The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  The Advantages of Parallel Worlds

  The tragedy of Rapa Nui was that the last Polynesians inhabited but one world. At the easternmost tip of the Pacific triangle of settlement, there seemed to be no place else to go. Of course, we all inhabit only one world, and (at least given foreseeable technology) there is nowhere else for us to go (in any significant numbers).

  The Lessons of Parallel Worlds

  Even when we cannot go elsewhere, we can still learn from others who have. The Polynesians who settled closest to their Asian origins had far more opportunity to learn from others than did the people of Rapa Nui. A richly studied Polynesian people on one of the Solomon Islands, which was populated mainly by other descendants of their mutual Austronesian ancestors, proudly proclaimed “we the Tiko-pia”19 do things this way at every opportunity, but only when they became aware that other people did things differently.

  The opportunity to learn that there are other worlds where people do things differently is one of the great advantages of studying history. What the Tikopia could do face-to-face we can do from a distance.

  What are the lessons we can draw from the three worlds that ran independent of but parallel to the world of Afro-Eurasia in the thousands of years before the world became one?

  Lessons of Similarities . That there were parallel worlds at all is a lesson in how humans share the same variety of possibilities and move along similar paths. The parallel worlds of inner Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific display the same range of activities, institutions, and ideas that we found in Afro-Eurasia during the same period. The processes of change were also similar. In all “four worlds,” hunter-gatherers increasingly became farmers and farmers learned to be more productive, usually choosing to live in more complex and densely populated societies. Everyone did not develop cities, writing, and bronze or iron metallurgy, but generally when people became aware of these developments, they sought them out and adopted them for themselves.

  We have reflected on the similarities in the growth of social classes, elites, chiefdoms, monarchies, and empires. Kings became more powerful as their realms expanded. They took more wives, humiliated more subjects, demanded more grave mates, and rationalized more sacrificial offerings to more demanding gods (often themselves). Whether or not soldiers replaced priests as the dominant class entrusted with preserving the material advantage of the privileged, both classes prospered in complex societies. So did fathers. City-and state-based societies tended to be more patriarchal than agricultural societies. West African and American agriculturalists were often matrilineal. In the process of the Bantu expansion, inner African societies become more patrilineal. Native American city societies were more patrilineal. In the Pacific, the early inhabitants of Southeast Asia, including Malaya, and the Austronesian ancestors of the Polynesians tended to be matrilineal. Polynesian society was patrilineal.

  Similarities or Connections . Travelers and amateur archaeologists have frequently speculated on the similarity of Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, a resemblance that has led some to imagine ancient travels across the Atlantic or Pacific. But similarity does not mean connection. We know that Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies were closely linked, but the Mesopotamian step pyramid, or ziggurat, was different from the Egyptian pyramid, and it performed a different function: temple rather than tomb. Mayan pyramids were also temples, as were those of the Aztecs and Incas. Ancient peoples built templelike structures for other purposes as well. Nor were they limited to city societies. North American farmers from the Mississippi to Georgia built pyramidshaped earthen mounds, although most built rounded mounds. Polynesians built pyramid structures, although most built simple platform altars. Rather than assume connections where no evidence of contacts exists, we might see the building of temples, tombs, mounds, platforms, and pyramids as efforts to communicate with sky gods, exalt certain elites, or reflect the power, shape, or ideals of the builders and benefactors of urban and complex societies.

  Lessons of Differences . The differences that occurred within these broad similarities can tell us even more. The fishing villages of the Pacific coast show that even hunter-gatherers can establish settled sophisticated societies. The people of the American Southwest and Mississippi show the upper limits of social organization possible without writing and metals. The Pacific Islanders show how much can be done with only a few seeds and a shipload of grit.

  The forceful role that pastoralists played in Eurasia is echoed by the Nilotic peoples of Africa but absent from the Americas and Polynesia. The almost complete absence of animals for transportation in the Americas and Polynesia prevented the dynamic synthesis we see from the clash of the two lifestyles elsewhere. But it does not seem to have prevented the development of patriarchy or military powers in the Americas or Pacific islands.

