The moment when Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 CE is widely considered to mark the advent of Europe’s world domination. But, as this chapter shows, the main event shaping the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not yet European expansionism. To be sure, the arrival of the conquistadores in the Americas spelled destruction for the indigenous peoples; and the Portuguese and Spanish crowns even divided the globe between them in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Yet colonial possessions in America, Africa, and Asia by the mid-eighteenth century remained limited compared to what came later. Directly controlled overseas possessions were mostly confined to coastal fortresses, manned by a few dozen soldiers, which were gradually surrounded by the wooden huts of merchants and adventure seekers. Despite developments in agriculture, trade, banking, technology, and manufacturing, Europe’s economy grew slowly. Wages and urbanization even stagnated throughout Europe, except in the Netherlands and Britain.1 The spectacular effects of the industrial revolution did not occur until after 1760.
Between 1500 and 1750, the world population grew from around 400 million to over 700 million. Less than one fifth lived in Europe, while over half lived in Asia. Much more significant to those people was the rise of Muslim empires in the densely populated Middle East and South Asia. The Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals subjugated about a quarter of the world’s population. China, which accounted for another quarter of the world population, was thrown into confusion by the invasions of the Manchu, which culminated in the establishment of the Qing Dynasty. Europe, the other important demographic centre, remained beset by violence within and between states: the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions (1701–13, 1740–48) – to name only the most familiar conflicts – were all fought over various combinations of territorial, religious, and commercial interests.
This world, where small kingdoms lived uneasily in the shadow of vast land empires, undoubtedly became more connected than ever before. The most compelling evidence remains the increasingly accurate globes and maps which were produced at the time in Europe, the Middle East, and in China, as well as the proliferation of travel journals and narratives whose exotic accounts of far-flung places were devoured by readers back home. Communication – both physical travel and the sharing of information – were advanced by the development of printing, the patronage of geographical exploration, and, most of all, by economic greed. Not since the junks of the Chinese admiral Zheng He plied the Indian Ocean in the early 1400s were ships with such firepower dispatched in the pursuit of gold, spices, and slaves. Now, however, there was no inward-looking Chinese emperor to stop this turn to the seas. European states competed with each other to monopolize overseas trade, while the ventures of increasingly enterprising merchants both stimulated and were emboldened by the emergence of modern capitalism, with its joint-stock companies, stock markets, and proliferation of financial products. The foundations of Europe’s global supremacy were unquestionably laid during this period, but the road to primacy was still occupied by far more powerful actors.
The Ottoman Empire
Until the fifteenth century, the Ottomans considered themselves the underdogs in any wars they fought. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, however, the sultans regarded themselves as at least the equal of the Holy Roman Emperor and aspired to conquer the whole world.2 This Ottoman bid for mastery was relaunched in the early sixteenth century by Sultan Selim I (1512–20).
Viewed from Constantinople, the three most important arenas were the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. In the Middle East, the Ottomans were interested in the trade of the Levant and the Red Sea, the holy cities of Jerusalem, Medina, and Mecca, and in countering the Shia Safavid Empire which was centred in Persia. In a letter to the Safavid monarch, Selim I presented himself as the defender of Sunni Islam and accused his correspondent of tyranny, oppression, and, worst of all, alcoholism. He ordered 60,000 Ottoman troops to invade Mesopotamia. In the Battle of Chaldiran (1514), the Ottomans prevailed over the Safavids thanks to mobile artillery and flintlock rifles. Selim was unable to subdue the Safavids completely, but he gained control over the Levant and northern Mesopotamia. The success fuelled Ottoman ambitions for further conquests on the eastern border, running from Armenia in the north to Egypt and the Red Sea in the south.
Selim was succeeded by an even more accomplished conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66). Most of the Balkans and the western Black Sea region were already ruled by the Ottomans. Suleiman, however, took advantage of a civil war in Hungary, which controlled the trade along the Danube and some of the overland commerce with the Baltic, and launched an offensive. In the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, Ottoman gunpowder weapons proved superior against the old-fashioned Hungarian knights. The scale of the victory – the Hungarian king and at least 15,000 of his men were killed and the capital subsequently burned to the ground – sent a wave of panic flooding through the rest of Europe. In 1529, Suleiman stood before the gates of the imperial city of Vienna. His failure to take it was largely due to bad weather, which had prevented him bringing most of his heavy siege artillery, and other supply shortages. Only after the siege of Vienna had been lifted did the Holy Roman Emperor start improving his defences in the east.
Suleiman, meanwhile, turned his attention to the Mediterranean. ‘If these scorpions [the Christians] are occupying the seas with their ships, if the flags of the Doge of Venice, the Pope and the kings of France and Spain are waved in the coasts of Thrace, this is because of our tolerance. I want a very strong navy large in number as well.’3 These words were already spoken by Selim but mostly put into action by Suleiman. His vast naval build-up ensured the Ottoman fighting machine became as feared at sea as it was on land, defeating the fleets of major Christian alliances at the Battles of Preveza (1538) and Djerba (1560). In little more than two decades, the Ottomans had emerged as the leading naval power in the Mediterranean.
Under Suleiman’s long rule, the empire reached its zenith. European diplomats were stunned by the beauty of Istanbul.4 A poet himself, Suleiman patronized forty cultural societies; he ordered the building of the famous Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and financed libraries, hospitals, schools, and public baths. The treasury was filled with booty, tribute, revenues from trade taxes, and the income from textile and armament industries. The construction and manning of galleys, the ranks of the Janissaries, labour on plantations and in palaces, not to mention the harems of wealthy Ottomans, required hundreds of thousands of slaves to be brought in from abroad.5 They were collected through the so-called ‘blood tax’ from Christians in the Balkans; by warlords who ‘harvested the steppes’ of the Black Sea region; by slave caravans from sub-Saharan Africa; and by corsairs who supplied the slave markets of North Africa with Christian men, women, and children seized from ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic or captured on raids as far afield as Ireland and Iceland. The corsairs were so active that a saying spread: it was ‘raining Christians in Algiers’.6
The Ottoman Empire appeared eternal. Court advisors theorized that the sultan’s power was based on a virtuous circle: as long as the sultan maintained justice, his subjects would flourish and support him. In reality, in the decades after the death of Suleiman the limits of Ottoman power became visible. Throughout the seventeenth century, the empire struggled with inflation and the effects of currency debasements, even though the production of textiles and other goods grew.7 By the end of the century, the custom whereby the new sultan secured his succession to the throne by killing all his brothers was also regularly causing civil wars, coups, and widespread instability. Increasingly, the Janissaries exploited the situation to control the succession, appoint viziers, and undermine the power of the sultans. The glory days of the empire were drawing to an end.
