand to increase extractive power structures and enforce even more taxes. The local communities had previously been subject to competition and thus the risk of people voting with their feet and moving out, which had restrained their abuses, but the central government did not face the same limitations once tax collection had been centralized. The predictable result was - as had been the case in late Roman Empire – that farmers abandoned their land, which led to falling food production and a declining tax base.

However, even this tax evasion did not prevent the state from engaging in a wide range of extremely expensive wars and, on several occasions, the Spanish government resorted to seizing private gold shipments and replacing them with government bonds to finance the bill. These bonds would often turn out to be worthless, because despite its large gold and silver revenue from Latin America, the country went bankrupt in 1557, 1576, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1660, 1662 and 1739.

Things grew particularly bad in Spain under King Charles II, who reigned from 1665 to 1700. Charles was the product of 100 years of close inbreeding in the Spanish Royal Family. His jaw thrust so far that he could not chew; his tongue was so great that he had difficulty speaking and often drooled, and he was known to be rather dim-witted. His leadership brought Spain a series of military defeats, intellectual decline and famine, although it must be said that it actually didn’t go bankrupt during his reign; perhaps because no one wanted to lend him money in the first place.

Why was the British approach so different from the Spanish? In a way it goes back to who they were, and here, funnily enough, we find that about 85% of the British were of Spanish origin.

Yes, Spanish, but that was from way back. Recent genetic studies have shown that the vast majority of the British today are Celtic, descendants of Basques, who walked from Spain to England and Ireland after the end of the last Ice Age. They could do this because the sea level then was approximately 130 metres lower than it is today, so the current British Isles at the time were only peninsulas on top of Europe. After these Basques (now called Celts) had arrived, sea levels rose and they became somewhat isolated, even though they eventually developed boats. They now lived in relative isolation for millennia until they were invaded by the Romans in the year 43. The Romans had great difficulty governing the country and described, with disdain, how they were attacked by disorganized bands of naked men and women with painted bodies - the so-called picts (picts meant painted). In around 410, they left the country which had never brought them much benefit, but rather a whole lot of rain and trouble.

We have only one source providing insight into what happened during the following 130 years: the monk Gildas who, around the year 540, wrote about it. According to him, after the Roman withdrawal, the Celtic tribes started fighting each other and, in particular, the southern tribes were attacked from the north. The southerners therefore hired Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, but this soon backfired as these brutes soon took over control of everything except Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

The Anglo-Saxon Jutes and Angles (Danes) now settled predominantly in Kent, whereas the Saxons (Germans) settled further towards the southwest. In fact, the word “England” descends from the words “Agnlorum “, “Angelcynn” and “Engelcynn” which all means the place of the Angli– the Romans had called it the islands Provincia Britannia. However, county names, that currently ends in “sex”, are all originally Saxon. Sussex, for example, means “South Saxony”, “Wessex” (which no longer exists) was “West Saxony”, “Essex” is “East Saxony” and “Middlesex” is...well, you guessed it. The reason that there isn’t a “Nossex” is probably that the Danes further up north got in the way.

We can be pretty sure that Gildas was right when he wrote that the Anglo-Saxons bullied the Celts, because recent DNA studies show that British Y-chromosomes are disproportionately from Anglo-Saxon men, while the DNA of the mitochondria are disproportionately from Celtic women. Indeed, a study from University College in 2011 showed that half of all British men have an Anglo-Saxon segment of their Y - chromosome, which is also shared by almost all men in Denmark and northern Germany.¹¹⁸ So a lot of Anglo-Saxon men took Celtic women, and not the other way around, and if this isn’t bullying, what is?

There were many more migrations and invasions after the early Anglo-Saxon take-over. For instance, in the year 886 the Danish Viking king Gorm won a war with England’s King Alfred, after which he imposed Danelagh (Danish law) in the Anglo-Saxon-dominated area. In 1015, England was attacked again, this time by the Danish King “Canute”, or Knut in Danish, who came to rule much of England until 1035.

Again, in 1066, the British Isles was attacked twice and almost simultaneously from two sides. From the northeast came a party of Norwegian Vikings, while the Normans attacked from the south. The locals (which were now Celts mixed with a minority of Anglo-Saxons from earlier emigrations) defeated the Norwegian invading force at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but lost shortly after to the Normans at the Battle of Hastings. After this, the Normans took complete power in all the previous Anglo-Saxon areas. And they would soon use this base to expand their international trading culture by building larger ships and sailing still further afield.

It is the combination of all this that created the Anglo-Saxon mentality; the combination of sailing tradition, individualism, Germanic effectiveness, Viking lust for adventure, pagan religions emphasizing achievement and the very old shared tradition for small communities and direct democracy. All this evolved into what German sociologist Max Weber in 1905 called “the Protestant work ethic”.¹¹⁹ A very simplified summary of Weber’s hypothesis may sound like this:

The Catholic Church had guaranteed access to Paradise if believers submitted themselves to its leadership (and perhaps paid indulgences).

Protestants were not offered similar guarantees, but nor were they required to submit to an institution. Instead, they believed they would qualify for God’s love through individual achievement (as with the previous road to Valhalla).

