Tobacco was introduced into China in the middle of the sixteenth century, and spread widely by Ming and Qing soldiers. Wealthy people carried pipes and tobacco pouches, or their servants did, with women using very long and slender pipes, as these were seen as more feminine (an aesthetic judgment that carried over into cigarettes designed specially for women in the twentieth-century United States). Gatherings of scholars and aristocrats were times for smoking, and poems in praise of tobacco appeared, extolling the virtues of “the Sage's vapor” and the “golden-thread smoke.” Because of the high demand, growing tobacco was more profitable than growing wheat or rice, and Chinese farmers began growing tobacco extensively in the eighteenth century, although it stripped nutrients from the soil and could only be planted for a short period.
Sugar and the slave trade
Caffeine and nicotine are powerful drugs, but what led coffee, chocolate, and in the eighteenth century tea to become even more popular was yet another addictive substance central to the Columbian Exchange, sugar. Sugar cane is native to the South Pacific and was taken to India in ancient times, from where it went to southern China and the Mediterranean. The Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa had the right kind of warm, wet climate for sugar, and the Portuguese who established colonies there in the late fifteenth century began growing and processing sugar cane. Producing sugar takes both expensive refining machinery and many workers to chop and transport heavy cane, burn fields, and tend vats of cooking cane juice. This means that it is difficult for small growers to produce sugar economically, and what developed instead were large plantations, owned by distant capitalist merchants or investors. The earliest sugar plantations were worked by both free and slave workers from many ethnic groups, but by the 1480s they were almost all black African slaves.
Columbus saw the possibilities of sugar first-hand when he lived on the island of Madeira, and he took sugar cane cuttings to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The first sugar mill in the western hemisphere was built in 1515 in what is now the Dominican Republic. Brazil also had the right kind of climate, and by the middle of the sixteenth century investors from all over Europe were setting up sugar plantations there. By 1600 Brazil was Europe's largest source of sugar, and sugar was becoming a normal part of many people's diets in Europe and among Europeans in the New World. Per capita consumption in England was several pounds per person per year, still tiny compared to modern sugar consumption (the United States has the world's largest per capita sugar consumption, at about 150 pounds a year), but much more than it had been earlier, when sugar was such a luxury that people thought of it more as a drug than a food. In some ways, sugar is a drug: it may not be physically addictive, but the human demand for sugar seems insatiable, as long as the price is low enough.
Slavery and shipping kept the price of sugar low. Sugar growers in the Caribbean and Brazil first tried to force native peoples to do the back-breaking labor that sugar demands. In the Caribbean, Spanish settlers (encomenderos) were given rights to compel native labor in the encomienda system, but the native peoples either died or ran away. Few Europeans were willing to wield machetes and haul cane in the hot sun for any amount of wages. The solution was the same one that had worked on the Atlantic islands: import enslaved Africans and set up huge plantations, where large numbers of workers supplied the sugar cane to keep complicated refining equipment running all the time. Slave traders from West and Central African coastal areas went further and further inland to capture, buy, or trade for more and more slaves. Some rulers tried to limit the slave trade in their areas, but others profited from it, and raiders paid little attention to regulations anyway. They encouraged warfare to provide captives, or just grabbed people from their houses and fields. The slave trade grew steadily, and first thousands and then tens of thousands of people a year were taken from Africa to work on sugar plantations. For 350 years after Columbus’ voyage, more Africans crossed the Atlantic than Europeans; current estimates of the total are 10 to 12 million, with many more millions dying on the way. Thus, of all the products of the Columbian Exchange, sugar was (and perhaps still is) the most harmful.
The slave trade had dramatic effects in West and West Central Africa, encouraging warfare and destroying families and kinship groups. In these areas women produced the bulk of food, making female slaves often too valuable to sell. Thus two-thirds of the slaves exported to the New World were men and boys, while women were instead retained as farm workers (and wives). The transatlantic slave trade further enhanced women's share of food production, and also increased the trade in slaves within many parts of Africa. Slaves were also transported across the Indian Ocean, both into the Dutch Cape Colony from India, Southeast Asia, and Madagascar, and from East Africa to sugar and other plantations on islands in the Indian Ocean and even to Brazil. Free men and women, ex-slaves, and occasionally even people who were still slaves acted as slave traders in Africa and sometimes in the colonies, responding to the changing demands for labor as the extraction and production for various commodities shifted.
