by Kevin Reilly
The Amerindian World
Yet another self-contained “world” was that of the Americas, or the Western Hemisphere, home to perhaps 40 to 100 million people. Here two major centers of dense population, sophisticated cultural and artistic traditions, and urban-based civilizations had emerged over the centuries. The Aztec Empire, founded in the mid 1300s by the Mexica people, drew on long-established civilizations in Mesoamerica. Its capital city of Tenochtitlan with a population of perhaps 250,000 awed the Spanish invaders with its elaborate markets, its high-quality crafts, its sophisticated agriculture, and its specialized group of long-distance traders called pochteca. One European observer wrote, “Some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said that they had never seen a market so well laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.”24 But Mexica society also appalled them with its pervasive human sacrifices, drawn largely from the ranks of conquered peoples. This sharp division between the dominant Mexica and their many subject and tribute-paying peoples was among the factors that facilitated Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century.
The Inca Empire, established only in 1440, covered a far larger territory than its Aztec counterpart. With an impressive network of roads, amazing cities high in the mountains, and a state-controlled economy, the Inca Empire stretched some 2,500 miles along the western coast of South America, incorporating dozens of conquered peoples and creating a huge zone of interaction and cultural blening. The latest in a long series of Andean civilizations, the Inca state, while no less a product of conquest than the Aztec Empire, attempted actively to integrate its enormous realm. Unlike the Aztec Empire, the Inca authorities encouraged the spread of their Quechua language; a remarkable communication system, using a series of knotted strings called quipus, enabled the central government to keep track of the population and of the tribute and labor owed by subject peoples; Quechua speakers were settled in various parts of the empire; and a system of runners and way stations made possible rapid communication throughout the realm.
But these two centers of urban-based civilization were probably unaware of one another and had no direct contacts. Writing, developed earlier among the Maya of Mesoamerica, never spread to the Andes, and the domestication of the llama, guinea pig, and potato in the Andean highlands did not penetrate farther north. Mexican maize, or corn, did spread slowly through much of North America, and there is evidence for considerable trade among the various peoples of the Mississippi valley and the eastern woodlands in what is now the United States. The arrival of Mexican corn apparently stimulated the development of small cities centered on huge pyramid-like earthen mounds, similar to those of Mesoamerica. The largest of these cities, Cahokia near presentday St. Louis, probably had a population of 20,000 to 25,000 people at its height in the twelfth century, roughly similar to that of London at the time.
Nonetheless, the network of relationships among the various societies of the Americas was much more limited than among those in the Afro-Eurasian world. This in turn limited the agricultural, technological, and political development in the Americas in comparison with the more frequent and stimulating encounters of Afro-Eurasian societies. Thus, many peoples of the Americas practiced a relatively simple form of agriculture, hunting-gathering styles of life also persisted in places such as California, Afro-Eurasian forms of metallurgy were unknown, and the absence of pack animals (apart from the llama in the Andes) put the burden of trade on human shoulders. Despite evidence suggesting sporadic contacts across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, no sustained interaction beyond the hemisphere broke the isolation of the Americas until the fateful arrival of Columbus in 1492.
The World of Oceania
Finally, the “world” of Oceania, including Australia and the islands of the central and western Pacific, represented another major region that had few sustained connections to either the American or the Afro-Eurasian world. But within Oceania, the many separate hunting-gathering societies of the huge Australian landmass encountered one another and exchanged foods, oyster shell jewelry, tools, skins, and furs. And the island peoples of Polynesia, who had earlier navigated the vast Pacific to populate these lands, developed sophisticated agricultural societies and highly stratified states and chiefdoms. In some places, such as Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa, people on nearby islands kept in regular touch with one another through trade and intermarriage. The history of Oceanic peoples also took a sharp turn when Europeans intruded violently into their domain in the eighteenth century.
