From Why the West Rules – for now (Ian Morris, 2010) pp148-9
All the energy capture in the world would not have taken a British squadron to Tinghai if they had not been able to organize it. Queen Victoria’s minions had to be able to raise troops, pay and supply them, get them to follow leaders, and carry out a host of other tricky jobs. We need to measure this organizational capacity. Up to a point organizational capacity overlaps with Spencer’s old idea of differentiation, but neo-evolutionists learned in the 1960s that it is almost impossible to measure differentiation directly, or even to define it in a way that will satisfy critics. We need a proxy, something closely related to organizational capacity but easier to measure.
The one I have chosen is urbanism. Perhaps that will seem odd; after all, the fact that London was a big place does not directly reflect Lord Melbourne’s revenue flows or the Royal Navy’s command structure. On further reflection, though, I hope the choice will seem less odd. It took astonishing organization to support a city of 3 million people. Someone had to get food and water in and waste products out, provide work, maintain law and order, put out fires, and perform all the other tasks that go on, day in, day out, in every great city.
It is certainly true that some of the world’s biggest cities today are dysfunctional nightmares, riddled with crime, squalor, and disease. But that, of course, has been true of most big cities throughout history. Rome had a million residents in the first century BCE; it also had street gangs that sometimes brought government to a halt and death rates so high that more than a thousand country folk had to migrate into Rome every month just to make up the numbers. Yet for all Rome’s foulness (brilliantly evoked in the 2006 HBO television series Rome), the organization needed to keep the city going was vastly beyond anything any earlier society could have managed—just as running Lagos (population 11 million) or Mumbai (population 19 million), let alone Tokyo (population 35 million), would have been far beyond the Roman Empire’s capabilities.
This is why social scientists regularly use urbanism as a rough guide to organizational capacity. It is not a perfect measure, but it is certainly a useful rough guide. In our case, the size of a society’s largest cities has the extra advantage that we can trace it not only in the official statistics produced in the last few hundred years but also in the archaeological record, allowing us to get an approximate sense of levels of organization all the way back to the Ice Age.
As well as generating physical energy and organizing it, the British of course also had to process and communicate prodigious amounts of information. Scientists and industrialists had to transfer knowledge precisely; gunmakers, shipbuilders, soldiers, and sailors increasingly needed to read written instructions, plans, and maps; letters had to move between Asia and Europe. Nineteenth-century British information technology was crude compared to what we now take for granted (private letters needed three months to get from Guangzhou to London; government dispatches, for some reason, needed four), but it had already advanced far beyond eighteenth-century levels, which, in turn, were well head of the seventeenth century. Information processing is critical to social development, and I use it as my third trait.
Last but sadly not least is the capacity to make war. However well the British extracted energy, organized it, and communicated, it was their ability to turn these three traits toward destruction that settled matters in 1840. I grumbled in Chapter 1 about Arthur C. Clarke equating evolution with skill at killing in his science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, but an index of social development that did not include military power would be no use at all. As Chairman Mao famously put it, “Every Communist must grasp this truth: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’” Before the 1840s, no society could project military power across the whole planet, and to ask who “ruled” was nonsense. After the 1840s, though, this became perhaps the most important question in the world.
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