11
Connecting the Globe (1450-1800 CE)
During the sixteenth century people sailing the seas connected the two hemispheres of the world. Seagoing travel had been expanding steadily, and some attempts had been made to cross the unknown ocean, which turned out to be two oceans divided by a continent. The Vikings had gotten to Newfoundland in 1001; Polynesians may have reached the Americas earlier; Mansa Muhammed of Mali may have led an Atlantic seagoing expedition; Basque fishermen caught cod off the coast of Newfoundland sometime in the fifteenth century. But as events transpired, it was sailors from Portugal and Spain who made the voyages that connected Eurasia and Africa to the Americas in a permanent way. The Portuguese and Spanish had the best location for reaching the New World, and they had the resources to establish themselves once they landed.
1
World historians, from Karl Marx to David Christian, agree that the coming together of the two world hemispheres stands as one of the most significant moments in the history of humanity. It proved brutal and destructive for three of the world’s areas—the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Eurasian societies prevailed and, as Karl Marx wrote, “World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century and from then on the modern history of Capital starts to unfold.”
2
The Crucible for Columbus
By 1500, less than 20 percent of the world’s landmass was marked off into states run by bureaucrats and governed by laws. The rest was organized into chiefdoms and tribes, most of which had settled down into some kind of agricultural existence. Hunters and gatherers probably constituted only 1 percent of the world’s population of 461 million.
3Whether in complex states or under local chiefdoms, people wanting to trade organized trading routes and circuits. One such circuit operated among the Pacific Islands, where possibly a few million people with extraordinary maritime skills (without magnetic compasses, using only their observations of the waves, stars, currents, and evidence of land) traded among the islands: Yap in the Carolines, Guam, Palau, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga.
Another trading circuit existed in the Americas, involving 40 to 60 million people. It linked the Great Lakes to the Andes mountains using overland relay trade and canoes on rivers and among the Caribbean Islands, and connecting with the Aztec system in central Mexico and the Inca empire with its roads in the Andes.
The third trade circuit involved three-quarters of humanity, about 260 to 300 million people, and extended across Eurasia and the northern parts of Africa. It consisted of two main routes: the caravan routes called the Silk Road across central Asia, and the sea routes from Korea, Japan, and China, around the Malay peninsula and the Molucca or Spice Islands, into the Indian Ocean to ports in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, extending into Europe by the Rhine, Elbe, Danube, and Po rivers, and into Africa by camel caravan.
4Within the third trade circuit Europeans had taken aggressive measures against Muslims, both in the various Crusades and in the efforts of Portuguese and Spanish Christians starting in 1031 to regain their land from Muslims. (Spain still consisted of Aragon, Castile, Navarre, and Granada.) By 1250 Christians had taken all of Spain except Granada, a narrow strip across most of the southern coastline.
During the Crusades Europeans first tasted sugar in Syria; since the European climate (except Sicily) proved too cool for growing it, they had a motive for looking for places capable of its cultivation. In addition, they wanted to tap into a larger share of the spice trade from the east.
5European rulers also wanted to find new sources of gold to expand their economies and to underwrite their activities. Most of their gold came from West Africa, from present-day Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Guinea, then called the Gold Coast by Europeans. This gold had to travel by camel caravan through the Sahara to Fez in Morocco or to Tunis or Tripoli, and Muslim merchants monopolized this trade.
Atlantic Europeans had the sea. They took advantage of it by designing oceangoing ships capable not only of sailing the high seas anywhere but also of carrying heavy cannon. The Portuguese developed the caravel, a small, two-masted ship one-fifth the size of the largest European and Chinese ships, with planks nailed to a skeletal rib rather than overlapping each other, as was common in northern Europe. With the caravel the Portuguese gained maneuverability by using triangular sails, called lateen sails (also used in the Indian Ocean), instead of the square European ones; these sails enabled the caravels to sail against the wind. Later, caravels developed into three-masted ships rigged with both lateen and square sails.
Building seaworthy ships solved only half the problem; knowledge about navigation also had to be built up, combining the traditions of Arab astronomy and mathematics with the practical experience of sailors. The key instruments were the magnetic compass, first developed in China, and the astrolabe, invented by the Arabs or Greeks, that measured the position of the sun or the stars to show ship pilots their latitude. In Portugal the king’s third son, Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) set up a research institute for studying navigation and collecting maps. He did this after leading Portuguese soldiers in an attack in 1415 on Morocco that failed to defeat the Muslims guarding the inland gold, motivating Henry to figure out how to sail down the coast of Africa. While the Portuguese worked on this, Ottoman Muslim forces took control of Christian Byzantium in 1453, henceforth called Istanbul, rendering the overland trade more difficult and upping the ante for finding a sea route to China.
By the time Henry the Navigator died in 1460, Portuguese sea captains, supported by state sponsorship, had reached islands off the coast of Africa (the Madeiras, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands) and had sailed down the coast as far as Sierra Leone. In 1487 a Portuguese expedition sailed westward and never returned. By 1488 Bartholomeu Dias rounded the tip of Africa, and in 1497-98 Vasco da Gama led a Portuguese expedition around Africa to India. In 1500 Pedro Cabral led ships that hit the coast of South America after they swung west to pick up winds they hoped would sweep them around the tip of Africa; this gave the Portuguese claim to Brazil. By 1510 the Portuguese had won a naval battle using cannon onboard ship and had begun establishing themselves in the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, the Spanish ruling houses were occupied with driving the Muslims out of Granada. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who had married in 1469, united their kingdoms in the 1480s, renewing their determination to defeat the Moors (Muslims). They revitalized the institution of the Inquisition, set up by the priest Dominic to root out heresy in Aragon.
