A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  By this time the great period of Islamic culture and science was over. As Islam increasingly penetrated the countryside – for centuries it had been a mainly urban creed – it became dependent on the popularity of ‘Sufi’ movements of ascetics and mystics, some of whom were venerated after death as ‘saints’. In effect, a hierarchy of magical and miraculous lesser gods was reintroduced into what was a supposedly monotheistic religion. Rational debate became a thing of the past as a system of religious schools, the Madrasas , taught a single orthodoxy – especially directed against the Shi’ite heresies – and a religious establishment sought to impose it on society as a whole. Learning came to mean knowing the Koran and the Hadiths rather than developing an understanding of the world. This increasingly stifled independent thought and scientific advance. By the beginning of the twelfth century the poet and mathematician Umar Khayyam could complain of ‘the disappearance of the men of learning, of whom only a handful are left, small in number but large in tribulations’ 75 – although the Arabic cities of Spain remained a beacon of learning for scholars from thirteenth-century Europe, and it was there that Ibn Khaldun developed ideas in the fourteenth century which anticipated the findings of the French and Scottish thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. 76

  The rise of Islamic civilisation in the seventh and eighth centuries was due to the way that the Arab armies and then the Abbasid revolution united an area from the Atlantic to the Indus behind a doctrine which made the trader and the artisan as important as the landowner and the general. It was this which had enabled products, technical innovations, artistic techniques and scientific knowledge to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other and real additions to be made to the heritage of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of classical India and of contemporary China. But by the same token, the decline of Islamic civilisation from the tenth century on was due to the limitations of the Abbasid revolution. In reality it was only a half-revolution. It allowed the traders and artisans to influence the state, but it did not give them control over it.

  Balancing between the urban classes and the great landowning classes, the state machine became all-powerful. It sucked in taxes from all classes, rewarded its generals and bureaucrats with vast estates, absorbed the surplus which might otherwise have been used to develop the productive base of society, and eventually drove vast numbers of the peasant producers below the level of subsistence necessary for them to keep toiling, so that total output sank. This in turn restricted the market for the merchants and manufacturers, giving them little incentive to move from reliance on artisan production to some rudimentary factory system. There was a cramping of further technological advance – even printing was not introduced into the Muslim world, although merchants who had been to China knew about it – and the mass of people remained sunk in poverty and superstition. Civilisation was restricted to a relatively thin layer of the population, and it began to wilt as the economic conditions that sustained them deteriorated.

  The Islamic empires were repeatedly shaken by revolts – rebellions by those who identified with the murdered revolutionary leader Abu Muslim, rebellions by those who saw one or other descendant of Ali as representing a pure Islam corrupted by the caliphs, rebellions by townspeople, rebellions by peasants, the great 16-year Zanj rebellion of black slaves in the southern salt marshes of Mesopotamia in the ninth century, 77 and the Ismaili rebellion that brought to power the rival caliphate in Egypt.

  Yet none of these rebellions was any more capable of showing a way out of the impasse than the revolts of ancient Rome or the peasant revolutions in China. They gave expression to enormous discontent, usually in a religious form. But they did not and could not begin to present a project for reorganising society on a new basis. The means by which the mass of people made a livelihood had not advanced enough for that to be possible.

  The Islamic civilisation, like that of the T’ang and Sung periods in China, was important in producing the seeds of further development. But the crushing weight of old superstructures prevented those seeds taking root – until they were transplanted to a primitive region of Eurasia where such a superstructure barely existed.

  Chapter 5

  The African civilisations

  The European colonists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described Africa as ‘the Dark Continent’. According to them it was without civilisation and without history, its life ‘blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism’, in the words of a Professor Egerton of Oxford University. 78 So strong were their prejudices that the geologist Karl Mauch, one of the first Europeans to visit the site of the twelfth-century city of Great Zimbabwe, was convinced it could not be of local origin, but must have been built by some non-black people from the north as a copy of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. 79 The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1965, ‘There is only the history of the European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness’. 80

  Yet all the processes which led to the rise of civilisation in Eurasia and the Americas occurred in Africa too, and not just once but several times. Egypt is the most obvious example. Although certain aspects of its civilisation were probably influenced by contact with Mesopotamia, its roots lay in independent developments in southern Egypt, among peoples from the west and south who settled in the Nile Valley. 81 The Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Kushite civilisation of Nubia (from the Nile above Aswan), which briefly conquered Egypt early in the first millennium BC, and which developed its own phonetic script. The Romans knew of the Axum civilisation of Ethiopia, which embraced Christianity early on, was in close contact with southern Arabia (some of Mohammed’s early followers fled there to avoid persecution in Mecca) and also developed its own alphabet. Traders from India, the Muslim empires and even China were in contact with cities all along the east African coast south to Mozambique. One of them, Ibn Battuta, described Kilwa in present-day Tanzania in 1331 as ‘one of the most beautiful and well constructed towns in the world’. 82 Hasan al-Wazzan (better known by his Italian nickname Leo Africanus), an exiled Moor from Granada, described crossing the Sahara from Morocco to visit some two dozen kingdoms along the River Niger in the early fifteenth century. He wrote that Tambo (Timbuktu) was a city of many thousands of people, with ‘many magistrates, learned doctors and men of religion’, where ‘there is a big market for manuscript books from the Berber countries, and more profit is made from the sale of books than from any other merchandise’. 83 Other civilisations arose in the forests of coastal west Africa, where the city of Benin made an enormous impression on the first Portuguese to visit it, and across a wide belt of central Africa from the kingdom of the Kongo in northern Angola to Buganda in present-day Uganda.

