by Kevin Reilly
In the Dar al-Islam, innovation was more a product of private initiative, mercantile trade, and individual leadership. Despite their prestige, however, the Muslim merchant class was as subject to higher authority as the Chinese. Only the authority was different: clerical and military rather than political and bureaucratic. In fact, in neither China nor the Islamic world was there an independent class of merchants. In both societies, business combinations were made up of families and relations whose loyalties lay with the lineage or clan.
Religious conservatism increasingly undermined innovation in the Islamic world after 1000. Chinese block printing was widely condemned by Muslim clerics who believed that books should be produced by hand, the way the Quran had been copied for centuries. The technical advantage that block printing had in duplicating images made it even more suspicious from the standpoint of those who believed that the Quran forbade visual replication.
European Christians had no such religious obstacles to printing, but they were slow to see its benefits. In fact, they were slow to recognize its existence. Block-printed seals on messages from the Ilkanid rulers of Iran to the kings of England and France seem to have gone unnoticed by their European recipients; although Marco Polo was struck by the paper money of China, he seems to have failed to notice the significance of its printing. Imitation is not automatic. One’s culture prepares one to see and understand.
And cultures change. Muslim science was studied in Europe until the sixteenth century, but once Europeans translated the Greek and Arabic texts, the balance shifted decisively. By the sixteenth century, European artists were drawing precise diagrams of human anatomy taken from dissected cadavers. Islam forbade dissections of human cadavers or pigs. Islamic medical students studied vague and inaccurate depictions of the human body, while students at Bologna were cutting them open.
In Europe sometime after 1200, innovation became systematized. A range of institutions paved the way. Europeans learned to work together in civic and other nonfamilial groups. Investment corporations, merchant companies, and banks often started as family ventures, as they were commonly elsewhere, but the experience of participation in other corporate groups—civic, guild, university, and church—spilled over into business, increasing their scale and flexibility.
In Europe, merchants and bankers could not be controlled or fleeced as easily as they could by an emperor or sultan. In autonomous cities, they became a self-governing class, used to operating independently and communally to secure their fortunes and opportunities. They loaned money to princes and kings and supplied their armies with armaments and uniforms. They were indispensable. Some large merchant banks, such as the Medici in Florence and the Fuggers in Germany, were more powerful than princes, who were a dime a dozen in the patchwork quilt of competing European states. In Europe, a class of capitalists created society in their own image. A recent world history puts it well:
Since moneyed men were continually on the lookout for anything that might turn a profit, a self-sustaining process of economic, social, and technological change gathered headway wherever political conditions allowed it the freedom to operate. Time and again, local interests and old fashioned ways of doing things were displaced by politically protected economic innovators, who saw a chance at monetary profit by introducing something new. This situation still persists today, having transformed European society, and then infected the whole wide world, thus marking modern times off from earlier, more stable forms of society.43
But we have seen that merchants were not the only innovators in Europe. Poets, painters, composers, scientists, and mechanics were cultural innovators as much as preservers. The city was as much the crucible of the new order as was the market. And the yeast of change was not only greed and private profit. It was also a product of universalism and civic identity, individuality and community, and reason and faith.
Finally, as we have seen over and over again, to invent something is not to own it. Often the borrowers are able to do more with an invention than its creators. While the seedlings of the modern age dug their roots in different soils and climes, their fruits are as transferable as the apples of Kazakhstan or the peaches of Samarkand.
Conclusion:
The Virtues of Variety
“Social and political institutions of Europe,” the historian Arnold Pacey says in a particularly felicitous phrase, “favored ‘the multiplication of points of creativity’ in the many small states in which the continent was divided.”44 We might generalize further and argue that cities had always favored “the multiplication of points of creativity,” that the intensity of city life led to more frequent interchange, imitation, and innovation than was possible on pasture or farm. This explains the enormous inventiveness of the first cities, especially the city-states of the ancient world.
Not only did the political geography of European rivers and mountains lead to numerous small states, able to compete with each other for the most talented or ambitious, but many of those states were city-states. They were states led from the city, not the county seats of aristocratic families or ancient lineages. Their leaders were people who prized innovation, who believed that advantage was everything, and who recognized that personal, social, and civic advantage came from doing something new and different and better.
Cities activated the inventions of Chinese, Islamic, and even Mongol civilizations as well. The cities of China and the Islamic world played a major role in shaping Chinese and Islamic civilizations. Together as links of a network, these civilizations became something much more. Each new addition to the network not only added a different way of thinking or doing but also changed the ways of all. The belated addition of European cities to the network of China, the Mongols, and Islam multiplied already numerous points of creativity.
Ibn Battuta never got to Christian Europe.45 He wrote and retired in the great city of Fez in what is today Morocco. But he began his travels with the most important pilgrimage a Muslim could make: the hajj to the holy city of Mecca. For the rest of his life, he traveled from one city to another. The full title of his account, called the Rihla, was A Gift to the Observers concerning the Curiosities of the Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels. Like a modern American who goes not to Europe but to London, Paris, Rome, and Venice, Ibn Battuta traveled to the great cities of his world: to Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Basra, Isfahan, Kabul, Samarkand, Bukhara, Constantinople, Kilwa, Mogadishu, Aden, Cambay, Calicut, Delhi, Chittagong, Canton, Quanzhou (Zaiton), Timbuktu, and many more. The Afro-Eurasian network was in fact a brilliant chain of cities, each a point of creativity that, like a string of lights on a tree, turned into something more magical and marvelous.
Suggested Readings
Abu-Lughod Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Challenging but important and influential.
