by Kevin Reilly
Notes
1. Historians do not know why they were called “blood sweating,” but Liu Xinru and Lynda Shaffer suggest that it may be a result of sweat oxidizing (turning orange or red) on snow. See Liu Xinru and Lynda Shaffer, Connections across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange along the Silk Roads (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). Other historians have speculated that a parasite may have caused lesions that bled.
2. Despite recent evidence of silk production in Harappan India before 1500 BCE, there is no evidence that it might have continued after the end of the Indus civilization about that time.
3. World population stagnated again at about 400 million between 1200 and 1300 as a result of the Mongol invasions and again at a slightly higher level from 1350 to 1450 as a result of the Black Death.
4. Lynda Shaffer, “Southernization,” Journal of World History 5 (Spring 1994): 1–21.
5. For a map, see http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kush/hd_kush_d1map.htm.
6. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 76. Bentley actually offers a number of reasons for the spread of Buddhism in China in this useful introduction to the subject.
7. William Theodore de Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan (New York: Random House, 1969), 132–37.
8. Laotzi or Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) is the traditionally designated author of the Tao Te Ching or Daodejing, variously translated as The Book of Changes and The Way and Integrity Classic, which was written by many authors in the third century BCE.
9. The carvings of Borobudur in Java tell the story of the Buddha in hundreds of relief images. Chinese sculptors also created the fat-belly Buddhas that expressed Chinese attitudes toward food and enjoyment. Indian and Southeast Asian Buddhas were thinner and more somber.
10. The Acts of John, adapted from M. R. James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 42.
11. Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 341.
12. See Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 144–47.
13. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Harper, 1988), 277.
14. Adapted from Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 106–9.
15. Willibald, Life of Boniface: The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, trans. C. H. Talbot (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 45. Willibald was a student of Boniface’s.
16. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Premodern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 109. The document is called the “Sutra on Mysterious Rest and Joy.” Bentley also notes that the Nestorian translations left something to be desired; for example, “Jesus” in Chinese became “Yishu,” which could mean “a rat on the move.”
17. Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 138.
18. Essentially, the Orthodox Church refused to recognize Roman superiority and disagreed about minor matters of doctrine like the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and Purgatory (both of which had become canonical in the West in the Middle Ages).
19. From about 2.7 million to 5.4 million, according to Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmond-sworth: Penguin, 1978), 145. According to the same source, the high of 700 was not reached again until the nineteenth century.
20. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See “Religious Conversion and the Spread of Innovation,” the author’s excerpt from the above, at “Fathom: The Source for Online Learning,” http://www.fathom.com.
21. See http://www.bede.org.uk/Library2.htm# Royal. Estimates vary widely. Seneca estimated 40,000 (or 400,000 if a zero was missed by the medieval copyist).
22. See http://www.acadia.org/competition-98/sites/integrus.com/html/library/time.html. As late as 1290, the Sorbonne library in Paris had only 1,017 volumes, and in 1475, the Vatican library contained 2,527 volumes; no European library contained more than 400,000 volumes until 1819.
The Making of an
Afro-Eurasian Network
1000 CE-1450 CE
China in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network
Industry and Invention
Textiles and Pottery
Paper and Printing
Compass and Ships
Guns and Gunpowder
Iron and Coal
Industrial Revolution?
Commerce and Capitalism
Money and Markets
Public versus Private Enterprise
Hangzhou
State and Bureaucracy
The Modern State
A Bureaucracy of Experts
Mongols in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network
The Mongols
Death and Destruction
Trade and Tolerance
Political Divisions and Economic Unity
World History for a Global Age
Ecological Unity: A Dark Victory
Islam in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network
New Muslims from the Steppe
Slaves, Soldiers, and Sons
In Place of Government
Muslims, Merchants, and Market
A Merchant’s Religion
Cairo
Islam in Africa
Islam in West Africa
Swahili Culture
A Single Ecozone
Islam in India and Indonesia
Europe in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network
Revival and Expansion
Good Weather and Good Luck
Two Europes, Four Economies
Cities and States
Urban Renewal
City-States and Citizenship
Law and Science
Natural Law and Natural Reason
Twelfth-Century Renaissance
Popular Science
The Formation of the Modern Network
Death and Rebirth
The Renaissance
The Classical and the Novel
Japan and Korea
Imitators and Innovators
Conclusion: The Virtues of Variety
IN 1325, Ibn Battuta, a young Muslim from Morocco, left for a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. From there, he traveled through Syria, Iraq, Persia, and finally to India, where he was appointed as a judge because, although he did not speak any Indian languages, he spoke Arabic and was a jurist of the Quran. From 1333 to 1345, in his thirties and forties, he traveled extensively throughout India on official missions and to satisfy his curiosity. In 1345, Ibn Battuta sailed from India to China. At almost every port in China, he met someone he knew—the man who had first offered him money to set him up in Delhi and a Chinese envoy who had previously accompanied him on a trip from Delhi to Calicut—and on an invitation to meet the emperor, he stopped at the port of Fuzhou, where he ran into a fellow Moroccan who had lived 40 miles from his home in Morocco, a man he had recently seen in India. For Ibn Battuta, the earth was a very small world.1
In the age of Ibn Battuta, global travel became predictable and almost common. There were established agents, carriers, tickets, regular stops, accommodations for the traveler, places of worship for the foreign community, contacts, letters of introduction, and even souvenirs. That a Muslim who lived near the Atlantic coast could travel to the Pacific coast of China without passport or hindrance was a sign of how integrated the world had become.
