The treasure fleets were commanded by the Muslim court eunuch Zheng He. Had the missions ended during his lifetime—he seems to have died during the last mission—and had he wished to continue to lead naval missions, he would have had nowhere else to go. More significantly, the captains and navigators and shipwrights who were made redundant by the abolition of the program had nowhere else to go either, unless they were prepared to defy the government by participating in increasingly curtailed and criminalized private trade. And that was as the authorities wanted it to be, for the same rationale applied to the suppression of the records of the voyages: as later critics put it, “Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed in order to suppress at the root.”49
By contrast, when Christopher Columbus needed a few ships to cross the Atlantic to get to China, he petitioned Portugal, Venice, Genoa, England, Spain, and assorted nobles for support, only to be turned down by all of them. When the Spanish crown later granted him a retainer that kept him around for several years until the project was finally launched, it may have done so to prevent rival powers from cashing in if his venture turned out well, even if that seemed rather unlikely.50
We could hardly wish for a better illustration of the benefits of productive fragmentation: political polycentrism preserved a multiplicity of options, interstate competition encouraged support even for highly uncertain undertakings, and a degree of cultural cohesiveness—another “productive” dimension of Latin Europe’s state system—made it easier for mavericks to find employment in a variety of locations.
Columbus was by no means alone. The Venetian Giovanni Caboto left his hometown to escape debt and tried his luck in Spain and Portugal before England commissioned the voyage that took him to Newfoundland in 1497. Magellan, whose ships were the first to circumnavigate the globe in the 1520s, had long served for the Portuguese until he fell from grace and was picked up by Spain. The cartographer Amerigo Vespucci worked for both Portugal and Spain. Unlike in China, there was no single ruler who could “turn off the tap for all of Europe.”51
Monopolies of power expressed themselves in other ways as well, by promoting the coordination of resources across large areas at the expense of local preference and advantage. The opportunity costs could be huge: as Wallerstein memorably observes, “When the Turks advanced in Europe, there was no European emperor to recall the Portuguese expeditions.” In a hegemonic empire, it was entirely up to the central authorities to promote, ignore, or suppress trade and overseas contacts.52
Chinese history illustrates this premise with exemplary clarity. When the Song and Mongol regimes supported maritime trade, merchant communities sprang up in continental Southeast Asia and Indonesia. The Ming volte-face that privileged state-controlled tribute missions and eventually banned private international trade pushed the latter into illegality and threatened to cut off the diaspora communities. Thus, just as the court could decide whether to sponsor treasure fleets or shut them down and burn the records, it could also more broadly decide whether to sponsor or obstruct maritime trade more generally. The lack of “independent bases of power and alternative states” with different preferences, a coupling of conditions that was emblematic of hegemonic empire, left no other options.53
GOING OUT THERE
Neither Needing nor Wanting to Go Out There: Agrarian Empires
Constraints on overseas ventures were not merely a function of monopolistic authoritarianism. Indifference or even hostility to such initiatives represented perfectly sensible responses to the incentive structure of hegemonic empire.
Relative economic development contributed to preferences. In the aggregate, imperial China’s resources were so large that there was no strong pressure to seek out more elsewhere, as Europeans endeavored to do. From this perspective, as Ian Morris notes, “It was always likely that fifteenth-century China’s administrators would eventually shut down the costly voyages into the Indian Ocean, and it was never likely that they would send fleets into the Pacific. Economic geography made exploration irrational.” In that sense, withdrawal was far less arbitrary and contingent than the launching of the treasure fleets had been. The question of why China did not pursue opportunities overseas may well be a red herring: the European experience cannot be accepted as a normative default.54
There is simply no point in imagining a counterfactual continuation of the treasure fleets’ operations by grafting European motivations onto Ming China. Notions that reconnaissance by smaller naval units around the Cape of Good Hope would eventually have led to encounters with the Portuguese and might have checked their advance into the Indian Ocean; that control of the Straits of Malacca would have benefited Chinese economic development; and that maritime advances would have allowed China to sell its products to European customers far closer to the latter’s home are technically correct and at the same time completely antithetical to any actual initiatives at the time. Predicated on a dramatic break with existing preferences and practices, such counterfactuals would entail nothing less than a refashioning of Chinese empire in the European mold. The same applies to the suggestion that China might then also have crossed the Atlantic to the Americas.55
The political economy of hegemonic empire was the decisive factor in forestalling not just exploration but even the very idea of overseas development. If the principal challenge was to hold on to an existing base well in excess of a hundred million people and to access their labor and assets, the outside world was of limited interest and consequence. In late imperial China, only 2 percent of the population was engaged in maritime commerce, compared to the 80 percent who cultivated the land. Trade never escaped from the crushing dominance of the agrarian sector. And more generally, the economic cost of forgone trade was much lower for large empires than for small states.56