Under the Muslims and under Christian kings before the plague broke out in 1348, Christians, Jews, and Muslims had lived in relative harmony in Spanish kingdoms. Jews and Muslims had come to own some of the most productive farms and businesses. With the first executions under the Inquisition beginning in 1481, wealth confiscated from Jews funded the war against the Moors, who surrendered early in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella then established Christian rule with no toleration for other religions. All Jews were ordered to convert or face immediate expulsion. Ten years later Muslims were given the same choice.
6In the fateful year of 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, after their success in driving out the Muslims, finally agreed to sponsor Christopher Columbus’s expedition to sail westward to seek China. Columbus had been petitioning for four years without success as the Spanish sovereigns battled their enemy. A climate of Christian militancy victorious after centuries of fighting holy battles against Muslims formed the crucible out of which Columbus and his men sailed on August 3, 1492, from Palos, the seaport near Seville. Columbus was not permitted to get under way until the last Jews had been expelled on August 2, 1492; the Jews sailed away to Portugal, northern Italy, or Holland, or to tolerant Muslim countries in northern Africa.
The roots of Europe’s racist thinking had taken hold in Iberia during the intensification of the conflict with the Moors. Most historians find that no concept equivalent to “race” existed in the thinking of Greeks, Romans, or early Christians. There was a hatred of Christians for Jews over responsibility for the death of Jesus, and this intensified in popular opinion during the years of the Crusades. There seems to have been no hatred of blacks in medieval Europe except in Iberia, where Christians learned from Muslims to associate blackness with slavery. (Muslims had both black and white slaves, but generally gave black ones the more menial jobs.) Whites as slaves in Europe declined as European polytheists were converted to Christianity.
Soon after the Iberians drove out the Jews and the Muslims, they enacted purity of blood laws (
limpieza de sangre) to keep those mixed with Jews or Moors out of some offices, and out of becoming conquistadors or missionaries, who had to be of pure Christian ancestry. Out of these attempts to maintain religious purity grew later European racist thinking in biological terms.
7
First Encounters
Columbus sailed for Cathay (China) carrying a printed copy of Marco Polo’s travels with him. He also took along a man who spoke Arabic to help him communicate with the Mongol khans, whom he believed still ruled China though the Mongols had been defeated in 1268.
11.1 The First Voyage of Columbus
Columbus made four trips to the Caribbean. On the first he arrived in Hispaniola, the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with 120 men for exploration (Fig. 11.1). The Taino people living there cultivated corn, sweet potatoes, hot peppers, yucca or manioc (a nutritious root/tuber), cotton, and tobacco. They collected traces of gold and worked it into ornaments for themselves; they did not trade it, and they had no iron. They were gentle and peaceloving; other groups on nearby islands practiced warfare. The Tainos welcomed Columbus cautiously and directed him elsewhere for gold. He left forty men, and they raped and fought so egregiously that the Tainos killed them.
On his second trip Columbus brought 1,200 men (no women) and cattle, pigs, and goats to set up a permanent colony. The men’s brutal behavior—again rape, stealing gold ornaments and food—provoked the Tainos to war. After a year of fighting, during which the Spanish killed tens of thousands out of a population of perhaps 250,000, the survivors were forced to pay tribute of food, spun cotton, and gold. There were no large deposits of gold on the island; the gold in ornaments had been gathered from dust over generations, but the Spanish killed those who did not provide their allotment by chopping off their hands. The animals brought by the Spanish devoured the Tainos’ food and crops, causing famine. Columbus returned two more times, always believing he was on islands off the coast of Asia, always seeking gold and spices to justify his trip. He proved a brilliant navigator but an ineffective administrator, even by Spanish standards. He returned in semidisgrace to Spain at age fifty-three in November 1504 and died in obscurity seven months later.
8Two years after Columbus reached the western hemisphere, Spain and Portugal divided the world between them—using the Spanish Borgia pope, Alexander VI, as their authority—by drawing an imaginary line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean extending, from their point of view, around the back side of Earth. Portugal got everything to the east of the line, Spain everything to the west. They called this the Treaty of Tordesillas, hoping to prevent disputes between them (Fig. 11.2). Not yet knowing the size of the world, the treaty makers could not assign the Molucca Islands, the source of valuable spices in the East Indies. However, in 1529, after Magellan’s ships had returned in 1522, Spain acknowledged that the Moluccas belonged to the Portuguese, who had already taken Malacca, the central port city on the Malay peninsula; Spain retained the Philippines.
The Spanish in the Americas acted to conquer, control, and convert nonbelievers in order to serve God and to get rich. After subduing the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, the Spanish men looked westward for greater treasure. In 1519 a thirty-four-year-old, ruthless, ambitious nobleman, Hernando Cortez, left Cuba with 600 fighting men to assault the Aztec empire that he had learned of two years earlier. One member of his expedition carried smallpox; it had appeared for the first time on Hispaniola in 1518 from illicit imports of African slaves.
11.2 The World Divided by Spain and Portugal
Cortez had no authorization either to conquer or to colonize from his sovereign, Charles I of Spain, who had just become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, as well. The Spanish king, the most powerful sovereign in Europe, would be occupied for the next ten years trying to unite Europe and push back the Ottoman Muslims, whom he defeated at Vienna in 1529.