  The sequence by which each of these civilisations arose is essentially the same as that which occurred in the case of the Eurasian and American civilisations. In particular regions people evolved forms of cultivation which provided them with a sufficient surplus for there to be the beginnings of a polarisation within old communal structures between chiefly lineages and others. Then some of these chiefly lineages crystallised into ruling classes which exploited the rest of society, while among the mass of the population specialised groups of artisans and traders emerged alongside the mass of peasants and herders.

  Sometimes these developments received a push from the impact of other civilisations. Egypt clearly influenced Nubia; southern Arabia (where towns already existed in 1000 BC) probably influenced Ethiopia just across the Red Sea; Indian and Arab traders had an impact on the east African coast. But this could only happen because tendencies had already arisen independently, capable of taking advantage of such influence. Traders only visited places such as the east coast because there were already complex societies with something to trade.

  The most important changes in the ways the various peoples of Africa made a livelihood occurred completely independently of outside influences. This had to apply to the domestication of plants, if only because the crops grown i
n the ancient civilisations of Eurasia and the Nile Valley would not grow in the tropical and subtropical climates of most of sub-Saharan Africa. African peoples developed forms of agriculture of their own. It also applied, much later, to the production of iron. Metalsmiths in west Africa learned to smelt iron ores about the same time as knowledge of how to do so was spreading across Eurasia in about 1000 BC. But the techniques they used were rather different, indicating independent development. 84

  Agriculture and iron together transformed the face of sub-Saharan Africa. The number of Bantu-speaking peoples from west Africa, who first adopted these methods, grew over the centuries, leading them between 2000 BC and AD 500 to displace many of the hunter-gatherers who had originally been predominant in central and southern Africa. Those peoples with a substantial agricultural surplus or well positioned for trade began to undergo the transition to class divisions and town living, usually at some point after AD 500. Trade brought the east coast towns into contact with the other civilisations of the Indian Ocean. The west African towns became part of a network of trade which stretched to the Nile and Egypt on the one hand and through the Sahara to the Maghreb. Such contacts enabled them to shortcut the long process of developing their own script by adopting that of the Arabs – and with it the Islamic religion, which fitted the atmosphere of urban life more than the old ‘pagan’ beliefs.

  Indigenous developments had produced, in order, the Egyptian, Nubian and Ethiopian civilisations. By the fifteenth century other civilisations existed right across the continent, from coast to coast, even if sometimes interspersed with so-called ‘primitive’ peoples living in pre-class societies. They were connected to the world system of trade via Islam long before Europeans landed on their coasts (indeed, one explanation of the decline of ancient Zimbabwe lies in an international decline in the price of the gold it exported in the fifteenth century). 85

  The peoples of Africa did end up as the victims of the emerging world system – so much so that their civilisations were all but erased from the historical record by a racist ideology that treated them as ‘sub-human’. But the reasons lie in an accident of geography.

  Eurasia stretches from west to east. There are vast belts of land which share essentially the same climate and, therefore, are suitable for growing the same sort of crops – wheat, barley and rye grow all the way from Ireland to Beijing, and rice grows from Korea and Japan to the Indian Ocean. There are also few natural barriers preventing the spread of domesticated animal species. Horses, cows, sheep and goats can thrive virtually anywhere, apart from the occasional desert region. So advances in farming could spread relatively rapidly, since they involved people learning from neighbours who farmed under similar conditions. Successive hordes of humans were also able to sweep from one end of the continental mass to the other, sometimes bringing destruction, as with the Huns or Mongols, but also bringing knowledge of new techniques.

  By contrast, Africa runs from north to south and has several different climatic belts. Crops which flourish in the Maghreb or in Egypt will not grow easily in the savannah region, while crops which will grow there are useless in the tropical region towards the equator. 86 Therefore, local improvements in farming techniques were rarely of more than regional importance until revolutionary new methods of transport enabled them to leap climatic barriers. There was also a huge natural barrier to the southward spread of cattle rearing – the tsetse fly in the central African region. Farming folk with domesticated cows had great difficulty reaching the lands in southern Africa which were ideally suited to cattle. Deep sea navigation was impossible from the west coast until the fifteenth century, because nowhere in the world had the naval technology to cope with prevailing winds. The east coast was easily accessible, but it was not easy for people to make the journey up into the highlands inland. And the Sahara, cutting the continent in two from the Atlantic to the Nile, was an obstacle to all but the most determined travellers even after the introduction of the domesticated camel in about AD 500.

