I want you to heIp me understand what made Western CiviIization...
...dominate the worId for the Iast 500 years.
Why did the West dominate the rest? Shakir?
- First of aII, they had guns. - Guns?
And everyone eIse had bows and arrows.
They had the attitude that they shouId probabIy get on boats
- and go and invade other countries. - ExpIoration. Getting in boats.
NIALL FERGUSON: Around 500 years ago, a band of intrepid sailors and soldiers
from the petty warring kingdoms of medieval Europe changed the world.
Thirsting after conquest, commerce, colonisation and conversion,
they exported their civilization from their little nook of Western Eurasia
to every corner of the globe.
Before long, Western civilization became the world's dominant civilization.
The West taught the rest its way of doing business...
its scientific method...
its law and its politics,
its way of dressing...
of speaking...
...and of praying.
The big story is that after 1500,
the West essentiaIIy dominated the rest.
And it's a story we ignore at our periI, because today,
after haIf a miIIennium of tiIting westwards,
the worId seems inexorabIy to be tiIting to the East.
China's pot is to become the worId's biggest economy.
IsIam couId soon overtake Christianity as mankind's favourite faith.
So, does aII this mean that Western civiIization itseIf couId soon be history?
The only way to answer that question is to understand
how the West came to be so powerful in the first place.
The thing of education. If you've got the right education...
The amount of Iand that a country controIs.
With trade, with the introduction of trade...
NIALL: I think we couId simpIify it.
I have boiIed it down to six things...
...and I'm going to caII them the six kiIIer appIications -
the kiIIer apps - that made the West dominate the rest.
The first one is competition.
Number two kiIIer app is science.
Democracy, medicine, consumerism.
The work ethic, which you obviousIy aII have.
(LAUGHTER)
Understanding how the West beat the rest gives us an insight
not just into the past but aIso into the future,
and I think you'II agree,
it heIps answer the question that couId be the most important of our time.
Are we the generation on whose watch Western ascendancy is going to end?
We tend to assume that our civilization,
the one that's dominated the world for so long,
will last for ever.
It's easy to forget that Western civiIization
has decIined and faIIen once before.
The ancient Roman ruins here at Caesarea in IsraeI
are a pretty potent reminder of that.
In the space of just a generation, in the fifth century AD,
the Roman Empire in Western Europe essentiaIIy feII apart -
the aqueducts dried up,
the roads overgrown, the circuses deserted.
Question - couId something simiIar happen to Western civiIization 2.0 -
the version that, after a miIIennium of stagnation,
rose to dominate the worId?
Beset by economic crises and by environmental fears,
the West today is also waking up to a growing Eastern challenge
to its political and military supremacy.
The evidence is here in China.
The biggest and fastest industrial revolution ever,
compressed into just 30 years.
A self-confident one-party state.
A culture reasserting itself on the world stage.
The ascent of China looks like being the defining political event
of the 21 st century.
lt's almost as if the clock is being wound back 600 years,
to the last time China led the world.
The Forbidden City in Beijing.
Built by the Ming dynasty in the early 1 5th century,
these awe-inspiring buildings are a reminder of
the last time China was a global leader.
They remain as relics of one of the greatest civilizations in all history.
But they're also a reminder that no civilization lasts for ever.
Within a century of their construction,
the decline of the East and the rise of the West had begun.
500 years ago, something quite extraordinary happened.
The impoverished, petty, strife-torn kingdoms of Western Europe
embarked on five centuries of uninterrupted expansion.
MeanwhiIe, the magnificent empires of the Orient,
exempIified by Beijing's Forbidden City,
stagnated and then succumbed to Western dominance.
By 1900, if not earIier,
the Westerners had effectiveIy subjugated the Resterners.
ln 1 500, Western Europe had accounted for only 1 0%
of the world's land surface and, at most, 1 6% of its population.
By 1 91 3, 1 1 Western empires controlled more than half of
all territory and population
and a staggering 80% of global economic output.
