From the 11th century onwards, new technologies arrived on the scene like kerosene deliveries to a burning building.
WATER MILLS, AND HOW NEW TECHNOLOGY CAN BE A CURSE
The scene was set for Europe’s descent into extreme inequality in the first centuries of the second millennium, and that period provides a clear example of what should have been good technology falling into the wrong hands, and becoming a curse.
Around the year 1000 there was a sudden proliferation of water mills for grinding corn, and this was examined in detail in 1935 by the historian who inspired Braudel, Marc Bloch.49 Whereas there were only perhaps 200 water mills in England at the time of Alfred the Great (849-899) there were 5,624 at the time of the Domesday Book (1086). In northern France the pattern was similar: 14 mills on one river, the Aube, in the 11th century, 62 in the 12th and over 200 by the early 13th century.50
This looks like a thoroughly enlightened development and had always been presented as such, but Bloch showed that it was quite otherwise. Far from being generous gifts from kindly aristocrats, water mills were imposed on unwilling populations and used as instruments of extraction. Peasants were required to take all the corn they grew to the lord’s water mill for grinding – so that the lord could help himself easily to whatever proportion he considered to be his just share: a much simpler arrangement than sending armed men around from household to household.
Hand mills were outlawed everywhere. Bloch found records of house-to-house searches for illicit mills in the 12th century, and at least one famous insurrection, at St Albans in 1274, which rumbled on until the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. All the water mills of that period for which records exist were imposed under feudal or monastic auspices.51
One sees just how all those great castles and abbeys came into being. They rose almost literally from the ground as the mill-wheels turned, sucking wealth out of everything and everyone around them. It no longer seems surprising that one of France’s most palatial châteaux, Chenonceaux, on the River Loire, began its life as a water mill.
It appears that hand milling has important nutritional advantages. Modern studies have found that the greater force and heat generated by mechanized milling can destroy nutrients, and more nutrients are lost if you have to grind your grain all in one go and then store it; over 80 per cent of its vitamins can be lost within three days.52 In her book about Ladakh’s peasants, Ancient Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge says that hand milling may have explained the Ladakhis’ excellent health, despite a diet consisting mainly of barley. Vitamin deficiencies started to appear after the introduction of petrol-powered mills.53
So perhaps the water mill’s introduction even played a part in the decline in stature of ordinary north Europeans (described in the next chapter), which started at just this time.
There was sharp increase in European inequality between 1500 and 1650. Peasants’ real incomes fell by as much as a half, and selective adoption of new technology played a part here as well. In a much-cited paper published in 1979, the economic historian John Pettengill demonstrated that a very large part of the decline could be explained by the widespread adoption of new, small firearms by the European nobility during these years.54 Hand guns in 1500 were cumbersome items, fired by a glowing fuse or ‘match’; useful in armies but not suitable for a casual demonstration of personal power. Leonardo da Vinci had invented a wheel-lock arrangement in the 1480s, which allowed a gun to be fired just by pressing the trigger; improved versions of this were spreading throughout Europe by the 1520s. Pistols became possible and horse riders could use them. By the mid-1600s cheaper, more efficient flintlocks were becoming common, but they were still far beyond the means of the peasantry.
The power of armed enforcers, militias, or just an individual with a gun, was multiplied with each improvement. Pettengill showed how, as these developments unfolded, rents and taxes on peasants rose by multiples; restrictions on the use of commons were introduced and enforced; peasant rebellions were crushed with greater and greater predictability.
The result in eastern Europe was a wholesale return to serfdom; in the west, the result was an increasing rate of migration from the land to towns (and in some cases, as in England, deportation of surplus population to new colonies in Ireland and then in America), and ‘proletarianization’, as merchant elites learned to harness the new, precarious population through the Verlag or ‘putting out’ system of manufacture.
Pettengill found similar increases in immiseration from Scandinavia to Italy, and from western Spain to Russia. He knew of ‘only two exceptions to this pattern: Venice and the newly industrialized areas of Holland’.
Was this bound to happen, once the principle of firearms had been invented? Things didn’t unfold in this way in other parts of the world. Firearms were well established in China by the 13th century but were not turned into personal weapons. They were adopted in the Arab, Persian and Indian empires by the 15th century, and developed there, but without the appearance of a culture of firearms like the European one. The historian Noel Perrin tells us that Japan acquired its first firearms, a pair of arquebuses, from a Portuguese trader in 1543 – the same year in which a French immigrant ironmaster gave England its first cast-iron cannon.55 Japanese gun enthusiasts improved on these two originals at a furious rate and reduced the cost of a gun from 1,000 to just 2 gold taels. By the end of the 16th century, the Japanese were able to have the kinds of battles among themselves that the Europeans could not manage until the end of the 18th (one of these, the battle of Nagashino, is the centerpiece of Akira Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha, the Shadow Warrior). They then ‘de-invented’ firearms during the long, peaceful period that followed the Tokugawa clan’s final victory in 1600 and lasted until 1868. When the US Commander Perry arrived in 1855 no guns whatsoever were to be seen.
It happens that the Tokugawa period was also a period of great equality in Japan. As the demographic historian Osamu Saito describes it, it was a case of ‘all poor but no paupers’.56 Society was rigidly hierarchical and ferociously punitive but, as Braudel puts it, it ‘bristled with “liberties” like the liberties of medieval Europe behind which one could barricade oneself’.57 Compared with Europe, the gap between rich and poor was minuscule, reflecting a much more equal balance of power. Village self-organization was a force to reckon with. The samurai class (who became government employees after the Tokugawa ascendancy) were often only a little better off than the peasants who, unlike so many ‘modernizing’ European peasants, controlled their own rural industries and paid little tax on the skilled work they produced, and which became regarded as so essentially Japanese. Other historians note that the physical quality of housing and amenities improved immeasurably and ‘when viewed through the lens of life expectancy, Japanese led surprisingly long lives’.58
The environment also recovered. In the earlier period, large parts of Japan had been stripped of timber (in large part for building castles, temples and monuments). Despite a doubling or even tripling of Japan’s population between 1600 and 1700,59 deforestation was permanently reversed from around 1670, apparently through community initiatives as well as government ones.60 Japan still has a surprising amount of forest for such a densely populated country. In 1993, 63 per cent of its land area was covered in closed forest.61
From a purely functional and environmentalist point of view, Japan seems to support a saying of the epidemiologist and equality campaigner Richard Wilkinson that, to a certain extent, ‘it doesn’t matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get it’.62
1 Stéphane Hessel, Time for Outrage, Quartet Books, 2010.
2 InterOccupy obituary for Hessel, nin.tl/InterOccupyonHessel Accessed 11 Aug 2014.
3 Neal Ascherson, review of Ian Buruma’s Year