4.3 Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498), based on the Book of Revelation in the Bible, shows Death, Famine, War, and Conquest riding across the land; Famine holds a weighing scale, a reference to the high price of food during a famine. This woodcut and accompanying text, part of a series, was published just as many people anticipated the Last Judgment in 1500, and brought Dürer money and fame.
Wherever it occurred, warfare was accompanied by diseases carried by the armies and often by famine, a link portrayed visually in images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible, which became a common subject for artists in Europe. More soldiers died from hunger, disease, and infection than from actual battle wounds, and famine and disease killed the general population in war-torn areas as well. War also involved acts of brutality, including beatings, torture, mutilation, and rape, which became common enough that special words were developed to describe this. During the Thirty Years’ War, for example, the plundering mob that accompanied troops and terrorized villagers became known as the Soldateska, and during the Ming/Qing transition people spoke of binghuo, “soldier calamities.” Sexual violence had long been part of conquest, of course, with women and girls understood to be among the spoils of war, but the frequency of armed conflicts in this era made this even more common. Some military historians are interested primarily in battles and strategy, but more are now investigating the broader social and cultural forces that led to war, shaped how it was fought, and resulted from it. They also emphasize that discussing war simply in terms of “causes and consequences” misses the point, as this neglects the course of the war itself, which can never be anticipated and is always ghastly.
Transferring food crops
Disease, famine, and war killed huge numbers of people in this era, but the world's total population did not decline. Global population estimates set the world's population in 1500 at about 400 to 500 million, just a bit higher than it had been before the pandemics of the fourteenth century, with more than half of this in South and East Asia. This increased slightly to about 550 million in 1600, as the drastic population decline in the Americas was matched by growth in Europe and Asia. By 1700 world population had increased slightly again, to about 650 million, and by 1800 it had grown at a more rapid pace to about 950 million.
The primary reason for this growth was another consequence of the Columbian Exchange: the spread of food crops, which were taken in all directions. Europeans brought wheat, their staple crop, to the Americas, which did not thrive in the tropical Caribbean, but grew well on the plains of Mexico and South America, and later in North America. Wheat was vitally important to the Spanish; bread was a central element in religious ritual as well as a primary foodstuff, and they thought that if they ate indigenous foods they would turn into Indians. Accounts of the introduction of wheat were thus repeated and written down, which reveal fundamental aspects of Spanish colonial society. In Mexico the first person to plant wheat may have been an African, Juan Garrido, a former slave who had been part of Cortés’ conquering forces, while in Peru two widows of Spanish landowners received the first seed grain and oversaw its planting, before they bothered to marry again. Slaves and widows were key to the Spanish colonial economy everywhere. Other crops were not as important culturally, so all we know is that they came: onions, barley, oats, peas, and fruit trees from Europe, and bananas, yams, rice, okra, sorghum, and coconuts from Africa. (The spread of one type of fruit tree later in the United States also has an often-told story attached to it, though the fact that Jonathan Chapman—Johnny Appleseed—planted apple trees in order to have fruit for hard cider is generally left out.)
Tomatoes, chili peppers, sweet potatoes, squash, beans, potatoes, peanuts, maize, manioc, pineapples, avocados, and other crops went from the Americas to other parts of the world, with about 30 percent of the foods eaten in the world today originating in the western hemisphere. Portuguese traders took manioc (cassava), a root crop that was a staple in tropical parts of the Americas, to West Africa, where it became a staple and the basis of what are now seen as national dishes, such as ebà and fufu. Traders took maize to Europe and Africa, where it was first grown as food for animals, and then gradually as food for humans as well, with dishes made of cornmeal integrated into existing cuisines. Peanuts, which the Spanish first encountered in the markets of Tenochtitlan, spread to southern China, tropical Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, as did peppers, becoming essential parts of local foodways. During the seventeenth century, Europeans recognized that the tomato, another New World plant, was not harmful even though it was related to deadly nightshade, and began planting it as a food crop as well as a garden ornamental. This exchange of plants improved nutrition around the world, and allowed the slow increase in total global population, despite the tremendous loss of life because of epidemic disease and war.