As recently as the 1 980s,
the average American was 7 0 times richer than the average Chinese.
We tend to assume that it was Western technology that trumped the East...
in particular,
the technology that went on to produce the lndustrial Revolution.
But it wasn't that.
The reaI kiIIer app that the West had and the rest Iacked
was competition, both poIiticaI and economic.
And the consequences -
the birth of the nation-state and the rise of capitaIism -
wouId Iead to a remarkabIe reversaI of fortunes.
This is history's greatest revelation -
how it was that Europeans, not Chinese, came to run the world.
What would you have seen
if you'd taken two trips along two rivers in the year 1 420?
The Thames and the Yangtze.
The Yangtze was part of a vast waterway known as the Grand Canal
that linked Hangzhou with Beijing 1,000 miles to the north.
The restoration and improvement of the canal was part of a plan
to stimulate China's economy,
masterminded by the formidable Ming emperor known as Yongle.
This is the Precious BeIt Bridge at Suzhou, with its 53 arches,
one of the architecturaI marveIs of the Grand CanaI.
In the reign of Emperor YongIe, which means, IiteraIIy, ''perpetuaI happiness'',
15,000 barges used to saiI up and down it every year.
Venice, eat your heart out.
When the intrepid Venetian Marco Polo had visited China in the 1 27 0s,
he'd been astonished by the volume of traffic on the Yangtze.
''The multitude of vessels that invest this river is so great
''that no-one who should read or hear would believe it.
''The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief.
''ln fact, it is so big, that it seems to be a sea rather than a river. ''
400 miles upstream from the South China Sea,
Yongle controlled his vast empire from the lmperial capital, Nanjing.
With a population of up to a million,
the city was probably the largest in the world.
YongIe didn't beIieve in doing anything by haIves.
This is just one voIume
of the vast encycIopaedia of Chinese Iiterature and Iearning
which he commissioned.
There were 1 1 ,095 voIumes in totaI,
and it was compiIed by a team of 2,000 schoIars.
It was surpassed as the worId's Iargest encycIopaedia onIy in 2007,
after a reign of 600 years...
by Wikipedia.
But Yongle was not content with Nanjing.
He resolved to build a new and more spectacular capital to the north,
in Beijing. By 1 420,
when the Forbidden City was at last complete,
Ming China had an incontrovertible claim
to be the most advanced civilization in the world.
lt really did seem as if the Emperor Yongle
ruled over ''All Under Heaven''.
Contrast Yongle's realm with that of his contemporaries,
Richard ll or Henry V.
They ruled over a land that was in some ways still mired in the Dark Ages.
lts mightiest river, the Thames, was, let's be frank,
a primitive backwater.
Yes, I know we're taught to think of Henry V
as one of the great heroes of EngIish history,
but I'm afraid his kingdom was very far from the ''sceptred isIe''
of Shakespeare's famous pIay.
More Iike a septic isIe.
There were, of course, some imposing sights on the banks of the Thames,
notably a large gaol, the Tower of London.
But a visitor from Nanjing wouId scarceIy have been impressed.
The Tower of London was a pretty primitive edifice
compared with the spIendours of the great towers of ImperiaI China.
London's old, patched-up city walls extended a paltry three miles.
By contrast, it took the founder of the Ming dynasty
21 years to buiId a waII more than 20 miIes Iong
around his capitaI city, Nanjing.
The gate where I'm sitting couId house more than 3,000 soIdiers.
And as you can see, this was serious bricks and mortar, buiIt to Iast.
By 1 5th-century standards, Nanjing was a pretty pleasant place to live.
London wasn't.
The ravages of the Black Death,
the bubonic plague that had devastated Europe in the early 1 4th century,
had reduced the city's population to around 40,000,
less than a 20th the size of Nanjing's.
English life expectancy at birth was a miserable 37 years.
Henry V himself became King at the age of 26,
and was dead from dysentery by 35 -
a reminder, by the way, that most history is made by young people.
