The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  The European Explosion

  No Martian would have predicted Europe’s explosion onto the global stage after 1500. Since the end of the Roman Empire around 500 CE, the European world had lost much of its claim to “civilization” as city life, literacy, longdistance trade, and land under cultivation all declined sharply along with any semblance of centralized political authority or stability. For many centuries, Europe was a backwater in world affairs. Even when Europeans began to rebuild the institutions of civilized life after 1000 CE, they long remained on the periphery of Afro-Eurasian interaction, clearly less developed, less unified, and less influential than the older centers of civilization in China, India, or the Islamic world. Why, then, should western Europe, rather than some other part of Afro-Eurasia, have led the way to the “one world” of modern times?

  Europe Outward Bound

  Momentum . One answer is momentum. European societies, like those of the Islamic world and China, had a long tradition of expansion. Memories of the great Roman Empire lingered despite its collapse many centuries earlier. And various European peoples had long been expanding internally, creating larger states, growing populations, and wealthier societies since around 1000 CE. Scandinavian Vikings had sailed the North Atlantic and established briefly a colony in Newfoundland. Military conquest and missionary activity brought Slavic peoples in the Baltic region into Christian European civilization, and Catholic missionaries had reached both India and China. European Christian Crusaders of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries launched massive expeditions to reclaim the Holy Lands for Christendom. The Spanish adventure into the Atlantic followed on the heels of the Spanish Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews—not incidentally in 1492.

  Opportunity . Another factor was opportunity, both geographical and technological. Europe was simply closer to the Americas than any other center of maritime voyaging, and its primary potential competitor, China, had voluntarily withdrawn from oceangoing ventures in the fifteenth century. West African societies, equally close to the Americas, had long oriented their commerce northward across the Sahara toward the Islamic world rather than seaward. Technologically, Europeans could draw on a long tradition of Mediterranean and North Atlantic voyaging and on their ability to borrow various navigational and shipbuilding techniques from China and the Islamic world. By the fifteenth century, these pieces had come together in a particular technology, the caravel—an efficient, full-rigged, oceangoing sailing ship, outfitted with naval guns and a compass to calculate its location with reasonable accuracy. It was of little use against major land-based empires, like those of the Turks, Chinese, or Russians, but it was fast and maneuverable on the open sea and able to carry heavy cannon.

  Motivation . Once naval technology made it possible, many European groups and individuals found overseas expansion an attractive proposition. European society was in fact distinguished by a widespread support for overseas expansion in contrast to the very limited enthusiasm for it in China. For some, it was the militant crusading tradition with its fierce antagonism toward Islam that motivated expansion. One goal of the Portuguese voyages around Africa was to join forces with a legendary Christian kingdom of “Prester John,” located vaguely somewhere in Africa or central Asia, and to fight Muslims together. Religious hostility to Islam was only compounded by the frustrating need to rely on Muslim intermediaries for access to Asian spices and luxury goods, such as nutmeg, ginger, pepper, and cloves, which wealthy Europeans so highly prized.

  A further source of support for overseas expansion came from a growing merchant class, benefiting from western Europe’s increasingly active commercial life. They easily imagined vast profits if direct access to these treasures could be achieved, and Italian merchants in particular generously funded Portuguese overseas expeditions. In some parts of western Europe, such as England and the Netherlands, such men of commerce and business acquired a social prestige and political influence unknown in most other societies, which were socially dominated by landowning aristocracies. Furthermore, European mon-archs, perpetually short of revenue to run their kingdoms and fight their wars, saw a taxable overseas trade very much in their interests. Their endless competition with one another, so different from the single centralized empire of China, also provided a motor for continuous expansion once the process got under way. And impoverished members of the landowning nobility needed new sources of wealth, for declining income from feudal payments was eroding their economic base. This was particularly true in a small country such as Portugal with little room for internal expansion.

  Beyond these particular sources of support for overseas expansion, Europe’s economy as a whole was running short of gold needed to finance its growing internal trade and to pay for spices, jewels, and other Asian luxuries for its wealthy elite. The initial motive for the Portuguese voyages was to gain direct access not to Asian spices but to West African gold fields, long monopolized by North African Muslim middlemen. And Europe’s agriculture, based on wheat and livestock, could expand only by adding territory, whereas the more intensive rice agriculture of Asia could grow by the application of more labor. Thus, the increasing desire in Europe for wheat, sugar, meat, and fish meant that Europeans needed new lands to support the growth of their economies.2

  Behind all these motives lay the perception of many Europeans that the “East” held the promise of great wealth. It was an acknowledgment that theirs was a relatively “underdeveloped” society. Europeans, after all, were seeking routes to Asia; few Asians were looking for ways to get to Europe.