The failure to conquer the Safavid Empire forced them to keep many troops in the east. At the same time, the expansion of Russia made it difficult for the Ottomans to defend their territory around the Black Sea. The Ottomans also began to lag behind the maritime innovations of the European ‘age of sail’. The turning point here had been marked by the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where the victorious European fleet had matched the Ottoman one in size but had carried twice as many cannon. Although the Ottomans’ galleys remained superior in the confined bays and straits of the Mediterranean, their sailing vessels never matched the quantity or quality of European ships. Despite a handful of naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century – one even ventured as far as the sultanate of Aceh on Sumatra in 1565 – the Ottomans were unable to contest the growing European mercantile and naval presence in the east.
In 1683, the Ottoman army returned to besiege Vienna once again. This time, the massed cavalry and artillery of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth shattered the Ottoman forces and lifted the siege. By the end of the seventeenth century, an alliance of Christian powers had driven the borders of the Ottoman Empire back into the Balkans in what were the first significant losses of territory in its history. Matters came to a head in 1703, when the Janissaries ousted the sultan in favour of his brother. Over the course of his reign, Ahmed III (1703–30) managed to establish a new status quo. Although the Ottomans were no longer able to threaten Western Europe, they continued to be the single largest power in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, for example seizing most of Venice’s Greek possessions in 1717, and briefly annexing territory in Armenia and the southern Caucasus in 1724 from the weakening Safavid Empire.
The Safavid Empire
At the peak of its power, the empire of the Safavid Dynasty stretched from the Black Sea to the Hindu Kush and contained around 50 million people. It originated, however, as yet another minor power on the fringes of Mesopotamia and Persia when a religious leader called Ismail became king of the Qizilbash, or ‘Redheads’ – a coalition of Shia warrior tribes in the Caucasus – in 1501. Once he was firmly in power, Ismail imposed Twelver Shiism as the official form of Islam in his domains: ‘With God’s help, if the people utter one word of protest, I will draw the sword and leave not one of them alive.’8 Nonetheless, he also continued to model himself on great ancient rulers of Persia, such as Cyrus, Darius, Khosrow, and Alexander the Great. He not only took the title of shahanshah, or ‘king of kings’, but also the Mongol title of ‘khan’, and the Indian title bahadur, meaning ‘valiant warrior’. This reflected the way that his subjects had grown to include Persians, Mongols, Turks, and Uzbeks.9 But, above all, the Safavid shah was the semi-divine ‘shadow of God upon earth’, the spiritual leader of the mystical Sufi order of the Safaviyya – from which the dynasty takes its name – and the earthly representative of the Mahdi, or redeemer, whose coming would herald the end of the world.10
Benefiting from the decline of the Mongol-Turkish empire ruled by the heirs of Timur, or Tamerlane, Shah Ismail conquered Armenia in 1501, most of Persia by 1504, and parts of Uzbekistan in 1511. In 1514, he fought his first major war against the Ottomans. It was not only a holy war – of Shia Safavid against Sunni Ottoman – but one with the same huge territorial stakes as the conflicts between the Byzantines and the Sasanians a millennium earlier: control over the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. But when tens of thousands of Ottoman and Safavid soldiers faced each other at the Battle of Chaldiran, it was the Ottomans who prevailed. In the aftermath, they seized most of Mesopotamia and pillaged the Safavid capital, Tabriz. In 1555, the Ottoman ascendancy was such that they were able to impose the humiliating terms of the Peace of Amasya, which gave them access to the Persian Gulf, established large buffer zones between the two powers, and forced the Safavids to abandon some of their holiest cities, such as Najaf and Karbala.
Although the first Safavids lost their battles against the Ottomans, Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) became their nemesis. He profited from the civil war that followed the death of the Ottoman sultan Murad III in 1595 to thrust them out of Mesopotamia, recapturing Baghdad in 1623. This success was also the outcome of reforms at home. Abbas had transferred power from the Qizilbash warlords to a new political administration and a new, more professional army equipped with modern European weapons, both of which were manned with slaves from the Caucasus. When the Georgians rebelled in 1614, Abbas crushed them ruthlessly, massacring tens of thousands, and forcing many more into captivity in Persia. He castrated the sons of the Georgian king, and tortured his mother to death for refusing to renounce Christianity. The Georgian monarch was left to weep ‘an endless Nile of tears’.11
In the east, the Safavids developed close diplomatic relations with the other rising Islamic power, the Mughal Empire. In 1544, the Safavid shah had provided sanctuary for the temporarily deposed Mughal emperor Humayun, welcoming him with a concert where ‘Fair women, amiable and meek, expert in rendering service, stood in every corner like virgins in paradise’; although he later wanted to execute Humayun for refusing to convert to Twelver Shiism.12 Relations soured even further under Shah Abbas, who desired the recovery of trade routes that had been lost to the Mughals. Tensions were stoked by Uzbek princes to the north, who even invited the Mughals to join a grand alliance: ‘If Prince Shah Jahan were to march north from the Deccan, we will also hurry there … After the victory, let us take Khurasan and whatever you wish of that country may be included in the imperial domains and the remainder granted to us’, suggested one Uzbek to the Mughal emperor without success.13 In 1622, Shah Abbas seized the chief prize at the heart of the conflict, the strategic fortress and trading city of Kandahar, in present-day Afghanistan.
The spoils of war, the control of trade, and the imperial silk factories allowed Abbas to spend lavishly on his new capital, Isfahan. The construction of buildings like the Ali Qapu palace marked the golden age of Safavid art and architecture. To the Safavids, Isfahan was the centre both of Islam and of global trade, as well as the seat of ‘the great king, whose empire extends to the four cardinal points of the world, whose word can be broken by no force nor power’.14 Soon after the death of Abbas, the glory of the Safavids began to wane. One of the reasons was that the start of almost every shah’s reign was accompanied by a succession struggle, despite the custom whereby Safavid monarchs blinded family members who might become rivals. Another was the neglect of agriculture, so that the empire’s cities relied excessively on international trade. Abbas’s secretary and the historian of his reign, Iskandar Beg, described how the Safavid rulers prioritized the security of trade roads and the promotion of silk exports over agriculture, but also how they banned the export of bullion.15 The lucrative Safavid silk trade was damaged by the Ottoman control of the Levant and the growing European presence in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf: in the seventeenth century, English traders began to bypass the Safavids’ monopoly by shipping silk directly to Europe from the Bay of Bengal. The Safavids, who lacked even a coastal navy similar to that of the Ottomans, were unable to protect their interests.