The ones that survived, that is.
Roughly one in five English children died in the first year of life.
ln London, the figure was nearly one in three.
Violence was endemic.
When not fighting the French,
the English fought the Welsh, the Scots and the lrish...
or themselves.
Between 1 330 and 1 479,
a quarter of deaths in the English aristocracy were violent.
Life in this period reaIIy was, as Thomas Hobbes famousIy said,
''soIitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short''.
It was aIso incredibIy unhygienic by OrientaI standards.
Without any proper sewage system,
medievaI London stank to high heaven,
whereas human excrement was routineIy coIIected in Chinese cities
and spread on outIying fieIds.
When he was Lord Mayor of London,
which was four times between 1397 and his death in 1 423,
Dick Whittington had to watch where he put his feet,
because the streets of his city were paved with something very different from goId.
And England was probably the most prosperous European country.
Life was even nastier, more brutal and shorter in France.
No, 600 years ago, the idea of a civilized West
would have seemed absurd.
The future of humanity surely lay in the East.
But why was the East so far ahead?
(GUNSHOT)
Long before the lndustrial Revolution came to England,
China was amazingly inventive.
You probabIy thought Jethro TuII, the EngIish agricuIturaI pioneer,
invented the seed driII.
But no, the Chinese got there 2,000 years ago.
ln fact, before 1 400,
there was a veritable alphabet of Chinese inventions.
Astronomical observatories.
Card games.
The clock.
This is the biggest water cIock in China.
Now, it's not reaIIy cIear if the Egyptians, the BabyIonians
or the Chinese invented the water cIock.
But it was utterly transformed in 1 086
by the great Chinese inventor Su Song.
Su Song combined it with a gear-driven escapement
to create the worId's first mechanicaI cIock.
Nothing remoteIy so accurate existed in EngIand untiI the 1 4th century.
Time reaIIy did seem to be on China's side.
Football.
Gunpowder.
lnk.
Matches.
Paper.
The printing press.
15th-century Germany?
More Iike 1 1th-century China.
The suspension bridge.
China, 2,000 years ago.
Not to mention the wheeIbarrow.
And that's not aII.
As a new century dawned in 1 400,
the emperor YongIe had another transport technoIogy at his disposaI,
which had the potentiaI to make him master,
not just of the MiddIe Kingdom, but of the entire gIobaI market.
It was time for ImperiaI China to set saiI.
Now, that's what I caII a ship.
What they're buiIding here in Nanjing is a fuII-scaIe repIica
of one of the treasure ships of AdmiraI Zheng He -
the most famous saiIor in Chinese history,
the man who very nearIy turned the MiddIe Kingdom into a gIobaI empire.
By the time they've finished, it'II be 400 feet in Iength.
That's ten times the size of the Santa Maria,
the ship that CoIumbus saiIed across the AtIantic Ocean in 1 492.
And there wasn't just one of them.
Zheng He set sail in command of a crew of some 28,000 men
in a fleet of dozens of these enormous ships.
Zheng He was an unusual man.
Captured in battle at the age of 1 1,
he was castrated and assigned as a servant
to the man who would seize the lmperial throne as Yongle.
Yongle and Zheng He would become one of the great double acts
of Chinese history.
(RHYTHMIC CHANTING)
Between 1 405 and 1 424,
AdmiraI Zheng He's fIeet ranged far and wide.
They saiIed to CaIicut, to MaIacca, to CeyIon, to Sumatra,
to Hormuz, to Aden...
Some schoIars specuIate they reached as far as northern AustraIia,
the Cape of Good Hope and GreenIand,
and aII this was years before the European Age of ExpIoration
had so much as begun.
The main purpose of these visits was not so much to trade,
but to assert Chinese supremacy.
Who could refuse to kowtow to an emperor possessed of so mighty a fleet?
In 1 415, Zheng He reached the coast of East Africa.
