To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned… At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. [114]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
Although American and European modernity are often conflated into a single Western modernity, they are in fact rather different. [115]The point of commonality was that the settlers, who first arrived in 1607, were Europeans. By 1790 the total population of the United States was 3,929,000, of whom 698,000 were slaves and thereby not regarded as part of American society: of the white population, 80 per cent were British (the rest being largely German and Dutch). [116] Successive waves of European settlers brought with them the values, beliefs, customs, knowledge and culture with which they had grown up. Their intention was to re-create the Old World in the New World. [117] In contrast to Europe, however, where capitalism was shaped by its feudal antecedents, the settlers were not constrained by pre-existing social structures or customs. In effect, they could start afresh, unencumbered by the past. This, of course, entailed the destruction of the native population of Amerindians in what we would now describe as a most brutal act of ethnic cleansing. [118] While Europe was mired in time-worn patterns of land tenure, the American settlers faced no such constraints and, with the decimation of the native population, enjoyed constantly expanding territory as the mythical frontier moved ever westwards. Where Europeans possessed a strong sense of place and territory, the Americans, in contrast, formed no such attachment because they had no need of it. The fact that the United States started as a blank piece of paper enabled it to write its own rules and design its own institutions: from the outset, steeped in Protestant doctrine, Americans were attracted to the idea of abstract principles, which was to find expression in the Constitution and, subsequently, in a strong sense of a universalizing and global mission.
The fact that the European settlers brought with them a powerful body of values and religious beliefs but were devoid of the class attitudes of their ancestral homes lent the white American population a feeling of homogeneity. The exclusion of African slaves from American society together with the destruction of the Amerindians imbued their identity with a strongly racial dimension. The boundless opportunities presented by a huge and well-endowed territory and a constantly moving frontier instilled the nation with a powerful sense of optimism and a restless commitment to change. The domestic market was unconstrained by the local and regional preferences and the class and status distinctions that prevailed in Europe and, being relatively homogeneous, was much more receptive to standardized products. [119] The relative scarcity of labour stimulated a constant desire to introduce labour-saving machinery and improve productivity. Unlike in Europe, there was little resistance to the process of deskilling and the routinization of tasks. The result was an economy which showed a far greater proclivity for technological innovation, mechanization, the standardization of products, constant improvement in the labour process, economies of scale and mass production than was the case in Europe. The American model was distinguished by a new kind of mass market and mass consumer, with all the attendant innovations in areas such as advertising. As a result, from the late nineteenth century American capitalism was to prove far more dynamic and innovative than its European counterparts.
In 1820, the US economy accounted for a mere 1.8 % of world GDP compared with 5.2 % and 3.9 % for the UK and Germany respectively. As indicated in the last chapter, by 1870, the US share of world GDP had risen to 8.8 % while the equivalent figures for the UK and Germany were 9.0 % and 6.5 % respectively. By 1914, the US had pulled well ahead with a share of 18.9 % compared with 8.2 % for the UK and 8.7 % for Germany. In 1950, America’s economic high noon, its share of world GDP was 27.3 %, compared with 6.5 % for the UK, 5.0 % for Germany and 26.2 % for the whole of Western Europe. [120] The damage wrought by two world wars notwithstanding, the American economy hugely outperformed the European economies in the period 1870–1950 and this underpinned the emergence of the United States as the premier global power after 1945. Largely eschewing the formal colonies which had been the characteristic form of European global influence, [121] the United States became the first truly global power: the dollar was enshrined as the world’s currency, a new constellation of global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and GATT, gave expression to the US’s economic hegemony, while its military superiority, based on airpower, far exceeded anything that had previously been seen. The United States succeeded in creating a world system of which it was the undisputed hegemon but which was also open and inclusive, finally reaching fruition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and with the progressive inclusion of China. [122] By 1960, if not earlier, the United States had supplanted Europe as the global exemplar to which other societies and peoples aspired. It demonstrated a new kind of cultural power and influence, through Hollywood and its television soaps, and also through such icons of its consumer industry as Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. Its universities increasingly became magnets for the best scholars and students from all over the world. It dominated the list of Nobel Prize winners. And it was the power and appeal of the United States that lay behind the rise of English as the world’s first true lingua franca.
The United States became the new metaphor for modernity: untrammelled by the baggage of the past, gravity-free, in perpetual motion, and possessed of the spirit of the new frontier. It was born in the present and has never grown old, its lodestar an abstract set of principles enshrined in a constitution, the whole society committed to a non-stop process of reinvention, a flow of immigration constantly shifting the composition and identity of the population. The rise of Silicon Valley, the penchant for cosmetic surgery and the growing importance of the Hispanic minority are all, in their different ways, but the latest expressions of the American psyche. This is so different from Europe as to be quite alien; and yet the fact that modern America literally comes from Europe has meant that the bond between the two, that sense of affinity, particularly in the global context, has always been very powerful and is likely to remain so. Ancestry, race, history, culture, religion, beliefs and a sense of shared interest have prevailed over profound differences, as evinced by the pervasiveness of the term ‘West’, whose meaning is not simply geopolitical but more importantly cultural, racial and ethnic, as personified in the word ‘Westerner’. [123] Whatever the differences between Europe and the United States, the West is likely to retain a powerful sense of meaning and identity: indeed, it may be that the rise of non-Western countries and cultures will serve to reinforce that sense of affinity. [124] It is true, of course, that the growth of new ethnic minorities in Europe and the increasing importance of non-white minorities in the United States, epitomized by Barack Obama’s election, is steadily changing these societies, but the extent of this process should not be exaggerated. It will be a very long time, if ever, before the still overwhelming white majorities on either side of the Atlantic cease to dominate their societies.
[114] Quoted in Arrighi,
[115] Therborn,
[116] Samuel P. Huntington,
[117] Ibid., p. 40.
[118] Ibid., pp. 53-4.
[119] Landes,
[120] Maddison,
[121] Robert Kagan,
[122] G. John Ikenberry,