by Ian Morris
By 1700, the lines of fire that Europeans deployed on land and sea were unquestionably the most ferocious the world had ever seen. Their one weakness, Pepys observed, was “the want of money, [which] puts all things, and above all things the Navy, out of order.” Keeping up with the arms race in standardized men and cannons was staggeringly expensive. Even in the richest states, there was never enough money, and matching means and ends soon became the greatest challenge for governments.
The crudest solution was to cook the books. Governments blithely defaulted on debts, let inflation run riot, and, when all else failed, simply stopped paying their troops. That, however, usually went badly. Unpaid English sailors invented the concept of going on strike, literally striking their ships’ sails so the fleet could not move until the government paid up. In 1667, with the fleet on strike and Pepys unable to work because of the “moan of the poor seamen that lie starving in the streets for lack of money,” a Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames and burned or towed away England’s best ships. Sailors’ wives laid hands on members of Parliament in the streets of London, shrieking, “This is what comes of not paying our husbands!”
The alternative to lowering the costs of war was raising more revenues to pay for it, and governments pursued this tack even more vigorously. One technique, known as absolutism, involved sweeping away the clutter of privileges that nobles, cities, and clergymen had accumulated over the previous thousand years and allowing monarchs to tax everything in their realms. Naturally, this appealed strongly to kings, but those whose privileges were being swept away were less happy. All too often, the result was civil war.
When things went badly for kings, as they did in England in 1649 and France in 1793, they might end up losing their heads. But even when things went well, there was still never enough money. Not even France’s Louis XIV, the greatest of the absolutists (who reputedly came up with the catchphrase l’état, c’est moi, “the state is me”), could actually raise enough money to batter all the kingdoms that combined to oppose him into submission. At his death in 1715, France was almost bankrupt.
A third approach was to mobilize money more efficiently. Here the Dutch led the way, creating a secondary market for government bonds. This allowed capitalists to buy pieces of the national debt, then sell them, along with the interest they paid, to other investors—much as banks today make mortgage loans and then sell them on. In combination with laws that soothed investors’ fears about sovereign default, this gave Dutch governments the ability to raise more money, faster and cheaper than any rivals. The Dutch fought constantly in the seventeenth century, and their debt ballooned from 50 million guilders in 1632 to 250 million in 1752, but thanks to investor confidence the interest they paid steadily fell, dipping under 2.5 percent in 1747.
In 1694, England took this idea further, opening a national bank to manage the public debt and allocating specific taxes to pay interest on bonds. Sound public finance brought in extraordinary amounts of money; while a single major defeat could bring nations with poor credit to their knees, governments in Amsterdam and London seemed able to raise, drill, and commit new fleets and armies almost at will. To the English novelist Daniel Defoe, it felt as if “credit makes the soldier fight without pay, the armies without provisions.”
Governments could hardly ask for more than this, yet most remained ambivalent about the new institutions. Then as now, financial instruments that looked wonderful to bankers could look alarming to everyone else, and then as now hardly anyone—including bankers—actually understood how the new tools really worked. In 1720 the South Sea Bubble in Britain and the Mississippi Bubble in France brought banks crashing down and left investors ruined. A Tea Party–style backlash set in, and although the eighteenth century had nothing quite like Wall Street versus Main Street, it did have Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England’s address) versus the country estate. Aristocrats who had dominated politics for generations suspected (rightly) that business-friendly governments might leave them worse-off, and kings found it hard to give up the plunder-and-spend policies that had worked for them in the past.
The most constructive solution to the problems of funding fighting, however, came not from cooking the books, raising extra revenue, or mobilizing money more effectively but from putting the paradox of war to work. Kings trimmed back their increasingly lethal forces but wove webs of alliances to share the costs of campaigns. The result was something of a balance of power, raising the price of aggression (if a government upset the balance, others would band together to restore it) and lowering the price of survival (if one state was threatened with destruction, others would rescue it to keep the balance intact).