In a short time, the fIeet was Ioaded up
with representatives of 30 different kings and chiefs
ready to acknowIedge the cosmic ascendancy of the Ming emperor.
Down beIow were stowed a host of exotic animaIs.
The SuItan of MaIindi chose a giraffe to send.
Yongle personally received the animal
at the gateway of the lmperial Palace in Nanjing.
The giraffe was hailed as a symbol of perfect virtue,
perfect government
and perfect harmony in the empire and the universe.
In many ways, the giraffe perfectIy symboIised
the zenith of Chinese prestige in the worId.
And then, in 1 424, came news that wouId fundamentaIIy change
not onIy the history of China, but the history of the worId itseIf.
The Emperor YongIe had died,
and with him died the dream of Chinese overseas expansion.
Within just a few years, China turned in on itseIf.
The death of Yongle had an immediate and dramatic impact.
Under his successors, Zheng He's voyages were suspended.
From 1 500, anyone in China found building a ship
with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty.
ln 1 551, it became a crime even to go to sea on a multi-masted ship.
The records of Zheng He's voyages were destroyed.
The tomb of Emperor YongIe at ChangIing
is an appropriate pIace to refIect on the huge opportunity that China missed.
What Iay behind the momentous decision to turn inwards?
Was it fiscaI troubIe or poIiticaI wrangIes at the ImperiaI court?
Was it because a war in Annam, modern-day Vietnam,
turned out to be more expensive than anyone had expected?
Or was it just Confucian suspicion of the so-caIIed strange things
that AdmiraI Zheng He had brought home with him?
We may never know. Like the Apollo moon missions,
Zheng He's voyages were carried out at enormous expense.
They were a formidable demonstration of power
and technological sophistication.
But beyond that, to be blunt,
they turned out to be pretty pointless.
Landing a Chinese eunuch on the East African coast
was essentially the same as landing an American on the moon -
pretty impressive.
But so what?
What was important was what you did when you got there.
China's faiIure to expIoit its advantages
Ieft the path of overseas expansion wide open for the West.
When the new emperor caIIed home Zheng He's mighty navy,
he virtuaIIy guaranteed that it wouId be
the West's version of civiIization that wouId sweep the gIobe.
Size isn't everything.
Admiral Zheng He's enormous ships and his emperor's grandiose ambitions
had done precious little for China.
How very different it would be
for the altogether more modest voyages about to be undertaken
by a remarkable man from the tiny little European kingdom of Portugal.
(BELLS TOLL)
His name was Vasco da Gama.
Da Gama made his country's - and his own - fortune
by cornering the market in the 1 5th century's favourite food additive...
...spices.
For centuries, the oId spice route ran from the Indian Ocean over Iand
across the Arabian PeninsuIa, into the Ottoman Empire,
and then from Venice into Europe.
It was entireIy dominated by the Arabs, the Turks and the Venetians.
The Portuguese had the briIIiant idea
that if they couId find an aIternative route,
aII the way around the coast of Africa,
round the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean...
then this business couId be theirs.
lt was here in the Castle of St George in the hills above Lisbon
that the newly crowned Portuguese King Manuel
appointed da Gama to command a fleet of ships,
to make discoveries and go in search of spices.
King ManueI's orders to Vasco da Gama teII us something very important
about the overseas spread of Western civiIization.
As we'II see, there was more than one kiIIer app,
but the one that reaIIy started the baII roIIing
was sureIy competition - both the main driver of capitaIism
and of the fragmented European state system.
For Europeans, expIoration was the Iate-15th-century space race.
Or rather, spice race.
Da Gama set saiI from this spot on 8th JuIy, 1 497.
When he and his feIIow saiIors rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
the southernmost tip of Africa,
they weren't wondering, as the Chinese had,
if they couId find some exotic animaIs to take home to their king.
They were wondering if they couId make money there.
ln 1 498, more than 80 years after the Chinese explorer Zheng He
had landed at Malindi on the Kenyan coast, Vasco da Gama turned up.