As we saw in chapter 10, the imperial center embraced an “agrarian paternalism” that regarded farming as the foundation of the economy and people’s welfare, and—however unsuccessfully—strove for the stabilization of wealth. Cities lacked autonomy, depriving urban traders and financiers of the kind of influence that stimulated European engagement overseas. Confucian elites did not endorse going abroad: “All people in motion were potential sources of anxiety.” Instead, their unwavering support for a social order that was considered intrinsic to China obviated the need to leave. The authorities sought domestic security and control: they had no interest in having particular constituencies gain too much wealth and influence from foreign trade, let alone in supporting mercantile colonies outside the empire’s contiguous territory that had the potential to evolve into rival power bases. Overall, subordination to an inwardly directed public sector constrained mobility.57
It may well be that the smug condescension on display in the Qianlong Emperor’s famous letter to Britain’s King George II in 1792 was directed in part at a fractured domestic audience and tactically preferable to intimations of curiosity. Yet even if the Qing ruler’s professed lack of enthusiasm in “the manufactures of foreign barbarians” need not have been quite sincere, his claim that “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders” was demonstrably emblematic of the self-image of universal empires well beyond China itself.58
It was not by coincidence that the one—if partial—exception to this principle occurred at a time when imperial China faced sustained interstate competition. Not only did the independent southern kingdoms of the tenth century greatly expand foreign trade. Under the Southern Song in particular, the state actively promoted maritime commerce. After the loss of northern China in the early twelfth century, the first ruler of the southern rump state, the Gaozong Emperor, was credited with the observation that “the profit from overseas trade is the greatest,” a sentiment informed by the increasingly desperate need for additional funds. Before long, foreign trade purportedly brought in one-fifth of total state revenue.59
The Southern Song state consequently sponsored innovation in ship
design, fielded hundreds of warships, and sought out Arab and Indian navigational and geographical knowledge. The floating mariner’s compass was developed at that time. As a result, Chinese vessels came to be the best in the Indian Ocean, and the Chinese share of maritime exchange kept growing. These advances later enabled the Mongols—foreign invaders not yet socialized to accept the ideal of stable and self-contained empire—to launch grandiose if generally unsuccessful naval expeditions against Japan, Annam, and Java. Overseas trade continued on a large scale under their rule of China until it was curbed by the Ming.60
Both the Ming and the Qing regimes derived most of their income from the land. No business communities lobbied for navies that could protect long-distance trade: “There was no political-economic imperative, unlike in the case of Western maritime powers of the early modern era, to establish and maintain the overseas empires.” The Manchu conquest regime was much more concerned about internal rebellion: in their political calculus, security risks greatly outweighed potential gains from overseas connections. A ban on maritime trade in 1661 was meant to isolate the renegades who had taken over Taiwan. In 1717, the Kangxi emperor ordered all Chinese in South Asia to return within three years or they would never be allowed back at all. Severe restrictions on trade with Europeans followed in 1757.61
And regardless of the state’s position on overseas trade as such, overseas Chinese were invariably on their own. The Chinese community in Malacca in the fifteenth century was strong in numbers but maintained, at best, minimal contact with officials back home. When a modest Portuguese force seized Malacca in 1511, the Ming empire could not be expected to intervene. Upon establishing a foothold in the Philippines in 1565, the Spanish encouraged immigration from China to develop their new territories. Before long, the massive growth of the Chinese community in Manila soon raised security concerns that culminated in a series of massacres (in 1603, 1639, and 1662). The Chinese government was unimpressed. The same was true when the Dutch later massacred Chinese expats in Batavia on Java in 1740, even though on that occasion the possibility of retaliation was at least discussed at court.
Factors that ought to have worked to the Chinese communities’ advantage—superior numbers and proximity to their mighty homeland—failed to do so: “Abandoned by Chinese officials,” they were “helpless against Spanish imperial power and … many became instruments of Spanish expansion,” playing a vital role in introducing New World silver and crops into China on behalf of the Spanish. In the Japanese port of Nagasaki, Chinese merchants struggled to compete with Dutch traders who enjoyed the benefits of a treaty that had been negotiated by their distant state: their Chinese peers lacked comparable backing. Wang Gungwu captures the essence of the contrast between Chinese indifference and European state sponsorship as “the difference between merchants barely tolerated by a centralized empire and those whose rulers and governments used them for their imperial cause.”62
China’s lack of interest and incentive was also reflected in its persistent rejection of military expansion across the sea. In keeping with the geostrategic conditions set out in chapter 8, engagement with the steppe was the principal focus of attention. At no time in its history had China made serious efforts to expand with the help of naval forces. (The Mongols’ bold overseas raids, conducted at the one time when China and the grasslands shared the same overlords, could almost be taken as the exception that proves the rule.)
Overall, we observe a striking disparity between terrestrial and maritime operations. Chinese expansion into Central Asia, driven by the desire to check and preempt steppe opponents, dates back to the Western Han period, and it resumed under the Eastern Han and the Tang. Comparably ambitious naval ventures were missing: an early presence on the southern island of Hainan a mere thirty kilometers from the mainland hardly counts. Taiwan, located about 180 kilometers from China’s east coast, was long left to its own devices. It fell to distant European powers to stage the first foreign intervention there. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the Dutch and Spanish competed for control of the island—and even that conflict, fought on China’s doorstep, failed to draw in the late Ming state.
