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

silk, leather, tin, tobacco, rice, indigo), which it returns to them — highly priced — in the shape of clothing and precious objects.
    In 1689 a political bombshell bursts over London. The country’s ruling monarchs, Mary and William of Orange (raised to the throne by Parliament following the execution of their grandfather, Charles I), are back on the throne following Cromwell’s dictatorship. They grant Parliament, freely elected by the country’s middle classes, the right to look into public affairs. Thus, after its sketchy Dutch beginnings, the birth certificate of modern democracy is officially promulgated. Parliament enacts laws, guarantees individual freedoms, and authorizes the king to raise troops and make war. England is the first market democracy.
    That same year, in London, John Locke publishes a Treatise of Government , in which he expounds his theory of democratic government, proclaiming individual freedom a natural and inalienable right. Still in the same year, Montesquieu is born in France, where he will later meditate on the separation of powers and political freedom. Henceforth nations will structure themselves around the ideal of equality: disparities, frowned upon by democracy, will remain necessary to the market. The influence of the Judeo-Greek ideal will go on expanding.
    In the eighteenth century, Great Britain’s wealth increases and projects itself into the world. Its external trade increases sixfold. The share of exports in its national revenue triples, generating a surplus that financesthe modernization of its industry and gives birth to a new creative, bourgeois, and industrial class.
    As with the preceding cores, this assumption of world power by British merchants is staggeringly single-minded. Following a competition sponsored by Parliament, an English clockmaker-carpenter named John Harrison perfects the first marine chronometer in 1734. It weighs 77.6 pounds. This major invention, willed into being by the political powers, leads to a dramatic shortening of transoceanic voyages. The chronometer thus gives Great Britain mastery of the seas and facilitates a systematic exploitation of the rest of the world. In 1757 the troops of the British East India Company take control of Bengal and force Bengali craftsmen to accept such low prices for their cotton that starvation kills more than ten million people. After three wars with Holland, the English finally take total control of the seas — and in particular, control of the trade in precious metals from the Americas, which the Dutch had wrested from Spain 150 years earlier.
    In 1776, the year Adam Smith publishes the first reference book on market economies ( An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ), Britain is forced to relinquish sovereignty over part of North America, but it continues to buy vast quantities of cotton from its former colonies in the South until the American Civil War. William Pitt’s government restores health to the nation’s economic situation by applying Adam Smith’s doctrine: in 1786, it even signs a free trade agreement with its archrival, France.
    Apparently unchanging, England is in fact in a stateof subterranean turmoil. The countryside is aflame with the vexed question of enclosures; highways become safer thanks to new poor laws; the old elites collapse. A new innovative class, the gentry (landless nobility), takes over the controls, leaving a tiny aristocracy in command of the totality of its landowning income. Every Englishman now pays indirect taxes, whereas in France the taille , a direct tax freely translated as “slice,” is paid only by the Third Estate.
    England now boasts a fighting navy as powerful as France’s, despite a population three times smaller, and a per capita income still only equal to a half of its cross-Channel neighbor and one-fifth that of Amsterdam.
    As the eighteenth century draws to a close, the bulk of English wool is still dyed in Flanders or the United