He wasn't here to impress the locals, much less to hunt giraffe.
He immediately saw Malindi's potential as a trading post.
By 1 506, the Portuguese had a near monopoly on shipping
along the East African coast.
This wasn't the only difference between the Chinese and the Portuguese.
There was also a streak of ruthlessness,
of downright nastiness,
about these Portuguese explorers that Zheng He seldom evinced.
The Portuguese knew they were eating someone else's lunch
along with their spices.
But they were ready to meet any resistance with cannon fire and cutlass.
This is the tomb of Vasco da Gama here in St Jerome's monastery in Lisbon.
Da Gama died in 1524 of a fever,
but that didn't mark the end of Portuguese ambitions.
ExpIorers Iike him pressed on beyond India, as far as China.
The great reversaI of fortunes was now unstoppabIe.
Along with Portugal, Spain had been first off the mark,
seizing the initiative in the New World.
The Dutch weren't far behind, building up a hugely profitable trading company
by following the spice route to lndonesia.
They, in turn, were closely followed by the French.
(BELL TOLLS)
And what of the EngIish, whose territoriaI ambitions
had once extended no further than France
and whose one big economic idea had been to seII wooI to the ItaIians?
How couId they possibIy sit on the sideIines with news coming in
that their archenemies, the Spaniards, were making a kiIIing overseas?
By the 1 7th century, the Thames was no longer a provincial backwater.
lt was the hub of Britain's burgeoning overseas empire.
The docks at Deptford were producing ocean-going ships by the dozen.
ln 1 635, the first English merchantman arrived in Chinese waters.
Once, when Zheng He had sailed the high seas,
China had been able to regard distant Europeans with indifference,
if not contempt.
Now trading rivalry had brought the barbarians to China.
And with each new trading post, each new warehouse, each new fort,
Western civiIization upIoaded its unique kiIIer app
of commerciaI competition.
The question is, why did the Europeans have that fervour
when the Chinese didn't?
Why was Vasco da Gama so clearly hungry for money -
hungry enough to kill for it?
WeII, you can find the answer here in the boweIs of the British Library
by Iooking at wonderfuI oId maps Iike this one,
which is of the city-state of Lubeck, dating back to 1530.
It's just one Iong - very Iong - ceIebration of IocaI autonomy.
And it was a pattern repeated throughout Europe.
In Venice, La Serenissima,
here in Frankfurt, on the banks of the River Main...
and, of course, in London itseIf. It wasn't just London pride.
AII the great European cities were proud of their own autonomy.
I can't heIp feeIing the message of these maps is ''divide and ruIe'',
except that it was by being divided that the Europeans ended up
ruIing the rest of the worId.
SmaII was beautifuI in the MiddIe Ages, because smaIIness meant competition.
Competition between states and, within states, between companies.
Compare that with China, with its one monoIithic empire.
Whereas in China power was centralised
in the hands of the emperor, in Northern Europe particularly,
there was an astonishing decentralisation.
Hundreds of states and city-states competing against each other.
ln England, the most important commercial centre in the country
was almost completely autonomous.
The City of London Corporation can trace its origins
back to the 12th century.
That means that the Iord mayor, the sheriffs, the city counciI,
the freemen, the Iiverymen
and the aIdermen are aII more than 800 years oId,
making this the worId's oIdest autonomous commerciaI institution.
In many ways, it's the forerunner of today's muItinationaI corporations.
In other ways, it's the forerunner of democracy itseIf.
The City was never in awe of the Crown,
and the wealthier the City became, the more leverage it had.
Loans to the Crown became the key to urban autonomy.
And the masters of the medieval universe were the livery companies.
And that's where power used to Iie -
with the drapers, the goIdsmiths, the grocers, the haberdashers,
ironmongers, mercers, the saIters, the shearers, the skinners -
not forgetting the taiIors and the vintners.
Dating back to the MiddIe Ages,
they're a reminder of the amazing power - economic and poIiticaI -
that used to be wieIded by London's craftsmen and merchants.