Worst of all was the threat from the north posed by the rapidly expanding tsardom of Russia. Since the establishment of direct relations in the first half of the sixteenth century, the two powers had alternated between alliances against their common Ottoman enemy and confrontations over territory and trade in the Caucasus region. In 1722–3, the Safavids, internally weakened and externally challenged on all sides, were comprehensively defeated by both the Ottomans and Russia. In the Treaty of Constantinople the following year, the victors dismembered the Safavid Empire between themselves. A Turkic warlord, Nader Khan, deposed the last Safavid kings, ruling first as regent, then as shah in his own right from 1736. He briefly restored the realm’s territorial integrity, and even lead Persian forces into Mughal India, where they sacked Delhi. But after his murder in 1747, Persia fragmented once again into anarchy.
The Mughal Empire
Like the Safavids, the Mughals originated in early sixteenth-century Central Asia. Around the year 1505, they crossed the Khyber Pass into the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The Delhi Sultanate initially resisted these incursions, but it was faced by threats on its other borders and could not sustain its defence. In 1526, the Mughal leader, Babur, formally founded his new dynasty, but it was his grandson Akbar (1556–1605) who turned the kingdom into a true empire. Akbar was a brilliant commander. Even if his troops were technologically no more advanced than those of other kings and sultans in South Asia, his tactical genius earned him victories like the decisive Battle of Panipat in 1556, which was fought against the sultan of Bengal.
Akbar prided himself on being a descendant of Genghis Khan. He took the title of shahanshah, like the Ottomans and Safavids; and, like the latter, he too claimed to be the shadow of God upon earth. Yet, at the same time, he also described royalty as a light emanating from god, a notion familiar to his tens of millions of Hindu and Buddhist subjects. Self-consciously presenting himself as the ruler of all religions, the Muslim Akbar embraced the Hindu and Buddhist concept of dharma, or righteousness, as a key principle of governance, sponsored the translation of classic Hindu texts like the Mahabharata and the Arthashastra, elevated lesser Hindu rulers to the Mughal nobility, and organized meetings for Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Christian philosophers to expound their beliefs. Out of these discussions he distilled a syncretic creed called the Din-i Ilahi, or the ‘religion of God’, and promulgated the principle of Suhl-i kul, or universal harmony through religious tolerance.
In 1595, Akbar’s vizier, Abu’l-Fazl, completed his official history of the Mughal emperor’s reign. In the course of paying tribute to Akbar, the Akbarnama’s pages contain references to Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great, as well as quotations from the Mahabharata and invocations of Hindu principles. The book concluded with some important advice for future princes. The prosperity of India’s diverse society – which Abu’l-Fazl described as a vast market place – depended entirely on the king’s being wise enough to preserve stability. Without a king, Abu’l-Fazl argued, the storm of strife would never subside as men were selfish, short-sighted, and intent solely on their own advantage. ‘The superiority of man rests on the jewel of reason,’16 he continued, explaining that this meant the king needed to resist self-aggrandizement, uphold justice, respect the religion of his subjects, be wary of unscrupulous advisors, reward merit, keep the army in good shape and neighbouring kingdoms from resorting to arms – and, in his personal life, abstain from womanizing and gambling.17 ‘All strife is caused by this,’ Abu’l-Fazl summarized: ‘that men neglecting the necessities of their state, occupy themselves with extraneous concerns.’18
One of the most important of Akbar’s reforms was his formalization of the system known as mansabdari, in which the loyalty and service of military officers and civilian administrators was secured in exchange for the revenues from lands owned by the emperor. Another was the hiring of European and Ottoman soldiers and military engineers to modernize his army with matchlocks and artillery. This military revolution was so overwhelming that many of the lesser kings of the Indian subcontinent could no longer resist Mughal power. Uzbek and Dutch diplomats, for example, described how Mughal troops continued to campaign along the Indus, beheading captured local leaders and forcing villagers to sell their women and children into slavery.19 To maintain the flow of trade, Akbar also built fortresses along the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya, and ensured that he controlled the ports of Gujarat and Bengal, which were the commercial gateways to the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia. By his death in 1605, the Mughal Empire encompassed present-day Pakistan, all of India except the southern most tip, and Bangladesh.
The Mughals established state monopolies in the production of salt, the saltpetre which was essential for making gunpowder, and textiles. Akbar commanded citizens buy locally in order to help shawl manufacturers in Lahore and carpet-weavers in Agra compete with wares imported from Persia.20 Exports of textiles, tobacco, tea, and other commodities were immense, so that the empire profited from a large inflow of bullion. The drawback, however, was that those exports were to a large extent controlled by foreigners: English and Portuguese who settled in trading cities on the coast and lent money to local governors in exchange for licences to trade and protection of their activities.
This dependence on Europeans led to friction. In 1686, the East India Company – the state-backed English corporation that traded with South and East Asia – attempted to force the Mughal Empire into granting it commercial privileges. When English ships blockaded the coast, thereby preventing Indian pilgrims from voyaging to Mecca, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb dispatched a fleet of his own against the East India Company’s base at Bombay (Mumbai). Eventually, in 1689, the English were forced to surrender and pay a substantial indemnity. European traders now started to develop the east coast of India as an alternative source of cotton and incited the Arakan kingdom in Myanmar to contest control of the Ganges Delta and the Bay of Bengal with the Mughals. To counter the threat, Aurangzeb ordered 300 ships to be built in the European fashion; but eventually, in order to protect his ports, he had to demand help from the Dutch and English, who saw this as an opportunity to strengthen their position in relation to the Portuguese. ‘One ship manned with Europeans would rout 20 ships manned by the Mughals,’ a vizier confided.21 The Mughals may have continued to win wars on land throughout the seventeenth century, but at sea they remained at the mercy of more advanced and heavily armed European ships.