  A Changing Europe

  Europe’s overseas expansion drew strength and energy from an unusually wide range of internal changes. It was the youngest of the world’s major civilizations, having taken shape only after 1000 CE, and it proved willing to borrow from the more established civilizations of Asia and the Islamic world. It was recovering from the disruption of the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which had reduced its population by perhaps one-third. As population grew again, new and stronger states, such as England, France, and Spain, were gaining a greater capacity to mobilize the resources of their societies. A growing economy was developing the institutions of an early capitalism, such as banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, joint stock companies, and a wealthy merchant class.

  The European Renaissance . At the same time, Europeans began to think in less religious and more secular terms about their place in the world. The Renaissance, a flowering of urban culture between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, reflected this new consciousness. Artists and writers sought inspiration in the non-Christian literature of classical Greece and Rome. Princes patronized artists, such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael, whose paintings and sculptures were far more naturalistic, especially in portraying the human body, than their medieval counterparts. Europeans read humanistic scholars who argued that Christians could legitimately involve themselves in the real world of marriage, business, and politics rather than withdrawing into the secluded life of monasteries.

  The Reformation . The Protestant Reformation likewise challenged older patterns of thought. It began in 1517 when the German monk Martin Luther raised a public protest against the abuses of the Catholic Church (such as selling indulgences said to remove the penalties for sin) and against some of its doctrines as well. To Luther, the source of religious belief was no longer the pope or the Church hierarchy but the Bible alone, interpreted by the individual’s conscience. These protests shattered the unity of the Catholic Church, which had for the previous 1,000 years provided the cultural and organizational foundation of Western civilization. Now a proliferation of “protestant” churches, all rejecting the authority of the pope, called into question the answers to life’s big questions that the Catholic Church had long provided and encouraged a skeptical attitude toward authority and tradition.

  The Scientific Revolution . Europe’s overseas expansion also coincided with its scientific revolution. F
rom the time of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) to that of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the view of the universe held by educated Europeans fundamentally changed. Instead of an earth centered under a canopy of heavenly orbs, propelled by angels and spirits, scientists began to see their planet as one of many in an infinite space. Yet the sun and innumerable stars seemed to be governed by the same principles as life on the earth, and these principles were discoverable by systematic observation, measurement, and theorizing. Highly polished Dutch lenses were turned on distant stars and previously invisible life on Earth to reveal regularities of motion, mass, and matter. The gravity that held us to our planet was the same as the force that kept the planets on their paths and prevented the objects of the earth from flying apart.

  Certainly, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution did not cause Europe’s overseas thrust, but in their challenge to conventional thinking and in their emphasis on the power of individuals, these movements created a cultural environment that supported those who ventured abroad and contributed to Europe’s vigorous response to these new opportunities.

  The Making of an Atlantic World

  The most significant outcome of Europe’s early modern expansion was the creation of an Atlantic world—a network of communication and exchange involving Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Germs, plants, animals, people, cultures, ideas, products, and money—all this circulated across the Atlantic world, linking forever four continents. While Islamic, Chinese, and Russian expansion continued older patterns of world history, Europe’s Atlantic imperialism gave rise to something wholly new and with genuinely global reverberations.

  When the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand sent the Genoese Christopher Columbus west to find the East, both they and he anticipated the development of trading connections with the richer civilizations of Asia. From their perspective, the discovery of America was an “immense disappointment, a heart-breaking obstacle on the hoped for route to the East.”3 The technologically simple societies inhabiting the Caribbean and the eastern coast of the Americas provided few trading opportunities. But it soon became apparent that other possibilities were at hand—vast expanses of fertile land, a potential native labor force, and heartening rumors of abundant gold and silver. From these possibilities, the Spanish and Portuguese—and later the British and French—fashioned empires in the Americas quite different from Islamic, Chinese, or Russian empires.

  American Differences

  Conquest . The rapid pace of conquest was the first important difference. Attracted by the promise of precious metals, the Spanish led the way, transferring to the Americas many of the patterns of conquest, conversion, and colonization that they had pioneered during centuries of struggle against the Muslim rulers of Spain itself. The speed and sweep of Spanish conquest in the Americas resembled only the previous conquests of early Islam. Within 50 years, most of what was to be known as the Americas had been claimed for the Spanish crown. These conquests included the sophisticated empires of the Aztecs and the Incas as well as the Indians of North America and the much of the Caribbean.

  While they encountered stiff resistance in many places, the Spanish—and later the other imperial powers—were able in the long run to dominate native peoples who proved fatally vulnerable to European weapons, European diseases, and their own internal divisions.

