Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, has come to be seen as the great rational defence of capitalism, just as the United States has become its most controversial exponent. In this context ‘wealth’ means the collective output of a free market whose different functions reinforce one another to the benefit of all. We tend to use the word ‘riches’ rather differently. Riches can be envied as much as enjoyed. To be rich you need to have done better, or been luckier, than your fellow men. It denotes individual good fortune rather than social wellbeing. Man works to be wealthy, but gambles to be rich.
The fact remains, however, that a society cannot be wealthy unless at least some of its members are rich. And wealth cannot be created unless individuals are motivated to acquire riches. How people become rich – in other words, whether or not they can be said to have earned their wealth – lies at the heart of our attitude towards this whole subject. As I write, Britain is engulfed in a scandal about MPs’ expenses. Many of them have been exposed for making extravagant and dishonest claims for the maintenance of their second homes. People are angry because they believe those they elected to be the guardians of the nation’s money have behaved like cheats, trying to become richer without earning the privilege. Unearned wealth is not to be tolerated.
But what do we mean by ‘unearned’ wealth? Less than a hundred years after Adam Smith explained the advantages of a free market, Karl Marx described its dangers. Where Smith saw benevolent prosperity, Marx found exploitation and inequality. The huge process of industrialisation, which was beginning to rumble into action when The Wealth of Nations was published, had, in Marx’s view, resulted in social and economic divisions that could only end in tension and conflict. How man has coped with wealth and defined both its benefits and drawbacks is an essential part of world history.
This chapter is about man’s acquisition, and sometimes loss, of wealth and its consequences. It begins with the building of the Via Egnatia that carried the traffic of the Romans across the Balkans from the Adriatic to Constantinople. The Roman road system supported the wealth of the greatest of the empires in world history, helping to maintain a centralised grip on the huge territory it controlled. The chapter then explores the city of Chang’an in China, the first great city of the world – richer and larger than anything Europe would see for hundreds of years afterwards. Marco Polo and his family risked their lives in search of wealth, travelling from Venice to China towards the end of the thirteenth century. But in the middle of the fourteenth century the wealth that Europe had begun to enjoy from its expanding trade was nearly destroyed by the arrival of the Black Death. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the foundation of the Dutch East India Company demonstrated how easily merchants could become princes, and how money could rule the world. The invention of the Flying Shuttle in the early eighteenth century was a simple improvement to the business of weaving that, though small in itself, was the first step along a process of industrialisation that led to the biggest revolution in wealth-creation the world had ever seen. The discovery of oil in America accelerated that process and made some individuals fabulously rich. After the First World War, a failure to understand the economic interests of different countries lay at the heart of the Treaty of Versailles which, in trying to put Europe back together again, only succeeded in preparing it for another terrible war. Meanwhile the invention of the Model T Ford ushered in an age of consumerism: many more people could now at least feel rich if they wanted to. Finally, in our own time, the Credit Crunch brought to an end a period of continuous wealth expansion as people discovered that good times are never forever. From the tramp of Roman legions across the packed sand of a Balkan highway to the hideous devastation of the plague and the calculated ruthlessness of sober Amsterdam businessmen, from the belching ferocity of the Industrial Revolution to the economic failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the remorseless spread of the motor car, the history of mankind is a history of trying to get rich and stay rich.
The Building of the Via Egnatia 146 BC
The Via Egnatia was a Roman road that stretched from the Albanian port of Durres on the Adriatic coast to Istanbul. It carried commercial and military traffic across the Balkans and through Greece and Turkey, sustaining the wealth of a great empire.
For nearly a thousand years, the Romans ruled an empire the like of which the world had never seen before, and has not seen since. Their rise to power began at the beginning of the fifth century BC when, as a republic, they elected their first ruling consuls. It ended with the sack of Rome, by then just another city in only half the empire, by the Goths in 410 AD. At its height, after the conquest of Britain in the first century AD, the empire covered all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans and most of Western Europe including Spain, France, the German lands and Italy. But its size, though vast, was not the most impressive thing about it. Its extraordinary achievement – one that has never been equalled in the history of the world – was the degree of organisation and control that it brought and then maintained to the disparate territories under its authority. When St Paul, a converted Jew from the town of Tarsus in Anatolia (in what is now eastern Turkey), fell foul of the law for his preaching about Christianity, he could claim that he was a Roman citizen – ‘civis Romanus sum’ – and therefore be sent to Rome for trial. Whether patrolling the bleak landscape on the border between occupied Britain and Pictish Scotland, or marching through the desert in the conquered provinces of North Africa, a Roman lived under the same laws and was entitled to the same treatment.
Legal and administrative systems were not the only things that bound together the peoples whom the Romans ruled. They were also connected by a great road network that ran throughout the empire. Aristides of Smyrna, an orator living in the second century AD, enjoyed flattering his Roman masters by proclaiming: ‘You have merged all nations into one family.’ He went on: ‘You have measured the earth, bridged the rivers and made roads through the mountains.’ For a man like Aristides, an educated Greek who travelled all over the empire, roads were one of the most obvious manifestations of Roman power and wealth. Journeys across huge territories were comparatively easy and helped to create a secure, prosperous environment.
The Roman Empire’s extraordinary achievement was the degree of control it brought to territories under its authority.
The Roman road system began with the Via Appia which was built in the fourth century BC, when Rome was still a republic. It was named, as were most roads, after the official who ordered its construction and, by the middle of the second century BC, had reached what is now the port of Brindisi on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At this point in time Roman expansion was confined to land within the Italian peninsula, although the republic subsequently grew into an international power following the defeat of the Greek king, Pyrrhus, whose armies invaded southern Italy in 280 BC. In the years that followed, the Romans pushed out beyond the boundaries of Italy itself, conquering all of Greece, the Balkans and North Africa. With these victories came the need for new roads.
The Via Egnatia picked up on the other side of the Adriatic from where the Via Appia ended. Starting on the Albanian coast it followed the line of the River Shkumbin and went over the mountains of Candava towards Lake Ohrid. It then dropped south, going through several mountain passes until it reached the Aegean Sea at Thessalonica in Greece. From there it went through the port of Kavala, today the second largest city in northern Greece, crossed into Turkey at Ipsala before travelling the last 160 miles into Istanbul, then called Byzantium and later Constantinople. It was a great Balkan highway 700 miles long, designed when it was built to help bring control to Rome’s new conquests across the sea from its eastern shore, but eventually becoming the essential link between its western and eastern capitals. It was about twenty feet wide and paved with big stone slabs or packed hard sand. From the time when the Romans first gained power over the peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor, to the moment, 500 years later, when their empire began to collapse, the Via Egnatia was one of the principal methods by which control was maintained and wealth distributed throughout this huge region.
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