China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly. Dehua in Fujian province, for example, became a centre dedicated to making porcelain to suit European tastes. Silk manufacture likewise received investment so that western appetites could be catered for. This was shrewd business practice, and helped the receipts of the Ming authorities to rise sharply, with some scholars asserting that they multiplied no less than four times between 1600 and 1643.83
The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver’s value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere – which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese. The opportunities for currency trading and taking advantage of these imbalances in what modern bankers call arbitrage were grasped immediately by new arrivals to the Far East – especially those who recognised that the unequal value of gold in China and Japan produced easy profits. Traders scrambled to buy and sell currencies and precious metals. Merchants operating out of Macau took cargoes of carefully chosen goods to Japan, according to one eyewitness, but were interested only in trading it for silver.84 Some could scarcely hide their excitement at the opportunity. The value of silver in relation to gold was so high that it made the latter amazingly cheap, noted Pedro Baeza; ‘a profit of 75 to 70 per cent would be made’, he wrote, if one precious metal exchanged for another in the east was brought to the Spanish territories in the Americas or back to Spain itself.85
The effects of the inflows of silver into China are complex and difficult to assess fully. Nevertheless, the flow of precious metal from the Americas had an obvious effect on Chinese culture, the arts and learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Painters like Shen Zhou and the others who formed the Four Masters (the great contemporary artists of the Ming dynasty) obtained patronage and financial reward for their work. Artists such as Lu Zhi found demand for their talents in private commissions from a growing middle class who were interested in developing their pastimes and pleasures.86
This was an age of experimentation and discovery, with texts like the Jin Ping Mei, an erotic novel often known as ‘The Golden Lotus’ after one of its leading characters, challenging attitudes not only to literary forms but to sex itself.87 New wealth helped to sustain scholars like Song Yingxing, who produced an encyclopaedia covering topics from snorkelling to the use of hydraulics in irrigation, and whose work was highly regarded and widely appreciated.88 The rising interest in Confucianism, and the esteem in which specialists like Wang Yangming were held, bears witness to the desire for explanations and solutions in a period of considerable change.89
Maps like the Selden map, recently rediscovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, likewise demonstrate the increasing Chinese interest in trade and travel in this period, offering an extensive overview of South-East Asia, complete with shipping routes. However, these are something of an exception: in this period, as before, Chinese maps typically retained a cloistered view of the world, with visual representations bounded to the north by the Great Wall and to the east by the sea. This was symptomatic of China’s readiness to play a passive role at a time when the world was opening up; but it also reflected European naval superiority in East Asia where Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese vessels targeted each other – but also regularly seized Chinese junks and their cargoes too.90 China was not keen to take part in running battles between aggressive rivals, let alone to be made to suffer as a result; in the circumstances, the inclination to become increasingly introspective, but at the same time reap the benefit of traders coming to them, seemed entirely logical.
Much of the silver that flooded into China was spent in a series of major reforms, not the least of which were the monetisation of the economy, the encouragement of free labour markets and a deliberate programme to stimulate foreign trade. Ironically, China’s love of silver and the premium it placed on this particular precious metal became its Achilles heel. With such great quantities of silver reaching China, above all through Manila, it was inevitable that its value would start to fall, which over time caused price inflation. The net result was that the value of silver, and above all its value in relation to gold, was forced into line with other regions and continents. Unlike India, where the impact of the opening up of the world produced new wonders of the world, in China it was to lead to a serious economic and political crisis in the seventeenth century.91 Globalisation was no less problematic five centuries ago than it is today.
As Adam Smith later noted in his famous book on the wealth of nations, ‘the discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind’.92 The world was indeed transformed by the roads of gold and silver that opened up following Columbus’ first expedition and Vasco da Gama’s successful journey home from India. What Adam Smith did not say in 1776, however, is how England fitted into the equation. For if the century that followed the discoveries of the 1490s belonged to Spain and Portugal, with the fruits showered on the empires of the east, then the next 200 years would belong to countries in the north of Europe. Against all expectations, the world’s centre of gravity was about to move again. This time it would belong to a Britain that was about to become Great.
13
The Road to Northern Europe
The world was transformed by the discoveries of the 1490s. No longer on the sidelines of global affairs, Europe was becoming the world’s engine. Decisions made in Madrid and Lisbon now echoed and reverberated thousands of miles away, as once they had done from Abbāsid Baghdad, from Luoyang in Tang dynasty China, from the Mongol capital at Karakorum or from Timur’s Samarkand. All roads now led to Europe.
