Origins
Page 9
Equids (species related to horses) evolved in the grassy plains of North America, but by the end of the last ice age the only four groups of equids to survive were all found in Eurasia: onagers in the Near East, asses in North Africa, zebras in sub-Saharan Africa, and the horse in the Eurasian steppe belt. Similarly, the ancestor of the modern camel – alongside the horse the other animal serving the crucial function of carrying packs or human riders over long distances – lived in the cold climate of the Canadian high arctic and crossed the Bering land bridge into Eurasia with the lower sea levels of a past ice age. The two-humped Bactrian camels in Asia are direct descendants from these American immigrants, and in the hotter deserts of Africa and Arabia the single-humped dromedary evolved to minimise its surface area and thus water loss. These camels became the backbone of the long trade routes through the Sahara, Arabian peninsula and the deserts along the southern margin of the Asian steppe belt. Camelids also migrated across the Isthmus of Panama into South America and developed into the llama and alpaca, but as a beast of burden the llama cannot carry much more than a man, and alpacas were used only for their fleeces.84
The great irony of the biological impediment faced by the American civilisations is that these two groups of animals which became so central to transportation and trade across Eurasia had in fact evolved in the Americas and then migrated into Eurasia along the Bering land bridge.85 But both the horse and camel subsequently died out in their homeland, probably due to over-hunting from early humans who crossed the same land bridge in the opposite direction during the most recent ice age. The first Americans had unwittingly hobbled the future development of civilisations across their continent.
Donkey, horse and camel became critical to the travel and trade routes across the steppes, deserts and mountain passes of Eurasia, Arabia and Africa, greatly empowering the economies and enabling the transfer of people, resources, ideas and technologies across the Old World. The Americas, on the other hand, were biologically impoverished and could not benefit from these revolutions. The camel never returned to the Americas in any significant numbers, but the horse was brought back to its native lands with the Spanish conquistadores in the early sixteenth century. And when contact between the two worlds was renewed in the 1500s, it was European states, the inheritors of this accumulated Eurasian bounty, that came to dominate the cultures of the Americas.86
When humanity emerged in the Cenozoic, the age of ‘new life’, we entered a world characterised by angiosperms and mammals – plants with encased seeds and animals with breasts. But within these broad categories, we have on the whole been surprisingly selective in the species we came to domesticate. Civilisations throughout history have been fed on a staple diet of cereal crops, derived from wild grass species that proliferated around the world as the climate cooled and dried over the past few tens of millions of years. The spread of these grasslands also drove the diversification of the ungulate species that we came to domesticate, providing us with a reliable source of meat, milk and wool, transport and traction power. But when humanity became able to settle as farmers and start down the path of civilisation soon after the end of the last ice age, the uneven distribution of domesticable plant and animal species around the world, as well as the fundamental orientation of the continents, came to exert a deep influence on the patterns of history.
Many of the earliest civilisations to emerge did so along the banks of great watercourses like the Tigris and Euphrates, Indus, Nile and Yellow rivers. They provided the lifeblood for reliable agriculture and the first cities, and political power often arose from the centralised control of their waters for irrigation. Successful agriculture is utterly reliant on intercepting fresh water as it cycles around the world – evaporating from oceans, falling as rain, percolating underground and then flowing back to the sea. Rivers are often the most reliable stage of this water cycle, and they remain critical for feeding many people around the world today. Industrialised agriculture has been refined to the point where it now supports more than 7.6 billion people. Today over 40 per cent of the total global population lives in India, China and Southeast Asia, and this brings us to the central geopolitical significance of Tibet.
THE WATER TOWER
China has controlled the Tibetan plateau at various periods through its history, such as during the Mongolian Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century and the Qing dynasty from the early eighteenth century. In recent times, the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong annexed Tibet in 1951, and after an uprising in 1959 the country’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India, where a government-in-exile is keeping the independence movement alive in the international eye.
China has two major strategic reasons for wanting control over the Tibetan plateau. The first is military: ensuring that India does not try to secure a commanding position itself, literally overlooking the Chinese heartland, and with it the possibility of using the region as staging grounds for an invasion into the plains below. Even without India taking over the plateau, China is concerned that if it allowed political autonomy to Tibet, India could be permitted to establish military bases there.87 But arguably even more important is a simple, but utterly vital resource that the Tibetan plateau provides: water.
