by Kevin Reilly
For native peoples and cultures, these empires were like bulldozers. Few had the weapons or disease immunities to resist. Native Americans were not the only people to be decimated by European diseases and conquest. The native peoples of Siberia suffered something similar at the hands of invading Russians, while native Taiwanese were numerically, culturally, and economically overwhelmed by massive Chinese settlement on their island. And the Japanese state was expanding into the northern island of Hokkaido, incorporating the native Ainu people. In the process, the Ainu, according to a modern historian, “degenerated from a relatively autonomous people . . . to a miserably dependent people plagued by dislocation and epidemic disease.”1
Gunpowder Revolution . The creation of these larger states and empires owed something to the spread of gunpowder technology, which allowed those who controlled it to batter down previously impregnable fortifications and to dominate peoples without gunpowder weapons. Originating in China, this technology was incorporated in the arsenals of China, Japan, India, the Ottoman Empire, and various European states by the sixteenth century. But this military revolution played out differently in various parts of the world. In Japan, for example, gunpowder weapons played an important role in unifying the country by around 1600 after centuries of civil war. But then the new rulers of the country, known as the Tokugawa shogunate, deliberately turned away from the new technology, banning handguns. Internal peace and external isolation for two centuries made the gunpowder weapons seem unnecessary and even dangerous. It was within European states, with their intensely competitive relationships with one another, where this military revolution developed most fully. Shipboard cannon gave European fleets a decisive edge over other navies, and the practice of close-order drill—enabling large numbers of soldiers to move as a single unit—gave their armies a growing advantages on land. Here was the beginning of a European military superiority that became increasingly pronounced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2
Patterns of Internal Change
Population Growth . The great agrarian civilizations of the early modern era were growing internally as well as expanding into empires. Population doubled from roughly 450 million in 1500 to 900 million by 1800. But it was a highly uneven process. The populations of Europe, India, Japan, and China grew substantially. China in particular quadrupled its numbers between 1400 and 1800, from 75 million to around 320 million people, then about one-third of the world’s population. One cause of this population growth was due to the European Atlantic empire: the spread of American crops such as corn and potatoes greatly increased the world’s food supply. On the other hand, indigenous populations in the Americas dropped catastrophically in the wake of European conquest and disease, while those of Africa grew very little as the slave trade drained millions from the continent.
Empires and growing populations also meant vast environmental change as forests, wetlands, and grasslands gave way to cultivated fields. In several places, such as Japan and the British Isles, shortages of firewood and its rising price represented a kind of energy crisis by the eighteenth century. Japan responded to these pressures by sharply limiting its population growth during the eighteenth century, by propagating an ideology of restrained consumption, and by a remarkable program of forest conservation and the replanting of trees. The British response to a similar set of environmental pressures was quite different. Far from seeking to limit growth, the British increasingly shifted from scarce wood to plentiful coal as a source of energy and aggressively sought new resources in its worldwide trading connections and colonial empire.3
Market-Based Economies . Another widespread pattern in many parts of the early modern world lay in a substantial increase in trade, production for the market, and wage labor, a process known generally as commercialization. China, India, Japan, and Europe all experienced this kind of economic change. When China in the 1570s imposed taxes payable in silver, millions of Chinese were required to sell either their products or their labor to get the silver necessary for paying taxes. This spurt of commercialization stimulated international trade throughout East and Southeast Asia. In India, high-quality cotton textiles, produced in rural villages, found markets all across the Eastern Hemisphere. At the other end of Eurasia, a more well known process of commercialization took shape in the Atlantic Basin and in western European societies as transatlantic commerce boomed in the wake of European “discoveries” in the Americas. Europeans in North America and Russians in Siberia stripped the forests of fur-bearing animals in a voracious search for pelts that brought a good price on world markets. Although Europeans were becoming more prominent in global commerce, the center of gravity for the world economy remained generally in Asia and especially in China throughout the early modern era. Eighteenth-century China achieved the remarkable feat of adding some 200 million people to its society while raising its standards of living to levels “almost unmatched elsewhere in the world.”4
European merchants and bankers hitched a ride on this Eurasian trade network, eventually gaining greater power in European societies than did their trading partners in Asia. As a consequence, European states, though smaller than those of Asia, became more commercialized, their governments more dependent on the class of money people, and their lives more determined by markets. Some historians have labeled these changes, especially as they developed in the city-states of Italy and in Dutch Flanders in the fifteenth century, as the beginning of market-based or capitalist societies.
Cities . Urbanization also accompanied the growth of populations, economies, and commerce. Cities, of course, have been central to all agrarian civilizations since ancient times. But the burgeoning of international commerce in the early modern era stimulated the growth of the port cities of East and Southeast Asia as well as in western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. India, now unified under the Mughal Empire, generated at least three cities with populations of half a million people and a substantial percentage of its total population in urban areas. Japan was probably the most urbanized region of the early modern world with the city of Edo (modern Tokyo) boasting more than a million residents in 1720, probably the largest city in the world and double the size of Paris at the time.