The Aztecs had received reports of white-faced, bearded men for several years before Cortez’s arrival. The Aztec ruler, Moctezuma Xocoytzin, may have hypothesized that Quetzalcoatl, the god of agriculture and the arts, must be returning, as stories had predicted he would. When Cortez landed at Veracruz in August 1519, Moctezuma sent divine regalia, and Cortez donned it, asking, “Is this all?” In November Moctezuma welcomed Cortez to Tenochtitlan and put him and his soldiers up in the royal palace. The Spanish explored the city and cleaned out the temples of human blood in horror. When Cortez took Moctezuma hostage, Moctezuma gave him the contents of the palace treasure room, which the Spanish melted down. Full-scale battle ensued, Moctezuma died (exactly how is not known), and Cortez withdrew to organize allies among those whom the Aztecs had subjugated. The first epidemic of smallpox hit Tenochtitlan in 1520, wiping out more people than the fighting had. Cortez returned to conduct a ninety-three-day siege of the city, blockading it and leaving it without food or water until it surrendered, with only one-fifth of its people alive. During the siege fifty-three Spanish soldiers and four of their horses were sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war.
9It took ten years for the Spanish to gain control of the whole of Mexico, which they called “New Spain.” A year after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Cortez became Captain General and Governor of New Spain and master of a huge estate, with thousands of Aztecs forced to cultivate his land. He enjoyed this life for twenty-five years until his death in 1547. By the mid 1550s, 130 Spanish families in the basin of Mexico controlled 180,000 Amerindians using a system of semifeudal forced labor, expressly against the wishes of Charles V. The change in culture changed the landscape forever. Forests were cut for firewood and for building Mexico City on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Plows cut deeper than planting sticks and caused soil erosion. Cattle, pigs, and sheep denuded the vegetation. The Aztec canal system was abandoned. In a few generations much of the basin of Mexico became useless for large-scale agriculture, and food had to be brought in. Spanish rule continued for nearly 300 years, until Mexicans gained independence in 1821.
10Smallpox reached the other American empire, the Inca in Peru, before the Spanish did. By the end of the 1520s countless Inca had died, including the emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court around 1526, and soon afterward his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi. The Inca had not yet heard of the Spanish; no news reached them until Francisco Pizarro landed on the Peruvian coast in 1527.
11Pizarro had come to the Americas to seek his fortune in 1502 as a twenty-five-year-old. He participated in conquering Hispaniola and in an expedition across Panama, where he became one of the wealthiest landowners. With a license from the king of Spain and a financial partner, Diego de Almagro, Pizarro gambled his fortune to explore the Pacific coast, where he learned of the Inca empire once he landed.
Most of the men with Pizarro were twenty-year-olds; in the Spanish feudal structure ambitious men could rise only by marrying an heiress or by warfare. Francisco Pizarro himself, the illegitimate son of a military captain who fought many battles against the Moors, was illiterate, driven to wealth and power, but not a religious zealot like Cortez. There was significant motivation, therefore, for these men to engage in violent warfare to improve their stations in life.
After the long, quixotic Spanish search for gold, Pizarro and his 180 men finally found it in the masterpieces of the Inca and in the mountains of the Andes. When Pizarro arrived on the coast of Ecuador, the Inca were embroiled in a civil war, as two half-brothers, Atahualpa and Huascar, fought each other for the throne. Atahualpa had just captured Huascar and was resting at a hot spring in Cajamarca, about 600 miles north of present Lima, before taking charge of the empire.
At their meeting in Cajamarca, Pizarro and his men captured Atahualpa after killing 7,000 to 8,000 unarmed Incas. After accepting Atahualpa’s ransom of 13,420 pounds of gold objects, Pizarro executed him, set up a puppet Inca ruler, and within three years controlled the area of the Inca empire.
Pizarro and his financial partner, Almagro, argued about who would govern what territory, and in 1541 Almagro’s supporters killed Pizarro. New officials had to be sent to restore order, as Spanish colonists were streaming into Peru, stimulated by a bestselling account of Pizarro’s success in finding gold, which was published in Seville only nine months after the execution of Atahualpa.
In 1545 the Spanish discovered silver deposits at Potosi (Bolivia). Ten years later they found mercury in Peru, helpful for mining gold and silver, and production soared. The mineral wealth of the Andes incited further conquests by the Spanish and financed its European empire, where it was used for coins, church and palace decoration, paying debts, and expanding the army. By 1570 to 1572 the native people were resettled out of their traditional communities into new villages near Spanish centers; the overall population had declined by 50 percent and in some coastal villages by 90 percent.
Why were the Spanish conquistadors able to conquer the empires of the Americas so quickly with so few men? Why did the encounter between cultures isolated from each other for over 15,000 years result in one dominating the other with such swiftness? This drama of human history, recent enough to feel directly connected to us, haunts our imagination.
The answer seems to lie in the fact that the Spanish had the advantage of living on the Afro-Eurasian continents where people had gotten a head start on cultural specialization and invention. This happened because domesticatable plants and animals were much more abundant than in the American hemisphere, and agricultural techniques could be spread laterally in similar climates. The surplus food enabled complex societies to develop earlier, producing the skills and attributes that made the difference: guns, horses, swords, cannon, ships, immunity to disease, literacy for communication, centralized political organization for resources, and scholarship for maps and navigation. The Spanish had enjoyed the benefits of exchange with all the complex societies of Afro-Eurasia that had risen and fallen since Sumerians made the transition to urban life.
