Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-Book Collection by Yuval Noah Harari
Now, to make matters worse, the king sends a treasury official to your brother to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that he expects to receive another loan of the same size, forthwith. Your brother has no money to lend. He writes home to Dad, trying to persuade him that this time the king will come through. The paterfamilias has a soft spot for his youngest, and agrees with a heavy heart. Another 10,000 gold coins disappear into the Spanish treasury, never to be seen again. Meanwhile in Amsterdam, things are looking bright. You make more and more loans to enterprising Dutch merchants, who repay them promptly and in full. But your luck does not hold indefinitely. One of your usual clients has a hunch that wooden clogs are going to be the next fashion craze in Paris, and asks you for a loan to set up a footwear emporium in the French capital. You lend him the money, but unfortunately the clogs don’t catch on with the French ladies, and the disgruntled merchant refuses to repay the loan.
Your father is furious, and tells both of you it is time to unleash the lawyers. Your brother files suit in Madrid against the Spanish monarch, while you file suit in Amsterdam against the erstwhile wooden-shoe wizard. In Spain, the law courts are subservient to the king – the judges serve at his pleasure and fear punishment if they do not do his will. In the Netherlands, the courts are a separate branch of government, not dependent on the country’s burghers and princes. The court in Madrid throws out your brother’s suit, while the court in Amsterdam finds in your favour and puts a lien on the clog-merchant’s assets to force him to pay up. Your father has learned his lesson. Better to do business with merchants than with kings, and better to do it in Holland than in Madrid.
And your brother’s travails are not over. The king of Spain desperately needs more money to pay his army. He’s sure that your father has cash to spare. So he brings trumped-up treason charges against your brother. If he doesn’t come up with 20,000 gold coins forthwith, he’ll get cast into a dungeon and rot there until he dies.
Your father has had enough. He pays the ransom for his beloved son, but swears never to do business in Spain again. He closes his Madrid branch and relocates your brother to Rotterdam. Two branches in Holland now look like a really good idea. He hears that even Spanish capitalists are smuggling their fortunes out of their country. They, too, realise that if they want to keep their money and use it to gain more wealth, they are better off investing it where the rule of law prevails and where private property is respected – in the Netherlands, for example.
In such ways did the king of Spain squander the trust of investors at the same time that Dutch merchants gained their confidence. And it was the Dutch merchants – not the Dutch state – who built the Dutch Empire. The king of Spain kept on trying to finance and maintain his conquests by raising unpopular taxes from a disgruntled populace. The Dutch merchants financed conquest by getting loans, and increasingly also by selling shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the company’s profits. Cautious investors who would never have given their money to the king of Spain, and who would have thought twice before extending credit to the Dutch government, happily invested fortunes in the Dutch joint-stock companies that were the mainstay of the new empire.
If you thought a company was going to make a big profit but it had already sold all its shares, you could buy some from people who owned them, probably for a higher price than they originally paid. If you bought shares and later discovered that the company was in dire straits, you could try to unload your stock for a lower price. The resulting trade in company shares led to the establishment in most major European cities of stock exchanges, places where the shares of companies were traded.
The most famous Dutch joint-stock company, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC for short, was chartered in 1602, just as the Dutch were throwing off Spanish rule and the boom of Spanish artillery could still be heard not far from Amsterdam’s ramparts. VOC used the money it raised from selling shares to build ships, send them to Asia, and bring back Chinese, Indian and Indonesian goods. It also financed military actions taken by company ships against competitors and pirates. Eventually VOC money financed the conquest of Indonesia.
Indonesia is the world’s biggest archipelago. Its thousands upon thousands of islands were ruled in the early seventeenth century by hundreds of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and tribes. When VOC merchants first arrived in Indonesia in 1603, their aims were strictly commercial. However, in order to secure their commercial interests and maximise the profits of the shareholders, VOC merchants began to fight against local potentates who charged inflated tariffs, as well as against European competitors. VOC armed its merchant ships with cannons; it recruited European, Japanese, Indian and Indonesian mercenaries; and it built forts and conducted full-scale battles and sieges. This enterprise may sound a little strange to us, but in the early modern age it was common for private companies to hire not only soldiers, but also generals and admirals, cannons and ships, and even entire off-the-shelf armies. The international community took this for granted and didn’t raise an eyebrow when a private company established an empire.
Island after island fell to VOC mercenaries and a large part of Indonesia became a VOC colony. VOC ruled Indonesia for close to 200 years. Only in 1800 did the Dutch state assume control of Indonesia, making it a Dutch national colony for the following 150 years. Today some people warn that twenty-first-century corporations are accumulating too much power. Early modern history shows just how far that can go if businesses are allowed to pursue their self-interest unchecked.
While VOC operated in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies Company, or WIC, plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the important Hudson River, WIC built a settlement called New Amsterdam on an island at the river’s mouth. The colony was threatened by Indians and repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664. The British changed its name to New York. The remains of the wall built by WIC to defend its colony against Indians and British are today paved over by the world’s most famous street – Wall Street.
As the seventeenth century wound to an end, complacency and costly continental wars caused the Dutch to lose not only New York, but also their place as Europe’s financial and imperial engine. The vacancy was hotly contested by France and Britain. At first France seemed to be in a far stronger position. It was bigger than Britain, richer, more populous, and it possessed a larger and more experienced army. Yet Britain managed to win the trust of the financial system whereas France proved itself unworthy. The behaviour of the French crown was particularly notorious during what was called the Mississippi Bubble, the largest financial crisis of eighteenth-century Europe. That story also begins with an empire-building joint-stock company.