Religious and Intellectual Ferment . These social and economic changes provoked some thinkers all across Eurasia to question the received wisdom of their cultural traditions.5 Perhaps the most far reaching of these challenges to the old order occurred in Europe. There, Renaissance artists and writers broke with long-established conventions inherited from the Middle Ages, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation challenged both the authority and the teachings of the Catholic Church, and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century projected a whole new approach to knowledge based on human rationality rather than religious revelation and painted a very different picture of the cosmos. We turn to these developments in the next chapter.
But new thinking was not confined to Europe. The Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) won numerous Confucians to a more meditative or Buddhist “neo-Confucianism” that was similar to Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church. Early modern India also witnessed serious challenges to established religions. A traditionally educated northern Indian named Nanak (1469–1504) established a new faith known as Sikhism that combined elements of Hinduism and Islam and rejected the religious authority of the Brahmin caste. Declaring that there is “no Hindu, no Muslim, only God,” Sikhism grew rapidly in northern India with a special appeal in urban areas and to women. In the late sixteenth century, the Muslim emperor of Mughal India, Akbar, actively encouraged religious toleration and sought to develop a new and more inclusive tradition that he labeled the “divine faith,” drawing on the truths of India’s many religions.
Continuities . Thus, we can find early signs across much of Eurasia of a transformation that later generations called “modernity”—deepening connections among human societies, more powerful states, economic growth, rising populations, more marke
t exchange, substantial urban development, and challenges to established cultural traditions. But nowhere was there a breakthrough to that most distinctive feature of modern life—industrialization. Most people continued to work in agricultural settings, to live in male-dominated rural communities, to produce most of the necessities of life for themselves, and to think about the big questions of life in religious terms. The primary sources of energy remained human, animal, wind, and water power, and technological change continued to be slow and limited. Traditional elites—royal families, landowning aristocracies, political officials, military men, and tribal chiefs—dominated the world’s major societies. Not until the nineteenth century did the industrial revolution, quite unexpectedly, give birth to more fully modern societies with rapid and sustained economic growth based on continuing technological innovation, first in Great Britain and then in western Europe, eastern North America, Japan, and Russia.
These shared processes all across Eurasia remind us that the European stamp on modernity was hardly apparent when Columbus set sail in 1492. Nor was it obvious in 1750, when China was still the world’s largest economy, Japan the most urbanized society, Russia the largest empire, and Islam the most widespread religion. This chapter, then, highlights the varying historical trajectories of early modern societies in three major regions of the Afro-Eurasian world—the Islamic world, China, and Russia—as the many peoples of the world came into increasing contact with one another. The next chapter focuses the historical spotlight on the eruption of western Europeans onto the world stage and the beginning of genuine “globalization.” How might we compare Islamic, Chinese, Russian, and western European patterns of expansion? How and why did the relationship among them change over time? How did European expansion achieve a global reach while the others remained regional in scope?
Islamic Expansion: Second Wave
For almost 1,000 years before Europeans ventured far into the Atlantic, the Islamic Middle East was the main crossroads linking African, European, and Asian societies. For several centuries (roughly 650–950 CE), a Muslim empire stretched from Spain in the west to the borders of India and China in the east. Even after this empire fragmented into separate political units, the religion of Islam and the Arabic language provided some coherence for an enormous and diverse civilization. The language and culture of the Arabian Peninsula became dominant in much of North Africa and the Middle East. And Islam took root well beyond the boundaries of Arab culture, penetrating the West African interior, the East African coast, and parts of Central and Southeast Asia, China, and India. Within this vast region, a distinctly Islamic civilization emerged that drew on, exchanged, and blended the products, practices, and cultures of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Pilgrims, scholars, officials, traders, and holy men from throughout the region traveled the length and breadth of this “abode of Islam.” Thus, the religion of Islam, wrote a leading historian, “came closer than any had ever come to uniting all mankind under its ideals.”6
Islamic expansion persisted into the early modern centuries. What changed around 1500 was the creation of several large and powerful empires that brought a measure of political unity and stability to an Islamic world that had been sharply fragmented for at least 500 years: the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the Safavid Empire in Persia (present-day Iran), and the Mughal Empire in India. All of them were created by Turkish-speaking invaders from central Asia, all made use of new gunpowder weapons and built huge armies, and all boasted rich and culturally sophisticated court life, flourishing economies, and impressive bureaucracies. Together they brought about a “second flowering” of Islamic power and culture, comparable only to the early centuries of Islamic civilization.7
The Ottoman Empire
Chief among these expanding states was the Ottoman Empire. From the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks advanced from their base in Anatolia, or Asia Minor, to incorporate much of southeastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Lasting into the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire began as a regime of conquest that sometimes took the form of frontier raids and skirmishes by military bands called ghazis, inspired by the warrior culture of central Asian nomads. Later, formal imperial campaigns mobilized huge armies whose disciplined elite military units, the janissaries, actively adopted the new technology of gunpowder into their arsenals and were probably unmatched as a fighting force at the time. Both forms of Ottoman expansion were justified in terms of spreading Islam, and together they produced an empire almost continually at war between the mid-fifteenth and the early seventeenth century.
