TOWARDS GLOBILISATION
While the Portuguese were establishing their trade empire in South East Asia, the Spanish were exploring their possessions in the Americas and began looking for their own westward route to the riches of the Spice Islands.
By 1513 a Spanish explorer had trekked across the Panama isthmus and was the first European to set eyes on the ocean on the far side.42 As we saw in Chapter 2, Ferdinand Magellan – a Portuguese navigator but sailing for the Spanish – passed round the bottom tip of South America in 1520 through the strait that now bears his name and called this new ocean the ‘Mare Pacificum’ – the Peaceful Sea.43 His fleet rode north along the coast with the Humboldt Current of the South Pacific Gyre before picking up the trade winds to sail westward to the Philippines, which he claimed for Spain. Magellan was killed on the island of Mactan, but his fleet continued on their voyage and in 1521 reached the Moluccas, the famed Spice Islands themselves and at the time the sole source in the world of nutmeg and cloves.fn15
The problem for the Spanish voyage to the Spice Islands was that the mariners had found a route west across the Pacific, but did not know the winds needed to return east to the Americas. The only ship of Magellan’s expedition to make it home did so by continuing west across the Indian Ocean, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. As her captain wrote: ‘We made a course around the entire rotundity of the world – that by going by the Occident we have returned by the Orient.’45
It took another forty years before Spanish sailors had gained knowledge of the winds that allowed a return journey back east across the Pacific to the Americas. Realising that the pattern of winds in the Pacific replicates that of the Atlantic, navigators sailed north from the Philippines as far as the coast of Japan before picking up the band of westerlies (in the Ferrel circulation cell of the atmosphere) that carried them in the right direction.46 The discovery enabled the Spanish to bridge the vast Pacific Ocean with regular round-trip shipping, the Manila Galleon Route. This ran between the colonies of New Spain in Acapulco, in present-day Mexico, and Manila in the Philippines, and for 250 years – from 1565 to 1815, ending with the Mexican War of Independence – this Pacific crossing was the longest-running trade route in history.47 The westerly winds across the Pacific delivered the galleons to the coast of California, where they needed way stations to be resupplied after this long ocean crossing and before setting off on the last leg of their journey south down the coast to Mexico. This explains the strong Spanish colonial presence in the region, with the names of the major cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego still recalling the Spanish influence today.
The main cargo carried west across the Pacific on this route was silver. In the 1540s the Spanish discovered rich silver veins in Mexico, as well as the ‘silver mountain’ of Potosí high in the Andes.48 fn16 Most of this silver was taken up the South American coast on the Humboldt Current to the Panama Isthmus, carried across this narrow land bridge by packs of mules and then loaded onto ships bound for Spain.52 Sailing across the Atlantic in treasure flotillas the Spanish galleons were the prey of French, Dutch and English corsairs with memorable names like ‘Peg Leg’ Le Clerc and Francis Drake.
About a fifth of the mined American silver was sent across the Pacific aboard Manila Galleons and in the Philippines it was traded for Chinese luxuries: silk, porcelain, incense, musk and spices.53 Ultimately, whether it was carried on the Manila Galleon route to the Philippines for trade with the Chinese, or back to Spain and then filtered through the European empires towards the east, about a third of all South American silver flowed to China,54 which placed a higher value on this precious metal even than on gold. Some of the silver was traded with India, where in the early seventeenth century the Mogul ruler Shah Jahan built a resplendent mausoleum for his wife – the Taj Mahal. This enduring symbol of love also epitomises the early global economy that was taking off with the Age of Sail: South American silver exploited by the Spanish, and handled through European merchants, ultimately financed a monumental building project in India.55
For a time, Spain grew immensely rich and powerful with this stream of silver coming out of the Americas. But like the Atlantic Trade Triangle, to which we’ll come later, this immense European wealth came at a great human cost for the workers mining the depths of the silver mountain for months at a time, suffering the heat and dust at a lung-straining altitude of 4,000 m. Potosí has been memorably described as the ‘mountain that eats men’.56
The seventeenth century saw another crucial new route opened to the East Indies. The passage discovered by the Portuguese in the last years of the fifteenth century went round the tip of Africa, followed up the continent’s eastern coastline and crossed to India, before heading round to the Strait of Malacca. The route dipped only slightly into the band of westerly winds to carry ships past the southern tip of Africa. These are the Southern-Hemisphere mirror image of the mid-latitude westerly winds that the Spanish learnt to ride from the Philippines to Mexico on the Manila Galleon Route. But as we saw earlier, in the Southern Hemisphere these westerlies are unobstructed by major land masses and are consequently far stronger. It wasn’t for over another century, however, that sailors realised how they could fully exploit the Roaring Forties.
Connecting the world: major oceanic trade routes exploiting different wind bands and ocean currents.