The death of Aurangzeb in 1707 sparked succession conflicts and civil war. These were exacerbated by the hardening of religious policies since the time of Akbar, so that relations with the Hindu majority had deteriorated. Meanwhile, the East India Company had assumed such a position of influence within the empire that it enjoyed tax-free trading rights for little more than a few thousand rupees a year, growing ever richer and more powerful at the expense of the Mughal administration. The concommitant neglect of the army and the defences in the north allowed the Persian ruler Nader Shah to invade in 1739. Mughal cavalry was overwhelmed by infantry with flintlock muskets and field artillery with horse-mounted swivel guns. The capital, Delhi, was sacked. ‘Now commenced the work of spoliation, watered by the tears of the people,’ wrote one Mughal courtier. ‘Whole families were ruined. Many swallowed poison, and others ended their days with the stab of a knife … In short the accumulated wealth of centuries changed masters in a moment.’22 Seven hundred elephants, 4,000 camels, and 12,000 horses were needed to carry the Mughal emperors’ treasury away.23
A Universe United
Throughout much of the sixteenth century, China under the Ming Dynasty flourished as its economy boomed and population multiplied. The Forbidden City, the central palace complex in Beijing, whose construction had already begun in 1406, was now entirely completed. Foreign envoys were required to rehearse the ceremonial protocols for three days under the supervision of the ministry of rites before they were escorted to the main entrance to the palace at the Meridian Gate. After crossing a sequence of vast squares and passing through the immense Gate of Supreme Harmony, they were greeted by silk-robed eunuchs of the directorate of ceremonial, who ushered them up the flight of forty steps to the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Here, in the largest pavilion of all, they had to kowtow four times in front of the emperor, who was seated on the dragon throne and surrounded by gold, jade, and silks.
When the first Europeans arrived, the emperor prohibited trade, but took great interest in their powerful artillery. Eventually, thousands of ‘red barbarian cannon’ – copied from Western prototypes – were produced.24 The Zhengde Emperor was criticized for being decadent, but he sealed an alliance with the Malacca Sultanate against Portugal, and in 1521 his junks defeated a small Portuguese fleet near Tunmen, near modern Hong Kong. Unable to break into the Chinese market, the Portuguese started to arm Japanese raiders with cannon and breech-loading swivel guns. These Japanese pirates soon revealed the weakness of China’s coastal defences. They looted ports, marauded up the Grand Canal, laid siege to major garrison cities, and in the end forced the Ming to cooperate with the Portuguese. In 1554, Macao became Portugal’s first trading settlement in China.
In the north, Mongol and Jurchen tribes now saw the chance to strengthen their position with regard to the Ming, and formed an alliance to invade China. In 1550, Mongol horsemen reached the suburbs of Beijing to demand trading rights. They were repelled, but wrested an agreement to trade horses for silk. The court ordered the Great Wall to be reinforced, magnifying it to the monumental proportions that are still visible today. Fortifications were also erected on the coast to deter pirates. Other challenges emerged. In 1592, more than 150,000 Japanese troops invaded the Korean Peninsula. The Imjin War (1592–8) forced the Ming to intervene and caused a new drain on the treasure. Rebellions broke out in both the south and north of China. Although they were repressed, the Wanli Emperor decided to retreat from public life. The emperor’s neglect of his responsibilities created a power vacuum that was filled by quarrelling factions at court, while the armed forces were no longer under unified command.
But now a much larger rebellion started to ferment in China’s northern periphery. Here, peasants were troubled by Jurchen incursions, deserting imperial troops, and large gangs of bandits.25 Meanwhile, a prolonged period of cold encouraged the Jurchen, like the Mongols four centuries before them, to leave their homeland and push south. Right from the outset, the Jurchen leader Nurhaci claimed to be fighting a holy war against the Ming.26 In 1618, he formalized his complaints against Ming repression and violations of Jurchen territory into a document known as the Seven Grievances, which to all intents and purposes was a declaration of war. ‘The Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty was unwise in politics. He did not attend to internal affairs,’ Nurhaci later stated in justification of his actions. ‘So Heaven condemned him, and bestowed the Ming Emperor’s land on the eastern side of the Yellow River upon me. Since Heaven favored me and endowed land to me, I was afraid that if I did not govern the nation according to Heaven’s will, I would be punished.’27 In 1635, Nurhaci’s successor formalized his people’s growing ascendancy by ordering them to cast off their old Jurchen name, with its derogatory associations in China, and now be known as the Manchu.
In China itself, the climatic changes that had affected the Manchu were causing famine. The Grand Canal dried out so that cities fell short of food.28 Particularly devastating typhoons wrought havoc again and again. Rebellion became nationwide as its leaders sought to establish a government more favourable to the peasants who formed the majority of the population. To subdue the rebels, panicking Ming officials courted the Manchu. They were now invited to cross the Great Wall, where they were joined by disgruntled Ming generals.29 In the series of engagements known as the Battle of Song-Jin (1641–2), Ming loyalist forces were decisively defeated, dealing a deathblow to the dynasty. In 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a fruit tree beneath the red walls of the Forbidden City. The heavenly mandate had passed on to yet another barbarian dynasty: the Qing.
The Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty were quick to adopt the armature of Chinese imperial tradition. Ming officialdom was incorporated into the new government, critical infrastructure preserved, and the teachings of the ancient classics promoted. Buddhism was supported and Confucian values once again defined imperial doctrine. ‘Evildoers are disliked by Heaven and their nations are subject to decline,’ stated the Manchu leader. ‘Those who do good deeds are blessed by heaven and their nations will be prosperous.’30 At the same time, however, the first Qing rulers wanted to avoid complete assimilation. Manchu warriors were forbidden to marry Chinese women or to become farmers; hunting was practised as an expression of Manchu identity; and the rituals of the Manchu’s traditional shamanism continued to be performed.
As regards foreign policy, the first Qing ruler of China, the Shunzhi Emperor (1644–61), restored the tributary tradition and received envoys from as far afield as the Vietnamese kingdom of Annam, the Ryukyu Islands south of Japan, and Tibet. ‘Now, the universe is united under one rule, the four seas have become a family, the people of all the countries have all become my children,’ he announced.31 In reality, nothing was further from the truth. The southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangdong, and Fujian were held by warlords. In the north, Qing troops encountered armies from Russia, whose eastward expansion reached Manchuria, and competed with the Mongols of the Dzungar Khanate for control of Central Asian trade routes and for influence over the centre of Buddhism, Tibet.