  Backward peoples in Europe – such as the British, the Germans or the Scandinavians – could eventually, even in the Dark Ages, gain knowledge of technical innovations and agricultural improvements from China, India or the Middle East. They could feed off advances made right across the world’s greatest land mass. The civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa had to rely much more on their own resources. They were relatively isolated, in a continent half the size and with about one-sixth of the population of Eurasia. It was not an insuperable barrier to the development of society, as the record of successive civilisations shows. But it placed them at a fatal disadvantage when eventually they were confronted by rapacious visitors from the formerly backward region of western Europe, which had been more easily able to borrow and develop technologies from the other end of Asia.

  Chapter 6

  European feudalism

  Merchants from the great Islamic cities such as Cairo and Cordoba travelled widely 1,000 years ago. 87 Any who made their way to the royal courts of northern Europe must have been shaken by the conditions they found.

  The land was divided between warring baronies, often separated from each other by dense woodlands or marshes. Each was a virtually self-contained economy, its people depending almost entirely on what was produced on its lands. For the peasants this meant a diet dominated by bread and gruel, and clothing spun and woven in their own homes out of rough wool or flax. It also meant devoting at least two-fifths of their energies to unpaid work for the lord, in the form of either labour or goods in kind. As serfs, the peasants did not have the freedom to leave either the land or the lord.

  The living standard of the lordly family was much higher, yet it too was restricted to what the peasants could produce. The lords’ castles were crude, built of wood and surrounded by wood and mud palisades, ill protected against the elements. Their clothing, much more abundant than the peasants’, was hardly any smoother on the skin, and the lords were rarely more cultured. They needed expertise in horseriding and the use of weapons to hold their lands against other lords and to punish recalcitrant peasants; they did not need to be able to read and write, and most did not bother to learn. When the lords with larger estates wanted to keep written records, they turned to the small social group which had preserved the knowledge of reading and writing – the thin layer of literate monks and clergy.

  There were a few products – salt, iron for plough tips, knives and the lords’ weapons – which came from traders. But these were very different from the wealthy merchant classes of the eastern civilisations, being akin to bagmen or tinkers as they tramped through forest paths and along barely recognisable mud-caked roads.

  There were few towns, and ‘entire countries, like England and almost all the Germanic lands, were entirely without towns’. 88 The towns that did exist were little more than administrative centres for the bigger barons or religious establishments, and were made up of a few houses clustered around a castle, monastery or large church.

  Yet this most backward extremity of the great Eurasian continent was eventually to become the birthplace of a new civilisation which would overwhelm all the rest.

  There have been all sorts of explanations for this transformation, ranging from the wondrous, through the absurd, to the obscene. Some ascribe it to the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition, although the Christian side of this certainly did not show any merits during the last years of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages in Europe or the stagnation of Byzantium. Others ascribe it to the climate which allegedly encourages ‘work’ and ‘enterprise’, 89 which makes one wonder how the first great civilisations were able to flourish. The obscene attempt to explain it in terms of the alleged ‘racial’ superiority of the Europeans falls at the first hurdle given that they were backward for so long. Another line of thinking ascribes the rise of Europe to ‘contingent’ factors – in other words, it was an accident. There was the fortuitous emergence of a series of great men, according to traditional mainstream history; there was the lucky rise o
f Calvinism and the ‘Protestant ethic’, according to followers of the German sociologist Max Weber; there was the chance outcome of clashes between peasants and lords in fifteenth-century England which left neither victorious, according to some North American academics. 90

  The backward go forward

  All these accounts miss an obvious point. Europe’s very backwardness encouraged people to adopt new ways of wresting a livelihood from elsewhere. Slowly, over many centuries, they began to apply techniques already known in China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and southern Spain. There was a corresponding slow but cumulative change in the social relations of society as a whole, just as there had been in Sung China or the Abbasid caliphate. But this time it happened without the enormous dead weight of an old imperial superstructure to smother continued advance. The very backwardness of Europe allowed it to leapfrog over the great empires.

  Economic and technical advance was not automatic or unhampered. Again and again old structures hindered, obstructed and sometimes crushed new ways. As elsewhere, there were great revolts which were crushed, and movements which promised a new society and ended up reproducing the old. Fertile areas were turned into barren wastes and prosperous cities ended up as desolate ruins. There were horrific and pointless wars, barbaric torture and mass enslavement. Yet in the end a new organisation of production and society emerged very different to anything before in history.