And craftsmanship brings us back to that great Chinese invention...
...the clock.
So this was the cutting edge of timekeeping technoIogy.
Yes, totaIIy correct.
No-one eIse in the worId
couId match the skiIIs or abiIities of the EngIish cIockmaker.
There's no better metaphor for the relentless shift of global power
than the clock.
The English mechanical clock was not only more accurate
than the Chinese water clock - it was also designed to be sold widely,
rather than monopolised by the emperor's astronomers.
IAN: CIocks often were made for a story, and this cIock,
Nebuchadnezzar is sIeeping in the Ieft-hand corner of the screen...
- NIALL: Oh, yes. - IAN: ...and he's having a dream.
The axeman is chopping the tree of Iife down -
and the whoIe worId wiII come to an end, and we'II aII die.
(SLOW TICKING)
(FAST TICKING)
(TINKLING)
Is this the kind of cIock that you sent to foreigners to impress them?
That is exactIy it.
You're showing off your technoIogy is better than theirs.
(CLOCK CHIMES)
The rise of the cIock, and Iater the portabIe watch,
went hand in hand with the rise of Europe
and the spread of Western civiIization.
And with every new individuaI timepiece,
a IittIe bit more time ran out for the age of OrientaI predominance.
While Europe was a patchwork quilt,
China remained a vast monochrome blanket.
Not even the most pretentious European court
could match the Ming dynasty's authority.
The Forbidden City in Beijing is just one vast monument
to the unity of lmperial power.
Just take a waIk from the Protecting Harmony HaII
to the MiddIe Harmony HaII, where the emperor had his private quarters,
to the HaII of Supreme Harmony, where the Dragon Throne itseIf sat.
Harmony, harmony, harmony.
It's a kind of codeword for unity, for undivided ImperiaI authority.
This simply had no counterpart
among the fractured and competing states and cities of 1 5th-century Europe.
ln China, lmperial rule was implemented
by a Confucian bureaucracy, recruited on the basis of perhaps
the most terrifying set of exam papers in all history.
This photograph is of the central examination compound in Nanjing.
Thousands of wannabe mandarins would be locked in these cells,
just three-and-a-half feet deep, about the same width,
and only five-and-a-half feet high. During the time an examination lasted,
the only movement allowed was the passage of servants,
replenishing food and water supplies,
or removing human waste.
Some candidates went completely insane under the pressure.
No doubt after nine Iong days shut in a shoebox, it was the most abIe,
and the certainIy most indefatigabIe, candidates
who passed the ImperiaI examination.
But this was an exam that rewarded caution, even conformity.
It was competitive, certainIy,
but not the kind of competition that fosters innovation,
much Iess the appetite for change.
Confucius said, among other things, that,
''The common man marveIs at uncommon things.
''The wise man marveIs at the commonpIace.''
But maybe there was just a bit too much that was commonpIace
about the way that Ming China was governed.
And in a worId that refused to stand stiII,
that was a recipe for troubIe. Big troubIe.
(GONG)
Great empires are complex things.
For centuries they can bask in a sweet spot of power and prosperity.
But then, often quite suddenIy, they can coIIapse.
Let's look again at what happened to lmperial China.
The Ming dynasty had been born in 1 368,
and as we've seen, for more than a century after that,
Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization
by almost any measure.
But then, in the mid-1 7th century, the wheels came flying off.
Political factionalism, fiscal crisis and famine
opened the door to rebellion and invasion.
The results were devastating.
Conflict and disease
reduced the Chinese population by as much as 40%.
ln 1 644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself out of shame.
This dramatic transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy
had taken little more than a decade.
What had gone wrong?
WeII, the answer is that turning inwards proved fataI
for a compIex and denseIy popuIated society Iike China's.
The Ming system had created a kind of high-equiIibrium trap.
OutwardIy it was very impressive,
but on the inside it was highIy fragiIe.
