20. See the article by Henley, “Spanish Stew,” p. 5, reviewing Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: “Boucher reviews the current state of the argument among the specialists, concluding that the evidence for cannibalism is very weak. If it was practised at all, it was probably only a highly ritualized procedure which may have involved the eating of the fat of slain enemies on certain restricted occasions. Certainly, they would never simply have boiled somebody up in a stew-pot.”
See also Wright, “The Two Cultures,” p. 3, who argues that European accounts of this practice should be treated with suspicion. “The case against the Mexicans is far from proven, and the Spaniards, by their own reports, were not above an occasional lapse in this regard.” Wright notes that during the siege of Mexico, there were plenty of dead bodies lying about and yet the defenders starved. But that might simply mean that cannibalism had ritual aspects that did not allow the eating of otherwise dead people. Cf. the Hebrew food ban of dead animals (that is, not ritually slaughtered), even though kosher.
21. Maybury-Lewis, “Societies on the Brink,” p. 56.
22. Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique, p. 150.
23. On the “Black Legend,” it is instructive to read Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples, pp. xli-xlii. Stern, who has a pressing urge to be politically correct, recognizes the misdeeds of the Spanish but concedes to the apologist position by alluding to “simplification” and “anti-Hispanic prejudice.” He also points to “an equally brutal history of racial violence and exploitation by other European colonizers.” Then a word of criticism: he laments that the anti-Legend thesis “reduces the Conquest to a story of European villains and heroes.” What about the Amerindians and their responses? he asks. It is no longer acceptable among ethnologists to portray native populations as helpless victims; as Stern says, they were not “mere objects upon which evil is enacted.” Fair enough, but what about the Amerindians? As we shall see below, they perpetrated their own cruelties; they imposed their own imperialisms. Imperialism is not the monopoly of Europeans or Westerners. The orthodoxy of Latin American history prefers to pass over that part of the story. The whole business is a minefield of traps for moral judgment. Latin American historians face the further dilemma that they often descend from both victims and victimizers. Where, then, should their sympathies go?
CHAPTER 6
1. On the psychological and physical significance of Bojador, see Randies, “La signification.”
2. Quoted in Huyghe, Coureurs d’épices, p. 121.
3. On the special navigational problems of the South Atlantic, see Landes, “Finding the Point at Sea,” in Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude; and Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, ch. 4: “A New Sky and New Stars.” This latter is a superb treatment of the scientific basis for Portuguese oceanic navigation and discovery.
4. Zacut was the author of the Almanach Perpetuum (1478), which worked out the position of the sun for each day at each latitude. This work, intended for astronomers, was simplified and converted into a table for use at sea by his co-religionist John Viz-inho—Jones, Sail the Indian Sea, pp. 37-38.
6. The above is taken from the valuable article of Godinho, “Role du Portugal,” pp. 81-83.
7. Introduction to his Tratado im defensam da carta de marear, cited in Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 126.
8. Cf. the splendid discussion in Needham, “China, Europe, and the Seas Between,” paper originally presented to the International Congress of Maritime History, Beirut, 1966, and republished in Needham, Clerks and Craftsmen, pp. 40-70. But the largest treatment of these voyages, rich and fascinating in its detail and broad in its coverage, is the recent book of Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas.
9. “By Sung times, Chinese junks had become very much more sophisticated. They were built with iron nails, and waterproofed with the oil of the t’ung tree, a superb natural preservative. Their equipment included watertight bulkheads, buoyancy chambers, bamboo fenders at the waterline, floating anchors to hold them steady during storms, axial rudders in place of steering oars, outrigger and leeboard devices, oars for use in calm weather, scoops for taking samples off the sea floor, sounding lines for determining the depth, compasses for navigation, and small rockets propelled by gunpowder for self-defence”—Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 137. This tradition continued under the Mongol dynasty: Khubilai Khan (Marco Polo’s emperor) had ships of more than ten sails, big enough to carry a thousand men. The biggest, running to about 450 feet, were lake vessels, which “moved through the water with great stability and made the passengers feel as if they were on dry land”—Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 81. Of course, lake water is not the ocean sea.
