The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Many of our people, keenly desirous as they are of the wares and things of your Kingdom, which are brought here by your people, and in order to satisfy their voracious appetite, seize many of our people, freed and exempt men, and very often it happens that they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and our relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdom. . . . And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately ironed and branded with fire. . . . To avoid such a great error and inconvenience . . . we beg of you to be agreeable and kind enough to send us two physicians and two apothecaries and one surgeon, so that they may come with their drugstores and all the necessary things to stay in our kingdoms.13

  Other states, such as Asante and Dahomey, arose in reaction to the slave trade and tried to take advantage of its economic possibilities while protecting their own people from its ravages. The Kingdom of Benin was unique in its relatively successful efforts to avoid a deep involvement in the slave trade and to diversify the exports with which it purchased European firearms and other goods.

  In some cases, participation was brief. Along the coast of Sierra Leone, for example, a series of wars in the mid-sixteenth century produced a large number of slaves for sale, but when political stability returned, trade focused much more heavily on local products such as beeswax, camwood, ivory, and gold. Elsewhere, extensive and prolonged involvement produced major social changes. Along the delta of the Niger River, societies of fishing villages organized on lineage principles were transformed into small monarchies in which extended family groups assimilated large numbers of slaves and became powerful “houses” with extensive commercial networks. Drawing on sources of slaves among the Igbo in the immediate interior, these transformed societies of the Niger River delta became the largest slave exporters in eighteenth-century West Africa.

  Economic Impact . From an economic viewpoint, the slave trade increasingly oriented West Africa commerce toward the Atlantic and growing integration within the emerging European-centered world economy and away from its earlier focus northward across the Sahara. Except on the coast, this new trade had little impact on African domestic industries as local textile and iron producers found continued demand for their products. But neither did it stimulate any real economic development. “The total impact of the trade,” a leading historian of the slave trade wrote, “has to be measured not by what actually happened but against the might-have-been if Africa’s creative energy had been turned instead to some other end than that of building a commercial system capable of capturing and exporting some eighty thousand people a year.”14

  The African Diaspora . In a global perspective, the major outcome of the slave trade lay in a vast spread of African peoples across the Atlantic world, a process commonly known as the African diaspora. Africans by the millions were deposited in the Americas, where they functioned both as laborers and as bearers of culture. As fieldworkers, domestic servants, or skilled artisans, slaves constituted a coerced and cheap labor force whose ruthless exploitation contributed greatly to the wealth of the American colonies and their European homelands. And despite the horrors of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, Africans brought their cultures with them. Their languages, religious ideas, foods, music, social patterns, and aesthetic standards all contributed to the making of African American cultures, which in turn influenced Euro-American cultures as well. Foods such as corn mush, gumbo, fritters, cooked greens, and batter-fried chicken all had African origins. Syncretic or blended religions, such as Vodou in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and Can-domble in Brazil, mixed Christian beliefs and practices such as church attendance, the search for salvation, and the use of candles and statues with African elements including drumming, dancing, animal sacrifice, and spirit possession.

  Slaves also played a political role in colonial America, especially when their actions threatened the social order. By 1650, hundreds of runaway slave communities had been established throughout the Americas. They ranged from small villages of 50 to 200 people to more centralized states with many thousands of inhabitants, such as Palmares in Brazil. Such communities interacted with Native American societies who often sheltered them and had to contend with European settlers who sought to destroy them. Even more threatening to Europeans were slave rebellions. The largest and most successful of these occurred in the French colony of Saint-Dominique (modern Haiti) in the 1790s. It was stimulated by the liberating ideas of the French Revolution, and it gave rise to the second independent state in the Americas and the first to be ruled by people of African descent. Its violent attacks on white planters contributed much to the conservatism of later Latin American independence movements whose elite leaders feared triggering further revolutionary upheavals and challenges to white control.

  The

  Slave Trade and Racism . A further legacy of the slave trade was racism. Europeans were better able to tolerate their brutal exploitation of Africans by imagining that these Africans were an inferior race or, better still, not even human. Lasting far longer than the slave trade itself, a racism that denigrated people of African descent served to justify the later colonial takeover of Africa and structured social life in African colonies. It found its fullest expression in the apartheid system of South Africa, which attempted to separate blacks and whites in every conceivable way while exploiting black labor in the economy. In the Americas, the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, far from ending racism, probably made it worse, for now the former slaves could exercise, at least potentially, a certain amount of economic and political influence. In the United States, the outcome was a racially inspired segregation, pervasive discrimination, and publicly sanctioned outbursts of violence against African Americans, poisoning the social life of the country into the twenty-first century.