Conclusion: Durability of Empire
Empires dominated the early modern world, as they did much of the ancient world. Their strengths are obvious: large, well-organized military forces; transportation and communication networks that reinforced unity and control; and some degree of cultural conformity. Variations abounded. We have noticed that some allowed a greater diversity of religion, some were more mercantile, and others were more military. But they all proved adept at controlling large populations over long periods of time. Why, then, have they all disappeared? Did empires suffer from a particular fault that made them ultimately untenable?
Two weaknesses are easy to diagnose. One is the problem of legitimacy, and the other is succession or transition. They are related, of course. An empire’s legitimacy was based on its exercise of unchallenged power. That concentration of power in the hands of a single ruler was not easily transferable on the emperor’s death. Mongol and Turkic rulers had a tradition of allowing claimants to fight each other for rule, thus ensuring that the strongest would govern and that possible challengers would be neutralized. But this system resulted in heavy militarization and in a civil war with each passing ruler. In the Mughal Empire, it became almost common for a son to challenge his brother or father for succession.
The modern world has replaced empires with nation-states. The ideology of nationalism provides a firmer legitimacy than the exercise of brute force, especially when joined to a representative or democratic political process. The roots of the modern national and democratic revolutions grew in different terrain than that of the great empires. Nationalism and representative democracy took root in small states and city-states on the border of great empires. Such states were often controlled by merchants rather than landed aristocracies or military leaders. Scattered along oceans and seas, they breathed salt rather than dust. The maritime trading centers of Italy and the North Atlantic were particularly important in this process. It was not the great Habsburg Empire, which combined Spain and Germany, but the tiny cities of the Netherlands, England, and Italy—more prosperous than powerful—that were to nurture the successful politics of the modern world.
Suggested Readings
Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. An up-to-date and readable biography of Russia’s modernizing tsar.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. An account of the Ottoman Empire that attacks Western perceptions of it as exotic and wholly different.
Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. A fascinating and detailed account of China’s maritime voyages during the Ming dynasty.
Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A brief account of the rise and decline of the Mughal Empire with a vivid account of Akbar’s reign.
———. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Examines on a global basis how expanding societies affected the environment.
Tracy, James D., ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350—1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. An examination of global commerce stressing the equivalence of Western and Asian contributions.
Wills, John E., Jr. 1688: A Global History. New York: Norton, 2001. A fascinating tour of the world in 1688 with a focus on ordinary life.
Notes
1. Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 11.
2. William H. McNeill, “The Age of Gunpowder Empires,” in Islamic and European Expansion, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 103—40.
3. John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4. Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 351.
5. For this idea, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (New York: Norton, 2003), 181–84.
6. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 71.
7. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
8. Quoted in C. T. Forster and F. H. B. Daniell, eds., The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, 1881).
9. Athar Abbas Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbars Reign (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975), 126–31.
10. Scott Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1500–1900 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002).
11. Leo Africanus, History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896). Originally published in 1600. Available online at http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/1982.
12. Quoted in Norman Iztkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1972), 106.
13. Richards, The Unending Frontier, p. 118.
14. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 175.
15. Robert Finlay, “The Treasure Ships of Zheng He: Chinese Maritime Imperialism in the Age of Discovery,” in The Global Opportunity, ed. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995), 96.
16. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration in Inner Asia,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (June 1998): 287–309.
17. This section is based on Richards, The Unending Frontiers, chap. 3.
18. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribners, 1974), 220.
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 452.
20. James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115.
21. Quoted in Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000), 220.
22. M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
23. Philip Curtin et al., African History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 274.
24. Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1963).