The Ieast IittIe thing caused the trap to snap shut
because there were no externaI resources to draw on.
And that expIains why Zheng He,
the personification of earIy Chinese expansionism,
for so Iong forgotten, is a hero in today's newIy gIobaIised China.
ln the words of China's great economic reformer of the 1 980s,
Deng Xiaoping, ''No country that wishes to become developed today
''can pursue closed-door policies.
''When Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open.
''After Yongle died, the dynasty went into decline
''and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance. ''
That's a plausible reading of history.
As England's population growth accelerated in the late 1 7th century,
trade brought an influx of new nutrients like potatoes and sugar,
while colonisation allowed the emigration of surplus people.
Over time, the effect was to raise productivity, incomes,
nutrition and even height.
ln contrast, by turning away from foreign trade
and intensifying rice cultivation,
the Chinese were stuck with rising population,
falling incomes and declining nutrition, height and productivity.
The English got better stimulants, too.
They got the coffee house...
...while the Chinese got the opium den.
ln 1 793, the 1 st Earl Macartney led an expedition
to the Qianlong Emperor,
in a vain effort to persuade the Chinese to re-open their empire to trade.
Macartney brought with him ample tribute...
...the most advanced scientific instruments,
including the finest clocks that England could make.
As he later wrote,
''The emperor and his minions were unimpressed.
''lt was discovered that the taste for science,
''if it ever existed, was now completely worn out.
''This intricate workmanship was all lost
''and thrown away on the ignorant Chinese. ''
Unrepentant in his isolation,
the emperor addressed a dismissive message to King George lll.
''There is nothing we lack.
''We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects. ''
Except maybe those nice English clocksl
I'm standing here in the heart of the Forbidden City
entireIy surrounded by cIocks.
It's just that aII these cIocks were either manufactured by
or designed by EngIishmen.
Nothing couId better symboIise the transition of power from East to West.
The Chinese had invented the mechanicaI cIock,
but now the ImperiaI court was reduced to accepting
superior timepieces as gifts from Europeans.
And when they broke down, the Chinese couIdn't even mend them.
The West's ascendancy was perfectly symbolised in June 1 842,
when British ships sailed up the Yangtze to the Grand Canal
in retaliation for the destruction of opium by a zealous Chinese official.
China had to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars,
cede the island of Hong Kong, and open five ports to British trade,
including this one.
This is one of the great outposts of British penetration of Asia -
the Shanghai Bund.
The oId headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
used to be described as the most Iuxurious buiIding
between the Suez CanaI and the Bering Strait.
lt was ironic, but perhaps appropriate,
that the first ''unequal treaty'' between Britain and China
was signed here at the Jinghai Temple,
built by the Emperor Yongle more than four centuries before,
in honour of Admiral Zheng He,
master and commander of the last lmperial super-ship.
Today, they're building ocean-going ships again in China...
...vast ships capable of bringing back the raw materials necessary
to feed China's insatiably growing industrial economy.
Competition, markets, profits, capitalism -
these are things that China once turned its back on.
Well, not any more.
I'm standing on a crane in the biggest shipyard in China.
Now, if 30 years ago, you'd predicted that China's wouId be
the second Iargest economy by 201 1 and the Iargest by 2030,
I think you'd have been dismissed as a fantasist.
But it wouId have seemed equaIIy fantastic in 1 420
to have predicted Western ascendancy.
The point is that in the course of the 15th century,
Europeans discovered the joys of competition,
both economic and poIiticaI.
And in a competition for controI of the Asian spice trade,
capitaIism was born and, with it, the foundation for a worId
dominated by Western civiIization.
The kind of economically driven civilization that today seems to be
working rather better in the East.
Yet competition was only one of the killer apps of Western dominance.
ln the next episode of CiviIization, l'll ask why it was
that the scientific revolution happened only in the West,
and failed to take off even in those parts of the Eastern world
that had once been pioneers of mathematics and astronomy.
Why, in short, was there no lsaac Newton in lstanbul?