Not everywhere but in numerous places—especially across Eurasia—people encountered the ways of foreigners. And in many cases, the ways of the foreigner became their own. Foreign religions, customs, clothes, crops, crafts, ideas, and even spouses won over or converted individuals, families,
and communities that had for generations prided themselves on the antiquity of their ways. Change was not always voluntary or swift, and many people dug in their heels instead of opening their arms, but, ironically, as the variety of human experience became more visible for all to see, more people found common interests and identities over vastly larger regions of the planet.
This chapter is the story of how the integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe increased between 1000 and 1450. It is also the story of how that integration changed localities, states, and regions, making them both less different, one from the other, and also each more internally varied as their inhabitants increased their contacts with foreign ways and changed their own. Thus, the story of hemispheric integration is also the story of the origins of the modern world.
The previous chapters show how our world has been shaped by processes that began a long time ago. The agricultural revolution changed the way we eat and work, how many of us there are, and the lives we lead. The urban revolution multiplied our numbers and vastly increased the complexity of life. The Iron Age extended that life down the social scale and over the horizon. Our classical cultures still inform and shape us through our languages, values, and ideas. When those classical cultures were absorbed and eclipsed by a new set of ideas, techniques, and religions (the impact of southernization and universal religions), new communities emerged that were frequently both larger and more cosmopolitan than their predecessors.
In the past 1,000 years, the world has become far more integrated still. While we think of globalization as a very recent development, its roots actually go back to the first half of the previous millennium. Between roughly 1000 and 1450, the Chinese, Mongols, Muslims, Africans, and Europeans created and participated in a single network of trade, travel, and interchange. In the previous chapter, we saw the development of the early stages of this network among the Muslims and Chinese. In this chapter, we see how Africa and eventually Europe became active partners in an even more global network.
The story begins with China because it stood like a colossus over Eurasia from 1000 to 1450. Chinese technologies, manufactures, economic innovations, and organizing ideas formed the principal fuel of global interaction.
China in the Making of an
Afro-Eurasian Network
We have seen in the previous chapter how the Chinese effort to exchange silk for horses created the Silk Road, the first important link between Asia and Europe. When the Huns and other nomadic peoples of north-central Asia interrupted the flow of goods along the Silk Road between the third and sixth centuries, the trade moved south. Malays, Indians, and Arabs pioneered a route that brought southern spices as well as silks and tropical products across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. China was reduced to a number of smaller feuding kingdoms, not unlike the period before its unification 500 years earlier.
By the sixth century, however, the northern steppe stabilized as the nomads learned to extract payment from the caravans for protection and provisions and China reunited its empire. Under three successive dynasties, Sui (580-618), Tang (618-907), and Song (960-1279), China achieved a level of technological innovation that the world had never seen. Consequently, as trade between China and the West developed again along the northern Silk Road, China was undergoing a profound technological transformation. The new contacts between China and the West were then interrupted temporarily by the Mongol conquests, but relations resumed under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Mongol rule was devastating, though in some areas—mainly maritime and military—the technology and economy of China continued to grow. The return of native Chinese rule with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) revitalized Chinese expansion, especially during the first half of the fifteenth century.
In three key areas that have shaped the modern world—the technology of the industrial revolution, the market economy, and the modern bureaucratic state—China was centuries ahead of the rest of the world.
Industry and Invention
So profound and pervasive was Chinese industrial growth from 1000 to 1450 that historians have compared it to the later industrial revolution. While historians still date the beginnings of the industrial revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain, many of the roots of that revolution lay in the industrial products and techniques of China.
Textiles and Pottery . Chinese silk and porcelain were the gold standards for textiles and pottery when Britain launched an industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century by producing factory-made cottons and ceramic dishes called “China.” By the Song dynasty, Chinese porcelains were collected throughout the world as works of art. In the fifteenth century, East African merchants displayed Chinese blue and white dishes on the walls of their houses as a sign of prosperity. True Chinese porcelain could not be duplicated elsewhere. The luminous pottery was made from Chinese clay and feldspar, a Chinese stone. The imperial potteries established after 1000 employed over a million people by 1712, when French Jesuits smuggled the secrets to Europeans.