It was the Kangxi Emperor (1661–1722) who did most to secure the Qing Empire from external threats. He believed that China could not rely on the protection afforded by the mountains and rivers that guarded its traditional borders. Defence through expansion was to be the strategy: ‘use the Liuchiu [Ryukyu] to defend the southeast, Korea the northeast, Mongolia the northwest, and Vietnam the south.’32 The Kangxi Emperor’s first step was to negotiate a border treaty with Russia. Then he took advantage of the conflict between the Khalkha and Dzungar Mongols to attack the latter. The Dzungar menace would be exterminated, the Kangxi Emperor swore; heaven wanted it to happen.33 During his reign, campaigns were also fought in Taiwan, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Tibet.
The Kangxi Emperor was succeeded by the Yongzheng Emperor (1722–35), who decided to engage the stubborn rebels of Yunnan. The Chinese spoke of its inhabitants as aboriginal thugs and frontier barbarians that killed for a living, while coveting its copper, salt, and tea and the direct route it provided to Tibet.34 The campaign was a bloodbath: tens of thousands of civilians were killed, including women and children. Limbs were cut off those who protested against the Qing presence. ‘If we do not kill a few at present, we will have to put to death many later on,’ one Qing governor explained, but the region remained restless.35 In Taiwan too policy hardened, with the Qing court classifying it as a strategically important place. Private settlers were followed by fully fledged colonization as more soldiers were deployed to the island.36
In the shadow of China, numerous lesser states continued to compete with each other. In the northeast, the Japanese regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi made use of matchlock muskets to unify the country and subsequently to invade Korea. Hideyoshi was praised for ruling the world ‘wherever the sun shines’.37 He was succeeded by almost three centuries of rule by shoguns from the rival Tokugawa clan. They kept the emperor as little more than a figurehead, repeatedly forced the Koreans to pay tribute, and mounted military expeditions as far away as Taiwan. However, concern began to mount about the growing influence of European traders: commercial and other interactions with non-Japanese should be restricted, it was argued. In 1633, the Tokugawa ruler ordered a policy of isolationism initially known as kaikin, or ‘maritime restrictions’, but later and more commonly referred to as sakoku, or ‘closed country’.38
In Southeast Asia, European firearms also allowed the Buddhist Le emperors to strengthen their grip on most of present-day Vietnam. The Toungoo kingdom in Myanmar vied with the Ayutthaya kingdom of Thailand, in particular for control of the trade ports on the Andaman Sea. Ayutthaya in turn was later pushed back by the Malay Sultanate, which itself also faced competition from the sultanates of Johor, Aceh, and Banten for the Malayan Peninsula and strategic sea lanes like the Strait of Malacca. These sultanates were played off against one another as the first Dutch and Portuguese colonists sought to establish rival trading posts, heralding the start of centuries of European imperialism in the region.
Europe’s Age of Iron
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the world’s four major powers – the Qing, the Safavids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans – all reluctantly engaged in trade with European colonists, copied European weapons, enquired into Western sciences, and welcomed Western artists. But none of them anticipated that this distant arena of squabbling pygmies was set to rule the globe. Christopher Columbus’ discoveries might have finally tied the two hemispheres together, and the voyage of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope in 1497–9 might have opened up a new way to reach Asia, but Spanish and Portuguese colonization remained very modest.
In the Western Hemisphere, the armies of the conquistadores were tiny, as we have seen; most of the devastation wrought on the indigenous populations of the Americas was the result of European diseases, not force of arms. Even as late as 1700, there were still no more than 200 voyages across the Atlantic a year. Asian resistance to European encroachment via the Indian Ocean was far sterner, with the continent’s vast land empires able to confine the initial colonial ventures to compact trading settlements along the coast and on islands.39 By the late seventeenth century, the Qing and the Mughals each ruled more than 150 million people and the Ottomans more than 30 million; the Spanish Empire, meanwhile, contained fewer than 20 million souls.40 Compared to the conquests of the Asian empires, European maritime colonialism was not necessarily more belligerent or aggressive.
In terms of political power, and the capacity to control large populations, therefore, Europe at this point might have only started its rise, but it already eclipsed the four major continental powers in significant ways. The most obvious was the continuing development of fast sailing ships, capable of voyaging vast distances and heavily armed with relatively long-range cannon. With their more lightly armed coastal fleets, it became increasingly difficult for the Asian empires to defend themselves against this naval might, which was soon converted into European maritime supremacy. As Asian trade, ports, and major cities came under threat, Europe began to take the economic lead. In China and India, economic production per capita did not increase between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; in Western Europe, it improved by 30 per cent.
Growth in Europe was driven by increasingly fierce competition for markets and for technological advantage. In the fifteenth century, Northern Italy had been Europe’s richest region, but gradually the centre of power began to shift to the north: first to the Flemish city of Bruges and then, after its main access to the sea had silted up and its competitiveness in the lucrative trade in woollen cloth had dwindled, to Antwerp in the sixteenth century. ‘No other town in the world could offer me more facilities for carrying on the trade,’ one of the Dutch city’s leading businessmen explained. ‘Antwerp can be easily reached; various nations meet in its market-place; there too can be found the raw materials indispensable for the practice of one’s trade; craftsmen for all trades can be easily found and instructed in a short time.’41 In 1585, however, Antwerp too lost its access to the sea – due to a blockade by the Spanish – causing the centre of commercial activity to shift to Amsterdam.
By this time, the Low Countries had become the richest region on earth. The combination of the regional European trade in cloth and metals with the maritime trade in spices from South and East Asia transformed cities like Antwerp and Amsterdam into truly global commercial hubs. But over the course of the seventeenth century, military conflicts, trade wars, and diminishing competitiveness saw the lead in finance, manufacturing, and technology gradually shift once more – this time, to London. In the eighteenth century, breakthroughs in the automation of textile manufacturing, innovations in steel production, and the modernization of financial organization paved the way for the industrial revolution and Britain’s ascendancy.