The imperial center finally took a reluctant interest only when Taiwan became a base for interference on the mainland. In the early 1660s, Zheng Chenggong, a Ming-friendly opponent to the newly installed Manchu regime, was ejected from China and ended up wresting Taiwan from the Dutch. The island became a launchpad for raids and invasions of the coastal mainland, prompting a Qing takeover in 1683.63
Manila lies about 1,300 kilometers from Guangzhou and not much more than 1,000 kilometers from Tainan in Taiwan, considerably farther away from the mainland but only a tiny fraction of the huge distances covered by the treasure fleets and well within the reach even of less ambitious Chinese navies. Three thousand kilometers of mostly inhospitable terrain separate Kashgar in westernmost Xinjiang from Chang’an, and yet the former was targeted multiple times. The Philippines never were, even though they could have been secured with very little effort. After all, the Spanish, within six years of invading with a paltry five ships that carried 150 sailors, 200 soldiers, and 5 friars, had defeated the local sultan and taken over Manila.
Had an Asian power suddenly seized the Canary Islands in, say, 1400, Portugal or later Spain would very likely have contested this takeover. Not only did China do nothing of the kind: it was the Spanish who for a while toyed with the idea of invading China. Various hopeful schemes were devised, permanently shelved only after the defeat of the Armada back in Europe.64
The Chinese state intervened in the Philippines just once and in much the same manner as it later would in Taiwan. In 1573–1574, a Chinese pirate who had been raiding China’s coast departed for the Philippines where he sought to dislodge the Spanish, albeit without success. A Chinese fleet was dispatched to kill or apprehend him. It thus appears that offensive naval operations were undertaken only against fellow Chinese who challenged imperial authority. Conversely, the authorities remained unmoved by the aforementioned massacres at the hands of the Spanish and Dutch. If anyone deserved to be punished, it was those who had removed themselves from the clutches of monopolistic rule.
Even when in the eighteenth century Taiwan became a major and lucrative source of sugar, China made no attempt to add similarly sugar-rich Luzon to its portfolio. There was simply no need: 90 percent of the Chinese sugar supply came from domestic sources, along with all its silk and tobacco. At that stage, trade in foreign luxuries, not to mention overseas colonization, promised little tangible gain. China’s politically unified domestic market generally obviated the need to develop overseas trade.65
This negative preference was not primarily a function of limited capabilities: rather, it was shaped by the logic of hegemonic empire. It was not necessary to venture out as long as foreign merchants went to great lengths to come to China. It was not expedient to develop overseas assets when the task of managing and preserving a huge empire absorbed a thinly spread bureaucracy’s full attention. It was not desirable to support colonial communities that might slip out of the center’s grasp. On the rare occasions that the empire projected power beyond its terrestrial core, it was either to advertise its hegemonic supremacy or to crack down on renegade Chinese who challenged its monopoly from the margins. All this makes it fruitless to wonder why the empire did not send out explorers or found colonies: the framing conditions could hardly have been more different from those that prevailed in Europe’s competitive state system.
In this respect, the Chinese experience was merely a particularly intense manifestation of a much broader pattern. Other large empires faced similar constraints. South Asia did not usually generate major maritime initiatives in the European mold. Empire formation was based on plunder and revenue from land, and state investment in navies was often modest.66
Developments in Chola—far away from the northwestern frontier—in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries remained a rare outlier. Chola’s naval ven
tures began with an invasion of Sri Lanka followed by westward expansion to Nicobar, the Andamans, Laccadivs, and Maldives, and culminated in an expedition against Srivijaya in Malaya and Sumatra in 1025. This undertaking involved capacious transport ships, similar to those the Ming treasure fleets employed 400 years later. Just as in the latter case, the Chola projects were driven by ambitious rulers, the father–son pair of Rajaraja I and Rajendra I. In a further parallel, this blue-water navy proved to be an unsustainable extravagance: more pressing concerns in the form of rivalry with a more traditional land empire—the Western Chalukyas—absorbed resources, just as war with the Mongols would in Ming China.
Structural incentives to develop expansion by sea were transient, weak, or absent. Occasional interest did not lead to transformative change in ship design or armaments, let alone to cooperation between the state and mercantile groups. Merchants, for all their sometimes very considerable wealth, lacked institutionalized power. Even though merchant associations existed—most notably in Chola—that collected taxes and maintained armed forces for protection and to assist rulers, they were always subordinate to domineering centers.67
The same constraint applied to the Ottoman empire. In his somewhat disingenuously titled study The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Giancarlo Casale succeeds above all in demonstrating that there was in fact no such thing. Just as in Ming China, politics at a monopolistic imperial court played a decisive role. An elite faction in favor of expansion and international trade in the Indian Ocean region competed with those who were staunchly opposed to these goals: initiatives were launched or aborted depending on which side held the upper hand. Thus, two viziers in the 1560s and 1570s were the driving force behind a southward push—with failed plans for a Suez canal and an expedition to Sumatra—that fizzled once the leading proponent, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, had been outmaneuvered by those favoring the more traditional imperial pursuit of war with Iran, and was finally assassinated. Support at the center faded, and renewed initiatives in the periphery, notably Yemen, were inadequate.68
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