  Europe and Asia

  European expansion in early modern times was unique in its genuinely global scope, encompassing in various ways the Americas, Africa, and Asia. But while Europeans dominated the Atlantic, conquering and ruling the Americas and extracting millions of slaves from Africa, their entry into Asian waters was quite different and produced a generally far more modest impact on Asian societies.

  Commerce and Coercion

  Portuguese in the Indian Ocean . The Portuguese were the first. Once Vasco da Gama showed the way around Africa to India in 1498, the Portuguese, with their efficient sailing ships and powerful onboard cannon, smashed into an ancient and complex maritime trading system that included Arab, Indian, Malay, and Chinese merchants and extended from East Africa to East Asia. Had they wanted only to trade, the Portuguese could have competed freely in this open commercial network. But far from home and with limited resources, fired by a militant Christianity, and schooled in the ruthless rivalries of European warfare, the Portuguese sought to control by force of arms the enormously valuable trade in spices, which had drawn them to the East. The total absence of armed ships in the Indian Ocean following the Chinese withdrawal and the relative lack of interest of the major land powers meant that the Portuguese were able to seize and fortify major transfer points for the Indian Ocean trade—Kilwa and Mombasa on the East African coast, Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Goa in western India, Malacca on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, and Ternate in the Spice Islands of Indonesia. In East Asia, where the Portuguese encountered the powerful Chinese and Japanese states, they established trade relations and small settlements only with the permission of local authorities.

  Competitors . Here was a “trading-post empire,” designed to control commerce rather than large populations or land areas. It was similar to the kind of control Europeans sought to exercise along the West African coast during the slave trade rather than the territorial and settlement empires they constructed in the Americas. By the seventeenth century, this Portuguese trading-post empire, overextended in Asia and without a strong base in Europe, confronted vigorous competition from the Dutch and English. Operating through private commercial East India companies rather than direct st
ate control, these rising northern European merchants established their own parallel and competing trading-post empires, with the Dutch focusing on what is now Indonesia and the British on India.

  Limitations of Empire . The impact of these European intrusions on Asian societies was important but modest. Political control was generally confined to small and divided coastal societies where European military resources, often numbering only a dozen or so ships and several hundred men, could be effective. Beyond their coastal trading posts, Europeans established real control only in parts of the Philippines and Indonesia, island chains where the Spanish and Dutch, respectively, faced politically fragmented peoples who were unprotected by their larger neighbors on the mainland of Asia. These larger Asian powers—the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, China, and Japan—were little threatened by the modest military forces of seagoing Europeans, far from their bases of supply. Europeans could be useful to these societies in various ways, but throughout the early modern era, the great Asian powers generally established the rules of the game. As late as 1795 the Chinese emperor Ch’ien Lung decisively rejected a British request for additional trading privileges in a famous letter to King George III that reflected China’s view of the world:

  Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But as the silk, tea, and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we permitted as a signal mark of favor, that foreign hongs [companies] should be established at Canton, so that your wants may be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence. But your ambassador has now put forward new requests. . . . I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of Our Celestial Empire. I have consequently commanded my Ministers to enlighten your ambassador on the subject, and have ordered the departure of the mission.15

  The Economic Impact . The European trad-ing-post empires shaped Asian economies in more extensive though still circumscribed ways. During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese managed to partially block the traditional Red Sea route by which spices had made their way to Europe and to carry about half of the spice trade to the West around the Cape of Good Hope, making handsome profits in the process. They also developed something of a “protection racket” by which they sold passes and charged duties to all kinds of Asian merchants, permitting them to trade in the Indian Ocean and enforcing the system with Portuguese warships. The Dutch in Indonesia succeeded in controlling not just the shipping but also the production of nutmeg and cloves by seizing several of the Spice Islands in Indonesia and using force to prevent the growing of these spices elsewhere. An enforced monoculture thus made these islands wholly dependent on the import of food and clothing. A twentieth-century Dutch historian described the results: “the economic system of the Moluccas [Spice Islands] was ruined and the population reduced to poverty.”16 The British exercised such a tremendous demand for popular Indian textiles that hundreds of villages came to specialize in export production and became dependent on it. Europeans also became heavily involved in shipping Asian goods to Asian ports, using the profits from this “carrying trade” to buy spices and other Asian products.

