The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2
Page 42
A World Economy
Above all, Western expansion created a global economic network centered on Europe. The Dutch of the seventeenth century provide a telling example:
Everything was grist for the Dutch mill. Who could fail to be surprised that wheat grown . . . in South Africa was shipped to Amsterdam? Or that Amsterdam became a market for cowrie shells brought back from Ceylon and Bengal, which found enthusiastic customers, including the English, who used them for trade with black Africa or for the purchase of slaves destined for America? Or that sugar from China, Bengal, sometimes Siam . . . was alternately in demand or out of it in Amsterdam, depending on whether the price could compete in Europe with sugar from Brazil or the West Indies?18
Eastern Europe in the World Economy . But not all parts of Europe were affected in the same way or to the same extent by this new world economy. Eastern Europe, especially Poland, was one of the first areas to be connected to the new global commercial system, largely through the export of rye and wheat to western Europe in exchange for herring, salt, silk, wines, and other manufactured goods. The strong demand for grain in western Europe encouraged a powerful landlord class in eastern Europe to produce for this market. In doing so, these landlords found it profitable to reduce their relatively free peasantry to serf laborers. The absence of both strong monarchs and an independent merchant class gave the landlords the political clout necessary to accomplish this “second serfdom.” Thus, the new world economy pushed eastern Europe into a subordinate and dependent position and gave rise to a quite different kind of society from that of a dynamic and modernizing western Europe.
Spain and Portugal in the World Economy . Even in western Europe, there were differences. The early leaders of Europe’s outward thrust—the Iberian powers Spain and Portugal—were not as substantially transformed as the Dutch, British, and French who followed a century later. Aztec and Inca treasure and vast quantities of silver and gold from the forced labor of Indians in American mines floated Spanish and Portuguese prosperity throughout the sixteenth century. But landed aristocrats (hidalgos), conquistadores, and priests ran Iberian society. The precious metals of the Americas paid for foreign luxuries, conquests, and conversions, not investment in domestic industry. Spanish gold found its way to the new money class on the borders of Iberia in Amsterdam and northern Europe. While the hidalgo class voiced contempt for enterprise, the new middle class of lenders, merchants, and producers flexed its muscles. It was not Portugal or Spain that was to direct the seventeenth century but the mercantile countries of northern Europe, beginning with the 17 lowland provinces of the Spanish Empire that were to fashion themselves the Dutch Republic, or the Netherlands.
Northwestern Europe in the World Economy . In Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the profits and products of empire worked their most transforming effects. Merchants, enriched by the profits of empire, gained a social and political prominence unknown elsewhere. They developed new mechanisms for accumulating capital, notably joint stock companies such as the British and Dutch East India Companies, which did so much to energize European commerce in Asia by allowing individual investors to pool their funds for a common purpose. Market relationships based on supply and demand became more deeply entrenched throughout society. In short, more thoroughly capitalist societies were emerging in this part of Europe. And in the late eighteenth century, the most dynamic, innovative, and globally expansive of these societies, Great Britain, gave rise to the industrial revolution, which initiated an unprecedented and revolutionary transformation of human society. “The wealth of the New World was not the only cause of the Industrial Revolution,” wrote historian Alfred Crosby, “but it is difficult to see how it could have happened when and as rapidly as it did without stimulus from the Americas.”19
Changing Diets . The European empire also transformed the way that Europeans—and eventually the rest of the world—ate. The long-established European diet, based on wheat, barley, oats, and rye, was vastly enriched by the addition of numerous American foods: corn (maize), white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, lima beans, peanuts, manioc, squashes, pumpkins, avocado, pineapple, chili peppers, and more. Corn and potatoes especially furnished more calories per acre, grew more rapidly, and could be stored more easily than traditional grains. By the eighteenth century, their use had spread widely in Europe, particularly as a food for the poor. So dependent had Irish peasants become on the potato that when the crop failed because of disease in 1845, about 1 million people died, and hundreds of thousands fled to the New World from which the potato had originated. Cod, found in great abundance in North Atlantic fishing grounds, provided inexpensive protein.
Population Growth . These foods played a major role in sustaining Europe’s rapidly growing population, which rose from 105 million in 1605 to 390 million by 1900. They had a similar impact in much of Asia, especially China, and in general provided an important part of the nutritional foundation for the world’s modern population explosion. These productive and inexpensive foods also contributed much to the diets of poorly paid factory workers as Europe’s industrial revolution got under way in the nineteenth century. One prominent historian has suggested, with only a little exaggeration, that the potato made the industrial revolution possible.20
Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate . Plants from abroad provided not only nutrition but also stimulation. Europeans found chocolate in Mexico, tea in China, coffee and sugar in the Arab world, opium in India, and tobacco in the Americas. All of them became increasingly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were produced for a mass market in various colonial settings, usually with slave labor. Tea was an exception, as China largely monopolized its production until the nineteenth century. Beginning often as luxuries for the rich, these drug foods became part of middle-class culture and then, as their prices dropped, became available to the poor as well.