In 1611, Captain Henrik Brouwer of the Dutch East India Company passed the Cape of Good Hope and instead of heading northeast towards India turned south, deeper into the westerlies. These carried him fully 7,000 kilometres east before he exited this fast-moving ocean freeway and turned north again to Java. The Brouwer Route, making use of the Roaring Forties, took less than half the time of the traditional passage – not least because it obviated the need to wait for the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean. As well as offering a far quicker voyage to the Spice Islands, this more southerly and cooler route away from the tropics kept the crew healthier and supplies fresher.
The development of the new passage had a number of profound historical consequences. It was sailors taking the Brouwer Route who first set eyes on the west coast of Australia. And detouring south around the Indian Ocean meant that the passage shifted the gateway into the East Indies from the Strait of Malacca to the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. The Dutch founded Batavia – present-day Jakarta – in 1619 as their operational centre in the region and to command this key strait. This zone of strong winds was also the reason behind the founding of Cape Town: the Dutch needed a resupply port for ships before the long final leg of their journey. The Roaring Forties wind belt is therefore the reason why Afrikaans is spoken today in South Africa.fn17
It was spices that drove the early years of the Age of Exploration and the global oceanic trade carried by European ships, but by 1700 new commodities had come to dominate demand. Crops originally grown in Africa and India had been transplanted to the New World and large amounts of coffee were now being produced in Brazil, sugar in the Caribbean, and cotton in North America.58 And the demand for labour needed to mass-produce these commodities for the European markets led to another transcontinental trading system, which is arguably the most significant of all for the shape of the world today.
In simple terms, the Atlantic Trade Triangle linked Europe, Africa and the Americas to serve Europe’s insatiable hunger for cheap cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco. Ships sailed from Europe with goods manufactured in these developed nations, such as textiles and weapons, down to the West African coast to trade them with local chiefs for slaves they had captured. They then transported these slaves across the Atlantic to sell them in the colonies, to plantation owners in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.fn18 The capital raised by selling this human cargo was used by the captains to purchase the commodities grown on the plantations, the produce of the slaves’ labours. The cargo holds of the slave ships were scrubbed with vinegar and lye and they then took these raw materials back to Europe for manufacturing, and so completed th
e loop.61 There were variations on the exact routes sailed and the wares transferred at each leg in overlapping circuits, as well as short hops shuttling goods along certain stretches of coastline,62 but this was the core of the Atlantic Trade Triangle that operated between the European homelands and their colonial territories from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.
Before shipment across the Atlantic, African slaves were held in coastal forts, known as factories, often established at the mouth of rivers as this offered the easiest way for transporting captives from further inland. The great majority of slaves were taken from West Central Africa – the region between the equator and about 15° south – and along the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra in the Gulf of Guinea. This too is largely due to the mechanics of atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean currents. From these locations it is easier to cross to South America with the southeasterly trade winds and then south down the coast with the Brazil Current for the Brazilian coffee plantations; or follow the northeasterly trades and north equatorial current to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands, the cotton plantations of Alabama and Carolina, and tobacco plantations of Virginia. The Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1807, but continued by smugglers until the abolition of slavery with the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. By this time over 10 million Africans had been forcibly seized and transported to the Americas,63 many dying in the abysmal conditions on the way or in the first year or two on the plantations. About 40 per cent were taken to Brazil, 40 per cent to the Caribbean, 5 per cent to what became the United States, and 15 per cent to Spanish America.64
The shipping merchants sold their cargo for a profit at each stage of the triangle, and so like an economic perpetual motion machine the system generated huge financial gains for its masters with each turn of the crank. While the European nations began to use waterwheels and then steam engines to power their mills and factories, the enslaved human workforce overseas providing the raw materials was an equally important component of the machinery driving the economics of industrialisation. Before the forces of abolitionism gathered strength, the taste of sweetened tea or a slug of rum, the feeling of a clean shirt on the back, and the invigorating inhalation of pipe smoke made Europeans close their minds to the human suffering that was ultimately providing for their lifestyle.65 fn19
The huge areas of new land that made up Europe’s overseas colonies and the raw materials and profits they provided helped create the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, but just as crucial for powering this transformation was the availability of seemingly limitless amounts of energy from the subterranean world, to which we’ll now turn.
Chapter 9
Energy
For the vast majority of the 10,000-year history of settled humanity we have been an agrarian society. Sedentary peoples have fed themselves on crops grown in the nearby fields and raised animals for meat, milk and traction power. Husbandry has also provided the fibres we make into clothes to protect ourselves from the elements: cotton, linen, silk, leather and wool.