Tibet is the highest and largest plateau in the world, and within its tens of thousands of glaciers it holds the largest store of glacial ice and permafrost outside the Arctic and Antarctic. This high plateau is often referred to as the planet’s Third Pole.88 The meltwater from these glaciers and snow forms the headwaters of ten of the largest rivers fanning out across the whole of South East Asia, including the Yellow River, Yangtze, Mekong, Indus, Brahmaputra and Salween. All these great rivers carry huge amounts of sediment eroded from the mountains to fertilise their flood plains and the rice paddies that have been established here.89
The Tibetan plateau thus serves as the water tower of the entire continental region, storing and distributing the precious resource along these rivers to provide drinking water, irrigation and hydroelectric power to more than 2 billion people.90 It’s this storehouse of vast amounts of freshwater, as well as the rich copper and iron ore deposits on the plateau,91 that China seeks to control for its growing population and economy. By 2030, China is anticipated to have a 25 per cent shortfall in its water needs,92 and so the Tibetan issue is no small matter. It’s immaterial whether India would actually ever attempt to seize Tibet and restrict the flow of the rivers to turn off the taps on China’s water – the mere possibility makes China vulnerable. Likewise, the concern from other downstream states such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam is that in the future China could begin diverting the flow from these Tibetan rivers for its own internal usage.93
The major rivers radiating away from the third pole of the Earth, the Tibetan plateau.
Irrespective of international criticism of China’s occupation of Tibet, and human rights issues therein, these highlands represent an overpowering geopolitical concern for Beijing. It’s for this reason that China is maintaining control, systematically constructing networks of road and rail links throughout the plateau and encouraging ethnic Han Chinese settlers into the area.94
Chapter 4
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The Geography of the Seas
Oceans and seas cover nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. It’s this fact that prompted the author Arthur C. Clarke to quip that we shouldn’t call our planet Earth at all, but Ocean. And in terms of the themes of this book, the oceans are one of the best showcases for the close links between life on our world and deep space. The water on Earth is vital for all life, but when our planet formed from the swirling disc of dust and gas circling around the proto-Sun it was pretty dry. The Earth was too close to the Sun for there to have been much ice
in the rocky material our planet coalesced from, and the heat of its formation melted the planet throughout and would have driven off water and any other volatile compounds. So the water that fills our oceans arrived after the Earth was born, brought by a bombardment of icy comets and asteroids from the colder, outer regions of the solar system – like a blizzard from deep space.
The oceans delivered by this extraterrestrial ice are of course enormously influential on the weather and climate systems of the planet, and water within the crust helps to lubricate the machinery of plate tectonics. But the oceans of the world are often considered to be just empty expanses. They are the blank spaces on our maps, the gaps on the page that merely define the outline of the landmasses. We have come to think that it is the continents and islands where history happens and upon which the human story has played out over the millennia. But the sea has its own rich story to tell.
TURNING WATER INTO WEALTH
From our earliest days, humanity has relied upon the planet’s watery expanses for food. Fish taken from rivers, lakes or shallow coastal waters have provided easily accessible nutrition for tens of thousands of years.1 But fishing in the open sea, far from land, requires much greater skills in shipbuilding and navigation. Norse seafarers were accomplished at long voyages and from around AD 800 had established an international trade in the dried cod they produced. These skills of the open sea were learned by other Europeans, and the North Sea became an important fishing ground.2 And it’s here that we can see how crucial the geography of the seas – and the landscape of the seafloor in particular – has been in history.
In the middle of the North Sea, between England and Denmark, lies Dogger Bank, a huge sandbank believed to be a large moraine that was piled up at the head of the Scandinavian ice sheet during the last glacial phase. During the lowered sea levels of the last ice age, this whole region would have been dry, known as Doggerland, and offered prime hunting grounds for our ancestors. Today it is submerged, but Dogger Bank forms a large area of shallow waters beneath the waves, and so provides a productive fishing area for cod and herring. (‘Dogger’ is an old Dutch word for a trawl-fishing boat.) Thus the Ice Age hunting grounds of our ancestors were drowned and transformed into a bountiful fishing region for medieval mariners.