Two staple crops had particularly dramatic effects, both good and bad: potatoes and sweet potatoes (which are not related). Potatoes originated in the Andes, and Spanish sailors carried – and ate – them on their way back to Europe. There they met great disdain. Potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible and grew underground, so they were seen as vaguely demonic, and people hated the way they tasted. Potatoes were fine for animals (and slaves in the New World), but not people in Europe. This lack of interest changed slowly when people realized they could be grown on extremely poor soil and were easy to harvest and store. A field planted with potatoes could feed two or three times the number of people that could be fed by the same field planted with grain, and potatoes are more nutritious. The potato crop was also more reliable year to year, as it was less likely to be destroyed by hail, drought, or unexpected early frosts, which evened out the available food supply and lessened the likelihood of famine.
By the late seventeenth century, potatoes were an important crop in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Ireland, where they fed both animals and people. The rulers of Prussia recognized potatoes would grow well in the cool summers and sandy soil of Prussia, and ordered farmers to plant them, as did the kings of Sweden and Norway. The Qing rulers of China, promoting the westward movement of Han Chinese into high, dry parts of Central Asia where various other ethnic groups lived, offered cheap land and lower taxes for farmers who planted potatoes and other New World crops. Agricultural historians estimate that the cultivated area of China nearly tripled between 1700 and 1850. The War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778–9, between Prussia and Austria, has been nicknamed the “Potato War” because the primary tactic involved gaining the food supply of the opposite side rather than actual battles, and Prussian troops spent their time harvesting potatoes. Antoine-Auguste Parmentier (1737–1813), a French army doctor and agronomist who had been imprisoned by the Prussians during the Seven Years’ War—in which France was on one side and Prussia the other—promoted potato cultivation in France, convincing the French queen Marie-Antoinette, so the story goes, to wear potato flowers in her hair and inviting local notables to all-potato dinners. (There are several soups and side dishes named in his honor, all containing potatoes.)
For French nobles an all-potato dinner was a novelty, but for many of Europe's poor it became a reality, as in some places potatoes were the only solid food very poor people ate. Agricultural historians estimate that, for example, the Irish diet in 1800 included an average of ten potatoes per person per day, or 80 percent of people's caloric intake; the rest came primarily from milk and cheese produced by cows fed on potatoes.
On the other side of the world from Ireland, sweet potatoes were another solution for what to grow on poor land. Spanish ships brought sweet potatoes from Central America, where they were native, to the Philippines, and Chinese merchants took them to Fujian province, on the coast of southeastern China, in the late sixteenth century. As the rulers of Prussia had with the potato, the provincial governors supported the growing of sweet potatoes by distributing them to farmers, and they thrived. They also grew well in mo
untains and dry upland regions, where Hakka people—one of China's many designated ethnic minorities—practiced shifting agriculture on steep slopes, many living in small huts so that others derisively called them pengmin, “shed people.” The diet of pengmin and other poor rural people came to revolve around the sweet potato, just as the Irish diet did the potato. But raising crops on steep slopes meant cutting down trees and other natural vegetation, which led to erosion and flooding, destroying fields and drowning rice crops at lower elevations. Officials attempted to stop cultivation in the mountains, but they were unable to do so, and famines and unrest caused in part by flooding would be among the reasons for the fall of the Qing dynasty in the twentieth century. (The communist rulers of China have continued to support the planting of New World crops, and today China grows three-quarters of the world's sweet potatoes, more than a quarter of the world's potatoes, and about a fifth of the world's maize.)
4.4 An ink painting by the Japanese artist Ike no Taiga (1723–76) shows a hefty man eating roasted sweet potatoes. Taiga was the son of a poor farmer who had moved to Kyoto, and this painting may be a commentary on gluttony.