In essence, agriculture gathers solar energy from a certain area of land, and transforms it into nutrition for our bodies and raw materials for our community. Over time we have increased the agricultural output either by expanding the area under cultivation – by clearing forest to make way for farmland and developing new tools and techniques, such as the heavy plough, to cultivate previously marginal land – or by selective breeding of higher-yielding crops and animals, and crop-rotation schemes. We have become increasingly adept at this through history, and consequently our population has boomed.
Felling forests has also provided the firewood we need for cooking our food and heating our homes. And timber provided the heat energy needed to convert the raw materials we gathered from the natural environment into products like pottery, bricks, metals and glass. To create the greater temperatures required in our kilns, furnaces, forges and foundries, we have carbonised wood to make charcoal. In this way, by relying on charcoal made from forests, even steel and glass production was tied to the growth of trees. As our population grew and the demand for timber to be used as fuel and construction materials increased, we began to run out of nearby natural forests and learned how to coppice. Coppicing is the system of managed forestry where trees such as ash, birch and oak are felled and allowed to resprout from the trunk to redevelop into another mature tree. Coppicing can be carried out in repeated cycles to provide a continual supply of wood from the land.fn1
But as the population in Europe continued to grow, even coppicing could not satisfy our insatiable appetite for firewood and construction timber. From the mid seventeenth century this shortage became more and more acute and the price of wood rose inexorably. Europe was hitting ‘peak wood’: all suitable land was already being used to grow food and the production of fuel could not be increased any further. Then, however, a new source of energy began to be explored that not only kept our home fires burning, but provided levels of energy that far outstripped muscle power.
SUNSHINE AND MUSCLE POWER
For most of human history, the power required for building and maintaining civilisation had been provided by muscles, whether those of human labourers or draft animals. Muscles, properly employed and coordinated, can achieve phenomenal feats: the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of medieval Europe – all were constructed with muscle power and simple mechanical contraptions like rollers, ramps and winches. But muscles need to be fuelled by food, which in turn requires farmland and pasture. And so as our population swelled and agricultural land became increasingly scarce, muscles got expensive.2
There already were alternatives to muscle power that harnessed natural, renewable energy sources. Much was accomplished with the turning force provided first by the waterwheel and then the windmill. The waterwheel was invented around 2,500 years ago, and by the first century AD it was used by the Chinese for driving the bellows in blast furnaces for smelting iron.3 The most extensive waterwheel facility constructed by the Romans was in Barbegal in southern France, built soon after AD 100.4 Here a system of sixteen waterwheels made up the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world,5 with a total output equivalent to 30 kilowatts of power.fn2 Windmills first appeared in Persia in the ninth century AD, and were constantly refined as they spread across medieval Europe. The Low Countries in particular adopted windmills with great enthusiasm for draining polders and reclaiming land from the sea, as we saw in Chapter 4. Waterwheels and windmills came to provide the motive power for everything from grinding grain into flour, pressing olives for oil, sawing timber, crushing metal ores and limestone, and driving rollers to squeeze iron bars into shape.
This mechanical revolution, which gathered pace from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, saw medieval Europe become the first society not to base its productivity on the straining toil of human or animal muscles alone. But even so, energy availability remained a limitation on productivity, with waterwheels and windmills subject to the vagaries of river levels and wind breezes. Even though waterwheels or windmills alleviated the physical exertion of running production processes, we continued to live in a world run on muscle power and sunshine.
Over history we have learned to divert the energy of the sun through the ecosystem and channel it instead into our bodies and our society. It was sunshine that ripened our crops and nurtured our forests. Indeed, for most of our history the productivity of civilisation had relied on, and was limited by, photosynthesis and how quickly plants could generate food and fuel on the land we had at our disposal.
This system has been given various labels, such as the Organic Energy Economy, the Somatic Energy Regime, or the Biological Old Regime,6 but they all allude to the same truth: before the eighteenth century, the entire history of civilisation had been supported by solar energy harvested by crops and forests, and muscle power supplied by human labourers and draught animals which in turn had to be fuelled by
food gathered from plants. But if society’s productivity is governed by the growth rate of crops and coppices – by how quickly you can harvest the sunshine – it is fundamentally limited by the suitable land that is available. Moreover, the food you eat and the firewood you need for manufacturing compete with each other over the same land. There is a hard ceiling on what agricultural empires can achieve.
The only way to escape these limitations is to find sources of energy that don’t require you to harvest sunlight directly. And this was accomplished in eighteenth-century Europe, by tapping into the huge stockpiles of stored energy lying under our feet. Rather than trying to extract more energy from the land surface, we burrowed underground to extract caches of ancient forest growth, in the form of coal. Coal is essentially a combustible sedimentary rock and a single coal seam represents the condensed essence of many seasons of forest growth – it is fossilised sunshine. Just one tonne of coal can provide as much heat energy as a year’s firewood taken from a whole acre of coppiced woodland. It was coal that built the modern world.
THE POWER REVOLUTION
Origins Page 23