By assimilating and adapting all that Afro-Eurasians had created, the Spanish embodied strengths not realizable in the Americas, where crops could not spread easily north and south, where there were no pack animals except llamas in the Andes, and where metal technology was just coming into use. There the development of complex societies remained 2,000 to 4,000 years behind that of northern Africa and Eurasia.
12Of all the advantages that accrued to the Spanish and Portuguese, the one that many historians believe made the most difference was their relative immunity to the human diseases that came from animals: measles, smallpox, influenza, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and, from tropical Africa, malaria and yellow fever. Native Americans, with no exposure to domestic animals, had never before encountered these bacteria and succumbed in overwhelming numbers without being able to fight. The smallpox epidemic of the Columbian Exchange proved one of the two worst population disasters in recorded history; the other was the plague pandemic in the fourteenth century. At least half, and perhaps as much as 90 percent, of the Amerindian population was lost between 1492 and 1650 to repeated epidemics. The Indians encountered by the Europeans were often the traumatized survivors of intricate civilizations collapsing suddenly from overwhelming disease.
13The behavior of the conquistadors in the Americas did not go unopposed by theologians and the king of Spain. From 1494 on, when the pope divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, scholars debated whether this gave the authority only for religious proselytizing, or also for invasion and conquest.
By 1512 to 1514 theologians in Spain were denouncing the settlers of Hispaniola and arguing that the king only had the right to proselytize, not to invade. The most famous champion of the Indians, the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, came to their defense in 1514, and in 1520 Charles V abolished
encomienda (giving allotments of natives to Spaniards), but he could not enforce his ruling. Twenty years later the king appointed a council to formulate new laws in favor of the natives, which provoked a civil war in Peru won by the colonists. Some experiments were made using natives as administrators, but Spaniards failed to surrender sufficient power.
14
The Global Exchange
In the 200 years following the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, Europeans developed the capitalist economy of the modern world. They did this by accumulating capital from both the forced labor and the land and resources of the Americas, especially the enormous quantities of gold and silver found in the Andes. With these metals, Europeans created portable wealth, which gradually overshadowed the landed wealth of the aristocrats, an irony since it was landed aristocrats who had gone out to locate the gold and silver, thinking it would increase their wealth.
15From 1500 to 1650 at least 180 to 200 tons of gold, worth about $2.8 billion today, flowed into Spain, carried by men out of the mountains and by mule across the Isthmus of Panama to waiting ships. Since the Spanish ruler, also the Holy Roman Emperor, used much of the gold to pay his debts, it soon flowed all over Europe, producing among other things the baroque and rococo styles of ostentatious decoration.
Yet silver unexpectedly had a greater impact, since silver coins served better than gold ones for daily transactions. With silver coins, private citizens could begin to save and accumulate wealth. In the first fifty years after the Spanish found the mountain of silver near Potosi, 16,000 tons of silver, worth $3.3 billion today, officially flowed into Europe (also carried out by men and mules), plus another possible 5,000 tons that flowed illegally. Amerindians mined the silver through forced labor, with four out of five miners dying in the first decades. From 1500 to 1600 the supply of gold and silver in Europe increased eightfold, causing inflation, which eroded the wealth of other societies. The silver coins of the Ottoman Empire lost value, doing much to undermine Islamic power. Africa also suffered, no longer having a market for its gold. India and China gained through Europeans’ desire for their goods; in general, silver flowed toward China, perhaps as much as two-thirds of the global production.
In the emerging global trade, African societies had the disadvantage; all they produced that the world wanted was slaves. Portuguese sailors had first bought West Africans in 1441, taking them to Portugal and to the Madeira and the Canary Islands, where they used them to raise sugarcane. Sub-Saharan Africans had been exported as slaves to the Middle East and China for over 1,000 years, but the slave trade increased in size and significance after the Atlantic Europeans connected the Atlantic coasts. Then, with no market for its gold, African princes and chiefs sold other Africans in order to buy cloth, iron, copper, tobacco, alcohol, guns, and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, which were used in West Africa as the main currency. With more wealth, chiefs could acquire additional wives, who brought them more children—their chief treasure.
Europeans needed slaves in tropical America in order to raise sugar and tobacco profitably. Columbus and his men took sugarcane, originally from India, to the Caribbean, and by 1520 there were sixty sugar mills on St. Thomas island alone. But the Tainos and Caribs were dying; Africans were cheaper than Europeans, and they were resistant to malaria, which they brought with them (along with hookworm and yellow fever).
The French and English competed with Spain in the Caribbean, and by the end of the eighteenth century both the French and the English regarded the Sugar Islands as their chief trading wealth. Dutch investors competed in Brazil; by the early seventeenth century they were making profit rates of 56 percent on sugar. Annual per-person sugar consumption rose in Europe from 4 pounds (nearly 2 kilograms) in 1700 to 18 pounds (8 kilograms) in the early 1800s, providing cheap calories for industrial labor.
16Transoceanic slave voyages began in 1534 from Senegal and Ghana to Brazil; eventually slave export extended down to Angola and, in the eighteenth century, to Mozambique and the eastern coast. Europeans usually did not have to capture their own African slaves; African rulers and slave merchants were willing to do it. During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 12 to 25 million enslaved people were shipped from Africa for the Americas, of whom some 85 percent survived the terrible six-to-ten-week voyage. About 40 percent went to Brazil, 40 percent to the Caribbean, 5 percent to what would become the United States, and the balance to the rest of Spanish America. By the 1820s five times more Africans than Europeans had come to the Americas.
17During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, Muslim slave traders took an estimated 2.1 million enslaved Africans from the east coast to Arabian and Indian ports. Overall, the Muslim slave trade lasted twelve centuries and shipped approximately 14 to 15 million people. Possibly as many people were enslaved within Africa as were shipped west and east.