Sweet potatoes also became a staple crop in Papua New Guinea, introduced in the eighteenth century from the Moluccas where they had been brought by Portuguese traders, which led to a change in traditional agriculture and an increase in population. They could also be found across Polynesia and in New Zealand, but here there is a mystery. The route by which sweet potatoes came into China can be traced through written sources, and their introduction occurred after the Spanish were in the Philippines. Sweet potato cultivation in the Pacific began long before this, however. The earliest radiocarbon dating is from about 1000 CE in the Cook Islands, which had been settled by Polynesians coming from Tahiti. The Maori Polynesians who settled New Zealand in the thirteenth century carried sweet potatoes (known as kumara) with them, along with other crops. How sweet potatoes got to eastern Polynesia from Central America is not clear, however. Seeds could not have easily survived floating on the open ocean or in the stomachs of birds, and sweet potatoes are generally cultivated by vine cuttings anyway, not seeds. (This is how they were taken to China.) Many geoarchaeologists thus think that Polynesians at some point reached South or Central America and took sweet potatoes back with them. They thus became part of what might be called a “Polynesian Exchange” that preceded the Columbian Exchange by several centuries. In New Zealand, the Maori adapted their horticultural techniques to raise tropical sweet potatoes in the cooler climate, planting them in sunny places sheltered from the wind and adapting the soil. When the British captain James Cook (1728–79) reached New Zealand on his first voyage in the Pacific in 1769, he reported large fields with sweet potatoes, yams (an Old World crop distinct from the sweet potato), and taro.
Cook's voyage was one of many in the eighteenth century through which much of the Pacific was explored and mapped by Dutch, French, and British ships. Initially they were searching for the huge continent that Europeans expected would be in the southern hemisphere to balance all the continents in the northern hemisphere. This “Terra Australis” (a phrase simply meaning “southern land”) showed up on maps before Europeans in 1606 got their first glimpse of what was soon named Australia. Australia was huge, but still not large enough to be the famed southern lands, and eighteenth-century expeditions continued the search. French and British ships reached Samoa, Tahiti, and other island groups, bringing back plants, animals, and often a few residents, along with reports and drawings of what they had seen, just as Columbus had. Naturalists collected specimens for collections—called “cabinets of curiosity”—or for possible use elsewhere. The most important of these Pacific voyages were those under Cook, who landed several times in Australia, and communicated well enough with the indigenous people to adopt an aboriginal word for the most distinctive animal he had seen, a kangaroo. In the 1780s, French and British ships carried breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean, hoping to grow it to feed slaves. One of these ships, the Bounty, captained by one of Cook's former officers William Bligh, experienced a mutiny that made it far more famous than its mission. Thus along with the Columbian Exchange and the Polynesian Exchange, what we might call the “Captain Cook Exchange” moved crops and other products around the world.
The trade in animals, alive and dead
While crops and soldiers traveled in all directions, animals, like disease, traveled primarily from the Old World to the New. The only New World animal that became a common food in Europe was the turkey, which seems to have acquired its name in English as a result of the new networks of global exchange, as the birds came into England on ships that also carried goods from the eastern Mediterranean, so the English called them “turkey hens.” The transport of animals in the other direction had dramatic demographic and social consequences. Europeans brought the same livestock elsewhere that Columbus had taken to Hispaniola: horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and poultry. These often escaped into the wild and thrived. Pigs in particular could eat anything and reproduced rapidly, destroying native agricultural plots and making traditional methods of farming with unfenced beds impossible. Cortés established a cattle ranch on his huge estates in Mexico, using African slaves who had familiarity with horses and cattle to work it, while the indigenous people he had enslaved farmed and worked in the silver mines he also ordered built. A herd of a hundred cattle that the Spanish abandoned in the grasslands—called pampas—of the Rio de la Plata area in what is now Argentina grew within several decades to over 100,000. African, indigenous, and mixed race people fleeing Spanish mines and plantations began to herd these cattle from the backs of horses, creating a form of pastoral life new to the Americas but common in parts of Africa (and many other parts of the world). They would later be celebrated as gauchos, the symbol of Argentina.