10. Needham gives the number of vessels as seventy-three.
11. The above relies especially on Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 73 ff.
12. Huang, China, pp. 155-57.
13. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 174-75.
14. Levathes emphasizes the link of indifference to trade to Confucian doctrine on the one hand, imperial legitimacy on the other. To seek trade was to admit that China needed something from elsewhere, and “the mere expression of need was unworthy of the dragon throne”—When China Ruled the Seas, p. 180.
CHAPTER 7
1. Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part I: “Such in reality is the absurd confidence which almost all men have in their own good fortune, that wherever there is the least probability of success, too great a share of it is apt to go to them [projects of mining] of its own accord.”
2. Cf. Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, pp. 211-20, on Aztec pride in their military success.
3. Stuart, The Mighty Aztecs, p. 73. Bartolomé de Las Casas, that great defender of Indian rights, came eventually to praise, not their rites, but the devotion that infused them. “One could argue convincingly,” he wrote in his Apologia, “on the basis that God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, that God does not entirely hate human sacrifice.” And further: “…in religiosity, [the Aztecs] surpassed all other nations, because the most religious nations are those that offer their own children in sacrifice for the good of their people.” Cited in Todorov, La conquete de I’Amerique, pp. 194, 196.
4. On the intellectual pains of anthropology (ethnology) as a discipline torn between “universal values” and “cultural relativism”—should we criticize another culture from some higher ground?—see Fluehr-Lobban, “Cultural Relativism and Human Rights.”
5. This kind of tu quoque exculpation goes back to Las Casas at least—Todorov, La conquete de I’Amerique, p. 194.
6. Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism,” p. 19, n. 24, citing George Macartney’s journal of his embassy to China in 1793. Poor Macartney: he sought by his own dignified conduct to convince the Chinese that the British were civilized. But all his efforts to preserve his dignity, that is, to establish his parity with his hosts, only convinced them that he had much to learn before he could be accounted civilized.
7. From the chronicler Pedro Aguado, as cited in Gomez, L’invention, p. 171. Cf. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part 2.
8. Kirkpatrick, Les conquistadors espagnols, p. 147.
9. Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 224.
10. Bernand, The Incas, p. 28.
11. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 80.
12. The demographic history of the Amerindians has been a subject of controversy and imagination. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary from 13 million according to A. Rosenblatt, La poblacion de America (1971) to 100 million by the Berkeley school. Cf. Woodrow Borah, Sherburne Cook, L. B. Simpson, Essays in Population History (1971). The latter would strike most scholars as wildly hyperbolic, and a figure between 50 and 70 million, the great majority in the corn-eating areas of Mexico and Peru, now seems more reasonable. Part of this is ideological: to magnify the demographic catastrophe by way of aggravating European guilt—as though it were not great enough already. Can it be that the Indian
population of the west coast of South America was composed of a different gene pool, one that had had some exposure to these pathogens? See the speculations of Dickinson and Mahn-Lot, 1492-1992, pp. 93-94.
13. On more than one occasion, plans for rebellion were betrayed via the confessional and reported to the authorities—Rowe, “The Incas” (1957), p. 158. Cf. Chklovski, Voyage of Marco Polo, p. 162, on the comparable role of astrologers (interpreters of dreams) in the Mongol Chinese empire of Kublai Khan. To be sure, these astrologers had never obligated themselves to keep these confidences secret.
14. The idiom is one of dismissal. But history has its own obligations, and Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 225, argues that we must not forget: “…it is important to restore the imperial careers of these African and American states to their place in the commonly received record of the past…without a broad picture of the expanding and convergent movements which met in the ‘age of expansion,’ the nature of the world moulded by European initiatives in the second half of our millennium cannot be fully grasped, nor the scale of the achievement realistically envisaged.”