The secrets of silk production—feeding silkworms on the leaves of mulberry trees, then unraveling the strands of their cocoons into a fine thread—had been protected by threat of death until the sixth century. In 552, however, the secret (along with the worms and leaves) was smuggled in bamboo from China to the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Constantinople established a rival silk industry that later spread throughout the Muslim world as well.
Chinese silk and porcelain attracted such a huge continental demand that these industries stimulated the development of power machinery and mass production, very much the way British industry did hundreds of years later. Already mechanized by the Song dynasty, Chinese textile producers used water-powered mills and spinning wheels by the eleventh century.
Paper and Printing . We have already pointed to early Chinese papermaking—from mulberry bark and bamboo fiber around 100 BCE (about 1,000 years before the Muslim world and 1,500 years before Europe). Printing with carved wood blocks may have originated in Buddhist monasteries as part of their effort to reproduce scriptures from India. The earliest of these may have been produced by Buddhist monks in Korea, but the first print shops were probably those in Chinese monasteries around 700 to 750. A million copies of the first Japanese scroll book were printed between 764 and 770, but not one was meant to be read. Rather, each was to be a miniature Buddha reciting prayers.2 The earliest Chinese printed book to be read dates from 868. Block printing (carving a complete page at once) was particularly appropriate for Chinese with its tens of thousands of characters, and blocks could be engraved with pictures as well as words.
The use of individual pieces of movable type for printing developed later. Chinese printers experimented with wooden, ceramic, and metal type (which was probably first developed by skilled Korean metalworkers). In general, however, Chinese printers continued to use block printing. Movable type worked best where a few symbols were used frequently. Not only did the Chinese have the problem of innumerable characters, but Chinese culture also prized calligraphy, having turned the written script into an art form—one entirely lost by machinelike interchangeable typefaces. For Europeans, who had used phonetic alphabets for centuries, movable-type printing was a much greater advantage. Nevertheless, both printing and movable type came to Europe sometime after 1250, probably through Italy, possibly in the skills of slaves from Tibet or western China who were brought from the Black Sea markets to many Italian cities. The creation of a movable-type printing press by Gutenberg around 1450 combined the advantages of a mechanical press with movable type and a phonetic language that would eventually produce mass-market books and periodicals for a reading public in the millions and even billions.
Compass and Ships . The Chinese discovered the magnetic properties of magnetite and created magnets and compasses as early as the third century. By the eleventh century, the floating compass needle was used in Chinese ships. During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese colonized areas in the south, and by the Song dynasty, a majority of the Chine
se population lived south of the Yangtze. Increasingly, relations with the peoples of the southern oceans became a matter of imperial policy. By the end of the Song dynasty, Chinese ships were sailing regularly into the Indian Ocean. Chinese vessels also sailed to the Spice Islands of modern Indonesia for the same spices that would attract Columbus 500 years later. During the period of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), the Mongols sent Chinese ships to invade Java and Japan. The Japanese invasion of 1281 failed, according to Japanese tradition, because of a “divine wind” (kamikaze) that sunk the Chinese ships, but recent excavations suggest that the ships, though huge by European standards, may have been poorly constructed.
When the native Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1644) gained control of China, shipbuilding became a major priority. Huge dry docks were constructed, new shipbuilding technologies perfected, and thousands of sailors trained. Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming emperor dispatched hundreds of “treasure ships,” huge vessels, any one of which could have tucked Columbus’s entire fleet of three ships into its hold. Under the command of Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim from Yunnan in southwestern China, these ships brought tens of thousands of Chinese sailors, diplomats, naturalists, artists, mapmakers, and tribute collectors on visits to foreign ports as far away as East Africa. The continual threat of invasion from northern and central Asia probably brought the ocean voyages to an abrupt close.
Guns and Gunpowder . In 644, an Indian monk in China showed that certain soils (containing saltpeter), if ignited, would produce a purple flame. By the eighth century, Chinese alchemists were making gunpowder. In the tenth century, soldiers packed gunpowder into bamboo tubes to launch rockets against enemy troops and fortifications. The first known cannon date from 1127. Probably the first population to share this Chinese technology was the nomadic confederacies of the steppe. Although their main weapons were crossbows fired from fast-moving horses, the Mongols also used gunpowder and Chinese catapults effectively, especially in the siege of cities. Weapons developed in warfare rarely remain secrets very long, particularly since it was common practice for each side to turn border populations and defeated troops into their own armies. Nevertheless, gunpowder did not reach European or Middle Eastern armament makers for more than 400 years. It may have come to Italy, along with printing, in the minds and skills of slaves purchased in Black Sea ports.
