A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali Page B
Authors: Jacques Attali
Ads: Link
fruitless warfare, while their bureaucracies wear themselves out trying to curb their expenses.
It is now that the caravel enters the picture: an outer jib, two square sails, and a lateen make of it a totally mobile vessel. Perfected in Portugal around 1430, it might have handed power to Portugal’s navigating rulers, ideally situated to explore the African coastline and link Flanders to the Mediterranean. But Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors are more eager for glory and salvation than for commerce.
Seville might also have become the third core. Castile and Aragon, now united under a single crown, are ideally situated to range over all the seas, from Flanders to the eastern Mediterranean. When the Genoese Christopher Columbus, seeking gold for the Spanish kings, stumbles upon a new continent full of promise, he might still have been able to make Spain the world’s premier power and Seville the new core of the mercantile order. But the Andalusian port (with its southerly neighbor Cadiz) lacks an agricultural hinterland, confidence in its own bankers, and the expert shipbuilders it needs. The city places too much trust in its military commanders. The Most Catholic Kings and their court think only of consuming, idly and unproductively, whatthey steal in the Americas while slaughtering the natives. They foster no technology, no industry, no commercial networks. Worse: by expelling Spain’s Jews and Moriscos they discourage their own innovative classes, leaving the core to two ports in succession, ports which through the workings of dynastic chance have become at once provinces of the Hapsburg Empire and Spanish colonies — Antwerp, followed by Genoa.
Around 1500, one after another, these two cities will don the mantle of Venice after a century and half of the Serenissima’s reign. The cores of two short-lived forms, they share the sixteenth century between them. Lesson for the future: accessibility to foreign elites is one of the conditions of success.
Antwerp 1500–1560: The Triumph of the Printing Press
First, around 1500, comes Antwerp’s day. Blessed with a rich hinterland where farmers raise the sheep that provide the wool Antwerp spins, over the past two centuries the city has traded Flemish linen, Zeeland salt, English cutlery, Flemish glassware, and German metals for products from the East. It still has only twenty thousand inhabitants when (around 1450) it becomes the Low Countries’ principal port. There, northern European products are traded for the spices now arriving from Africa and Asia aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships: pepper, malagueta , cinnamon, and sugar. Everyone, even the French and English, comes here to have fabrics dyed using techniques the city jealously keeps secret.The Antwerp Exchange becomes Europe’s leading financial center for insurance, wagers, and lotteries. The city builds a sophisticated banking network, using new silver currencies — their rates strictly controlled — such as the groat, to finance external trade. Lacking an army, Antwerp dominates the form — as the other cores have already done and will continue to do — through its ability to manage the financial markets and dragoon them into its service. Lesson for the future: closely linked, finance and insurance make up an essential dimension of commercial power.
Antwerp is also (as other cores will be) the first industrial user of a major technological innovation from abroad: the movable-type printing press, a Chinese invention rediscovered in Germany and at first reserved exclusively for the church.
What we have here is the first in a long series of advances aimed at accelerating the transmission of data. The written word becomes the major source of wealth, whose marginal reproduction cost is virtually zero. It will not be the last. The book thus becomes the first mass-produced nomadic object. It too will not be the last.
The success of the printing press is dazzling, so hungry are the new
It is now that the caravel enters the picture: an outer jib, two square sails, and a lateen make of it a totally mobile vessel. Perfected in Portugal around 1430, it might have handed power to Portugal’s navigating rulers, ideally situated to explore the African coastline and link Flanders to the Mediterranean. But Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors are more eager for glory and salvation than for commerce.
Seville might also have become the third core. Castile and Aragon, now united under a single crown, are ideally situated to range over all the seas, from Flanders to the eastern Mediterranean. When the Genoese Christopher Columbus, seeking gold for the Spanish kings, stumbles upon a new continent full of promise, he might still have been able to make Spain the world’s premier power and Seville the new core of the mercantile order. But the Andalusian port (with its southerly neighbor Cadiz) lacks an agricultural hinterland, confidence in its own bankers, and the expert shipbuilders it needs. The city places too much trust in its military commanders. The Most Catholic Kings and their court think only of consuming, idly and unproductively, whatthey steal in the Americas while slaughtering the natives. They foster no technology, no industry, no commercial networks. Worse: by expelling Spain’s Jews and Moriscos they discourage their own innovative classes, leaving the core to two ports in succession, ports which through the workings of dynastic chance have become at once provinces of the Hapsburg Empire and Spanish colonies — Antwerp, followed by Genoa.
Around 1500, one after another, these two cities will don the mantle of Venice after a century and half of the Serenissima’s reign. The cores of two short-lived forms, they share the sixteenth century between them. Lesson for the future: accessibility to foreign elites is one of the conditions of success.
Antwerp 1500–1560: The Triumph of the Printing Press
First, around 1500, comes Antwerp’s day. Blessed with a rich hinterland where farmers raise the sheep that provide the wool Antwerp spins, over the past two centuries the city has traded Flemish linen, Zeeland salt, English cutlery, Flemish glassware, and German metals for products from the East. It still has only twenty thousand inhabitants when (around 1450) it becomes the Low Countries’ principal port. There, northern European products are traded for the spices now arriving from Africa and Asia aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships: pepper, malagueta , cinnamon, and sugar. Everyone, even the French and English, comes here to have fabrics dyed using techniques the city jealously keeps secret.The Antwerp Exchange becomes Europe’s leading financial center for insurance, wagers, and lotteries. The city builds a sophisticated banking network, using new silver currencies — their rates strictly controlled — such as the groat, to finance external trade. Lacking an army, Antwerp dominates the form — as the other cores have already done and will continue to do — through its ability to manage the financial markets and dragoon them into its service. Lesson for the future: closely linked, finance and insurance make up an essential dimension of commercial power.
Antwerp is also (as other cores will be) the first industrial user of a major technological innovation from abroad: the movable-type printing press, a Chinese invention rediscovered in Germany and at first reserved exclusively for the church.
What we have here is the first in a long series of advances aimed at accelerating the transmission of data. The written word becomes the major source of wealth, whose marginal reproduction cost is virtually zero. It will not be the last. The book thus becomes the first mass-produced nomadic object. It too will not be the last.
The success of the printing press is dazzling, so hungry are the new
Similar Books
