A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Map 3.2 The Americas before 1492

  Different cultivars of maize were developed for many different climates, but maize was difficult to grow in high altitudes. Thus in the Andes, maize was grown in more low-lying areas and various types of potatoes at higher altitudes. To keep hillsides from sliding and increase the amount of land available for crops, villagers often built terraces separated by stone retaining walls on the steeper slopes, along with irrigation channels and ditches to bring water to the fields. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, families in most Andean cultures were organized into ayllus, groups of related kin that cooperated in farming and ritual activities. Land was owned by the ayllu, not by individuals, with parallel lines of descent; women achieved access to resources such as land, water, and herds through their mothers, and men through their fathers. Ayllus were grouped within one of two moieties, an upper and more prestigious moiety called the hanansaya often associated with warfare, and a lower and less prestigious moiety called the hurinsaya. After the Inca conquests, members of both moieties and all ayllus owed labor services to the central government in Cuzco, which included working the land, building roads, weaving, and military service.

  Maize will also not grow in hot, wet climates very well. Thus in Amazonia, manioc, a tuber that can be cooked in many ways, became the staple food, planted along with other crops, including fruits, nuts, and various types of palm trees, transforming the rainforest into a landscape at least partially managed by humans. People domesticated peach palms, for example, which produce fruit, pulp that is made into flour, heart of palm that is eaten raw, and juice that can be fermented into beer. People throughout the Americas domesticated dogs, but because no native species allowed itself to be harnessed as horses, oxen, and water buffalo did in Asia and Europe, all agricultural labor was human-powered. Judging by later descriptions and depictions, women did much of the crop-raising, or both sexes did, with gender-specific tasks.

  In sub-Saharan Africa, Bantu-speaking peoples continued to migrate into forest, savannah, and highland regions, bringing iron tools and crops such as yams and sorghum. In eastern Africa these were joined by bananas and plantains brought from Asia by Austronesian migrants sailing across the Indian Ocean. Because soil quality was poor and draft animals that provided fertilizer as well as power could not survive in many tropical areas because of diseases, farmers generally practiced shifting cultivation, moving to new fields when the soil became less fertile or when population increase required this. Village networks were interwoven with those of clans, religious societies, and age-grade groups (groups of people of about the same age who often underwent rituals that marked stages of life together) into a complex web of associations that stretched beyond a single village to link it to others.

  The Austronesians who sailed westward across the Indian Ocean to Africa also sailed eastward into the Pacific Islands beginning about 1500 BCE, carrying domesticated crops and animals along with families, seeds, and religious objects. These intentional settlement voyages pushed further and further across the Pacific, although the timing of these is currently undergoing revision as radiocarbon dating is becoming more reliable and more widely available. This newer research suggests that Samoa was settled in about 800 BCE, but then voyaging stopped for a long time, and was resumed only about 800–1000 CE, perhaps spurred on by population growth, the invention of the large double-hulled sailing canoe that made long voyages possible, and decisions to explore and colonize made by political leaders. There may have been a particular burst in the thirteenth century when seafarers spread out to the most remote islands of East Polynesia, reaching Hawai‘i in the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the east, and Auckland Island in the south, on some voyages crossing more than 2,000 miles of open ocean, navigating by the stars, sun, currents, wind patterns, and paths of birds. Once islands had been located, navigators also used nautical maps made of palm-fronds and reeds that indicated the time required to sail between islands. By 1500, people lived on almost every inhabitable island in the Pacific, and had brought with them crops such as yams, taro, bananas, coconuts, sweet potatoes, and breadfruit, along with pigs, chickens, dogs, and (unintentionally) rats. On some islands, settlers built terraces and irrigation canals for crops, along with artificial fish ponds where keepers raised plants for fish to eat and then caught them easily in weirs and nets.

  Map 3.3 Settlement of the Pacific

  Polynesian society was organized into clans under hereditary chiefs, and in many islands there were sharp distinctions between social groups. In Hawai‘i, for example, distinctions developed between the highest social group of chiefs (ali'i), an elite group of priests, diviners, healers and professionals (kahuna), the large body of commoners, and an outcast group. Relations between these groups were regulated by a code of conduct that carried strong religious sanctions in which certain acts such as coming too close to a ruler were kapu, ritually forbidden or restricted. (This is the origin of the English word “taboo.”) Contact between men and women also had rules of kapu. Men and women were forbidden to eat together, or to prepare food for the other sex; women were prohibited from eating many foods, including pork, bananas, coconuts, and certain types of fish. Other Polynesian island societies also had similar codes of forbidden and expected conduct that were just as complex as those at royal courts, but how and when they developed is not clear. Judging by practices recorded later, many Oceanic cultures accepted some types of same-sex relationships, such as those between older men and boys, or those involving individuals regarded as shamans.