Ottomans and the Arabs . In the process of these enormous conquests, the Ottoman Turks, relative newcomers to Islam, came to occupy a leading position within the vast community of Muslim societies. Their victories against Christian powers and especially the taking of Constantinople in 1453 gave them a growing prestige in the Islamic world that eased the expansion of the empire. Most notably, the Ottoman Empire incorporated much of the Arab world, where the faith had originated, including the Islamic holy places of Mecca and Medina. In an age when religious identity was more important than ethnicity, the Ottoman Empire was widely viewed as the protector of Muslims—the strong sword of Islam—rather than as Turks who conquered Arabs. Muslims in Spain, Egypt, central Asia, and elsewhere appealed to the Ottoman state for support—both military and political—in their various struggles against infidels and one another.
Ottomans and the Persians . But in one part of the Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire came into prolonged conflict with fellow Muslims, for to its eastern border lay the rising Safavid Empire, governing the ancient lands of Persia. With traditions of imperial rule going back 2,000 years, Persia was in many ways the cultural center of the Islamic world. Its language, poetry, architecture, and painting had spread widely within the lands of Islam. Beginning in 1500, the Safavid dynasty, Turkish in origin, now ruled this ancient land. Its most famous leader, Shah Abbas I (1587–1629) turned the country into another prosperous and confident center of Islamic power. A new capital of Isfahan became a metropolis of 500,000 people with elaborate gardens and homes for the wealthy, public charities for the poor, dozens of mosques, religious colleges, public baths, and hundreds of inns for traveling merchants.
The Ottoman–Safavid rivalry was largely a struggle for influence and territorial control over the lands that lay between them (modern Iraq), but it also reflected sharp religious differences. The Ottoman Empire adhered to the Sunni version of Islam, practiced by most Muslims, but the Safavid Empire had embraced the Shi’ite variant of the faith. This division in the Islamic world originated in early disputes over the rightful succession to Muhammad and came to include disagreements about doctrine, ritual, and law. Periodic military conflicts erupted for over a century (1534–1639) and led to violent purges of suspected religious dissidents in both empires. These religious conflicts within the Islamic world paralleled similar struggles within Christian Europe as Catholic and Protestant rulers battled one another over issues of theology and territory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
Ottomans and the West . In conquering much of the Arab world and in extended military confrontation with the Safavid Empire, the Ottoman Empire encountered other Muslim societies. But its expansion into southeastern Europe represented a cultural encounter of a different kind—the continuation of a long rivalry between the world of Islam and Christian European civilization. In 1453, the Ottomans seized Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, and by 1529 their armies had advanced to the gates of Vienna in the heart of central Europe, led by Suleiman (r. 1520–1566), the most famous of all Ottoman rulers. All southeastern Europe now lay under Muslim control, including Greece, the heartland of classical Western culture. Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire controlled the North African coast and battled Europeans to a naval stalemate in the Mediterranean Sea. Here was an external military and cultural threat to Christian Europe that resembled the much lat
er threat of communism in the twentieth century. In both cases, an alien ideology backed by a powerful state generated great anxiety in the West. One European ambassador to the Ottoman court in the mid-sixteenth century summed up the situation in fearful terms:
It makes me shudder to think of what the result of a struggle between such different systems must be; one of us must prevail and the other be destroyed. . . . On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories, readiness to endure hardships, union, order, discipline, thrift and watchfulness. On ours are found an empty exchequer, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits, a raw and insubordinate soldiery, and greedy quarrels; . . . and worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we to defeat.8
Even in distant England, the writer Richard Knolles in 1603 referred to “the glorious empire of the Turks, the present terror of the world.” The Islamic threat in the east was one of the factors that impelled Europeans westward into the Atlantic in their continuing search for the riches of Asia.
But not all was conflict across the cultural divide of Christendom and the Islamic world. Within the Ottoman Empire, Christians and other religious minorities were largely left to govern themselves, and little attempt was made to force Islam on them. Balkan peasants commonly observed that Turkish rule was less oppressive than that of their earlier Christian masters. Furthermore, politics and greed sometimes overcame religious antagonism. Christian France frequently allied with the Ottoman Empire against their common enemy, the Austrian Habsburg Empire, and not a few Christian merchants sold weapons to the Turks, knowing full well that these would be used against fellow Christians.