Free A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali Page A

runs European politics with a masterly hand. Its navy controls all the seas; its bankers reign over exchange rates; its merchants fix the price of all products. Despite its apparent power, France — Europe’s most populous country — endures check after check: military failure at sea, diplomatic failure in the Indies, Louisiana, and Canada, financial failure with the bankruptcy of the speculator John Law. Although by 1714 it finally becomes possible for the French aristocracy to engage in trade without demeaning itself, the tiny French bourgeoisie interests itself neither in its navy nor in modern industry. France’s economy is content to vegetate in the outmoded industries of agricultural capitalism (food, leather, wool) that the daring merchantsof the United Provinces are only too happy to leave in its hands.
    All this time in China, where the practice of three annual rice harvests permits the population to expand from 180 to 400 million inhabitants (far ahead of any other country on the planet), there is no response from the emperor when Dutch merchants begin to trade in Canton from their Indian Ocean bases.
    And yet, around 1775, a century and a half after taking power, this fifth mercantile form declines, like its predecessors and for the same reasons. Dutch warships are no longer the most powerful, the seas are no longer their playground, defense of their commercial routes is increasingly costly, and the energy used by their industries (forest timber, also essential in shipbuilding) is close to exhaustion. Dutch dyeing and shipbuilding techniques no longer make progress; social conflicts are on the rise; wages soar; and Amsterdam’s woolen industry is becoming an increasing burden.
    Lesson for the future: it may seem eternal, but no empire can last forever.
    Elsewhere in Europe, the middle classes murmur and call for greater freedoms — nationalism is now a force to be reckoned with. A premonitory sign that cannot lightly be ignored: the rulers of every European court now insist that their musicians write their opera librettos in their national language and not in Italian, which had been the custom hitherto. Music — harbinger of the future.
    In 1776, Britain’s colonies in America declare their independence. In 1781, the French navy, in a rare moment of effectiveness, makes it possible for the Americaninsurgents to win the battle of Yorktown. In Europe, hungry peoples cry out. Throughout the continent, war threatens. Shipbuilders, followed by the best Dutch financiers, leave the Low Countries for London, by now Europe’s safest and most dynamic city.
    As always, a financial crisis confirms the decline of a heartland. In 1788, the Low Countries’ banks declare bankruptcy. On the eve of the French Revolution, the core of capitalism crosses the North Sea for good to settle in London, where democracy and market move forward together.
London 1788–1890: The Power of Steam
    As early as the sixteenth century, England had mastered wool-spinning, coal-mining, and glassblowing technologies. Its abundant streams, serving primarily as energy sources, foster the mechanization (in Lancashire) of spinning a new raw material for the textile industry, soon to be a rival of wool — cotton, long familiar in Europe and rediscovered by the British in India.
    To possess this vegetable fiber, henceforth as strategically important as Peru’s gold and silver, the British East India Company assumes control of India, large tracts of North America, and South Asia, all cotton-producing regions. The first English bridgehead in South Asia had been established in 1619 at Surat, on India’s northwest coast. A little later the British East India Company — which manages these regions solely in its own interest — sets up permanent trading counters in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. British armies do thesame in North America. England is now importing from its colonies — at rock-bottom prices — every conceivable product (wool, cotton,