  In cold and rainy northern Europe, the introduction of the heavy plow pulled by oxen and suited to clay soils allowed agriculture to spread into areas where the light Mediterranean plow had not. Here people lived in small houses with spaces for their animals attached; villages were set within broad fields, and although families worked their own strips of land within the fields, they often kept the needed oxen collectively. Households generally consisted of one married couple, their children (including step-children), and perhaps one or two other relatives, a neolocal pattern that led to people marrying relatively late, when both spouses had earned or inherited a few resources to establish the household. In southern and eastern Europe, extended families were more likely to live in the same household or near one another, and marriage was earlier, especially for women.

  New villages were established in forests, swamps, and coastal areas of Europe that were near to existing villages, but large numbers of people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also migrated from one part of Europe to another in search of land, food, and work: the English into Scotland and Ireland; Germans, French, and Flemings into Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary; Christians into Muslim Spain. These long-distance migrants spoke a different language, had different traditions, customs, and laws, and sometimes practiced a different religion than the local population. Chroniclers writing in Latin at the time spoke of differences in terms of gens (race or clan) or natio (kind or stock); we might now call these “ethnic” differences. If the migrants were predominantly male, they often intermarried with local women, but if women migrated as well, and in some cases even if most migrants were male, laws were sometimes instituted that attempted to maintain distinctions between groups by prohibiting intermarriage. Among these was the 1366 Statute of Kilkenny in Ireland, in which the English who were trying to impose their rule over Ireland and had imposed legal restrictions on the Irish forbade any marriages between English immigrants and Irish, requiring English people to speak English (and not Gaelic), wear English clothing, and ride in the English style (with a saddle), to make which group someone belonged to instantly visible. Laws such as these were variable in enforcement—and they never applied to the upper classes, for whom politically advantageous marriages were made across all kinds of lines—but they contributed to a growing consciousness that certain differences were not simply a matter of customs or language, but were in the body as, for example, “Christian blood” or “English blood
.”

  In southern, eastern, and southeastern Asia, the expansion of agriculture was also a combination of localized intensification and migration to new areas by ethnic groups with a conscious common identity and traditions different from those of the people who already lived there. Whether long-time residents or migrants, villagers diked and leveled forests, swamps and coastal plains, transforming them into irrigated rice paddies that were less dependent on fluctuating rainfall. To grow two crops a year, they grew rice seedlings in a seed bed and then transplanted the seedlings into a flooded field, an extremely labor-intensive process involving every family member. This contributed to an expansion of the food supply that allowed the Chinese population to double from about 50 million in the eighth century to about 100 million in the twelfth, and increased populations elsewhere. Especially in China, villagers also grew cash crops such as sugar, tea, mulberry leaves (for silkworms to eat), and cotton, and women in village households raised silkworms, spun silk thread, and wove textiles. Profits from these household enterprises were used to pay rents and taxes—increasingly in copper coins instead of goods—and to purchase charcoal, tea, oil, pottery, and other consumer goods. Families were generally under the control of the eldest male, who might take several wives, and extended families often lived together in family compounds. Living older family members were to be honored and obeyed, and dead ones venerated.

  The spread of agriculture was so extensive as to be nearly global, but it was not unchallenged. Not everyone accepted the new impositions, and in some places people moved to avoid settled farming rather than to spread it. In a process that has been best studied in Southeast and South Asia, some people moved to or remained in rugged and remote terrain, growing root and vegetable crops in small plots of shifting cultivation, and supplementing these by gathering, hunting, and fishing. Commentators from courtly cultures judged such “forest peoples” to be primitive barbarians even less advanced than villagers, but the survival of this less sedentary way of life was in some cases a conscious choice and not simply a holdover.

  In some environments, foraging remained the primary subsistence strategy because temperature, rainfall, and terrain prevented agriculture or pastoralism, not because people actively rejected these. Other than some reindeer herding among the Sami people of what is today Scandinavia and Russia, foraging continued as the way of life in the northern zones of boreal forest, taiga, and tundra in Asia, Europe, and North America. Here people such as the Inuit hunted land and sea mammals, birds, and fish, using equipment made of stone, bone, leather, sinew, tusk, and antlers. Foraging also continued in some tropical forests, in deserts and semi-desert areas, and in mountainous regions. Most of the people in Australia were hunter-foragers, although the Guditjmara people who lived in southeastern Australia built an extensive system of ponds, channels, and weirs to farm eels, similar to the fish ponds of Hawai‘i, which supported a permanent community. Throughout Australia there were sacred sites where men and women gathered to sing, dance, and play musical instruments in ceremonial rituals, and to exchange goods, ideas, and marital partners. Foraging could not support the population that agriculture could; estimates of the entire population of Australia in this era range from 250,000 to 750,000, about the same number of people that lived in one of the larger cities in agricultural states.

