Listeners to Wyman’s “Tides of History” podcast will find the cinematic storytelling throughout “The Verge” familiar. So, too, Wyman’s ability to weave complicated, subtle arguments about the past through engaging sketches of historical figures. Wyman spoke to Today’s WorldView about the book, the ways we think about early modern history and whether we are living through a similarly transformational moment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What about the period framed in the book is so crucial to the birth of modernity?
Patrick Wyman: When we think about causality — about why things happen in the grand scheme of history — the usual approach is to try to isolate one variable and track its course over time. That’s especially the case when it comes to explaining the emergence of Western Europe.
But that’s not how things actually happen. History is messy and confused. Events build off one another and snowball. Rather than tracking a single process, I thought I’d try to isolate the specific period when it seemed to me that the most stuff happened, and figure out why. A lot of stuff changed very quickly: Columbus and voyages of exploration, an enormous outbreak of warfare, and of course the Reformation. There was no going back afterward. It’s what political scientists call a critical juncture, when really deeply rooted structures and institutions can break or transform quite rapidly with effects that last for centuries afterward.
Q: You make a specific point to home in on the “economic institutions” that existed in Europe as a springboard for its success, more so than any theory of its unique “cultural genius.” Could you unpack that a bit?
Wyman: When we swipe a credit card to pay for milk and eggs and a candy bar, there’s a whole series of assumptions about the nature of money and especially trust in a series of abstract forces that go into that. After all, you’re not transferring hard currency from hand to hand.
In Europe around the end of the 15th century, there were particular sets of these assumptions that were present all over the continent, from the wealthiest bankers making loans to kings and popes, all the way down to peasants buying beer and day-to-day necessaries.
Everybody owed somebody else, and everybody trusted in the basic assumption that they’d get paid back. That same assumption applied whether we’re talking about financing a voyage of exploration, hiring an army of mercenaries or printing a thousand copies of Martin Luther’s latest work. They all relied on the same mechanisms, and that’s the uniting thing that binds this period together.
Q: The printing press is also a major part of the story. Why?
Wyman: Printing had been around since the 1450s, but almost all the early printers went out of business, and there were still more books being copied by hand in the 1490s than were being printed.
That changed in the first couple of decades of the 16th century. The Reformation was largely carried out through the medium of print, and especially through cheap, easy-to-print pamphlets. The more inflammatory the content, the better. Martin Luther was a master of writing angry, entertaining prose — because that was what sold. The Reformation provided the ready funds that kept printers in business, incentivized more investors to open presses and helped to create a whole group of consumers who were habitually used to paying money for printed products.
The same process applied to voyages of exploration, gunpowder warfare and making loans to kings to pay for still more gunpowder warfare. In this period, people figured out how to make these things profitable, so they poured more and more money into them. The result was a massive shift in scale, very quickly, all of it powered by that largely theoretical money I mentioned earlier.
Q: How important is the Ottoman Empire — which you spotlight in a chapter on Suleiman the Magnificent — to understanding the emergence of the early modern world?
Wyman: The Ottomans were expanding at the same time as the kings of France and Spain were consolidating their holdings and creating the direct ancestors of modern states. Gunpowder? The Ottomans had bigger and better guns, more of them, and more experience using them. State apparatus? The Ottomans were better at collecting taxes and directing the funds. They ran budget surpluses when the kings of France and Spain were scraping the bottom of the barrel for funds.
There was no sense that the Ottomans were destined to become the Sick Man of Europe. But if that’s the case, why was it eventually Western Europe and not Istanbul that became the global hinge? Nobody could’ve predicted that developing more and more complex, tortuous ways of stretching credit to cover new state expenses would eventually result in the quantum leaps of European empires in the centuries to come. There was no sense of destiny here, much less a moral arc or lesson.
Q: Given the disruptions of the past four decades, could we argue that we are at another sort of critical juncture, where political paradigms dramatically shifted and new technologies transformed societies and economies?
Wyman: I absolutely think so, and especially the last decade or so in the aftermath of the Great Recession. I see two major parallels. First, it’s not just the emergence of the Internet as the primary medium of communication, but the amounts of money to be made, and investors’ willingness to pour absurd sums of money into things like Uber and WeWork. Whole established industries can be transformed or destroyed practically overnight by the application of concentrated capital.
The second parallel, to my mind, lies in the essential lack of concern about the consequences of all this. Columbus’s investors didn’t much care about who got hurt or enslaved in order to make his voyages profitable. [Sixteenth-century German merchant] Jakob Fugger financed wars on a continentwide scale in which cities were sacked and battlefields left soaked in blood, but he doesn’t seem to have lost any sleep over it.
The ways of doing things that they and their contemporaries laid down in this period had a long, brutal and tragic afterlife that defined the world for centuries to come. The disruptions of our current period — the kinds of incentive structures and values and durable new institutions being created — will certainly do the same, in ways we can’t yet begin to imagine. In 1530, the Industrial Revolution and global empires were still far distant on the horizon, even if the circuitous paths leading there had, I think, been set down. We should cast a critical eye on the potential downsides of our own innovations as well.
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