In the plains and deserts of the North American West and Southwest, horses transformed the economy, as Native Americans gave up sedentary farming and localized foraging for a more nomadic existence hunting vast herds of buffalo and other animals from horseback. The Comanche, Cheyenne, Lakota, and other plains tribes acquired horses from Spanish colonists—and later from each other—through trading and raiding, building up large herds. By the mid eighteenth century tribes from the Rio Grande River north to what is now Saskatchewan depended on horses. They were generally owned by men, and became a prestige item as well as a means of obtaining food. Like all prestige goods, horses appear to have enhanced social and gender hierarchies, as men with more horses married more wives and acquired captives through raiding or purchase, in part to care for their horses. Desire for more horses encouraged warfare among plains tribes and between Native Americans and European colonists, but was also a motivation for trade. Along with horses, indigenous peoples acquired guns and ammunition, woolen and cotton cloth, blankets, metal tools and implements, beads, alcohol, and a host of other goods in a North American consumer revolution parallel to that in Europe and Japan. These were integrated into local cultural forms, as, for example, beads replaced porcupine quills on embroidered clothing. European traders came to recognize that Native American groups had specific preferences in beads and cloth that could change from year to year; writing to their suppliers, they requested certain colors, patterns, and levels of quality, knowing that these would sell while others would not.
European goods were exchanged primarily for furs. Not many live animals were transported from the Americas to Europe, but tens of millions of their skins were. The global fur trade thus altered life in the woodland areas of eastern and northern North America where horses did not become common. Fur had been worn since Paleolithic times for warmth, of course, and the skins or fur of certain animals also had symbolic value. Warriors in many cultures draped lion, leopard, jaguar, or wolf skins over their heads and shoulders to associate themselves with these powerful animals and signify their masculinity. Rulers wore capes or coats of rare furs such as ermine or sable as a sign of high status, while nobles and other
wealthy people had their jackets and coats trimmed with fox or lynx. The thickest and softest fur came from mountainous or northern areas where animals built up dense coats to survive the cold; in Eurasia, the vast steppes of Siberia yielded the most highly prized furs, especially as over-trapping and over-hunting had reduced the fur available from other areas. Traders from the city of Novgorod had obtained furs from the indigenous Komi and other Siberian tribes as early as the tenth century, and beginning in the fifteenth century the expanding Russian state with its capital at Moscow conquered much of Siberia, forcing native people—whom the Russians saw as inferior savages—to pay them sable furs as tribute, and spreading smallpox. Russian fur trappers also moved to Siberia to obtain fur directly, particularly as prices escalated in the sixteenth century when wearing fur became even more fashionable and as prices in general went up as a result of New World gold and silver and other global economic developments. Siberian fur traveled south to Persia and China as well as west to Europe, with squirrel fur particularly favored in China because it was durable and relatively inexpensive. At first Russian trappers and traders stayed for a year or two and then went back to Russia, but eventually some stayed in Siberia, often marrying women from among the local tribes.
Siberian fur alone could not meet the demand, and northern North America offered new opportunities for exploitation. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch, French, and English established inland fur-trading posts as well as coastal settlements. Europeans traders, almost all of them men, brought in goods of interest to both men and women: guns, rum, cloth, kettles, flour, needles, and tea. The Europeans were only interested in fur, however, which came from animals hunted and trapped by men, and not in the products that indigenous women produced, such as crops or clothing. Thus among Native Americans, men's activities often came to be more highly valued as a source of imported goods, in contrast to earlier periods in which men's hunting and women's horticulture had been more equally valued.
A Concise History of the World Page 27