  Nomadic pastoralists

  While some people resisted agricultural states by moving, others did so militarily, for this was a period in which mounted nomadic pastoralists extended their authority over vast swaths of Eurasia. These nomadic incursions began with the invasions of the Huns (Xiongnu) and the Hepthalites in the fifth century, included the many campaigns of various Turkish peoples, and then those of the Mongols in the thirteenth century under Chinggis Khan (his title, not his name, and which means “universal ruler”) and his sons and grandsons. Chinggis Khan combined astute military leadership, personal bravery, and diplomatic shrewdess. He led mobile groups fighting from horseback with compound bows who coordinated their military tactics to overwhelm their opponents, and used psychological strategies against his enemies, sparing them if they surrendered, but killing them ruthlessly, including women and children, if they resisted. Mongol troops leveled cities and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. As the troops advanced, the Mongols built roads and bridges, seized arms and their makers, and learned new tactics such as the catapault, thereby laying the groundwork for further expansion. These storms of nomads fully ended only in the fifteenth century when the empire created by the ruthless and charismatic Turkish conqueror Timur (Tamurlane) collapsed. Most of these nomadic pastoralists were from the steppes of Central Asia, but some historians would put the initial expansion of Islam within this framework as well, as much of Muhammad's army of conquest was made up of mounted nomadic Bedouins.

  Conflicts between agriculturalists and pastoral steppe nomads are among the big stories of this era, but nomads required sedentary cultures to trade with, plunder, and tax. The Mongols were able to create the largest land-based empire the world has ever seen despite a small population by fully mobilizing the resources—both human and material—that they extracted from the regions that came under their control. Chinggis himself kept conquering new territories until he died, but as he pushed onwards he left behind subordinates and officials to establishment administrative and economic structures in order to keep revenue flowing. They did this primarily by modifying institutions that were already there to promote production and trade, working with Mongolian-approved locals. Some of his commanders suggested turning all of north China into pasture for the horses needed for conquest, but local officials convinced Mongol leaders that it would be far more advantageous to tax the grain, silk, and other commodities produced by farming and artisanal families. The Mongols forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of farmers, artisans, entertainers, hostages, soldiers, and others over vast distances when they judged their labor was needed, and others moved on their own, all of which served to spread agricultural and other types of technology, along with goods and ideas. Chinggis’ successors, such as his grandson Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–94) who conquered southern China and Korea, followed a similar pattern: first destruction, and then bureaucracy.

  The social structures of Central Asian steppe peoples were also closely connected with this subsistence strategy that combined pastoralism, plunder, conquest, and trade. The steppes were too dry for large-scale agriculture, and there were no good rivers for irrigation, so people and animals followed set migratory paths based on the climate and seasons, living in large round tents called yurts and using horses to herd sheep, goats, and cattle. Men, women, and children learned to ride and care for animals, and ate a diet that relied largely on animal products. Nomadic societies were traditionally organized into clan and tribal groups, with leaders who gained stature through military exploits and the force of their personality.

  Chinggis Khan reorganized the Mongol army so that warriors fought not in clan groups, but in groups that combined people from different tribes led by his personal allies chosen on the basis of merit and loyalty rather than tribal chiefs. Because every Mongol man was a soldier (women provided logistical support), this reorganization led to social revolution, as soldiers’ loyalty was transferred from their tribe to their commander and up the chain to the Chinggisid family. Mongol practices and rituals also enhanced male self-esteem and soldiers’ loyalty to one another. As the Mongols expanded their empire, they took a census of all households and required all male adults to register for military conscription. Some of these men were actually drafted into the army, where they were made distinguishable from the rest of the population by an unusual uniform haircut. That marked them anywhere they went as part of a group of men whose function was fighting, no matter what kind of clothing they were wearing; it made desertion more difficult but also allowed soldiers to recognize one another immediately and encouraged bonding within the group. (Distinctive military haircuts continue to serve all these functions.) The Mongols also had
a specific type of male bonding, the anda (“sworn friend”) bond in which two men pledged to aid one another under any circumstances, creating a permanent spiritual bond between them, ritually consecrated by an oath. Chinggis Khan himself had anda bonds with leaders from other clans, as did his male relatives and descendants, which shaped their military strategies and alliance networks.

  3.4 Chinggis Khan's youngest son Tolui Khan (1192–1232) and his wife Sorghaghtani Beki (c. 1198–1252) with courtiers and court ladies, in an illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Rashid al-Din's Compendium of Chronicles. Sorghaghtani Beki was a Nestorian Christian, but supported religious institutions of other faiths as well, and helped her four sons become rulers of Mongol states, including Khubilai in China.

  Loyalty among men was an important tool in Mongol expansion, and so were other gendered practices. Mongol marital norms forbade marriage to someone from the same clan, so men had to get their wives from other clans and tribes, which they sometimes did by forcibly abducting them. That pattern of exogamy continued as the Mongol Empire grew, and men raped, seized, purchased, and sometimes married women from the groups they conquered. This pattern was particularly evident at the top, as Mongol leaders generally had a number of wives of various ranks and many more women available to them. A widely reported 2003 article from the American Journal of Human Genetics noted that over 8 percent of all males in a broad area of Asia from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea share the same Y chromosome. The twenty-three authors of this article concluded that this pattern most likely resulted from the success that Chinggis Khan and his male descendants had in spreading their Y chromosome across Central Asia. If their sample is representative, more than 16 million men today are direct-line male descendants of Chinggis Khan, surely one of the world's most successful lineages.