Several factors accounted for Europe’s comparative success during this era: the absence of pandemics on the scale of the medieval plague; the climate slowly becoming warmer; widespread agricultural and industrial innovation; the growth of skilled craftsmanship and the birth of a recognizably modern consumer society in cities; the inflow of wealth from colonies; and the proliferation of new financial instruments and institutions.42 Some of the latter had been employed by early medieval Islamic traders, others originated in late medieval Italy. But they were now avidly adopted in the Netherlands and England, where they were perfected and began to be employed globally. Joint-stock companies spread financial risk, thereby encouraging investment – both directly and through newly emergent stock markets – which in turn further promoted trade. The first central banks were founded, such as the Amsterdam Exchange Bank in 1609 and the Bank of England in 1694. The cumulative effect of these developments was to facilitate international credit and to pressurize rising trading nations into observing the rule of law and maintaining low commercial taxes if they wished to encourage foreign trade. More than ever, the competition for wealth between European states – and the cities within them – knitted the continent together through networks of commerce, capital, and information.
Throughout the period between 1500 and 1750, the signs of Europe’s growing prosperity encouraged its thinkers to dream once again of the prospect of universal peace. ‘A unified empire would be best if we could have a sovereign made in the image of God,’ wrote the Dutch humanist Erasmus in 1530; ‘but, men being what they are, there is more safety in kingdoms of moderate power united in a Christian league.’43 His friend, the English statesman Thomas More, described his ideal world of Utopia as an island protected by the sea, where people lived in harmony. ‘Most princes apply themselves to the arts of war instead of to the good arts of peace,’ he complained in 1516. ‘They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or crook than on governing well those they already have.’44 He reckoned that peace would be better served by persuading princes of the benefits of supporting the trade of their country. Over a century later, the Flemish painter and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens was still of the same opinion. ‘The interests of the whole world are intimately connected at this moment,’ he asserted.45
The sixteenth-century French political philosopher Jean Bodin was of the opinion that trade and communication would be the main facilitators of a respublica mundana, or ‘global commonwealth’. Others believed the law of nations – founded on the common law of precedent and the natural law inherent to all human societies – would be more instrumental. The Spanish philosopher and jurist Francisco de Vitoria stated: ‘The sovereignty of the individual state is limited because it is part of a community of nations linked by solidarity and obligations.’46 His fellow countryman and fellow philosopher Francisco Suárez also insisted on international rules based on the shared needs of peoples, while still emphasizing the importance of separate sovereignties. The seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius advocated a voluntary international common law. The French political theorist Émeric Crucé, in 1623, even argued for an association of states with a permanent assembly of ambassadors located in Venice. Decisions would be reached by majority vote, and armed forces pooled.
Not all believed that the role of diplomacy was to further some respublica mundana. The English envoy Henry Wotton famously claimed in 1604 that ‘An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.47 A year earlier, the French diplomat Jean Hotman had stated that the ambassador’s primary duty was to conceal the follies of his country, like a child protecting a senile parent. The Dutch diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort explained in 1682 that the role of an ambassador merely ‘consisted in maintaining effective communication between two Princes, in delivering letters in soliciting answers to them in protecting his Master’s subjects and conserving his interests’.48 Any ambassador, he concluded, also needed ‘a Tincture of the Comedian’ in his character.49
Peace summits like the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520 and the Conference of Westphalia in 1648 raised hopes for a better future. When King Francis I of France and King Henry VIII of England met near Calais in June 1520, accounts of the splendour of the temporary accommodation and the monarchs’ retinues – not to mention descriptions of the two kings wrestling together – dazzled the rest of Europe, concealing the fact that politically the gathering accomplished little of any value. ‘Now all the Christian princes were conducting themselves as though they had, as one, accepted the humanist critique of war as correct,’ wrote Henry’s secretary of state.50 Over the course of the sixteenth century, such meetings between kings gradually gave way to conferences of so-called plenipotentiaries, or ambassadors with a full mandate to negotiate on behalf of their rulers. In 1648, more than a hundred delegations gathered in northern Germany, in the imperial cities of Osnabrück and Münster. The French diplomats alone brought twelve cooks, five bakers, and 300 barrels of wine. The delegates had come to negotiate an end to the Thirty Years War, the most recent and most destructive of the ‘wars of religion’ that had blighted Europe since the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The resulting Peace of Westphalia established one of the most fundamental principles of all subsequent Western diplomacy: that no state had any right to interfere with another’s sovereignty or meddle in its domestic affairs.
Historians have referred to the Peace of Westphalia and other conferences and treaties from around that time as marking the beginning of modern diplomacy, in that they demonstrate the interests of a state’s body politic being prioritized over a monarch’s personal interests or those of more nebulous supranational bonds, such as the ties of Christendom, or Catholicism or Protestantism. Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of King Louis XIII of France from 1624 to 1642, for example, remarked that the state was no longer derived from divine provision, and advised governing rationally and strictly in accordance with the national interest, or raison d’état. However, it is difficult to judge whether the seventeenth century really did mark a diplomatic watershed. The concept of ragion di stato had first been defined in 1547 by the papal diplomat Giovanni della Casa; while around the beginning of the sixteenth century the Florentine politician Niccolò Machiavelli had summarized the primary pursuit of politics as ‘the self-preservation of the state with all means at any price’.51
It also has to be asked how far conflicts like the Thirty Years War had ever been purely and genuinely about religion. King Henry IV of France famously switched his allegiance from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1593 in order to secure his hold on the throne during a civil war ostensibly fought along religious lines. In the period prior to the Thirty Years War, Henry’s chief minister, the Duke of Sully, had envisaged fomenting discord in order to ‘divide Europe equally among a certain Number of Powers, in such a Manner, that none of them might have Cause, either of Envy or Fear, from the Possessions or Power of others’.52 In other words, religion and politics had always been – and remained – mixed. Colonization was still justified on religious grounds; kings continued to assert that they ruled with the blessing of God; and states continued to fight wars of religion.
The road towards the mid-seventeenth-century debate about sovereignty had also been paved decades earlier by the writings of thinkers like Jean Bodin, Giovanni Botero, and Thomas Mun on the role of the state in economic affairs. But whereas optimists still assumed that a common interest in prosperity would lead to cooperation, economic progress often resulted in yet more violence. The scientific and technological breakthroughs that boosted economic productivity also made guns more powerful and fortifications far more complex and sophisticated. States could now afford to maintain ever larger standing armies and subsidize allies to fight proxy wars. The consequence, as often as not, was military stalemate – but one produced at immense cost in men and materiel. ‘Whenever this war ceases,’ observed the English economic thinker Charles Davenant about the Nine Years War (1688–97), ‘it will not be for want of mutual hatred in the opposite parties, nor for want of men to fight the quarrel … but that side must first give out where money is first failing.’53 Economic competition also caused states to lock horns over strategic sea lanes, such as the English Channel, the Kattegat in the Baltic, and the Strait of Gibraltar in the Mediterranean, as well as over regions rich in commerce, manufacturing, or natural resources, both within Europe and increasingly across the globe.