This left some deeply frustrated. None were more bitter than the English. It was bad enough that the treasuries of England’s rivals multiplied overnight; what made it worse was the triumphal and tiring story that the gold and silver raining down on the Spanish crown was part of God’s design. This was particularly painful following England’s break with Rome. ‘How great is the power that the Divine Majesty has placed in the hands of the kings of Spain,’ wrote one Jesuit priest in the sixteenth century; Spain’s wealth has been ‘ordained by the Lord on high, who both gives and takes away kingdoms from whomever and in whatsoever way he wishes’.1
The message was that Protestant rulers should expect punishment for abandoning the true faith. With the Reformation in full swing, violence and oppression erupted across Europe between Catholics and Protestants. Rumours swirled of imminent military action against England, especially after the false dawn had passed following the death of Mary I, under whom it had seemed that the country would revert to adherence to Rome and accept papal authority. When her half-sister, Elizabeth I, took the throne in 1558, she had to walk a precarious tightrope between the competing religious demands of a vocal and powerful lobby group on the one hand and insurrection by those who were disaffected, sidelined or victimised in the atmosphere of intolerance on the other. Being all things to all men was made no easier by England’s relative isolation on the fringes of Europe. By the time that Pope Pius V issued a bull in 1570 entitled Regnans in Excelsis, declaring Elizabeth to be ‘the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime’ and threatening to excommunicate any of her subjects who obeyed her laws, thoughts were turning to how to fight off an expected invasion when – rather than if – it came.2
Heavy investment was made in the Royal Navy to create a formidable and effective first line of defence. State-of-the-art dockyards were built, such as at Deptford and Woolwich on the Thames, where warships were designed and maintained with ever increasing efficiency, which in turn helped revolutionise the construction of commercia
l vessels. Ships that could hold more cargo, travel faster, stay out at sea longer and carry more crew and more powerful cannon began to be built.3
The doyen of shipwrights was Matthew Baker, himself the son of a master builder. He adopted mathematical and geometric principles – set out in a seminal text entitled ‘Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry’ – to create a new generation of ships for Queen Elizabeth.4 These designs were quickly adopted for commercial use, with the result that the number of English ships weighing a hundred tons or more almost tripled in the two decades after 1560. The new generation of vessels quickly gained a reputation for their speed, for handling well and for the formidable threat they presented when encountered at sea.5
The fruits of the build-up of England’s naval forces became apparent when Spain attempted to send a huge fleet to pick up troops from the Netherlands in the summer of 1588 for a full-blown invasion of England. Outmanoeuvred and outduelled by the English, the surviving members of the Spanish Armada returned home in shame. Although most of the ships that were lost foundered on reefs and in unusually severe storms rather than at the hands of the English, few doubted that the naval investment had paid off handsomely.6
The capture four years later of the Madre de Deus, a Portuguese caravel, off the Azores as it returned from the East Indies laden with pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ebony, tapestries, silks, textiles, pearls and precious metal, made the point about seapower even more emphatically. The haul from this single ship, which was towed into Dartmouth harbour on the south coast, was reckoned to be worth half of England’s regular annual imports. Its seizure prompted agonised discussions about how the booty should be shared out between the crown and those responsible for the success – something that was not made easier when high-value portable items quickly went missing.7
Successes like these were good for confidence and encouraged increasingly disruptive behaviour in the Atlantic and elsewhere. England began to build ties with anyone who was an enemy of Catholic rulers in Europe. In the 1590s, for example, Queen Elizabeth made a point of releasing Muslims from North Africa who had been serving as ‘gally-slaves’ on captured Spanish ships, providing them with clothes, money ‘and other necessities’, before sending them home safely.8 The English, moreover, had support from the Muslims of North Africa in an attack on Cádiz in 1596 – an incident that is referred to at the very start of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Such was the alignment of interests in this period that one modern commentator talks of the English and the Moors participating in a ‘jihad’ against Catholic Spain.9
As a result of England’s attempt to challenge the new Spanish and Portuguese routes to the Americas and to Asia, considerable effort was devoted to forging close relations with the Ottoman Turks. At a time when most of Europe looked on with horror as Turkish forces were all but knocking on the gates of Vienna, the English backed a different horse. They were conspicuous by their absence when other Christian states assembled to form a ‘Holy League’, a coalition that gathered to attack the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth in 1571. The victory of the Holy League prompted scenes of jubilation across Europe, where poetry, music, art and monuments were created to commemorate the triumph. In England, it was met with silence.10
Even after this, the Sultan in Constantinople was assiduously courted with warm letters of friendship and the dispatch of gifts from the court of Queen Elizabeth – with the result that ‘sincere greetings and abundant salutations, rose perfumed, which emanate from pure mutual confidence and the abundance of amity’ were sent back to London.11 Among the presents dispatched from England was an organ, designed by Thomas Dallam and shipped to Constantinople in 1599. Dallam was horrified when, due to heat and humidity, ‘all glewinge failed’, and the pipes were damaged in transit. The English ambassador took one look ‘and sayde that it was not worthe iid [tuppence]’. The organ was resurrected after Dallam had battled round the clock to mend the damage – and impressed the Sultan, Mehmed II, so much when he played it for him that he was showered with gold and offered ‘tow wyfes, either tow of his Concubines or els tow virgins of the beste I could Chuse’.12
Elizabeth’s approaches to the Sultan were underpinned by the prospect of opportunities that had opened up following the Turkish advance into Europe. The Pope had long been urging Christian rulers to rally to prevent further losses, warning gravely that ‘if Hungary is conquered, Germany will be next, and if Dalmatia and Illyria are overrun, Italy will be invaded’.13 With England resolutely ploughing its own furrow, developing good relations with Constantinople seemed sensible foreign policy – as well as offering the prospect of developing commercial links.
