Читать книгу Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History - Hugh Williams - Страница 7

Most of the children described in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses come to a sticky end. Matilda, who lies, is burned to death; Henry King, who chews string, dies from knots in his stomach; and Godolphin Horne, who is excruciatingly superior, becomes a bootblack at the Savoy. Only one child is saved from misfortune – the obsequiously good, horribly nice Charles Augustus Fortescue.

In eating Bread he made no Crumbs, He was extremely fond of sums,

To which, however, he preferred The Parsing of a Latin Word–

Such assiduous, good behaviour brings its just reward:

He rose at once in his Career, And long before his Fortieth Year

Had wedded Fifi, Only Child Of Bunyan, First Lord Aberylde. He thus became immensely Rich, And built the Splendid Mansion which

Is called ‘The Cedars, Muswell Hill’. Where he resides in Affluence still, To show what Everybody might Become by SIMPLY DOING RIGHT.

The gentle satire of Belloc’s comic verse, written at the very beginning of the twentieth century, has some relevance to life in Britain today. Men like Charles Augustus Fortescue still exist, their apparently effortless success a source of bewilderment and envy. How did they do it? Why have they been blessed with so much money? The way in which people set about acquiring wealth, and how they use it once they have got it, has preoccupied mankind for centuries.

Most human beings want to be richer than they are. In the English language there is a difference of meaning, or at least of usage, in the words ‘wealth’ and ‘riches’. Wealth implies a sense of prosperity shared for the common good. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, has come to be seen as the great rational defence of capitalism, just as the United States has become its most controversial exponent. In this context ‘wealth’ means the collective output of a free market whose different functions reinforce one another to the benefit of all. We tend to use the word ‘riches’ rather differently. Riches can be envied as much as enjoyed. To be rich you need to have done better, or been luckier, than your fellow men. It denotes individual good fortune rather than social wellbeing. Man works to be wealthy, but gambles to be rich.

The fact remains, however, that a society cannot be wealthy unless at least some of its members are rich. And wealth cannot be created unless individuals are motivated to acquire riches. How people become rich – in other words, whether or not they can be said to have earned their wealth – lies at the heart of our attitude towards this whole subject. As I write, Britain is engulfed in a scandal about MPs’ expenses. Many of them have been exposed for making extravagant and dishonest claims for the maintenance of their second homes. People are angry because they believe those they elected to be the guardians of the nation’s money have behaved like cheats, trying to become richer without earning the privilege. Unearned wealth is not to be tolerated.

But what do we mean by ‘unearned’ wealth? Less than a hundred years after Adam Smith explained the advantages of a free market, Karl Marx described its dangers. Where Smith saw benevolent prosperity, Marx found exploitation and inequality. The huge process of industrialisation, which was beginning to rumble into action when The Wealth of Nations was published, had, in Marx’s view, resulted in social and economic divisions that could only end in tension and conflict. How man has coped with wealth and defined both its benefits and drawbacks is an essential part of world history.

This chapter is about man’s acquisition, and sometimes loss, of wealth and its consequences. It begins with the building of the Via Egnatia that carried the traffic of the Romans across the Balkans from the Adriatic to Constantinople. The Roman road system supported the wealth of the greatest of the empires in world history, helping to maintain a centralised grip on the huge territory it controlled. The chapter then explores the city of Chang’an in China, the first great city of the world – richer and larger than anything Europe would see for hundreds of years afterwards. Marco Polo and his family risked their lives in search of wealth, travelling from Venice to China towards the end of the thirteenth century. But in the middle of the fourteenth century the wealth that Europe had begun to enjoy from its expanding trade was nearly destroyed by the arrival of the Black Death. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the foundation of the Dutch East India Company demonstrated how easily merchants could become princes, and how money could rule the world. The invention of the Flying Shuttle in the early eighteenth century was a simple improvement to the business of weaving that, though small in itself, was the first step along a process of industrialisation that led to the biggest revolution in wealth-creation the world had ever seen. The discovery of oil in America accelerated that process and made some individuals fabulously rich. After the First World War, a failure to understand the economic interests of different countries lay at the heart of the Treaty of Versailles which, in trying to put Europe back together again, only succeeded in preparing it for another terrible war. Meanwhile the invention of the Model T Ford ushered in an age of consumerism: many more people could now at least feel rich if they wanted to. Finally, in our own time, the Credit Crunch brought to an end a period of continuous wealth expansion as people discovered that good times are never forever. From the tramp of Roman legions across the packed sand of a Balkan highway to the hideous devastation of the plague and the calculated ruthlessness of sober Amsterdam businessmen, from the belching ferocity of the Industrial Revolution to the economic failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the remorseless spread of the motor car, the history of mankind is a history of trying to get rich and stay rich.