Nature's Evil

In the China of the Han period, both the mining and forging industries developed with extraordinary speed. In northern China, people started using coal very early, which allowed them to create extremely high temperatures. In around 1000 ce , Chinese blacksmiths were making refined weaponry, coins and ornaments from bronze and iron. Forges used waterwheels which powered bellows and hammers. The Chinese rulers decreed a monopoly on mining. Copper, iron and salt became the property of the state. But something always went wrong, and these decrees had to be reissued time and again. Iron was used for the forging of swords, shields and lances, the making of ploughs, and the construction of bridges and sluice gates. The Chinese used iron to make statues of the Buddha and the roofs of pagodas. They added the blood of sacrificed animals – sheep or buffalo – to the smelted metal. The abundance of implements helped agriculture to thrive; peasants adopted intensive methods, ploughing up new lands and digging irrigation channels. Nowhere else in the world was there such a flourishing of industry up until the Industrial Revolution. The extraction and smelting industries were concentrated in several centres in northern China, close to the mines. Thousands of workers were employed in one such centre; towns with populations of about a million each grew up around the mines. In the middle of the tenth century, Chinese mines and forges extracted and smelted more iron than at the beginning of the twentieth century. 6

This early industrialisation came to a dramatic end: the iron industry of northern China completely disappeared. At the end of the Song dynasty the government was disillusioned: the Confucian state acknowledged the social problems caused by mono-resource development. The owners of pits and mines became richer than princes. According to documents from the beginning of the eleventh century, government inspectors found that the mines led to moral decay. This ‘moral decay’ was very close to the contemporary sense of ‘corruption’. Workers suffered injuries; accidents were frequent. Worst of all, the mines led to the destruction of the state: at first the entrepreneurs paid bribes to the bureaucrats, then the bureaucrats tried to seize the mines from their clients. Probably this was the first time that a technical civilisation encountered the resource curse. In 1078, a decree from the emperor forbade the extraction of metals, blaming the mines for all the woes of the empire. The decree was ignored, but the Song state was also doomed. The Mongol invasion brought hunger, floods and epidemics. Dams and roads were destroyed, trade stopped, and the survivors reverted to subsistence farming. The Mongols introduced paper money, but they still needed sabres and lances; however, the mass use of iron implements ceased. Over three centuries the population of these lands fell by a factor of ten. From the eleventh century until the beginning of the Second World War, the mines of northern China produced no iron. Although the Silk Road already connected China to Europe, the secrets of Chinese metallurgy did not travel along that route. The technology of smelting metal heated by coal would only be reinvented in England in the eighteenth century.

But the borders of the European world were widening thanks to the quest for ore. The exchange included increasingly remote lands – England, which was rich in tin, the Caucasus with its copper deposits, the Alps with their silver and copper, the Carpathians with their forests and metals. The curators who conducted the trade in metals belonged to various ethnic communities: at first they were Phoenician, then Armenian and Jewish, and later Venetian and German merchants. Europe exchanged its metals for ‘Eastern luxuries’ – sweets, spices and textiles, brought by Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch ships. The first such centre of exchange was Venice; supplied by the mining industry in Central Europe, it developed in new ways which did not depend on the Roman traditions. New industrial centres were set up on the frontiers of the German and Slav worlds – in Bohemia, Saxony, Styria and the Tyrol. Disappointed by the revenue from their peasants, local landowners put their faith in the depth of mines and the heat of furnaces. At German princely courts, alchemy and the science of minerals were held in high regard. From Munich to St Petersburg, cabinets of curiosities displayed local ores and crystals jumbled up with exotic finds from the colonies (whalebone, a shaman’s tambourine, the horn of a rhinoceros), the corpses of newborn freaks and sculptures carved from sugar.

Fugger