A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Map 4.1 World map 1500

  In the Caribbean and the lands on its borders, many European powers contested Spanish dominance. Beginning in 1550, the English crown licensed private ships to prey on Spanish shipping and attack Spanish colonies. This government-licensed and-regulated piracy brought glory to successful captains such as Francis Drake and returned a huge profit to the merchants and landowners who invested in it, making them supporters of overseas expansion and naval power. The English, French, Swedes, and Dutch established their own colonies in the Caribbean and along the North American coast in the 1620s and 1630s, and then pushed further inland. Permanent private companies were established in England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe to support these ventures, which provided financial backing, ships, personnel, and military force, as did similar East India Companies licensed to trade and raid in Asia. They attempted to monopolize trade, although in a place like the Caribbean where colonies were close to one another—often on the same island—smuggling was endemic, and sometimes involved the very government and company officials who were supposed to prevent it. Piracy was also common, conducted both by licensed privateers and by buccaneers, multiethnic groups of former soldiers, escaped slaves, refugees, criminals, and others who attacked silver-laden ships from remote bases.

  The Dutch won their independence from Spain through warfare, and established more colonies, trading centers, and plantations in South Africa and Southeast Asia as well as the Americas, taking Malacca from the Portuguese and much of Java from local rulers to gain pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean basin; in the 1650s they also annexed the Swedish colonies in North America. In the 1660s a second wave of colonies was founded in North America, especially by England. English forces conquered New Amsterdam and the rest of the Dutch holdings, renaming these New York, and founded South Carolina and Georgia to serve as a buffer between existing English colonies in the mid-Atlantic states and New England and Spanish colonies in Florida. The French moved into the Great Lakes and central river valley regions, and in 1699 founded Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi to prevent either the Spanish or the British from controlling trade with the interior. French colonies never attracted as many immigrants as did the British colonies, however. By 1750 the entire population of New France probably included only 100,000 Europeans and Africans, while the British North American colonies may have had as many as 2 million inhabitants. Wars in the last half of the eighteenth century gave Britain many of France's overseas colonies, and it became the major power in the Indian Ocean, eclipsing the Dutch. Although Britain lost much of North America with the American War of Independence, in 1787 it established a penal colony in Australia (where it sent convicts because it could no longer ship them to America), and was on its way to establishing the world's largest sea-based empire. Britain maintained a standing navy that now promised to end piracy and smuggling, and claimed the right to board any ship to enforce this. (See Map 4.2.)

  Just as land- and sea-based empires expanded, so did global trade, fueling a “consumer revolution” especially in Europe and European households in the colonies, as wealthier households bought imported luxuries and the less well off cheaper imports or locally produced knock-offs. Millions of pieces of Chinese porcelain made in the inland city of Jingdezhen were transported to Guangzhou, carried on ships to Amsterdam and London, and then exported to Jamaica, Boston, Berlin, and Moscow. Calico cloth made by village residents in the Gujarati area of northwest India went to Europe, and also to the Senegambia in western Africa, where it was traded to African merchants for slaves and for the gum of the acacia tree. Acacia gum was used in Britain and France for papermaking and for producing calicoes that Europeans hoped might eventually compete with those of India. These new consumer goods were not worn or used simply by Europeans, however. Wealthy female traders in West Africa combined items of European clothing with their existing dress to create new styles, and calico was one of the many items promised “in perpetuity” to Native American tribes in treaties with British and later American authorities. Tokugawa Japan experienced a similar consumer revolution in its large cities, where imported luxuries from China joined brocade, lacquerware, and porcelain made by local artisans for the wealthy, along with less expensive imitations for those with more style than cash. Prestige goods had separated elites from everyone else since the Neolithic, but now increasing numbers of urban residents could have at least a few of these, and they paid attention to changing fashions in dress and household goods. Commerce in the Atlantic is often described as a “triangle trade” linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and that in the Pacific as a line from Mexico to China through the Philippines, but no geometrical figure can accurately capture the many lines of interaction.

  Map 4.2 World map 1783

  Plantations and the global trade network were essential parts of the expanding capitalist economic system. Economic historians often joke about the phrase “the rise of capitalism,” as it is invoked to describe quite varied developments over a long period of time. No matter where you look, capitalism always seems to be rising, seemingly independent of human agents, rather like bread dough. Some of this expansionism comes from the elastic meaning of capitalism, which includes investment in property and the materials used to make or provide goods and services (what economists call the “means of production”), wage labor, the use of money to make more money, financial institutions such as banks, and complex forms of economic organization. As we saw in earlier chapters, all of these were present to some degree in many agricultural societies, but they became increasingly important in the trading centers of Europe, China, Japan, India, and parts of the Muslim world during the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with income derived from capitalist business ventures joining landholding as a major form of wealth and creating new avenues for social mobility. Capitalism developed first in long-distance trade—this is often termed “mercantile capitalism” — and then in production.