They wouldn’t give money away to charity as they thought it would make the beneficiaries weak, and they didn’t give cash to the Church either, as it didn’t need it. So they invested it in farms, workshops and factories.

Going back in time, many writers and thinkers visited the US and were amazed by the Protestant work ethic. In fact, many of them described how Protestants looked down on people who didn’t work hard and start a family. For instance, the Frenchman Michael Chevalier visited the US in the 1830s and wrote:

“The American is educated with the idea that he will have some particular occupation, that he is to be a farmer, artisan, manufacturer, merchant, speculator, lawyer, physician, or minister, perhaps all in succession, and that, if he is active and intelligent, he will make his fortune. He has no conception of living without a profession, even when his family is rich, for he sees nobody about him not engaged in business.”³¹

Their individualism was important. Already in 1384, before Martin Luther founded Protestantism, the English theologian John Wycliffe wrote that: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people”. When the US. Constitution was written in 1787, it contained the following sentence: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”

So the idea of giving priority to the individual over institutions was repeated here almost 400 years later, but probably stretched back to the aforementioned phenomenon that Germanic people had ruled themselves in small communities for at least 1,500 years and possibly much longer.

Not many other people in the world had that experience and culture. The closest comparison is the decentralized Greeks from approximately 700 BC until it consolidated from 359 BC; after this, it was centrally ruled by first Alexander the Great, then by the Roman Empire, which, however, initially gave some self-rule to a few Greek city states such as Rhodes, Dilos, Crete and Chios until at least 30 BC. This was followed by rule by the static Byzantine Empire, then the even more static Ottomans, and finally, from 1839 until today, by kings, military dictators and (only since 1973) by a democratically-elected parliament. Greece invented many of the ideas that inspired democracy, enlightenment and more in the West, but the Greek democracy, we know today, is only two generations old, which explains a lot.

We have now studied which of the creative drivers seemed most important for Western Europe (the answer was decentralization); why China and the Islamic nations fell behind (they closed the door to travelling and knowledge,) and why England and its colonies became so disproportionally successful (adventurous, individualistic and democratic culture going thousands of years back). Our last big question is this: why was the increase in creativity not exponential between 400 BC and 1400 AD? After all, we have previously seen that the natural development of a creative design space is hyper-exponential, so why didnt Charles Myrray’s curve of human accomplishment look exponential all the way?

The answer to this is simple and scary: Creativity in a civilization tends not to last for long because it is destroyed from within. The natural process of a creative design space is exponential development, but someone tends to step in to stop it, and while it was accelerating in Western Europe, it was decelerating in China and the Islamic nations, which explains the lack of overall acceleration from year 400 to 1400 AD.

This is a general pattern. There was intense creativity during Djoser in ancient Egypt in the third dynasty 2737-2717 BC. The same was true at the beginning of the Mesopotamian civilization and among Incas, Aztecs and Mughals. But all of those societies then stagnated. Similarly, creativity prevailed in the early Roman Empire, but was suffocated in its latter days. The fact is that virtually all civilizations that previously were creative, only maintained their dynamism for a limited time.

And within Western Europe after Rome? Here it triumphed in Spain, but was then choked by the consolidation of power and the Inquisition. Florence had its golden age in the 1400s and especially during the Lorenzo de Medici, who was the city-state’s leader from 1469 to 1492, where art, philosophy, science and technology flourished. In fact, the Medici family sent people out in the world to buy books which they copied, and it was under them that we saw artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli shine.

However, this golden period lasted only one generation (yes, one). In 1494 the power was taken over by the monk Girolamo Savonarola, who immediately introduced a series of prohibitions and restrictions to impose austere demeanour. You were then only allowed to wear simple clothes, and bully gangs of so-called vigilantes patrolled the streets to find unnecessary items such as mirrors, cosmetics, books and other items that were now forbidden. Music and modern literature was also banned, and Savonarola arranged a huge burning of books and symbols of vanity aptly known as Bonfire of the Vanities.

Similarly, Venice’s heyday ended abruptly when its government, in 1314, began to nationalize some foreign trade activities and from year 1324 began collecting heavy taxes for citizens who would took part in private foreign trade. The city never really recovered again.¹²⁰

So lots of people tried to stop the party, but the crucial advantage Europe had was that its decentralized structure resulted in fierce competition and gave residents the opportunity to move from their own community to another, if they felt suffocated or persecuted. With so many small states, the next one was rarely far away. Consequently, there were constant migrations back and forth, and for example, when Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, it triggered a massive migration of Greeks, especially to Italy.

In 1993, the US National Bureau of Economic Research completed a comprehensive analysis of the development of various city-states of medieval Europe and their migration patterns, and it showed something interesting:

“As measured by the pace of city growth in Western Europe from 1000 to 1800, absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without absolutist government. This might be explained by higher rates of taxation under revenue-maximizing, absolutist governments than under non-absolutist governments, which care more about general economic prosperity and less about State revenue.”¹²¹

So people voted with their feet, and they consistently voted for freedom. If the West had been centralized, its creativity would probably have stopped long ago.