18The impact of the slave trade on African culture is much debated, but at the very least it militarized many African societies, promoting warlord-entrepeneurs. In terms of loss of people, the impact of slavery on Africa proved far less than that of disease on the Americas.
The English government got into the race for colonies early by sponsoring a Genoese sailor, John Cabot (Giovanni Cabato), who reached Newfoundland in 1497 and New England in 1498. After these trips large-scale fishing expeditions were launched to harvest the bounty of the waters off North America, which required salting to reach Europe in edible condition. Salt cod fed sailors, soldiers, and the poor of northern Europe. England was not quick to follow up on Cabot’s landing. Sir Walter Raleigh tried and failed on an island off North Carolina in 1584; English colonists barely succeeded at Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. The English government provided royal charters but was not able to provide strong bureaucratic support; its colonists were more nearly on their own than were Spanish or French colonists.
The French experience in the New World focused on furs, for which there seemed to be insatiable markets in China and Europe. The French founded a colony, called New France, on the St. Lawrence River in 1608, at the site of present-day Quebec. From there French trappers moved up the St. Lawrence River and out onto the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay to penetrate the heart of the continent to secure foxes, ermine, squirrels, and sable, easy to transport in canoes. In exchange for fur, Amerindians received firearms, fabrics, metal tools, and alcohol. With the trappers went Jesuit missionaries full of zeal for converting natives to Catholicism. Not nearly as many colonists settled as did in the English colonies; French royal policy excluded Huguenots (French Protestants) from going to America because they wanted New France to remain Catholic. (The Reformation had begun in 1517; see page 206). After a series of wars between France and England and their colonies, the French in 1763 had to cede Louisiana to Spain and Canada to England.
While the French were bringing the hunting-gathering peoples of North America into the trading network of agrarian and urban societies, the Russians were doing the same in the vast area of Siberia, roughly one quarter of Eurasia. There people still lived in kinship groups as hunters, fishermen, gatherers, and herders of reindeer/caribou. The Russians recruited Cossacks from the Ukraine to build a fur business in Siberia, using cannon on riverboats to defeat the local people; the diseases they brought helped them, too. By 1440 they reached the shores of the Pacific, imposed a tribute system on every adult male, and traded with flour, tools, and alcohol in exchange for furs. During most of the seventeenth century the Kremlin received 7 to 10 percent of its revenues from the pelts arriving from Siberia. By the 1730s Russians had extended their trading posts to Alaska, and by 1810 to northern California.
One other European country, the Netherlands, competed for colonies in North America. It set up a trading colony at New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson River, and pushed into the fur trade. The Dutch were stopped in 1664, when the English navy took New Amsterdam by cannon and renamed it New York.
Out of this trading frenzy in the Atlantic Ocean emerged new economic institutions that would reshape the world. Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tried to keep their overseas trade and colonies as royal monopolies, but this proved expensive and inefficient. Colonists in America preferred to trade with the French, Dutch, and English. Wealthy private investors from those countries figured out ways to reduce their risk and increase their profits through banks, stock companies, stock exchanges, and chartered trading companies, which together formed the system called capitalism. Joint stock companies sold shares to investors as a way to raise the large sums required for overseas expeditions; investors needed a way to buy and sell shares. In 1530 a stock market opened in Amsterdam that became the world’s largest through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in England the Royal Exchange, from 1695, developed into the Stock Exchange in 1773.
19Some governments supported the efforts of their private citizens with policies to promote and defend their citizens’ trade, with force when necessary, a policy called merchantilism. One of the early examples of merchantilist capitalism occurred in the Netherlands, when the government in 1602 gave the Dutch East India Company a legal monopoly over all Dutch trade in the Indian Ocean. This encouraged investors to buy shares in the company; they were rewarded when the company captured control of the sea routes in the Indian Ocean from the Portuguese. The government was rewarded with increased taxes. About twenty years later the Dutch government chartered the Dutch West Indies Company to operate in the Atlantic, where it seized Brazilian ports and African slaving ports from the Portuguese. From 1652 to 1678 the English and French defeated the Netherlands in the Americas using larger navies.
As economic institutions developed, banks charged interest on money lent, called usury by those opposed to interest or at least excessive interest. The demands of the emerging capitalist economy created a crisis of conscience for those Christians who, like Muslims, believed that charging any interest was wrong—an agrarian reaction to the power of money. The Old Testament (Deuteronomy) says that one may charge interest to strangers only. Catholics in Europe reasserted ancient restrictions on lending money at interest; it continued to be an offense in French law until 1789. Calvin stated the Protestant position in 1545; that interest is legitimate at reasonable rates of about 5 percent.
20The trade between Europe and Africa and the Americas involved two kinds—items already known to both sides and items entirely new to one side. For example, fish and fur were known to both sides, but sugar had never been seen in the Americas, while tobacco had never been grown in Afro-Eurasia. Historians call this transfer of novel peoples, plants, animals, diseases, and technology the “Columbian Exchange.”
It is difficult to imagine culinary life before the Columbian Exchange. What did Italians put on their pasta before tomatoes came from America? Likewise, chocolate came from the Americas; no one in Afro-Eurasia had any before 1492. Corn and potatoes, new to Europe, helped keep many people alive. Cassava, or manioc root, a highly caloric root crop of tropical America (native to Brazil) that thrived in poor soil and drought, became a lifesaver in tropical Africa. Beans, squash, sweet potatoes, peanuts, chilies, dyes, tobacco, and medicines all flowed to Afro-Eurasia as gifts from the Americas.