The Roots of Globalization
1450-1750
The European Explosion
Europe Outward Bound
Momentum
Opportunity
Motivation
A Changing Europe
The European Renaissance
The Reformation
The Scientific Revolution
The Making of an Atlantic World
American Differences
Conquest
Disease and Disaster
Plants and Animals
Migrations
Colonial Societies in the Americas
Settler Colonies
“Mixed-Race Colonies”
Plantation Colonies
North American Differences
The Impact of Empire
Africa and the Atlantic World
Origins of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Demand
Supply
African Slavery
The Slave Trade in Operation
Counting the Cost
Lost People
Political Variations
Economic Impact
The African Diaspora
The Slave Trade and Racism
Europe and Asia
Commerce and Coercion
Portuguese in the Indian Ocean
Competitors
Limitations of Empire
The Economic Impact
The Silver Trade
American Crops in Asia
Missionaries in East Asia
Jesuits in China
Japan and European Missionaries
Europeans in Oceania
The Fruits of Empire
A World Economy
Eastern Europe in the World Economy
Spain and Portugal in the World Economy
Northwestern Europe in the World Economy
Changing Diets
Population Growth
Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
New Knowledge
The First World Wars
Conclusion: Empire and Globalization
“GLOBALIZATION” SEEMS so twenty-first century. But that process of building a dense web of relationships across the boundaries of oceans, nations, regions, and civilizations actually had its roots in the early modern era of world history. We have seen how the empires of Eurasia stretched the web of contacts and trade between 1500 and 1800. What Europeans did in this period was to integrate the previously unknown Western Hemisphere into that emerging global network.
This network was new in at least four major ways. First, it was genuinely global, encompassing all the inhabited areas of the world, while earlier networks had been limited to particular regions. Second, this new global network came to have a single dominating center—western Europe. This was quite different from the earlier Afro-Eurasian web in which various peoples and societies participated on a more equal basis. Third, this new global system worked far more profound changes on many of its participants than had earlier transregional encounters. The twin tragedies of the early modern world—the decimation of Native America peoples and the Atlantic slave trade—vividly illustrate this unprecedented impact.
Finally, globalization was driven by the relentless expansionism and quest for profits associated with modern capitalism. Earlier patterns of expansion had been motivated by population pressures, dynastic and military rivalries, religious conversion, and the search for exotic or high-prestige goods—gold, silk, pottery, and ostrich feathers—that conveyed status. Much of this continued after 1500, but at the heart of modern globalization lay the endless acquisitiveness of corporate capitalism. The European empires of the early modern era were increasing driven by the quest for profits. Religion played a role in the early stages of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the colonial conflicts of the Protestant Reformation. But from Columbus’s efforts to raise money for his voyages to the granting of corporate charters to entities like the Massachusetts Bay Company, the European settlement of the Americas was an endeavor of capitalists as well as kings. The hallmarks of European expansion were the great commercial trading companies such as the British East Indies Company, the plantation economies of the New World, and the slave, silver, and spice trades. By the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism, with its voracious need for materials and markets, supplied the central driving force of globalization. And in the twentieth century, especially its second half, giant transnational corporations—like Boeing, Exxon, Mitsubishi, and Microsoft—became primary players in the drama of globalization.
At the starting line of this new globalizing process were the peoples of western Europe—the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. Through exploration, commerce, conquest, and settlement, they set in motion a vast process of change that embraced most of the world.
In initiating this enormous process, Europeans bore the advantages common to many Afro-Eurasian societies. Their food production capacity, based on a variety of protein-rich grains, was far greater than that of the Americas, which ha
d a much more limited range of food crops. Afro-Eurasians enjoyed a virtual monopoly on large domesticated animals providing protein, power, and manure. They were also relatively more immune to a wider range of diseases and possessed more sophisticated technologies, including metallurgy, gunpowder, and means of harnessing wind and water power. Many of these advantages derived from their larger and more intensely interacting populations which could learn from one another. Finally, Eurasians had more powerful states with literate elites able to mobilize their societies’ resources on a large scale.1 On the basis of these advantages, Europeans colonized the Americas, extracted millions of slaves from Africa and, somewhat later, penetrated Oceania as well.
They also created new layers of linkages—both commercial and cultural—among the already interacting societies of Afro-Eurasia. Here, however, they confronted peoples that enjoyed many of the same advantages that gave Europeans such an edge in their encounter with Native Americans. Thus, throughout the early modern era, they were generally unable to exercise in Asia and Africa the kind of political, military, and economic domination that came with such relative ease in the Americas and Oceania. Not until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century dramatically altered the balance of power within Afro-Eurasia did this situation change.