Slavery is not simply a method of organizing labor, but also a method through which a labor force can be reproduced. In Africa, the Muslim world, and Southeast Asia, enslaved women were often part of households, as secondary wives, concubines, or servants. They thus increased the wealth and power of their owner/husbands through their work and their children, although under Islamic law those children would be legally free, as the legal status of children followed that of their father. This was not the case in the slave societies of the Americas, where children inherited their “condition of servitude,” as the law described it, from their mothers. In some parts of the Americas, reproduction was not of great concern to slave owners, who simply bought new slaves as others died. In Brazil, for example, conditions on sugar plantations were especially brutal and there were very few enslaved women, so many more slaves died than were born. Slave owners figured that most slaves would live about seven years and calculated the costs of buying new slaves into the price they hoped to get for their sugar. In North America, “natural increase” came to be more important than continued importation in increasing the slave population; of the millions of people who were taken from Africa to be slaves in the New World, only 5 percent went to North America. Evidence from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America suggests that enslaved women sometimes took steps to control their fertility, limiting childbirth through plants and other products that lessened fertility or caused miscarriages. Childbearing, along with agricultural labor, remained a central part of most enslaved women's lives, however, though the number of children who survived to adulthood varied greatly.
4.6 Enslaved workers carry out various steps of sugar processing in this seventeenth-century French engraving. Workers carry cane to the mill at the rear where an ox powers vertical rollers to crush it, juice flows to tanks in the boiling house center-left, and in the front a white overseer supervises.
By itself, the slave trade did not bring spectacular profits, but the plantation system was an essential part of a capitalist business network that provided steadily increasing wealth for European merchants and investors, who also developed plantations to raise indigo, cotton, rice, tobacco, and other crops. Slavery was a part of many societies around the world in this era—as it had been earlier—but the plantation slavery of the New World was different because it had a racial element that other slave systems generally did not. By linking whiteness with freedom and blackness with slavery, the plantation system strengthened ideas about Africans held by many European Christians and Arabic Muslims, who saw them as inferior, barbaric, and primitive. Plantation owners came to think of their slaves more as machines than human beings; like machines, slaves would wear out and need replacing. Some Christian missionaries objected to this treatment, especially for slaves who had converted to Christianity, but other church leaders praised slavery, saying that although it might make people's lives on this earth worse, it gave them the opportunity of getting into heaven by becoming Chri
stian, so in the long run they were better off.
Religious transformations and their consequences
Religion served as a justification for slavery in the early modern period, and also as a justification—and motivation—for conflict and colonization. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John,” wrote Columbus, a destiny he saw as symbolized by his first name, Christofero, which means “Christ carrier” in Latin. Gold inspired more voyages and conquests than God, but religious aims shaped patterns of expansion and empire-building. This had long been true, but reforms and reinvigorations of existing religions and the creation of new faiths in the sixteenth century led to higher levels of religious zeal. These movements were begun and extended by individuals with a powerful sense of calling, who developed new spiritual practices they believed fit better with divine will. They ultimately gained many adherents because large numbers of people found their message persuasive, or because they saw social, economic, or political benefits in converting (or both). Converts included rulers, who often demanded their subjects adhere to the same religion and used religion as a reason for conquest.
Religious reformers and leaders set out certain duties as incumbent on a believer, often with distinctions between men and women. They viewed everyday activities and family life as opportunities for people to display spiritual and moral values, though at the same time criticized religious practices if they were done without the proper inward belief or faith. Once they were established, these new, reformed, or revitalized religions became part of inherited traditions, as children followed the faith of their parents.
Among these transformations, the splintering of Christianity in western Europe was the most dramatic, and brought the most violence. In the early sixteenth century, most people accepted the Christian church's teachings and found religious activities meaningful, but a significant minority called for reforms. They complained that the church, headed by the pope in Rome, was concerned more with wealth and power than with the spiritual needs of believers. In the 1520s, that group came to include Martin Luther (1483–1546), a professor of theology at Wittenberg University in Germany. Luther wrote and spoke against church teachings, and his ideas turned into a widespread movement that became known as the Protestant Reformation, in part through the new technology of the printing press. Together with Columbus’ voyages, the Protestant Reformation has traditionally been seen as marking a sharp break with the past and the beginning of modernity—or at least early modernity—though, like Columbus, on many issues Luther does not seem very modern.
Luther's understanding of essential Christian doctrine, often codified as “faith alone, grace alone, Scripture alone,” asserts that salvation comes through faith, which is itself an unmerited gift of God, and that God's word is revealed in Scripture, not in the traditions of the church. Luther translated the Bible into German, and he and other Protestant reformers rejected practices for which they did not see a biblical basis, including clerical celibacy, which Luther thought was a fruitless attempt to control a natural human drive and brought no spiritual benefits. Protestants proclaimed family life in which men were serious, responsible husbands and fathers and women loving, obedient wives and mothers as the ideal for all men and women, and regarded unmarried people of both sexes as suspect. Most Protestant areas came to allow divorce and remarriage for a limited range of reasons, although the actual divorce rate remained very low, as marriage created a social and economic unit that could not easily be broken apart.
