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

bankers, shipbuilders, fighting men, artists, and intellectuals relocate. Form by form, the fields of individual freedom, of the market and of democracy, expand. Form by form, peasants, craftsmen, and independent workers are transformed into insecure wage-earners. Form by form, wealth is concentrated in a shrinking number of hands; wider freedoms are enjoyed by consumers and citizens, and greater alienations are inflicted on the workers.
    By a curious irony, this tilt from the imperial to the mercantile order engenders a return of peasant and traveler to a nomadic way of life. Whence the importance of the long history of nomadism (the foundation of human culture), which has resurfaced in our era and which, as we shall see, will be even more present in our future.
    Down to our own day, the mercantile order has experienced nine successive forms. We will see that they can be designated by the name of the core city (Bruges, Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, Boston,New York, Los Angeles). They can also be identified by the roster of services they progressively transform into mass consumer goods (foods, clothing, books, finances, transport, domestic aids, instruments of communication, and forms of entertainment). Or else again by technology that allows men to extend the field of commerce (the stern rudder, the caravel, printing, accounting practices, the reed instrument, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, the microprocessor), and finally by the name of the dominant currency (groat, ducat, guilder, genovino, florin, pound sterling, dollar). Perhaps even (as we will also see) by the name of an artist or philosopher representative of the core.
    The essentials of economic, technical, political, and military history of the last seven centuries can be discerned in the strategies deployed by powers to become the core, to remain the core, to escape the periphery or to exit from the mercantile order. And this history reveals the laws of the future even more clearly than those of the past.
Bruges 1200–1350: The Beginnings of the Mercantile Order
    At the end of the twelfth century, a handful of ports in Flanders and Tuscany (whose hinterlands boast the continent’s finest farming soil) are home to visiting merchants, rebellious slaves, and serfs driven from their fields. In these townships, on the margins of feudalism, no absolute monarch takes the surplus; serfdom does not monopolize the whole work force; a newinnovative class, the bourgeoisie, implements new technical knowledge and economizes on work practices to grasp the profits for itself.
    In the surrounding countryside there first appear triennial crop rotation, the horse and ox collar, the windmill, and the mechanization of threshing. These technical advances make possible the beginnings of industrialization of farm products. Then comes the all-important invention of the stern rudder, allowing ships to sail into the wind and, a little later, to arm themselves for the very first time. Such innovations give these townships — at once seaports, arsenals, and fairs — the means of mastering seaborne trade. In the regions they control, money displaces force, wage-earning displaces serf-dom, investment displaces monumental building projects, and trade displaces the police. Division of labor grows more complex; agricultural productivity rises; the price of wheat, now produced in great quantities, sinks; more citizens can consume it and buy woolen clothing colored by new dyes; the first spinning machines appear; the need for credit arises. Tiny Jewish communities, sparsely populated on the European continent for more than thirteen centuries but still the only ones theologically authorized to lend at interest, are obliged (as they were under Islam) to lend to kings, traders, and peasants in exchange for a precarious protection — and to create banking systems. And since the seasons are no longer precise enough instruments to demarcate city time,