15. Among the most important are (1) the account by Father Bernabe Cobo, History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indians Customs and Their Origin Together with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institutions (finished 1653). Rowe, “Inca Culture,” p. 195, describes Father Cobo’s History as “still the best and most complete description of Inca culture in existence.” And (2) Garcilaso de la Vega El Inca, Royal Commentary of the Incas and General History of Peru (finished 1616). De la Vega, related to the Inca royal family on his mother’s side, was the son of a Spanish conquistador. On de la Vega’s somewhat edulcorated account of Inca conquests, see Bernand, The Incas, p. 28.
16. I say “humiliating” deliberately. In confrontations with the Spanish, the Araucanians would parade captured and visibly pregnant Spanish women before their former spouses, skirts tucked above the waist—Padden, “Cultural Change and Military Resistance.”
17. Cobo, History, pp. 228-30. Much has been made of the excellence of the Inca roads, and the Spanish themselves were impressed by the broader, straighter sections; although truth to say, the Spanish did not have good examples at home to go by. Two major routes ran north-south, one along the coast, the other along the highland ridge; these were fed by east-west transversals and local paths. From an economist’s point of view, the excellence of these roads lay in their practicality: they were no better than they had to be. In the more difficult terrain, they were often nothing more than a track, perhaps a yard wide, paved with stone as required and stepped to save distance. They were protected where necessary from rockfalls, but the users were expected to keep themselves from falling. At intervals, in towns or along the road, the Incas built shelters and storehouses for travelers. Almost all travelers were on official business. The Inca state discouraged private trade and had an effective monopoly of long-distance commerce. Cf. Rowe, “Inca Culture,” pp. 229-33.
CHAPTER 8
1. Around 1600, Spain’s Caribbean island empire had a population of maybe 75,000-80,000, of whom one in ten Spanish, the rest black and mixed. Few traces of natives. Thus one person for 5 sq. km., one Spanish “settler” for 50 sq. km.—Chaunu, L’Amerique, p. 112.
2. Twenty-five sugar refineries in Amsterdam alone in 1622—Rich, “Colonial Settlement,” p. 334.
3. Wood, Spanish Main, p. 125, gives a total of something under 5,000.
4. On bugs in the Caribbean, see Starkey, Economic Geography, p. 60; on animal pests, Watts, The West Indies, p. 195. Needless to say, the combination of climate, pests, and pathogens made for high death rates, of work animals even more than of humans. (I owe these references to Stanley Engerman.)
5. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, p. 276. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 55, says this figure is “impossible.” On the basis of poll tax returns, he suggests a population of about 10,000 in 1640, equal to that of Massachusetts or Virginia.
6. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, p. 276.
7. Chaunu, L’Amérique, p. 113.
8. Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part 2.
9. Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, p. 20, cited in Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 194.
10. Rich, “Colonial Settlement,” p. 322.
11. Joseph Miller, in his book on the Angolan slave trade, Way of Death.
12. Sheridan, “Eric Williams,” p. 326, citing Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. vii, 52, 105. Sheridan writes (p. 327) that Williams’s book “inaugurated the modern period of West Indian historiography.”
13. Inikori, “Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism,” p. 101.
14. Sheridan, “Eric Williams,” p. 327.
15. Thus Oxaal: “Williams attacked the moral complacency associated with Britain’s understanding of its slave-holding past.” He describes Williams (along with James) as a “marginal, black intellectual whose personal experiences had made him aware of the hypocrisy behind the metropolitan country’s pious self-congratulation over its dealings with the colonies”—Black Intellectuals, pp. 75-76.
16. In a review in the American Sociological Review, Wilson Gee criticized Williams for exaggerating the role of slavery “by claiming that it was almost the indispensable foundation stone in the establishment of modern capitalism.” Cited by Sheridan, “Eric Williams,” p. 320.