This sandbank helped launch open-sea fishing in northern Europe from around AD 1000.3 With increasing competition between fishermen and overexploitation of the closest shoals, Norse, Basque and other European seafarers were drawn further and further out into the North Atlantic in search of rich fishing grounds, first for cod and later for whales. European sailors ventured west, sailing past Iceland to Greenland, and then on to the north-east American coast where Norse fishermen established colonies on Newfoundland, half a millennium before Columbus set sail across the Atlantic. It was the lessons learned in the process – in seamanship and robust shipbuilding – that enabled European sailors to embark on the Age of Exploration in the early fifteenth century and build vast international trading empires (which we will ourselves explore in Chapter 8).4
But the same North Sea landscape has had another important influence on creating the modern world. The Low Countries of Belgium and the Netherlands sit on the flat coastline of the North European Plain, and from the thirteenth century the Dutch have been using windmills for drainage in order to create new farmland from the sea and marshes.5 In effect, they are reclaiming portions of Ice Age Doggerland since it was re-submerged by the rising sea levels. But the building of dykes and windmills to reclaim tracts of land was expensive, and could only be financed with the pooling of resources from the community. The necessary funds were raised by the local church or council collecting loans from residents, and the agricultural profits from the newly reclaimed fields were then shared amongst those who had originally financed the project. Everyone in society soon came to invest their spare cash in the bonds sold to finance these large enterprises and this, in turn, created thriving credit markets. Shaped by the demands of its landscape, and the necessity to manage the sea, Holland became a land of capitalists.6
This system naturally transitioned into international commerce in the seventeenth century – it is a small step from buying shares in the construction of a local windmill to financing a trading ship bound for the Spice Islands. The practice of dividing the overall cost of a project into part shares also allowed investors to spread their risk – they could put small amounts of money into several voyages, so that if any one ship was lost, they would not be hit too heavily. This encouraged people to invest their money, rather than simply stashing it, which kept the interest rates on loans low and so the cost of capital cheap for further ventures. The Dutch also enthusiastically adopted and greatly refined the concept of the futures market. This is the ability to negotiate a price for a certain commodity at some point in the future – for example guaranteeing your price for 100 lb of cod landed from the Dogger Bank next week, or in a year’s time. These derivatives can then be bought and sold themselves, like the actual products, creating a trade not of stock already in a storehouse but of abstractions.
The first national central bank as well as the first formal stock market were founded in Amsterdam in the opening years of the seventeenth century,7 by which time Holland had become the most financially developed country in Europe.8 These instruments of formalised capitalism quickly spread to other nations and created the financial institutions needed for the Industrial Revolution. Like the windmills in the medieval Netherlands, Britain’s mills, factories and steam engines would have been prohibitively expensive to build without the pooling of capital from a number of different, and confident, investors.9 Dutch financial innovations helped build the modern world, and they had grown out of her low-lying landscape and the need to reclaim land from the sea.
There are many other ways in which the salt waters of the planet have been instrumental in the human story. The sea can isolate a people from the rest of the word, which is what happened on Tasmania, for example. Here the inhabitants became cut off from the mainland with rising sea levels after the last ice age. The population on the island was too small to maintain technologies and tools such as fishing nets and spears, across the generations, and they became forgotten.10 Or, as we have seen, the sea can help protect from invasion and maintain the independence of an island nation like Britain. The oceans are like the deserts on land: they are not inhabitable in their own right,fn1 but they can be traversed for the movement of goods and people. Storm waves notwithstanding, the sea surface itself is a conveniently flat and unresisting medium for providing highways of trade across great distances. Ports are sited at the interface between sea and land, where goods are transferred from ships to river-boats or carts (or more recently, trains and trucks) to continue their journey to where they’re needed inland, and many of these ports became prosperous and politically powerful cities. It was by mastering the navigation of the oceans that European states built vast maritime empires from the early sixteenth century onwards, projecting their power over immense distances with the help of fleets of cannon-sprouting, floating fortresses. And the chokepoints in maritime routes, where ships are constrained to pass through narrow straits, are as strategically central to geopolitics and the power-play between states today as they were millennia ago.
In these different ways, the huge areas shaded blue on our world maps are just as important in shaping human history as the green, brown and white features indicating plains, forests, deserts and icy mountain ranges on land. Like this dry landscape the geography of the seas has directed our affairs through history. Let’s start by looking at the Mediterranean.
THE INNER SEA
The Mediterranean region is one of the most complex tectonic environments on Earth. Here the African plate is shunting northwards and being subducted beneath the Eurasian, with a jumbled array of several smaller plates trapped in between, to drive a flurry of mountain-building and volcanic activity. The Mediterranean has also hosted a vibrant interplay of civilisations throughou
t history, with diverse cultures emerging, developing, trading resources and ideas, competing and going to war with one another, all within a relatively small and compact area. Could these two phenomena be related? Are there good reasons why the tectonic Mediterranean milieu offered a particularly fertile setting for nurturing ancient civilisations?
For millennia, the Mediterranean Sea has buzzed with maritime activity. From the Bronze Age merchants of the Minoans and Phoenicians, through the Greek city states and the Roman Empire, to the trade empires of Genoa and Venice in the later Middle Ages, this oval-shaped sea has connected peoples and cultures around its shores. The Mediterranean is an interior sea where passages are often just short hops. The high mountain ranges along the northern coast, created by the crunching tectonic plates, provide useful landmarks for navigation further from the coast. And the pinching narrowness of the Strait of Gibraltar, where it joins the Atlantic, means that generally the tides within the Mediterranean are minimal – a matter of mere centimetres – and there are no major surface currents to sweep you off course. The Mediterranean does experience fierce storms, however, and the wind patterns are complicated by air flowing off the surrounding landmasses. Still, on the whole this interior sea is ideally set up for communication and trade between cultures. Yet there has been a noticeable bias throughout history: the vast majority of civilisations have blossomed on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and not on the southern.