Dunn, Ross E. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. A fine history of the great traveler’s experiences. Quite accessible.
Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. Accessible entry to an important debate.
Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276. Translated by H. M. Wright. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. Very readable and evocative study of China in the period of Marco Polo and the Mongols.
Lopez, Robert S. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 960-1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Slightly dated standard introduction to an important topic.
McClellan, James E., III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Thoughtful introduction to the subject.
Miyazaki, Ichisada. China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Translated by Conrad Schirokauer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Fascinating reada
ble study by a leading scholar of China.
Notes
1. See Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
2. Roger S. Keyes, Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press and the New York Public Library, 2006).
3. Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 26 (1966): 34.
4. Robert Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China: Coal and Iron in Northeast China, 750-1350,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10, no. 1 (1967): 144.
5. Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China,” 153. Hartwell adds that the population of Kaifeng was no more than 100,000 as late as 1933. The estimate as of 2011 was almost 5 million.
6. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 64.
7. See Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 65-67.
8. Lynn White Jr., “Tibet, India, and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 515-26. See also his Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 85-116.
9. James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 123.
10. Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276, trans. H. M. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 81.
11. Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China,” 150-51.
12. The idea of a thirteenth-century world system is now generally accepted by world historians. The idea was first developed, however, by Janet L. Abu-Lughod in Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
13. This apt phrase is that of Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 155.
14. “First Day” [041]. See http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/decameron/engDecShowText.php?myID=d01intro&expand=day01.
15. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 53.
16. On this combination of military despotism and anarchy (as on so many other topics) see Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 131-32.
17. People from the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in modern southwestern Russia.
18. See especially S. A. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
19. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, Economic Foundations, viii.
20. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, Economic Foundations, 66.
21. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354, trans. and ed. H. A. R. Gibb (London: Broadway House, 1929), 50.
22. Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 69.
23. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, 67.
24. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354. See http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1354-ibnbattuta.html.
25. Roderick McIntosh, The Peoples of the Middle Niger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 10.
26. Furuzanfar #630, in A. J. Arberry, ed., Persian Poems (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1972).
27. See Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A.D. 300-900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
28. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, 237.
29. Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 960-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 43.
30. Warming returned from about 1450 to 1550, followed by a dramatic “little ice age” from 1560 to 1890. Since then, global warming has returned with the addition of human causes.
31. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 28.
32. David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 132. Estimates on Paris and London vary between 3,000 and 25,000. At the usual ratio of four inhabitants to a house, the population of Cordoba would have been over a million.
33. Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124. Huff cites other presentations of this idea, but this chapter follows Huff’s linking of law and science.
34. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 186-87.
35. Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 21.
36. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.
37. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, 84.
38. Francesco Petrarch, Seniles V-III, “On the Latin Language and Literature” and “To Boccaccio,” in The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, trans. James Harvey Robinson (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1898). Available at http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet07.html.
39. Compare, for instance, the opening lines in the original “Middle English” with modern English: “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote. The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” and “When in April the sweet showers fall That pierce March’s drought to the root.” See http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm.
40. See http://www.mmtaylor.net/Literacy_Book/DOCS/pt2.html.
41. Kim Won-Young, Early Moveable Type in Korea (Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 1954), quoted in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (London: Verso, 1984), 76.
42. Pokee Sohn, “King Sejong’s Innovations in Printing,” in King Sejong the Great: The Light of 15th Century Korea, ed. Young-Key Kim-Renaud (Washington, DC: International Circle of Korean Linguistics, George Washington University, 1992), 55.
43. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 14.
44. Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 44-45.
45. He did travel to the Muslim cities of Malaga and Granada in Spain and Cagliari in Sardinia.
Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa,
the Americas, and Oceania
BEFORE 1450
The World of Inner Africa
Geography, Race, and Language
The World’s Three Transformations in Africa
Humans, Farmers, and States
The Nile Connection
The Saharan Separation
The Bantu Migrations
Words, Seeds, and Iron
A Common Culture?
Empires, States, and Stateless Societies
Politics, Population, and Climate
Lots of Land
West Africa
Stateless Societies
Kingdoms for Horses
East and South Africa
Cattle and Colonization
Great Zimbabwe
Inner Africa and the World
The World of the Americas
States and Empires of Middle America
Before the Aztecs
Classical Mayan
A Theoretical Interlude: Priests and Soldiers
Toltecs and Aztecs
States and Empires of South America
Before the Incas
Classical Chavin
Moche Warrior Priests and Divine Emperors
Incas and Their Ancestors
States and Peoples of North America
Peoples and Places
Rich Pacific Fisheries
Pueblos of the Southwest
East
ern Woodland Farmers
Americas and the World
The World of the Pacific
Islands and Settlers
Islands
First Wave
Australia
Austronesian and Polynesian Migrations
Austronesian Migrations
Polynesian Migrations
Language and Culture
Ecology and Colonization
The Advantages of Parallel Worlds
The Lessons of Parallel Worlds
Lessons of Similarities
Similarities or Connections
Lessons of Differences
The Strength of Parallel Worlds
WHILE THE Afro-Eurasian world came together as a single system between the classical age 2,000 years ago and the rise of the West 500 years ago, other parts of the world carried out their own traditions, established their own networks of interaction, and experienced their own arcs of change. We turn in this chapter to these “parallel worlds” in inner Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Ocean because their stories are as compelling as they are separate. Indeed, their very separateness gives us a greatly expanded field of evidence and example to help us understand the human condition and historical change. To focus only on the dominant trend is very much like telling only the history of the victors. In either case, we end with a lesser sense of who we are and an even lesser sense of who we could be.