  Trade depends to a great deal on trust, on relying on those who sell, transport, and buy goods, or who borrow and loan money, to act honestly and fairly. Not surprisingly, many firms thus began as family companies or among groups that shared close cultural connections. The word “company” actually conveys this, as it comes from the Italian word compagnie, which means “bread together,” i.e. sharing bread. In Europe, the Medici family of Florence and the Fugger family of Augsburg became fabulously wealthy as bankers and merchants, with branches in many cities that loaned money to rulers as well as urban residents. Their most prominent members, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de Medici (1449–92) and Jacob “the Rich” Fugger (1459–1525) were also patrons of the arts, commissioning paintings, collecting sculpture, and supporting musicians and writers. Economic growth laid the material basis for the Italian Renaissance, as rich, social-climbing merchants and bankers joined popes and princes to spend vast sums to glorify themselves and their families, hiring artists, architects, sculptors, furniture-makers, and metalsmiths to create beautiful buildings and objects.

  Family connections predominated in business elsewhere as well. In Japan, the family of Konoike Shinroku began as makers of sake, then became rice shippers and bankers, loaning money to local nobles throughout Japan and turning swamps into rice paddies. Armenian Christians in the city of Julfa in the Ottoman Empire (now in Azerbaijan) established family firms that traded across Asia. In 1603, the city was captured by the Safavid ruler ‘Abbas I, who decided he could not hold it so burnt it to the ground and deported the Armenians to “New Julfa,” a city he built for them right next to his new capital at Isfahan. From New Julfa, the Armenians built even more extensive trade networks that extended from Guangzhou to London, and into the Americas. Here they sometimes settled permanently, building homes and churches, though they returned to New Julfa to marry, and kin networks became denser and more interwoven. Most Armenian merchants were multilingual, but they wrote letters and records in a dialect of Armenian that few outsiders could read, thus protecting the
ir trade secrets. Heavily capitalized mercantile firms in India, many from the Gujarat area of the northwest, were also organized along family and caste lines, and those in Chinese cities and among Jews relied on connections among relatives.

  4.2 This detail from a Chinese porcelain bowl shows a somewhat romanticized view of the manufacturing process of porcelain itself, which involved shaping, painting, glazing and firing. Blue-and-white porcelain using imported Persian or local cobalt came to be mass produced in China, much of it made specifically for the export trade.

  The merchants who traveled were almost all men, and the heads of large family firms were as well, although female family members sometimes invested money they had inherited or acquired in business ventures. Occasionally circumstances allowed a widow who did not have adult sons to play a more active role. The Mendes family of Portugal (later known as the Nasi family) was forcibly converted from Judaism by the rulers of Portugal, fled to the Netherlands, and established large-scale banking operations in Antwerp. Gracia Nasi (1510–68), the widow of the firm's founder, ran the family business from Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara, and eventually Istanbul, making an alliance with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66) for trading and financial privileges. She reconverted to Judaism, and established an “underground railroad” to get Jews out of places where they were being persecuted by Christian rulers, convincing Süleyman to grant her a long-term lease on property in Greece where these refugees could resettle. Like Lorenzo de Medici and Jacob Fugger, Gracia Nasi patronized learning and the arts, especially the publication of Hebrew books, and her nephew became a close adviser to the sultan and the governor of several territories.

  Money made in trade was invested in land in many places, which was expected to make a profit. Landowners encouraged or forced the peasants who farmed their land to raise cash crops alongside or instead of staple food crops, or they switched to raising sheep or other animals if this would generate a higher income. Land that had been held collectively or by customary use became private property, as happened in North America as European settlers moved westward and occupied Native American land and in Central Asia as Chinese settlers also moved west and began farming land that had been the grazing grounds of nomadic pastoralists. This also happened in Europe and other long-settled places as common lands such as forests, meadows, and marshes were enclosed, that is, fenced off into privately owned fields and sheep-runs no longer accessible to poorer people who had used them to raise a few animals or gather firewood. Capitalist trade and production raised overall wealth and brought a greater array of goods to many people, but not everyone shared in these benefits.

  Capitalism developed in many places and involved many different groups, but among Europeans it became intimately related to colonialism. Capitalist merchants often provided the impetus and the equipment for colonization, and many colonies were established to be both sources of raw materials and markets for trade goods. Gaining and defending colonies was too expensive for family firms, and large joint-stock companies of unrelated individuals were established, a business form that was later adapted to production as well as trade. Colonies provided income to Europe, which was partly responsible for the divergence in power and wealth between Europe (and its settler colonies) and the rest of the world that would mark the nineteenth and subsequent centuries.

  Warfare

  Colonial empires were created by military force, and war was a constant elsewhere as well. Devastating wars, with armies that sometimes numbered in the hundreds of thousands, were widespread across much of the Old World, most fought with gunpowder weapons, which made them more deadly and much more expensive than earlier wars. Military expenditures generally made up the majority of state budgets, and taxes, systems for collecting these, and other apparatus of the state grew, largely to finance war. Some officers were members of traditional elites, but others were professional military contractors, who recruited soldiers and sailors from among the poorer groups in society with promises of pay and bonuses, or forced them into military service by threats or even kidnapping. The demands of war thus shaped all aspects of society, especially for men but also for women.