  If one conclusion seems inescapable, it is that these parallel worlds were not ignited by clashes with others—pastoralists or settled people—the way the people of central Eurasia were. The fact that they went their own way, colonizing empty or underpopulated lands, allowed them to develop the unique propensities of their own cultures but kept them away from center stage. But there is a profound irony here. The separate development that was their historical weakness when Eurasia came calling is also what makes them so valuable to the rest of the world today. Just as plants that exist nowhere else can provide the world with a cure to a global scourge, the variety of human cultures testify to the breadth of our possibilities. Recently, for instance, linguistic scholars recognized that, probably uniquely in the world, the Aymara speakers of the Andes think of the past as in front of them and the future (since it is unknown) as behind them.20 Thus, a presumed human universal can be put to rest because a parallel world is around to tell us it need not be so. Who knows what possibilities such new ideas could help us back into?

  The Strength of Parallel Worlds

  We have seen how the story of human history might be summarized as 100,000 years of global dispersal followed by 1,000 or 2,000 years of reconnection. That reconnection and even reintegration has been especially profound in the past few hundred years, increasing in intensity even in recent decades. The benefits in communication, coordination, and innovation are enormous. But one result is increasing sameness. Like the early agriculturalists who chose a few wild plants from hundreds of thousands of candidates in the wild, we throw off old cultures, languages, ancient beliefs, and customs like old clothes. And once they are discarded, they cannot be retrieved. We lose the capacity to try on alternatives. Parallel worlds provide alternatives at virtually every step. The irony, of course, is that their value is in their accessibility, and that is also the cause of their demise.

  Suggested Readings

  Adams, Richard, E. W. Ancient Civilizations of the New World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. A good introduction to the Americas.

  Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Good popular discussion of the environmental theme, including an Easter Island case study.

  Ehret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Good introduction to history of inner Africa.

  Finney, Ben R. Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Great read that shows how Polynesians sailed from Hawaii to New Zealand—by doing it.

  Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longman, 1965. The great West African classic.

  Shaffer, Lynda Norene. Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. Excellent introduction to Native Americans of the eastern United States before Columbus.

  Notes

  1. Lonnie G. Thompson et al., “Kilimanjaro Ice Core Records: Evidence of Holocene Climate Change in Tropical Africa,” Science 298 (October 18, 2002): 591, http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore/589.pdf.

  2. Christopher E
hret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History 1000 B.C to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 296-97.

  3. D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (London: Longman, 1965), 62.

  4. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75.

  5. Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 255.

  6. Swahili was a written language using an Arabic orthography with the earliest extant writings dating to the eighteenth century.

  7. Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones, and Stephen Mennell, The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), 1996, esp. 31-62.

  8. The phrase is the title of Jared Diamond’s popular work about Western dominance generally. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). Of course Spanish iron was not steel.

  9. This “maritime foundations” hypothesis was presented in Michael Mosely, The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings, 1975). See also the author’s The Incas and Their Ancestors (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

  10. The system is described in Richard E. W. Adams, Ancient Civilizations of the New World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 120.

  11. Mary Giraudo Beck, Potlatch: Native Ceremony and Myth on the Northwest Coast (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Books, 1993).

  12. Adapted from Stephen Plog, Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 170-71.

  13. Lynda Norene Shaffer, Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).

  14. B. G. Corney, ed., The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain during the Years 1772-6, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913-1919), 2:284-87. The account is from the journal of Andia Y. Varela, who visited in Tahiti in 1774, and is slightly modernized.

  15. D. E. Yen, in The Sweet Potato and Oceania, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, 236 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1974), argues that Polynesians sailed to South America about 1000 CE and brought the sweet potato back.

  16. Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican anthropologist at John Moores University in Liverpool, England, most recently argued that early Australians sailed across the Pacific and were the first settlers in the Americas, citing stories of a “long-faced” people on the Pacific coast of Mexico who were wiped out by the Spanish conquest (Reuters, September 6, 2004).

  17. Ben Finney, “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 284.

  18. See Diamond, Collapse, 79-119.

  19. “We the Tikopia” is the title of Raymond Firth’s classic study of this people. Published in 1936, it was one of nine books he wrote on the Tikopia.

  20. James Gorman, “Does This Mean People Turned Off, Tuned Out and Dropped In?,” New York Times, June 27, 2006, F3, commenting on Rafael E. Nunez and Eve Sweetser, “With the Future behind Them: Convergent Evidence from Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time,” Cognitive Science 30 (2006): 401-50.