Flowing back to the Atlantic coast were the European crops—wheat, olives, grapes, and garden vegetables. Also, Europeans took the Afro-Asian crops—rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, sugarcane, citrus fruit, melons, figs, onions, radishes, and salad greens. The Spanish took horses, which had originated in the Americas but had died out there during the last ice age, cows, pigs, sheep and goats, rats, and rabbits. The enslaved Africans took okra, black-eyed peas, yams, millet, sorghum, and mangoes.
Along with the gifts of Afro-Eurasians went bacteria and viruses absolutely new to the Americas. Peoples in China and the Mediterranean had been devastated in the early centuries of the Common Era but had gradually developed immunities. The Amerindian population, virgin to the diseases, was reduced by 50 to 90 percent, as described earlier. The Americas sent tobacco back to Afro-Eurasia, and it seems likely that syphilis originated in the Americas, taken by sailors to the rest of the world.
The expanding world trade eventually brought the ecosystems of Australia and the Pacific Islands into contact with the rest of the planet, though not until the late eighteenth century. In 1769 Captain James Cook, sponsored by Great Britain, began charting the coastline of New Zealand, where an estimated 100,000 Maoris lived, descendants of Polynesians who had arrived about 1300. Australia was home to some 750,000 Aborigines, who lived in mobile groups hunting and gathering. In 1788 Britain began shipping convicts, mostly petty thieves, to Australia; by 1845 the settlers outnumbered the Aborigines. In the exchange Australia gave the world the eucalyptus tree, while it acquired scores of new plants and dozens of new animals in the most drastic alteration of any area of the world.
The Major Empires
Despite the exchange going on across the Atlantic Ocean and on its coasts, China and the Moghuls in India remained the world’s powerhouse empires in volume of trade and wealth through the eighteenth century. After China and India, the two other most powerful governments were the Ottoman Empire, originating in Turkey, and the house of Hapsburg, controlling about 20 percent of Europe and the Spanish colonies of the Americas.
In China the Ming dynasty passed to the Qing, a Manchurian family that captured Beijing in 1644, conquered the rest of China in forty years, and ruled until 1911. The Qing dynasty included two outstanding emperors, Kangzi (r. 1662-1722) and Qianlong (r. 1736-1796). The Chinese government controlled trade strictly, allowing Europeans to trade only at Canton, where they exchanged mostly silver for the Chinese products they wanted. The wealthy and aspiring middle classes of Europe avidly consumed Chinese goods, genuine and imitation—silk, porcelain, tea, wallpaper; by the late 1700s the British were worried about their massive trade deficit with China and tried to negotiate changes in policy, to no avail.
The Chinese population shot up from 100 million under the Ming to 350 million by 1800, constituting one-third of humanity. The pressure of population led to deforestation, which led to serious erosion and flooding; the Grand Canal was so silted as to be unusable by the end of the eighteenth century. Rebellions by farmers became endemic in central and southwestern China.
The Moghul empire in India developed when Muslim Turks from the Ferghana Valley in today’s Uzbekistan, led by Babur, defeated the sultanate of Delhi in 1526. Babur was a descendant of Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai. These Muslim Turks ruled as a minority over a land of Hindus and extended their empire over all of northern India from the Indus and Ganges rivers, Kashmir, the Punjab, and down to Bombay, but not the southern tip or eastern coast. Babur’s grandson, Akbar (r. 1556-1605) married a Rajput princess, producing a son both Muslim and Hindu. The court produced a distinctive style based on sumptuous display, incalculable wealth, and the Persian language. With a population of 100 to 150 million, India enjoyed great prosperity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, trading cotton cloth from its ports, with no navy or merchant ships. In the seventeenth century, Moghul state revenues were four times those of France. The Moghul empire survived in name until 1857, when the British removed the last Moghul emperor, but its real power began to evaporate after 1707 as regional Hindu power challenged Moghul military supremacy, devolving India into princely states and leaving them vulnerable to British intrusion in the nineteenth century.
The Ottoman Empire, formed by Muslim Turks from northwestern Anatolia, started growing after 1415, included Constantinople (changed to Istanbul) by 1453, and by 1550 extended from the Euphrates River to Hungary in Europe and the Sahara in Africa. The empire contained some 20 to 25 million people, growing perhaps to 30 million in the eighteenth century. After conquering Christian countries in the Balkans, the Ottomans imposed levies of male children on Christian villages, placing these children with Turkish families and later in military schools in Istanbul to provide soldiers and, for the talented few, government posts. Coffee, grown in the highlands of Yemen on the tip of Arabia where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, became the rage in fifteenth-century Istanbul before it spread to Europe (Venice in 1615, London in 1651). Despite frequent wars with Iran, the Ottoman Empire lasted until the tumult of World War I put it out of business.
In 1600 Iran, known as the Safavid empire, stretched from Baghdad in the west to the Moghul empire in the east. The founder of its ruling family, Ishmael, insisted that Iran practice Shiite Islam, distinguishing it from its neighbors, all of whom were Sunni. Ever since the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258, Iranian culture had looked more to India than to Arabia; its scholars and writers used Persian primarily, rather than Arabic. Most people in the Safavid empire, whether Iranians, Turks, Kurds, or Arabs, lived by subsistence farming or herding. Their only products for foreign trade were silk fabrics and the deep pile rugs still treasured today. By 1722 the central government had so little support from its nomadic groups that Afghans were able to capture the capital and end Safavid rule.