In this respect, it is striking that a formal trade agreement was made which gave English merchants in the Ottoman Empire privileges more generous than those accorded to any other nation.14 No less striking was the common language that was used in communication between Protestants and Muslims. It was no coincidence, for example, that Queen Elizabeth wrote to the Ottoman Sultan that she herself was ‘by the grace of the most mightie God . . . the most invincible and most mightie defender of the Christian faith against all kinde of idolatries, of all that live among the Christians, and falslie professe the name of Christ’.15 Ottoman rulers were equally alert to the opportunities to reach out to those who had split from the Catholic church, underlining similarities in how they too interpreted their faith – especially when it came to visual images: among the many errors of ‘the faithless one they call the Pope’, wrote Sultan Murad to ‘members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain’, was that he encouraged the worship of idols. It was much to their credit that the followers of Martin Luther, one of the architects of the Reformation, had ‘banished the idols and portraits and bells from churches’.16 Against all the odds, England’s Protestantism looked as if it could help open doors rather than close them.17
Positive views of the Ottomans and of the Muslim world spread into mainstream culture in England. ‘Mislike me not for my complexion,’ says the King of Morocco to Portia in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, when attempting to win her hand in marriage. The king was a man, the audience was informed, who had fought bravely for the Sultan on many occasions and was a fine match for the heiress (who stands as a cipher for Queen Elizabeth herself) – and a man who was shrewd enough to realise that ‘all that glisters is not gold’. Or there is Othello, where the tragic nobility of the protagonist, a Muslim in Venetian service, contrasts sharply with the double standards, hypocrisy and deceit of the Christians around him. ‘These Moors are unchangeable in their wills,’ the audience is told at one point – a reference to the belief that Muslims were trustworthy and resolute when it came to making promises and agreeing treaties, and were therefore reliable allies.18 Indeed, the Elizabethan era saw the emergence of Persia too as a common, and positive, cultural reference point in English literature.19
Coupled with positive portrayals of Muslims and their realms in England were scathing attitudes towards the Spanish. The publication of Bartolomé de las Casas’s account of the conquest of the New World was therefore a godsend, especially in the context of the revolution pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg a hundred years earlier which had enabled texts to be printed in quantities that would previously have been considered unimaginable.20 This allowed accounts like that of de las Casas, a Dominican friar, to be disseminated quickly and relatively cheaply. As with the technological advances in the early twenty-first century, it was the sudden increase in speed in the sharing of information that made the difference.
The account of de las Casas was important because the priest had grown increasingly disillusioned by the suffering of the native populations in the Americas, which he witnessed at first hand. The text, setting out the atrocities in gruesome detail, was seized upon in England, where it was translated as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias). Widely circulated in the 1580s either in full or abridged to include the most damning passage
s, it presented an unequivocal portrait of the Spanish as mass murderers and of Spain as a cruel, bloodthirsty realm. The translator of the text, James Aligrodo, wrote in his introduction that ‘12. 15. or 20. millions of poore reasonable creatures’ had been slaughtered.21
Stories spread quickly through Protestant Europe, noting the Spaniards’ grisly treatment of those whom they believed to be their inferiors. The analogy was obvious: the Spanish were natural-born oppressors who behaved towards others with ominous cruelty; given the chance, they would persecute those closer to home in just the same way.22 It was a conclusion that struck fear into the people of the Low Countries, which were locked in an increasingly vicious struggle with Spain in the late sixteenth century as the latter sought to assert its authority in regions where the Reformation had attracted strong support. Richard Hakluyt, the famous chronicler and advocate of British settlement in the Americas, described how Spain ‘governs in the Indies with all pride and tyranny’, and casts innocents into slavery, who mournfully ‘cry with one voice’, begging for freedom.23 This was the Spanish model of empire, in other words, one of intolerance, violence and persecution. England, of course, would never behave in so shameful a manner.24
That was the theory. In fact, attitudes to slavery and violence were more ambiguous than such high-minded promises suggest. In the 1560s, English sailors repeatedly tried to take a share of the lucrative slave trade in West Africa, with Sir John Hawkins using investment from Queen Elizabeth herself to help generate healthy profits shipping men across the Atlantic. Having concluded that ‘Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and that store of Negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea’, Hawkins and his backers were more than willing to get in on the action. Far from refusing to deal with Spanish ‘tyrants’ in the New World, those at the highest levels of English society did rather well out of them.25
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