The Protestant reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant churches. Rulers recognized that breaking with the Catholic Church would allow them to confiscate its land and other property, and give them authority over religion as well as other aspects of life. In England, the desire of King Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) for a male heir led him to split from the Catholic Church and establish a separate English church, actions which some people accepted willingly while others resisted. Protestant and Catholic political authorities all thought that their territories should have one official state church, but some individuals and groups rejected this idea, and thought that religious allegiance should be voluntary. These groups also developed ideas that were socially radical, with some calling for pacifism and others common ownership of property, so they were intensely persecuted and often forced to flee from one place to another. Peasants who used Lutheran ideas to justify their demands for social justice were also suppressed with force, a move that Luther supported. The Reformation brought with it more than a century of vicious religious war, beginning in Switzerland and Germany, then spreading to France and the Netherlands later in the sixteenth century.
In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms as well. Both of these moves were led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits, begun by Ignatius Loyola (1491?–1556), a Spanish knight who also thought that Christianity was in trouble, but saw the solution as stricter obedience to the pope and existing practices, not a break from them. By the later sixteenth century, Roman Catholic Christianity was reinvigorated in what came to be called the Catholic Reformation, building stunning churches in which lavish decorations and shimmering frescoes reflected the new dynamic proselytizing spirit. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin (1509–64) inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor, similarly reflected in Calvinist church architecture, which featured white walls, plain windows, and no images. An emphasis on morality and social discipline emerged in Catholic areas as well, however, and authorities throughout Europe sought to teach people more about their particular variant of Christianity in a process historians have termed “confessionalization.” This process of confessionalization and the enforcement of social discipline lasted well beyond the sixteenth century, as educating people and encouraging (or forcing) them to improve their behavior took far longer than either Protestant or Catholic reformers anticipated.
Both Protestant and Catholic authorities also arrested, tried, and executed individuals they judged to be heretics or in league with the devil, among whom were between 100,000 and 200,000 people tried for witchcraft. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least three-quarters of them women. Misogynist ideas, legal changes, social stresses, religious zeal, and concerns about order all combined into witch panics among learned and unlearned alike, which only abated when the same types of religious and legal authorities who had so vigorously persecuted witches decided that torture would not yield the truth, and that the devil would probably not turn to poor older women if he wanted help.
In the seventeenth century, Calvinist-inspired Protestantism combined with social, political, and economic grievances in England and led to civil war. Some members of the lower-level nobility—usually termed “gentry”—and many urban residents wanted to “purify” the English state church of what they saw as vestiges of Catholicism. These “Puritans,” as they came to be known, included members of parliament, the national representative body that had the authority to raise taxes and that opposed an expansion of royal power. Parliament called for legal and religious changes, both it and King Charles I recruited armies, and open fighting began in 1642. Parliament and its army were controlled by a charismatic military leader, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), who turned the army into a formidable fighting force and political institution. The army captured and executed the king, to the horror of many English people and monarchs everywhere. Cromwell, who saw himself as called by God, ruled by what was effectively martial law and attempted to maintain order and control in a situation where individuals and groups were promoting (or at least discussing) radical social change, such as communal ownership of property. With Cromwell's death, fact
ions were divided about what to do next, and Parliament backed the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. It was unwilling to see the return of Catholicism, however, so when the restored dynasty became Catholic, Parliament offered the throne instead in 1688 to the Protestant sister of the ruling Catholic king, and her husband a Dutch prince, the joint monarchs William and Mary. This coup, bloodless in England though not in Scotland and Ireland, and later called the “Glorious Revolution,” affirmed the power of Parliament even though England was technically a monarchy. It also assured the power of the gentry, that 2 percent of the population perched socially between the tiny group of high nobles and the rest of the population, who along with merchants and professionals who often married into gentry families controlled England's policies and institutions into the twentieth century.
Christianity was not the only religious tradition in which politics and religion became closely intertwined, or in which this led to violence. In 1500, Ismail (1487–1524), a teenager who was the hereditary leader of the Safavid Sufi brotherhood, began assembling an army, asserting power, and conquering territory. He proclaimed himself ruler, or shah, and declared that his subjects would from that point on all accept Shi'a Islam, in a variant known as Twelver. Twelver Shi'a holds that the twelfth and final infallible imam after Ali (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) did not die, but went into hiding to escape persecution and will one day return and take over proper religious authority. Many of Shah Ismail's followers, who included large numbers of nomadic Turks, shared these messianic hopes and viewed him as the hidden imam, so they fiercely supported his decisions. Ismail and his successors enforced Shi'ite beliefs through force and through learning. They persecuted Sunni Muslims, many of whom fled to the Ottoman Empire, but also brought in Shi'ite scholars from elsewhere in the Muslim world, who established schools and other institutions. Afghan forces invading from the east ended the Safavid dynasty in the middle of the eighteenth century, but Shi'a religious institutions and leaders grew stronger. Today Iran is the only Muslim state in which Shi'a Islam is the official religion.
A Concise History of the World Page 29