  The collapse of the Aztec Empire provides a telling example. In just two years (15191521), this expanding and prosperous state was suddenly and devastatingly overwhelmed. A small Spanish force, led by Hernando Cortes and joined by thousands of hostile subjects of the Aztec Empire, decisively defeated the Aztec defenders. The capital city of Tenochtit-lan was left in ruins. The last Aztec emperor, Cuahtemoc, surrendered and, in a face-to-face meeting with Cortes, placed his hand on the Spaniard’s dagger and begged to be killed, “for you have already destroyed my city and killed my people.”4 While the former subjects of the Aztec Empire, from whom captives had long been seized for human sacrifice, may have rejoiced at their liberation, for the dominant Mexica people all was lamentation, as reflected in this poem composed shortly after conquest:

  Broken spears lie in the roads;

  we have torn our hair in our grief.

  The houses are roofless now, and their

  walls

  are red with blood.

  Worms are swarming in the streets and

  plazas,

  and the walls are splattered with gore.

  The water has turned red, as if it were

  dyed,

  and when we drink it,

  it has the taste of brine.

  We have pounded our hands in despair

  against the adobe walls,

  for our inheritance, our city, is lost and

  dead.

  The shields of our warriors were its

  defense,

  but they could not save it.

  We have chewed dry twigs and salt

  grasses;

  we have filled our mouths with dust and

  bits of adobe;

  we have eaten lizards, rats, and worms.5

  Disease and Disaster . Isolated for thousands of years from the world of Afro-Eurasia, the inhabitants of the Americas lacked immunity to common diseases on the other side of the Atlantic. Smallpox, measles, yellow fever, and malaria swept into oblivion both millions of individuals and many entire peoples in the Americas. The native population of the Caribbean, estimated at several million in 1492, numbered only several thousand by the 1540s. A densely populated Mexico with perhaps 14 million people declined by 90 percent or more within a century of Cortes’s arrival in 1519. Far more than Spanish conquistadores or missionaries, the germs of Europe and Africa shaped the transatlantic encounter.

  The deadly impact of disease was only exacerbated by the brutality of European rule. A young sixteenth-century priest, Bartolome de Las Casas, wrote an eyewitness account of Spanish behavior on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola:

  Into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts . . . that had been starved for many days. And the Spaniards behaved in no other way during the past 40 years . . . , for they are still . . . killing, terrorizing, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before. . . . After the wars and killings had ended . . . , the survivors were distributed among the Christians to be slaves . . . to send the men to the mines to dig for gold, which is intolerable labor, and to send the women into the fields of the big ranches to hoe and till the land. . . . And the men died in the mines and the women died on the ranches from the same causes, exhaustion and hunger. And thus was depopulated that island which had been densely populated.6

  From this combination of disease and brutality emerged a demographic catastrophe of genocidal proportions, albeit largely unintentional. Nothing of this magnitude accompanied Chinese or Islamic expansion that operated within a common disease environment; it was a distinctive and horrifying feature in the making of the Atlantic world and one that was replicated in parts of Oceania in the nineteenth century. It was, however, similar to the fate of many other isolated peoples in earlier times when they were incorporated into urban-based civilizations bearing new and deadly diseases.

  Plants and Animals . Accompanying Europeans in their conquest of the Americas were not only their pathogens but also their plants and animals, which likewise contributed enormously to transforming the Western Hemisphere and its peoples. The introduction of sugarcane gave rise to plantation economies and the massive use of African slaves, thus shaping the entire social structure of the Americas. The importation of cows and horses produced ranching economies and cowboy culture in both North and South America and transformed the societies of numerous Native American peoples. The Pawnee of the North American Great Plains, for example, had lived as settled farmers in sedentary villages, hunting bison only on a seasonal basis. But with the
adoption of the horse, hunting bison became a year-round occupation, temporary tepees replaced permanent houses, and the economic role of women diminished as a male-dominated hunting and warrior culture emerged. European imports like sheep, cattle, goats, and especially pigs, together with grapes, wheat, and various European vegetables, also flourished in the Americas and made possible the reproduction of major elements of European ways of life in a new setting. After all, the first conquistadores wondered, how was it possible to live in a country without bread and wine?

  Migrations . The demographic disaster that accompanied European conquest of the Americas created not only human suffering on an epic scale but also an enormous labor shortage that opened the way to massive European and African migration in the four centuries following the arrival of Columbus. It was the largest and most rapid population transfer in world history. The infusion of these new populations gave European empires in the Americas their most distinctive quality. Until the nineteenth century, African slaves were far more numerous than European immigrants, with more than 6 million arriving in the eighteenth century alone. After that, the slave trade gradually diminished, and the flood tide of European migration took over with some 55 million people leaving Europe between 1820 and 1930, the vast majority of them headed for the Americas.7

  Colonial Societies in the Americas

  Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans mixed and mingled in various ways, depending on the extent of the demographic disaster, on the policies of various colonial powers, and on the economies that the newcomers erected. Out of this vast process of cultural transplantation and blending emerged several distinct kinds of colonial societies in the Americas. What they had in common was their novelty. While the Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires largely incorporated existing societies and changed them only modestly, the European empires in the Americas gave rise to wholly new societies.