In 1717 the Mississippi Company, chartered in France, set out to colonise the lower Mississippi valley, establishing the city of New Orleans in the process. To finance its ambitious plans, the company, which had good connections at the court of King Louis XV, sold shares on the Paris stock exchange. John Law, the company’s director, was also the governor of the central bank of France. Furthermore, the king had appointed him controller-general of finances, an office roughly equivalent to that of a modern finance minister. In 1717 the lower Mississippi valley offered few attractions besides swamps and alligators, yet the Mississippi Company spread tales of fabulous riches and boundless opportunities. French aristocrats, businessmen and the stolid members of the urban bourgeoisie fell for these fantasies, and Mississippi share prices skyrocketed. Initially, shares were offered at 500 livres apiece. On 1 August 1719, shares traded at 2,750 livres. By 30 August, they were worth 4,100 livres, and on 4 September, they reached 5,000 livres. On 2 December the price of a Mississippi share crossed the threshold of 10,000 livres. Euphoria swept the streets of Paris. People sold all their possessions and took huge loans in order to buy Mississippi shares. Everybody believed they’d discovered the easy way to riches.
39. New Amsterdam in 1660, at the tip of Manhattan Island. The set
{Redraft of the Castello Plan, John Wolcott Adams, 1916 © Collection of the New-York Historical Society/The Bridgeman Art Library.}
A few days later, the panic began. Some speculators realised that the share prices were totally unrealistic and unsustainable. They figured that they had better sell while stock prices were at their peak. As the supply of shares available rose, their price declined. When other investors saw the price going down, they also wanted to get out quick. The stock price plummeted further, setting off an avalanche. In order to stabilise prices, the central bank of France – at the direction of its governor, John Law – bought up Mississippi shares, but it could not do so for ever. Eventually it ran out of money. When this happened, the controller-general of finances, the same John Law, authorised the printing of more money in order to buy additional shares. This placed the entire French financial system inside the bubble. And not even this financial wizardry could save the day. The price of Mississippi shares dropped from 10,000 livres back to 1,000 livres, and then collapsed completely, and the shares lost every sou of their worth. By now, the central bank and the royal treasury owned a huge amount of worthless stock and had no money. The big speculators emerged largely unscathed – they had sold in time. Small investors lost everything, and many committed suicide.
The Mississippi Bubble was one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully from the blow. The way in which the Mississippi Company used its political clout to manipulate share prices and fuel the buying frenzy caused the public to lose faith in the French banking system and in the financial wisdom of the French king. Louis XV found it more and more difficult to raise credit. This became one of the chief reasons that the overseas French Empire fell into British hands. While the British could borrow money easily and at low interest rates, France had difficulties securing loans, and had to pay high interest on them. In order to finance his growing debts, the king of France borrowed more and more money at higher and higher interest rates. Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather’s death, realised that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy. Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution.
While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company.
The Indian subcontinent too was conquered not by the British state, but by the mercenary army of the British East India Company. This company outperformed even the VOC. From its headquarters in Leadenhall Street, London, it ruled a mighty Indian empire for about a century, maintaining a huge military force of up to 350,000 soldiers, considerably outnumbering the armed forces of the British monarchy. Only in 1858 did the British crown nationalise India along with the company’s private army. Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.
In the Name of Capital
The nationalisation of Indonesia by the Dutch crown (1800) and of India by the British crown (1858) hardly ended the embrace of capitalism and empire. On the contrary, the connection only grew stronger during the nineteenth century. Joint-stock companies no longer needed to establish and govern private colonies – their managers and large shareholders now pulled the strings of power in London, Amsterdam and Paris, and they could count on the state to look after their interests. As Marx and other social critics quipped, Western governments were becoming a capitalist trade union.
The most notorious example of how governments did the bidding of big money was the First Opium War, fought between Britain and China (1840–42). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company and sundry British business people made fortunes by exporting drugs, particularly opium, to China. Millions of Chinese became addicts, debilitating the country both economically and socially. In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street – many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies – so they pressured the government to take action.
In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of ‘free trade’. It was a walkover. The overconfident Chinese were no match for Britain’s new wonder weapons – steamboats, heavy artillery, rockets and rapid-fire rifles. Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police. Furthermore, the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking (Hong Kong remained in British hands until 1997). In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts.3
Egypt, too, learned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the nineteenth century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled, and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after World War Two.
These were hardly the only wars fought in the interests of investors. In fact, war itself could become a commodity, just like opium. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. The uprising aroused great sympathy in liberal and romantic circles in Britain – Lord Byron, the poet, even went to Greece to fight alongside the insurgents. But London financiers saw an opportunity as well. They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders’ interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.
40. The Battle of Navarino (1827).
{© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.}
The bear hug between capital and politics has had far-reaching implications for the credit market. The amount of credit in an economy is determined not only by purely economic factors such as the discovery of a new oil field or the invention of a new machine, but also by political events such as regime changes or more ambitious foreign policies. After the Battle of Navarino, British capitalists were more willing to invest their money in risky overseas deals. They had seen that if a foreign debtor refused to repay loans, Her Majesty’s army would get their money back.
This is why today a country’s credit rating is f
The Cult of the Free Market
Capital and politics influence each other to such an extent that their relations are hotly debated by economists, politicians and the general public alike. Ardent capitalists tend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital. They argue that when governments interfere in the markets, political interests cause them to make unwise investments that result in slower growth. For example, a government may impose heavy taxation on industrialists and use the money to give lavish unemployment benefits, which are popular with voters. In the view of many business people, it would be far better if the government left the money with them. They would use it, they claim, to open new factories and hire the unemployed.