Paradoxically, because armed forces were now so deadly, the amount of killing they did declined. To avoid provoking hostile coalitions, rulers limited their wars, defining aims narrowly and using force carefully. Battles remained as gruesome as ever (in 1665, England’s Duke of York was knocked off his feet by the detached head of the Earl of Burlington’s second son), but wars—which European writers started calling Kabinettskriege, or “ministers’ wars”—grew more orderly. “No longer is it nations which fight each other,” a French politician observed in the 1780s, “but just armies and professionals; wars are like games of chance in which no one risks his all; what was once a wild rage is now just a folly.”
In the classic case, seven European governments came together in a grand alliance in 1701 to stop the crowns of France and Spain from landing on a single royal head. Uniting Paris and Madrid would have created a superpower, shattering the balance; so, for a decade, volleys and broadsides blasted from Blenheim to Barbados to prevent this from happening. By 1710, the alliance clearly had the upper hand, but some of its members started worrying that crushing France and Spain would tip the balance of power too far in Britain’s favor, so they switched sides to even things out. The fighting finally petered out in 1713–14.
Judged just by what was happening in western Europe, the coming of guns and the closing of the steppes had not been very productive at all. While it had freed Europe from the long cycle of productive and counterproductive wars by giving it the weapons to defeat the steppe horsemen, it had not revived productive war in the same way as had happened in Asia, where great new continental empires had formed since 1500. Western Europeans seemed bogged down in unproductive war, in which kings and their cabinets besieged fortresses and exchanged frontier provinces but neither productively built up nor counterproductively broke down larger societies.
The War on the World
The three hundred years of war between 1415 and 1715 did little to change the map of western Europe, but they turned much of the rest of the globe upside down. Europe’s conflicts spilled out across the oceans, and Europeans drifted into waging a war on the world. From Portugal to the Netherlands, rulers on Europe’s Atlantic fringe grew very keen on overseas activity that they could tax, spending the gains on wars at home. The money that poured in paid for much of Europe’s military revolution, and the military revolution in turn gave Europeans the weapons that made overseas expansion possible.
Cannons gave fifteenth-century sailors naval superiority everywhere they went and worked wonders for focusing the minds of reluctant trading partners. When haggling could not convince merchants in Mozambique and Mombasa to sell him supplies in 1498, Vasco da Gama found that gunfire could, and when Pedro Álvares Cabral reached India two years later (discovering Brazil along the way, when he sailed a little too far into the Atlantic while trying to get around Africa), his bombardment of Calicut—killing five hundred people—opened its markets promptly.
By 1506, Portugal had formulated a breathtakingly ambitious plan, elevating piracy to the level of grand strategy. Every ship trading in spices had to use a few key ports; so, Portuguese sailors reasoned, by shooting up and seizing Hormuz, Aden, Goa, and Malacca, they could turn the Indian Ocean into a private lake and tax every ship on it. Portugal would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
The plan
almost, but not quite, came off. Part of the reason was military; because Portugal never managed to take Aden, Arab traders went on entering the Indian Ocean without paying duties. But the bigger problem was that there was more to overseas expansion than just winning battles. Four other forces—distance, disease, demography, and diplomacy—had as much to do with the outcome as did devastating firepower. How well Europeans fared in any part of the world was a function of the balance between these forces.
America, where the balance massively favored Europeans, saw the most extreme outcome. Distance and demography certainly worked against the interlopers, limiting the number of Europeans who could reach the New World to a tiny proportion of the number of Native Americans. But once Europeans arrived, the natives’ stone blades, clubs, and cotton armor proved almost useless against steel swords, horses, and guns. Forty years after Columbus came ashore, a mere 168 Spaniards routed tens of thousands of Incas and captured King Atahuallpa at Cajamarca (Figure 4.7). Bulletriddled skulls from sixteenth-century cemeteries testify vividly to firepower’s triumph over distance and demography.