  New military technology—artillery, hand-held weapons, guns on ships—required longer training, so those fielding military forces felt it necessary to maintain at least the core of a standing army from one conflict to the next. Soldiers were often housed with civilian families, with the family expected to provide a place for a certain number of soldiers to sleep and keep warm. In theory the soldiers were supposed to pay for their food, but as their pay itself often remained theoretical, they simply took what they needed by force. Until the development of systems of provisioning in the late eighteenth century, during actual campaigns troops were accompanied by people—sometimes including the soldiers’ girlfriends, wives, or other family members—who pillaged the countryside for food and other provisions, as well as food for horses.

  Scholars counting wars and their duration and intensity have found that perhaps only one year in ten was war-free in many areas during these centuries. In Europe, there were religious, naval, dynastic, and territorial wars, almost too many to count. Much of continental Europe became involved in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that mixed religious and political aims, and in which there were no clear lines of battle. Mercenary armies indiscriminately burned crops and villages, and killed animals and people. Hunger and disease, including dysentery, typhus, plague, and syphilis, accompanied the troops and the refugees who fled from place to place. At least one-quarter and perhaps as much as one-third of the population of the Holy Roman Empire died during the course of the war, civilian losses that would not be matched again until the wars of the twentieth century. The development of colonial empires and international trade meant that European wars in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often spread beyond Europe itself. The Seven Years’ War (1755–63) was so global in scope that it could almost be called the first “world war,” involving conflict in North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and India as well as Europe.

  The Ottoman Empire was not a combatant in either the Thirty Years’ War or the Seven Years’ War, but it was engaged in its own expansionary wars. The Ottomans expanded into Europe and around the Mediterranean, and on their eastern border the Sunni Ottomans engaged in frequent warfare with the Shi'ite Safavids. On their eastern border, the Safavids fought with various Central Asian groups, and with the Mughals. These three empires—the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal—were labeled “gunpowder empires” in the 1970s by the US historian Marshall Hodgson, who saw their ability to use artillery to take stone fortresses as the key to their success in creating and holding large empires. Now historians think a better label might be “empires in the age of gunpowder,” as their military success owed as much to their skills at logistics—keeping the armies fed and supplied—and strategies as to the weapons themselves. These three Islamic empires also created relatively effective institutions and bureaucracies to collect taxes and administer their large territories, and ideologies that legitimated their rule in the minds of their subjects, many—and in the case of the Mughal Empire, most—of whom were not Muslim.

  The Islamic empires were not always at war with one another or with others of their neighbors, but staying in power required suppressing rebellions and preventing invasions, so they maintained large standing armies, as did the Ming and Qing rulers of China and the states of Europe. Prussia, for example, one of the larger states in a still-disunited Germany, tried in the eighteenth century to sustain a permanent army of about 80,000 troops with a population of perhaps 3.5 million. During war, this army increased to almost 150,000, or about one-quarter of all adult males. The rulers of Prussia expected martial values to influence everything in Prussia, not just the army, demanding obedience from their subjects and supporting compulsory primary education and broadened technical training because these would provide better soldiers. Not surprisingly, observers described Prussia as a state attac
hed to an army.

  Military values also shaped Japanese society, even though actual war was rare after about 1600. In the sixteenth century, the regional lords known as daimyo built local power bases centered on castles, and used their armies of samurai to fight with one another and seize more territory. Gradually a series of skillful daimyo built up more centralized power, and in 1603 one of these, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), defeated most of his rivals and took the title “shogun”; the Tokugawa shogunate, centered in Edo (now Tokyo), lasted until 1867. The Tokugawa shoguns created a rigid class structure, and gave daimyo and samurai special privileges linked to their role as warriors—only they could carry swords, for example, and they could demand deference from commoners. They also stripped them of any real function, however. Daimyo were required to live every other year in Edo, and their wives and children had to live there permanently. Thus the shogun could keep an eye on the daimyo, and they spent much of their time and money moving back and forth to the capital. (King Louis XIV of France and Tsar Peter the Great of Russia would also follow similar policies, requiring their nobles to be at court if they wanted royal favors, which removed them from their local power bases.) Samurai were forbidden to own land or work at other trades, but had to depend on stipends from their daimyo; when death or bankruptcy ended these, they became unemployed ronin, scrounging for work as bodyguards, serving as hired muscle, or just stealing. They became enough of a social problem that the shoguns eventually relaxed restrictions on their employment, though gangs of ronin, claiming the samurai code of conduct known as bushido (“the way of the warrior”) prevented them from engaging in less exalted tasks than fighting, continued to plague the peasants who made up the vast majority of the Japanese population.