  The Silver Trade . Among the most important goods carried on European ships was silver, which was in great demand in Asia. This was fortunate for westerners, who had little else to exchange for the Asian spices, silks, porcelain, and other products that they so ardently desired. China in particular became an enormous market for silver as this gigantic and flourishing economy, supporting 20 to 25 percent of the world’s population, was transforming its currency and taxation system to a silver base and drove the price of this precious metal to double its world price in the early seventeenth century. Thus silver flowed into China in enormous quantities, much of it from rich Spanish American mines in Mexico and Peru. From Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast, annual Spanish fleets carried tons of the precious metal to Manila in the Spanish Philippines, where it was exchanged for Chinese-manufactured goods. Still more tons flowed eastward through Europe to China and other Asian destinations. European ships also carried Japanese silver to China. The immense profits from the silver trade considerably financed Spain’s American empire and its many European wars, indirectly underwrote the slave trade, and enriched Europe generally. But these profits occurred as Europeans participated in a vast and sophisticated Asian commercial network, suggesting that “the economic impact of China on the West was far greater than any European influence on Asia in the early modern period.”17

  American Crops in Asia . The silver trade and the slave trade marked the beginning of a genuinely global economy involving the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia in a single integrated network of economic transactions. Another sign of this global network lay in the impact of American food crops introduced by Europeans into Africa and Asia as well as into Europe itself. In China, for example, as rice cultivation reached its limit, New World dryland food crops, such as peanuts, corn, sweet potatoes, and white potatoes, contributed greatly to the growth of Chinese food production. They sustained China’s huge and rapidly growing population in recent centuries. In the mid-1990s, some 37 percent of the food consumed in China originated in the Americas, and that country had become the world’s largest producer of sweet potatoes and its second-largest producer of corn.

  Europeans exploited products, routes, and techniques that had been pioneered by Asian traders, but they were not able to eliminate them. The Portuguese failed to monopolize the spice trade as they had hoped. Chinese, Indian, and Arab shipping continued to ply Asian waters as they had for centuries. Despite growing Dutch control of Indonesia, Chinese merchants handled most of the spice trade to China. Europeans entered long-established Asian trade routes as shippers, carrying goods between Japan and China, for example, but they neither created nor destroyed these routes. Large-scale trade within the Ottoman Empire, India, and China and the land-based trade among them remained wholly in Asian hands.

  Missionaries in East Asia

  Jesuits in China . The cultural impact of the European intruders in Asia was likewise modest. Unlike the Americas, where elements of Christian belief and practice were widely accepted, the considerable missionary effort in Asia won far fewer converts. Jesuit missionaries in China, armed with the latest in European scientific and technological developments, initially won considerable respect among the learned elite, particularly as the Jesuits had mastered the Chinese language and Confucian culture. They proved useful to the Chinese court in constructing calendars, clocks, and canon. But when the papacy and rival missionary orders became critical of Chinese culture, forbidding Chinese Christians to venerate their ancestors, the court lost interest, and the Jesuits’ plan to convert China from the top down proved a failure.

  Japan and European Missionaries . Japan’s encounter with Christianity was even more dramatic. A politically fragmented Japan, chronically engaged in civil war in the sixteenth century, welcomed Western traders and missionaries, as various parties in these conflicts found the firearms and trade goods that the Europeans brought with them useful. A sizable Christian community, numbering perhaps 300,000 by the early 1600s, emerged from the missionaries’ efforts. But by that time, Japan had overcome its earlier conflicts and unified under the Tokugawa shogunate. These new rulers of a more unified Japan, viewing Christians as potential dissidents and a threat to Japan’s largely Buddhist culture, brutally suppressed the embryonic Christian movement and executed large numbers of its followers. They drove the missionaries out and restricted contact with Europeans to a small island near Nagasaki, where only Dutch traders were permitted to operate. In all of Asia, Christianity developed deep roots only in the Spanish Philippines, which remained under direct European control.

  Europe
ans in Oceania

  A final indication of the limited European role in early modern Asia involves its penetration of Oceania, the large and small islands of the Pacific basin. European exploration of the vast Pacific Ocean began with Magellan’s famous circumnavigation of the world between 1519 and 1522 and continued with Dutch explorer Abel Tasman’s mapping of parts of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Tonga in the seventeenth century. But not until the voyages of the English captain James Cook (1768-1780) did Europeans begin to affect the previously isolated world of Oceania. During most of the three centuries of the early modern era, it remained a separate world. But once European merchants, missionaries, settlers, and colonial officials descended on these societies, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the impact was devastating, resembling the demographic disasters in the Americas. A Hawaiian population of perhaps 500,000 in 1778, when Captain Cook happened on the islands, was reduced to less than 60,000 a century later.

  The Fruits of Empire

  Europe itself was transformed by its empire. Neither Ottoman, Chinese, or Russian expansion so fundamentally changed their own core societies. In large part, this is because Europe became the hub of a wholly new network of global communication and exchange that brought together a variety of already established regional networks into a single worldwide system. As Europe moved rapidly from a marginal position in Afro-Eurasia to a central position in this new world system, it accumulated unprecedented power, wealth, and information, greatly transforming European society.