The development of new financial and credit instruments caused instability too, especially when rulers, as they often did, borrowed beyond their means. Debt defaults, currency debasements, and extortionate taxation frequently led to social unrest. In 1568, for example, the cash-strapped Holy Roman Emperor tried to raise taxes in the Low Countries, causing riots that escalated into the Eighty Years War. In 1618, a currency debasement and tax increases prompted furious Bohemian politicians to throw Habsburg officials out of the meeting hall window, signalling the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Even those actively involved in the new financial markets, such as Joseph de la Vega, a Spanish Jewish merchant in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam, could regard speculation as ‘the falsest and most infamous business in the world’.54
Economic competition gave birth to mercantilism: a system of protectionist government policies intended to build a strong national economy and to preserve a positive trade balance. All major powers, beginning with Spain and Portugal, established trading companies which were granted monopolies on the trade from particular colonies. English mercantilists claimed that their own national trading companies were the only way to change an unfair economic order and rectify the Spanish ‘injustice toward the English, whom, contra ius gentium [against the law of nations], have excluded from commerce with the West Indies.’55 At the same time, thinkers like the jurist John Selden were promulgating the notion of a mare clausum – a ‘closed sea’ – in order to try and lock out England’s closest trading rival in the seventeenth century, the Dutch. Others – like Thomas Mun, one of the foremost mercantilist thinkers of the early seventeenth century and himself a director of the East India Company – argued that the import of all goods which were also domestically produced should be prohibited.
The outcome of these debates was a slew of protectionist legislation: in England, for example, the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1673 required all trade to and from overseas colonies to be carried by English shipping; while the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 banned all cotton imports into England. Such measures, however, merely fanned the flames of European war. As the French finance minister Jean Colbert warned in 1669: Europe’s commerce ‘is carried on by 20,000 vessels and that number cannot be increased. Each nation strives to have its faire share and to get ahead of the others.’56 Mercantilism, it appeared, was a zero-sum game.
The Rise and Fall of the Habsburgs
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set the stage for modern European power politics. At the beginning of the era, the continent was dominated by the Habsburg Empire. The dynasty’s policy of imperial expansion by marriage culminated with Charles V (1519–56), whose dominions included Austria, Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries – not to mention immense colonial possessions overseas. Spanning both hemispheres and the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, the Habsburg Empire was – as its propagandists proudly boasted – the first ‘upon which the sun never set’.57
France, however, considered the Habsburg expansion along its borders a major threat. King Francis I went so far as to describe it as an evil empire, and was even prepared to forge alliances with Protestant England and the Islamic Ottoman Empire to fight it.58 After Charles V divided his empire into a Spanish part, ruled by his zealously Catholic son Philip II, and an Austrian part, governed by his brother and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, the kings of France seized on the opportunities that arose to try to weaken the Habsburg hegemony.
The first chance was provided in 1568 by the start of the long-running popular uprising against Spanish rule in the Netherlands known as the Eighty Years War. But Philip II retaliated by inciting civil war between France’s Catholics and Protestants. Another chance came with the Thirty Years War, which originated as a rebellion against Habsburg rule in Central and Northern Europe and spread to encompass most of the continent’s powers at one time or another. Cardinal Richelieu outlined the French strategy in 1629.
We need to be constantly worried about stopping the rise of Spain and, unlike that nation, whose goal it is to enhance its domination and expand its borders, France must only think about fortifying itself and build and open gateways to enter the states of its neighbours in order to be able to save them from the oppression of Spain when the moment arises.59
To that end, France subsidized the large anti-Habsburg alliance of Protestant states spearheaded by the Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus, and eventually took up arms itself, before exhaustion brought all the parties to the negotiating table in Westphalia in 1648. Although the war often took the guise of a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, in reality it was a struggle for the political mastery of Europe. To the extent that the Habsburgs were undoubtedly left weaker than they had been in 1618, France benefited from the war. But fears of France’s rising power had already emerged during the conference at Westphalia, where Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain all sealed bilateral agreements with each other.
The formal conclusion to the Thirty Years War did not bring peace to Europe. Within a few years of Westphalia, the continent’s leading trading nations – England and the Netherlands – were at war, Portugal was struggling to establish its independence from Spain, and Sweden was fighting the other northern powers for supremacy over the Baltic. Under the pretext of liberating Europe from the Habsburg yoke, France meanwhile continued its war with Spain and made repeated efforts to detach the German polities along the Rhine, the states of Northern Italy, and the provinces of Flanders from the Holy Roman Empire. The would-be beneficiaries of such French altruism, however, were far from welcoming. ‘The nature of France is restless and can scarcely be suffered except at a distance,’ wrote one Dutch pamphleteer. ‘In the cold light of day, France aims at the expansion of its kingdom and of Catholicism, and finally even to obtain imperial dignity,’ warned a Swiss diplomat.
In 1659, France and Spain finally agreed peace. In return for marriage to Philip IV of Spain’s daughter, and a large dowry, Louis XIV of France would abandon his claims on Flanders. But the failure to pay the princess’s dowry served France as a pretext to try and seize the Spanish Netherlands in lieu. This ignited a half century of conflicts – the War of Devolution (1667–8), the Dutch War (1672–8), the Nine Years War (1688–97), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) – in which shifting alliances of European powers fought to rein in French ambitions. Louis XIV may have been known as ‘the Sun King’ in recognition of the dazzling splendour of his court, but beneath the glittering surface the treasury coffers were increasingly bare. By the time of Louis’s death in 1715, financially overburdened France had been checked and an uneasy balance of power established. A complete and lasting cessation of conflict, however, was another matter altogether.