  Empires and Encounters

  in the Early Modern Era

  1450–1750

  Common Patterns across the World

  Patterns of Expansion

  Premodern Connections

  Early Modern Empires

  Gunpowder Revolution

  Patterns of Internal Change

  Population Growth

  Market-Based Economies

  Cities

  Religious and Intellectual Ferment

  Continuities

  Islamic Expansion: Second Wave

  The Ottoman Empire

  Ottomans and the Arabs

  Ottomans and the Persians

  Ottomans and the West

  The Mughal Empire

  Muslims and Hindus

  An Expanding Economy

  The Songhay Empire

  Religious Vitality and Political Decline

  An Islamic World

  Conversion

  Decline of Islamic Empires

  China Outward Bound

  China and the World

  The Tribute System

  New Forms of Chinese Expansion

  A Maritime Empire Refused: The Ming Dynasty Voyages

  A Road Not Taken

  Comparing Chinese and European Voyages

  Power and Religion

  Differing Motives

  Differing Legacies

  China’s Inner Asian Empire

  Manchus Move West

  Empires of Many Nations

  Consequences of Empire

  China and Taiwan

  The Making of a Russian Empire

  Mother Russia

  “Soft Gold”: An Empire of Furs

  Siberia and Beyond

  The Impact of Empire

  Russia and Europe

  Looking Westward

  Peter the Great

  The Cost of Reform

  Russia and the World

  Parallel Worlds

  The World of Inner Africa

  The Amerindian World

  The World of Oceania

  Conclusion: Durability of Empire

  THE SINGLE most important historical fact memorized by generations of students not too long ago was “in fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Today, the name “Columbus” may not ring as loudly as it did then. We have learned to substitute words like “encounter” for “discovery,” and no one imagines anymore that American Indians were lost (or that they came from India). But 1492 is still the date to remember—or 1500 or thereabouts: because it was in the wake of Columbus and other European voyagers to the Western Hemisphere that the world became one. In bridging the ocean barriers that had long separated large segments of humankind, Europe’s “discoveries” had profound consequences for world history. Some were bleak: the decimation of American Indians and the enslavement of millions of Africans in the Western Hemisphere. And some neutral or positive: the construction of whole new societies in the Americas, the modern growth in world population, and, indirectly, the industrial revolution. European oceanic voyages marked the initiation of a genuinely global network of communication and exchange and the beginning of the densely connected world that we commonly define as “modern.” Thus, historians often refer to the early centuries of this era, roughly from 1450 to 1750, as the “early modern” period of world history.

  We will pick up the European part of the story in the next chapter, but first we must set it in a larger context. To put it simply, that context is that the fragmented world of the Middle Ages was rapidly becoming unified in other regions around 1500, before and after Columbus and other Europeans set sail across the Atlantic and the Pacific and joined the two together. Even before the European maritime voyages began, Chinese ships had sailed as far as Africa, and large land empires were established across much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In short, the modern world began before—and outside of—Europe.

  Common Patterns

  across the World

  Europe expanded after 1500 into a world that was already coming together into a few large empires. Without them European expansion would have been meaningless; in fact, it probably would not have happened.

  Patterns of Expansion

  Premodern Connections . Nor were European countries the first expansive societies. Polynesians had been sailing and settling the wide Pacific for at least 1,000 years. The huge Roman, Arab, and Mongol empires had earlier brought together very diverse populations. Merchants and monks had traded across the Eurasian “silk roads,” the Sahara Desert, and the Indian Ocean since the time of the Romans. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam had spread far beyond their places of origin. Islam in particular gave rise to a world civilization that joined parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe in a s
ingle zone of communication and exchange. Technologies such as papermaking, gunpowder, and the compass; foods such as processed sugar, bananas, and citrus fruits; and diseases such as the plague, or Black Death—all these had diffused widely, generally moving from the eastern end of the Eurasian network to the west. So Europeans did not begin the process of joining the world’s separate peoples and civilizations. Their maritime voyages and empires marked another stage in a long history of cross-cultural encounter and deepening interactions of a shrinking world.

  Early Modern Empires . Furthermore, at the same time that Europeans ventured overseas, other empires were also taking shape. During much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, while Europeans were taking the initiative in the Atlantic, they were very much on the defensive to the east, where the powerful Ottoman Empire was vigorously expanding its territory and spreading Islam. At the same time, yet another Muslim power, the Mughal Empire, was bringing most of India under Islamic rule, while the Songay Empire briefly unified a large part of West Africa in a state dominated by Muslim elites. Farther east, in the fifteenth century, the Chinese sent into the Indian Ocean fleets of treasure ships that dwarfed the slightly later European caravels. By the eighteenth century, China was constructing a huge inner Asian empire, doubling its territory in the process, and had extensively settled the neighboring island of Taiwan. Russians, beginning around 1550, were building the world’s largest empire across Siberia to the Pacific.