Figure 4.7. Sites in the Americas mentioned in this chapter
Like the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, however, Spaniards in the Americas learned that firepower was not always enough. In 1520, Cortés’s conquistadors only escaped an Aztec uprising by the skin of their teeth, and their sack of Tenochtitlán the next year had as much to do with diplomacy as with guns. Cortés certainly had diplomatic problems of his own, at one point having to fight a civil war against a rival conquistador, but these paled next to the divisions among Native Americans. In Mesoamerica, the Tlaxcalans and other victims of Aztec imperialism were all too happy to revolt, while in Peru, Pizarro faced an Inca Empire that was bitterly divided after a recent civil war. The bulk of the troops that took Tenochtitlán and Cusco were in fact natives.
The biggest factor in the Spaniards’ success, however, was disease. For thousands of years, European and Asian farmers had been living alongside domesticated animals and evolving the unpleasant suite of microbes described in Chapter 3. Native Americans, who had very few domesticated animals, had no resistance to these infections. They had a few horrible ailments of their own (including syphilis) to give back to the Spaniards, but the exchange of infections worked overwhelmingly in Europe’s favor.
“Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies,” Aztec eyewitnesses said. “The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds … They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.” Exact numbers are disputed, but a recent DNA study shows that the Native population shrank by at least half across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This demographic disaster left the invaders largely free to do what they wanted, which included looting the Aztecs and Incas, digging up the world’s biggest deposit of silver at Potosí in the Andes, and importing African slaves to replace the lost Native labor. Savage struggles with Native Americans went on for centuries, but the biggest threat the Spaniards faced came not from indigenous resistance but from other Europeans who, by 1600, were trying to muscle in on their business.
These newcomers—mostly English, Dutch, and French—faced an uphill struggle. A few optimists thought there were more Aztec and Inca Empires waiting to be robbed and threw their lives away hunting for El Dorado, but most assumed that the Spaniards had already stolen everything worth stealing. (One report concluded that New Mexico contained nothing but “naked people, false bits of coral, and four pebbles.”) The only ways to get rich, it seemed, were by hunting for new veins of precious metal (“the most disadvantageous lottery in the world,” in Adam Smith’s words) or plundering the ships carrying silver back to Spain.
That was certainly what the English thought. Walter Raleigh set up a pirate lair on Roanoke Island in 1585, but the colonists vanished without a trace. The gentlemen who settled at Jamestown in 1607 pinned their hopes on finding gold and jewels, but soon they too were disappointed and starving. Cut marks on the bones of a fourteen-year-old girl excavated in a garbage pit suggest that in the winter of 1609–10 they were reduced to eating corpses. But in 1612 the emaciated survivors made a great discovery: tobacco thrived in their swampy, malarial new home. Its leaves were not as sweet as the version Spaniards grew on Cuba, but it was cheap, and Englishmen were glad to buy it.
By then, French settlers in Quebec and Dutch in Manhattan were finding equally strong European markets for American fur, and the religious refugees who fled England for Massachusetts in the 1620s were happily selling timber for ships’ masts to their former persecutors. By the 1650s, Puritans were also exporting food to the Caribbean, where plantation owners were turning over every scrap of land to sugar, a wonder drug that sold even better than tobacco. Commodities moved from west to east, and people—a “white plague,” the historian Niall Ferguson calls them—flooded in the other direction.
Outside America, however, Europe’s war on the world at first went less well, because the balance between distance, disease, demography, diplomacy, and firepower was less favorable. In West Africa, the source of slaves for American mines and plantations, Europeans again had overwhelming military dominance but consistently lost the war of microbes, thanks to yellow fever and malaria. Only where the disease environment was unusually favorable, as around Cape Town, did Europeans really have things their own way. After landing here in 1652, Dutch settlers pushed the local Khoekhoe farmers back fifty miles, and a smallpox epidemic in 1713 virtually ended native resistance.