The fourth of the world’s largest empires from 1000 to 1500 was the house of Hapsburg in Europe; it originated in Switzerland, where the ruler, Rudolf I, became Holy Roman emperor in 1273. He installed his son as ruler of Austria, and through marriage and inheritance the Hapsburgs acquired the Netherlands in 1477 and Spain in 1516, plus Luxembourg, Burgundy, Bohemia, Hungary, Sicily, Naples, and Milan. In 1519 the Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles I (the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella) became, as well, the Holy Roman emperor known as Charles V, as mentioned earlier.
Since Charles V ascended the throne just two years after Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation, he led the militant Catholic crusade against Protestantism, as well as the crusade against the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. Charles V ruled over 20 million people, about 20 percent of Europe. He was not successful in unifying Europe or in stopping Protestantism; he fought four wars with France, and the Holy Roman Empire degenerated into religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. Charles V abdicated and retired to a monastery in 1556; the holdings of the Hapsburgs were broken up, continuing in Austria to the end of World War I in 1918.
By the early 1600s Spain was bankrupt, despite its subsidy of silver from its American colonies, and France, led by the Bourbon kings, had become Europe’s most powerful state. Amsterdam served as the financial center and major port of seventeenth century Europe. By 1689 England had become France’s most powerful rival. The political fragmentation in Europe created an unusually competitive situation and possibly a self-generating process of technological change.
Rural life in Europe probably worsened from 1500 to 1750. Cooler weather, known as the Little Ice Age, caused illness, malnutrition, and death. Trees were cut in immense numbers for lumber for ships and buildings, fuel for heating and cooking, and charcoal for smelting ores. This deforestation affected the poor, who flocked to cities. In 1500 Paris was the only northern European city with over 100,000 people; by 1700 Paris and London each had 500,000 people, Amsterdam had 200,000, and twenty others had more than 60,000. In the cities, the wealthy people who dominated, called the bourgeoisie or town dwellers by the French, devoted long hours to business, supported by monarchs whose state revenues increased as business grew. Some 10 to 20 percent of urban people were so poor that they were exempt from taxation.
Religion, Science, and Warfare
From 1450 to 1800 printing with moveable and reusable metal type distinguished Europe and its colonies from the rest of the world, including the Ottomans, Moghuls, and Ming Chinese. These other empires relied on scribes until the nineteenth century. The possible reasons are varied and unknowable—perhaps governments feared they couldn’t control printing or feared offending the scribes; perhaps printing didn’t seem much better in places using ideographic rather than alphabetic scripts. For a time, Muslim authorities felt that printing constituted a desecration of the sacred text of the Quran. The only known exception was Korea, where moveable metal type had been invented in the thirteenth century and an alphabet added in the early fifteenth, setting off a boom in printing restricted to Korea, where only a tiny elite could read.
21In Europe Gutenberg’s printing press (1454) spread with amazing rapidity. By 1500, 236 European towns had similar presses. By 1501, type was cast for the Cyrillic and the Greek alphabets. The Spanish set up presses in America by 1533 and the English in 1639. By 1605, the first regular newspapers appeared, and by 1702, the first daily. By 1753, in Britain, 20,000 newspapers were sold daily. Rates of literacy rose, business communication flowed, and more people took part in intellectual debate, particularly in vicious religious arguments.
It was probably printing that led to nearly half of Europe becoming Protestant. A Catholic monk and professor of divinity at the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther (1483-1546) objected to Pope Leo X’s practice of authorizing indulgences, by which people could earn forgiveness of the punishment due for past sins by making a donation or going on a pilgrimage. Luther wrote his objections in Latin and nailed them to the church door in 1517, asserting that Christianity is a personal commitment and that salvation comes by belief/faith alone, to the exclusion of any kind of good works. Cheap pamphlets spread these ideas, which were embraced by princes and paupers alike; the established church tried but could not stop their spread. Luther didn’t argue for religious toleration; he wanted Protestantism to replace Catholicism as the one true faith. The Germanic states dissolved into warfare, and in 1555 a truce was negotiated in which every prince was permitted to decide the religion of his own kingdom. In the rest of Europe, other reform movements sprang up, such as Calvinism, Anglicanism, and Presbyterianism.
Challenges to established religion occurred in many areas of the world. In China Wang Yangman (1472-1529) argued that ordinary people could achieve virtue and truth without long studies in Confucian ideas; his challenge eventually resulted in a reassertion of Confucian orthodoxy. In India, Gure Nanak (1469-1539) started a new religion, Sikhism, based on Hindu texts but rejecting the clerical authority of the Brahmin caste and advocating a strict moral code for all followers rather than one that varied for different castes as did Hinduism. The emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) encouraged religious diversity and toleration, but later emperors favored Muslims.
Around the world during this time many local religions disappeared, swept away by the increasing currents of movement, trade, communication, and colonization. People who clung tenaciously to local traditions were left isolated or became opportunities for Muslim and Christian missionaries. Even the nomadic Mongols, who had long followed local shamanistic traditions, gradually converted to Tibetan Buddhism; in 1601 a Mongol was chosen as the next Dalai Lama and soon Buddhist monasteries sprang up all over Mongolia.