17. Anstey, “Capitalism and Slavery” also his Atlantic Slave Trade. Anstey goes on to estimate the part of slave profits in British capital formation at 0.11 percent—“derisory.” Stanley Engerman, “The Slave Trade and British Capital Formation,” plays with the numbers “under some implausible assumptions” and comes up with hypothetical figures, strongly and knowingly biased upward, ranging from 2.4 percent to 10.8 percent over the period 1688-1770, which he says “should give some pause to those attributing to the slave trade a major contribution to industrial capital formation in the period of the Industrial Revolution.” He also compares the “gross value of slave trade output” to British national income and comes up with an average of about 1 percent, climbing to 1.7 percent in 1770, too small by itself to explain much. He goes on to suggest that the contribution of the slave trade itself has to be joined to that of the plantation system; and that these together were better seen in a dynamic context of linkages.
18. Inikori, “Market Structure,” p. 761, n. 52. Inikori estimates profits at 50 percent, intermittently but over a number of years. This is based on an investment that does not include debts incurred in the purchase of trade goods: “What the individual slave trader actually put into the ventures as his investment (the actual cash outlay) was often less than half of the total outward cost….” (p. 775).
19. On gains to planters, see Sheridan, “The Wealth of Jamaica,” and Ward, “The Profitability of Sugar Planting.” There is a rebuttal to Sheridan from a macroeconomic point of view: R. P. Thomas, in “The Sugar Colonies,” points in good Smithian fashion to the overhead costs of empire and the cost to consumers of a protected, monopolistic market in Britain for sugar from British plantations. This, of course, is an old story: privatize the gains and socialize the costs. Net out, and one finds that the macroeffects differ from partial results.
20. Along these lines, cf. Zahedieh, “London and the Colonial Consumer.”
21. Solow and Engerman, eds., British Capitalism, pp. 10-11.
22. Most of the following material on Mexican sugar is drawn from Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations.
CHAPTER 9
1. William Hunter, History of British India, I, 109, cited by Masselman, Cradle of Colonialism, p. 218. Masselman writes: “There were many more examples of this kind, all part of a deliberate policy of intimidation to gain control over India.” On this practice of cutting off nose and hands—because it was a deliberate practice—see chapter v (above) on Spanish policy.
2. Cited by Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 297.
3. Lang, Portuguese Brazil, p. 34.
4. Cf. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 59.
5. The words are from The Letter-Book of William Clarke, Merchant in Aleppo, cited in Domenico Sella, “Crisis and Transformation in Venetian Trade,” in Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy, p. 97.
6. On all of this, see especially the works of K. N. Chaudhuri: The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760; Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean; and Asia Before Europe.
7. I take these verses from Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 115. On the weakness of Portugal vs. the Dutch and English, see Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade, pp. 116-35.
8. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 57.
9. From Luis da Camoëns, The Lusiads (Os Lusiadas, “The Lusitanians”). The great epic poem was written over a period of many years and finally published in 1572.
10. Cited by Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 147.
11. The expression is from Father Antonio Vieira, S.J. (1608-1697), cited in Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 340.
12. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, pp. 135-37 and n. 133.
13. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 350.
14. From Dom Luis da Cunha, cited in Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 356. The allusion is surely to the Methuen treaty of 1703, by which Portugal agreed to admit British wool and woolens duty-free, while Britain would take Portuguese wines (porto and madeira) at sharply reduced rates.
15. Ibid., pp. 340-2.
16. Ibid., p. 350.
17. Ibid., p. 344.
CHAPTER 10
1. From his Werken, III, 628-29, translated by Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, p. 3. Keene’s book, little known outside the field of Japanese studies, is a gem.
2. As given in Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, III: Le temps du monde, p. 149. This quotation, from a report by a certain abbé Scaglia, has passed through several avatars on its way to my page.
3. Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 24.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 64