But that was an exception. Usually, Europeans made little headway unless they got lucky diplomatic breaks. In southeast Africa, for example, Portuguese traders began moving up the Zambezi River in 1531, but the kingdom of Mutapa (one of the successors to Great Zimbabwe, which had declined in the 1440s) kept them at arm’s length. Only around 1600, when a rebellion unnerved the Mutapan king, did that change. Fearing for his throne, the king invited in Portuguese soldiers and missionaries, and by the time he died in 1627, these advisers had such influence that they could handpick his successor.
As late as 1700, Europeans mostly had to content themselves with tiny toeholds along the coast, where merchants built forts and negotiated what deals they could with local communities. “You have three things we want,” one African chief is supposed to have told a European trader: “powder, musket, and shot. And we have three things you want: men, women, and children.” On this basis, between 1500 and 1800, Europeans bought something like twelve million people from warring African chiefs for shipment across the Atlantic.
Europe’s position in Asia was initially even weaker. Disease gave Europeans no advantage: Eurasia’s disease pools had largely merged since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, producing a balance that if anything worked against Europeans, who remained vulnerable to malaria in the tropics.
The vast distances separating Europe and Asia—eight thousand miles from Lisbon to Calicut, then another two thousand on to Malacca, and two thousand more to Guangzhou—were also hard to overcome. Dutch sailors found a shortcut in 1611 (trimming two thousand miles off the coastal route that the Portuguese had found to Southeast Asia by picking up the Westerlies near the Cape of Good Hope, taking them almost as far as Australia, and then cutting north), but even in 1620 a mere 20,000 or so Europeans faced nearly 200 million Asians around the Indian Ocean and another 100 million in China.
Asians could not stop European ships from coming, but until well into the seventeenth century they did not really want to. The sultan of Gujarat’s view that “wars by sea are the affairs of merchants, and of no concern to the prestige of kings” was not far wrong. Portuguese carracks could pose existential threats to little city-states like Malacca, but to Turkey, Persia, India, China, and Japan they were more annoying than dangerous. Europeans were in the same category as pirates: both kinds of parasites might reduce imperial revenues by killing people in coastal towns, but so long as t
hey stayed within limits, it was cheaper to ignore them than to fight them. There could even be advantages to courting them, particularly if an emperor needed to buy guns.
A two-speed economy took shape in the Indian Ocean. The great empires continued to dominate their own enormous internal markets, but Europeans inserted themselves around their edges and, so long as the empires ignored them, fought each other for shares of the rich international trade.
The fighting did not go well for Portugal. Ever since da Gama’s day, the crown had kept traders on a short leash, and the kinds of commercial cartels that set up East India Companies in London (1600), Amsterdam (1602), and Paris (1674) barely existed in Lisbon. In principle, and often in practice, these private East India Companies carried all the costs of doing business in the Indian Ocean. The governor-general of the Dutch East India Company spelled it out in a letter to his directors in 1614: “Trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of your own weapons, and those weapons must be wielded with the profits gained by the trade. So trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.”
The overburdened Portuguese government simply could not compete with this business model. By the 1650s, the Dutch had relieved it of its bases at Malacca and around Sri Lanka, and with the Portuguese effectively out of the picture, the Dutch turned on the English. “The trade of the world is too little for us two,” an English seaman explained; “therefore one of us must down.” Between 1652 and 1674, the two countries’ fleets perfected the new line-ahead tactics in a string of grinding wars. Thanks in no small part to Pepys’s labors at the Admiralty, England gradually came out on top, but by then France had emerged as a new rival.
Despite all the drama of these wars, though, the sultans, shahs, and emperors in Istanbul, Isfahan, Delhi, and Beijing paid little attention. One set of Europeans might replace another, but the larger balance of power was set in stone. As late as 1690, the Mughal Empire could slap down the English East India Company almost without effort when it felt that the interlopers were pushing a little too hard in Bengal. Half the men in an English invasion force died of disease that year, and the company had to swallow a humiliating peace.