In Europe the challenge to authority went to the point of forming a new attitude: Don’t rely on authority at all but subject every idea to experimentation and reason. This attitude, known as scientific, flourished in Europe, where universities served as supportive communities for those practicing science. By 1500 more than one hundred universities functioned in Europe, absorbing and trying to make sense of the flow of global information coming their way. The papacy began in 1559 to proscribe books it considered subversive; it did not give up trying until 1966. It acted against the scientist Galileo Galilei, who argued that the Earth circled around the sun rather than vice versa. Church authorities kept him under house arrest in Florence, Italy, after 1616, but they could not suppress his ideas, which were published in the Netherlands. The conflicts produced by the rapid changes going on in the world were reflected in the plays of the Englishman William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Warfare has been a constant thread in this narrative without much description of how it was conducted. From 1450 to 1800 the nature of warfare was changed by major new developments: oceanic navies armed with cannon, field cannon, and huge fortifications against them; standing drilled armies capable of not retreating under fire; and massive logistical support for field troops. These developments cost so much money that banking systems became part of warfare. The largest empires spent 70 to 90 percent of their revenues on their war machines.
Not every empire engaged the new military developments equally. Only Europe and China built oceanic navies, and China retracted its. The Europeans and Ottomans excelled in field cannon and armed infantry. Europeans invented close-order drill plus the banking system (Italy, the low countries, England), despite the fact that Christian scripture prohibited usury. Muslims obeyed their scripture and practiced no usury; they figured out a system whereby the loaner became a partner in the venture. The Moghuls had no banking or sea power. The Qing defeated the Ming in China by using siege cannon, which they learned to use from Jesuit missionaries. Africans acquired only a small part of the new military developments, which destroyed nomad power forever since nomads could not make guns and cannon in quantity.
By 1750 to 1800 a worldwide system of exchange and trade was in place, using the seas that connected the continents. Port cities and their hinterlands prospered, while landlocked areas languished. It took a month to cross the Atlantic, three months to cross the Pacific, a month or more to cross the Sahara by camel, and a year to walk from one end of Eurasia to the other. Trade on the high seas distinguished the period from 1450 to 1800.
During the same period the world’s population doubled to reach 900 million. The Columbian Exchange of food crops contributed to this, as well as the waning of disease epidemics. Africa grew in population much slower than other areas, but in general the eighteenth century proved the turning point in population growth; it marked the beginning of the modern age of extremely rapid growth. Yet 80 to 85 percent of the world’s people still lived as farmers, using their own muscles as power, not being able to read, and only seldom encountering a stranger. The number of slaves in the world grew markedly during this period, reaching 20 to 50 million, or 2 to 5 percent of humanity by 1800.
The growth of the global economy proceeded at about the same rate as the population. From 1450 to 1800 the economy grew less than a quarter of a percent annually, for a total increase during this time of two- to threefold. The growth occurred mostly from population increase rather than from increased efficiency, since muscles still provided the power for most efforts. China and India remained at the economic center with almost 80 percent of the world’s goods and services until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Atlantic economy began to rival that of the western Pacific. Within a few decades after 1492 the rate of economic growth in Europe began to speed up dramatically, based on cheap and slave labor and land taken in the Americas.
For the period 1000 to 1500 our story focused on the Mongols. For the period 1500 to 1800 it has focused on the Atlantic Europeans, the Mongols of the sea.
22 With ruthless brutality and determined conviction, they extended their culture to the Americas, and in Europe they laid the foundation for industrialization and the worldwide dominance of Europe that followed.
Unanswered Questions
1. What impact did the slave trade have on Africa?
Some historians, such as McNeill and McNeill, judge that the impact of the slave trade on the demographics of Africa as a whole was probably small. They say that 25 million enslaved people, spread over 400 years and many countries, affected a very small (but unknowable) portion of the population.
23 Others, such as Patrick Manning, say that sub-Saharan Africa had virtually no population growth from 1750 to 1850 and that without slavery it would have grown from 50 million to 70 or 100 million. Manning believes that from 1750 to 1850 “perhaps 10 percent of the African population—6 or 7 million people—was in slave status as a result of Occidental and Oriental demand for slaves.”
24Slavery had other impacts on Africa. It favored the formation of states because stateless people were especially vulnerable to capture. It militarized many societies and increased the number of guns, purchased from trading slaves. It divided societies and forced societies and individuals to choose whether or not they would trade in slaves. Even today in parts of Africa people remember whose ancestors were slavers and whose were slaves.
2. Did any Europeans protest the treatment of the Amerindians?
A few did, chief among them Bartolomé de Las Casas (ca.1484-1566), born in Seville of converso heritage—that is, his family converted from Jewish to Catholic faith. His grandfather was burned as a Jew in 1492; his father accompanied Columbus on his second trip. Las Casas went with his father to the Caribbean from 1502 to 1506, returned to Spain to take the orders, and returned to the Caribbean in 1509 to 1515 to witness the conquest of Cuba. Las Casas wrote several books detailing the mistreatment of the native people at the hands of his countrymen. Eventually he influenced the passage of laws that offered some protection to Amerindians, called the New Laws of 1542, which outlawed the enslavement of Amerindians and limited other forms of forced labor. In the 1550s he wrote
A History of the Indians. Las Casas, however, did not object to the enslavement of Africans.
253. Why did capitalism emerge in parts of Europe rather than in parts of China or India?
This is a favorite question of social scientists and historians in Europe and the United States. Many possible explanations have been advanced, including the competition among states due to the lack of a European unified government, the location on the sea, the windfall of food, labor, and gold and silver from the conquest of the Americas, the strong state machineries, deposits of coal, population density, fast communication due to printing, differences in social structure and policy, plus lots of accidents. All seem to have played a role. The follow-up question is: How did England come to take the lead in the development of capitalism? The next chapter will offer some suggestions.