Since the mid-sixteenth century, the various states surrounding the Baltic had engaged in a series of ‘northern wars’ for control of the region’s lands and its lucrative trade in natural resources. With other contenders weakened by the Thirty Years War, the opportunity arose for Russia to flex its muscles. Under the Romanov Dynasty, which first came to the throne in 1613, the anarchy that blighted the realm was slowly expunged and a degree of order imposed. The first real sign of strength came during the Russo-Polish War of 1654–67, when Russia made significant territorial gains in Ukraine. In 1686, when Russia and Poland–Lithuania signed the alliance known as the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, the terms clearly demonstrated that it was the tsardom which was the senior partner. In 1700, Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1725) felt powerful enough to challenge Sweden for supremacy of the Baltic. Following the decisive victory at Poltava in 1709, Russia was able to take possession of Swedish territories in Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. By the time the war ended in 1721, Sweden’s ascendancy in the Baltic had been shattered.
Peter the Great made the Russian Empire the leading power in Northern and Eastern Europe. He also took advantage of the weakening of the Safavids, as we have seen, to annex much of their former empire in the Caucasus and Caspian region. In addition, he built himself an entirely new capital – the city of St Petersburg, strategically located on the Baltic – brought in shipbuilders from the Netherlands in order to construct a powerful modern navy, founded his own trading company, and adopted mercantilist policies to try and strengthen the Russian economy. Peter was brutal in imposing his Westernizing reforms, but he also aspired to be an enlightened European monarch the equal of any king of France or Habsburg emperor. Just as ‘Romans praise their first two tsars, Romulus and Numa, that one by war and the other by peace strengthened the fatherland, or as in sacred history David by arms and Solomon by politics created a blessed well-being for Israel,’ wrote the great Orthodox preacher Theophan Prokopovich, so ‘in our case both were achieved by Peter alone. For us he is Romulus, and Numa, and David, and Solomon – Peter alone.’60
But Russia was not alone, for the period saw a second rising power in the region: Prussia. The state originated in 1618 when the elector of Brandenburg inherited the duchy of Prussia. With its territories divided between the region around Berlin and the area surrounding Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad), the priority of its first rulers was geographical consolidation. The Elector Frederick William seized the opportunities provided by the Thirty Years War, using French subsidies to build a standing army and assimilating some of his smaller war-exhausted neighbours. ‘Alliances are certainly good, but a force of one’s own, that one can confidently rely on, is better,’ he wrote in 1667. ‘A ruler is not treated with respect unless he has his own troops and resources.’61
To bolster Prussia’s standing and security further, Frederick William’s successor obtained international approval in 1701 for his state’s elevation from an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire into a kingdom – the reward for Prussia’s long-term contribution to various anti-French coalitions. Even though Prussia was now the largest German state after Habsburg Austria, diplomacy by itself was not felt to be sufficient. True to his electoral namesake’s teachings, King Frederick William I (1713–40) expanded the army to such an extent that Voltaire, or so the story goes, quipped: ‘Where some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state.’ In order to survive, let alone flourish, Prussia had to become a kingdom of iron. ‘It is the duty of a God-fearing ruler,’ Frederick William declared, ‘to repress and not to tolerate the temple of Satan, that is, mistresses, operas, comedies, redoutes, ballets, and masques.’62
Europe’s epoch of Renaissance, of global and scientific discovery, was no golden age; it remained, as Rubens put it, inherently an ‘age of iron’.63 ‘Not even a Turk could be so cruel as to wish the Christians greater misfortune than the suffering they inflict upon each other,’ lamented Erasmus in the early 1500s. The Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted his apocalyptic vision of The Triumph of Death in 1562. As armies fought across its war-torn landscape of ruined buildings and piles of bodies lit by flames on the horizon, the painting’s message seemed to be that conflict spared no one, rich or poor. Three-quarters of a century later, Rubens expressed the tragedy of the Thirty Years War in his nightmarish masterpiece, the Horrors of War (1638). In England, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote his influential political thesis Leviathan (1651) against the backdrop of a civil war that had resulted in the execution of the country’s king. In order to escape from lives that were naturally ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, Hobbes urged, mankind had to submit to the rule of law in the form of an absolute monarch.
But subsequent events in Britain suggested that Hobbes’s theory might not be entirely right. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 introduced a framework of constitutional monarchy that, in its core principles, would prove lasting and would effect the gradual transformation of the government of England, Scotland, and Ireland from three personal monarchies loosely connected by a shared sovereign into a single, centrally administered state. Although sporadic incidences of rebellion would flare up in Scotland and Ireland during the eighteenth century, these changes ushered in an era of enduring domestic peace. They also established the context that would allow Britain – for so long a peripheral power – finally to forge ahead of its European rivals and occupy the centre of the global stage.
Outburst
Between 1500 and 1750, Europe was still far from being the world’s centre of power. The initial colonization of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia may have appeared an extraordinary outburst of energy, ambition, and violence to Europeans at the time, but in reality such power was modest compared to that of the three Islamic empires – the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals – and the Chinese Qing Dynasty. Although the European conflicts of the period were undeniably savage, the main arena of great power competition was in Asia. Here, the causes of strife differed little from previous centuries: the desire to enhance security by controlling the gateways to imperial heartlands, and the quest for trade and profit.
Mercantilism – the policy of state intervention to protect and augment commerce – was in full swing all over the world. The Ottomans sought to control trade in the Mediterranean, the Safavids endeavoured to boost their silk exports, the Mughals protected their textile industries, and European rulers licensed lucrative monopolies to national trading companies. Most major powers had the ambition to go to sea. Yet it was here, in matters concerning maritime mobility, that European connective power started to make a major difference.
As in past eras, wars continued to be fought in order to prevent other states becoming too powerful. In Europe, for example, first the Habsburgs and then the French faced coalitions cobbled together to rein in their expansionist ambitions. Conversely, weakness too still elicited aggression. The Ming tried to hide behind their newly reinforced Great Wall; but as the emperor became unable to rule, the court fell into disarray, and as hardship ignited social unrest, the Manchu seized their chance to take over their empire. It was the weakness of the Safavids that allowed numerically inferior Russian forces to destroy their dynasty, and weakness that permitted European colonists to shatter kingdoms in the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Ocean.
All these campaigns were justified by religious fervour, a burning sense of moral and cultural superiority, and a belief that the blessings of civilization and harmony were being bestowed on a world of benighted barbarians – even as rulers began to be governed by notions of national interest and diplomats elaborated the principles of national sovereignty. True sovereignty, it was understood, remained the preserve of the strong.