These addictive foods became a profitable staple of the emerging world economy, widely used all across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia by 1800. They made millions for European merchants and their governments while causing misery for those who produced them. New forms and places of leisure emerged for their enjoyment, such as opium parlors in China and coffeehouses in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Coffeehouses became popular and sometimes politically subversive meeting places, but they illustrated the more densely connected world that was being born. “The coffeehouse was the world economy in miniature . . . joining coffee from Java, Yemen, or the Americas, tea from China, sugar and rum from Africa’s Atlantic islands or the Caribbean, and tobacco from North America or Brazil.”21
New Knowledge
The global network was a conduit not only for foods, drugs, products, labor, and capital but also for information, and most of this too wound up in Europe. In the 1570s, the Italian mathematician and physician Girolamo Cardano wrote about how extraordinary it was to be born in a century “in which the whole world became known; whereas the ancients were familiar with but a little more than a third of it.” He worried, however, that this would mean that “certainties would be exchanged for uncertainties.”22
The sheer immensity of the new information and the speed with which it was acquired was staggering. Entire new continents; vast oceans; wholly unknown plants, animals, and geographical features; peoples of the most varying descriptions; magnificent cities; unusual sexual practices; and religions that were neither Muslim nor Jewish and certainly not Christian—knowledge of all this and much more came flooding into Europe in the several centuries following the earliest Iberian voyages, provoking much debate and controversy. Movable-type printing and the growth of a publishing industry made this new knowledge much cheaper and more widely accessible than the older system of hand-copied manuscripts. European intellectuals tried to organize this torrent of data by drawing new maps; by classifying the new plants, animals, and cultures that came to their attention; and by inventing whole new fields, such as botany, zoology, and geology.
This accumulation of unsettling new
knowledge surely contributed to Europe’s seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which transformed so dramatically the view of the world held by educated Europeans. Clearly, many factors played a role in this complex intellectual change—the inadequacies of older models of the universe; new data from careful observation of the heavens; the secularism of the European Renaissance; the stimulus of Islamic learning; the growth of independent universities teaching astronomy, mathematics, and physics; and the printing press, which allowed easy dissemination of new ideas. But it is arguable that new knowledge born of European expansion produced “uncertainties,” as Cardano had predicted; undermined long-held views of the world; and thus opened the way to a novel scientific understanding of the universe and human life.
The First World Wars
Europe’s overseas expansion was a highly competitive process that reflected the long rivalry of Europe’s various “great powers.” Global empire and global commerce projected these rivalries abroad and led to a series of conflicts that might be considered the earliest global wars. Spain and Portugal, the first European states to venture abroad, managed to avoid outright conflict by negotiating a treaty dividing the newly discovered world between them in 1494. But no such division was possible once other European powers joined the fray. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English, French, and Dutch vigorously contested Spain’s imperial monopoly in the Americas and Portugal’s trading-post empire in the Indian Ocean. The pirates, merchants, and navies of these newcomers to empire challenged the Iberians all across the colonial world. In the late sixteenth century, the English sent more than 70 expeditions to attack Spanish outposts in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, while the Dutch forces ousted Portuguese merchants from much of Southeast Asia.
As Spanish and Portuguese power declined, the British and French took their place. In the mid-eighteenth century, their rivalry led to the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Often referred to as “the great war for empire,” this global conflict was fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and India. British victories paved the way for a largely English North America, for British colonial rule in India, and for British domination of the seas and of global commerce for the next 150 years. Warfare on a global scale did not begin in the twentieth century.
Conclusion:
Empire and Globalization
The early modern era in world history can be viewed in two different ways. On the one hand, it was an age of empires—Ottoman, Mughal, Songay, Chinese, Russian, and western European. In particular, it witnessed the eruption of the previously marginal western Europeans onto the world stage. Europeans created imperial systems that bore both similarities to other empires—conquest, divide-and-rule tactics, and a sense of superiority—and strikingly new features, including new colonial societies, massive use of slave labor, and catastrophic death rates among Native Americans and Africans.
Alternatively, we might view the early modern era as a vast and quite rapid extension of human connections. With western Europeans as its primary agents, this early globalization involved destruction and creation and victims and beneficiaries. Native Americans who died in the millions, Africans unwillingly transported to Caribbean or Brazilian plantations, Indian weavers now producing for European markets, Chinese who paid their taxes in silver and ate sweet potatoes, Japanese who briefly experimented with Christianity, and Europeans who found new homes across the Atlantic—all these and many more experienced the consequences of incorporation into a new “worldwide web.”23 The making of this web contained both remarkable achievements and tragedies of immense proportions.
The Europeans who initiated the process were likewise transformed by it. The great changes of modern European history—popula-tion growth, the scientific revolution, capitalism, and industrialization—coincided with Europe’s emergence at the hub of a new network of global exchange and communication. While Europe was certainly not the only center of expansion and innovation in the early modern world, it was the only one whose expansion catalyzed changes of this magnitude. This “modern transformation,” together with the subsequent deepening and extension of the European-centered global network, combined to produce a new and even more revolutionary phase of world history in the nineteenth century.
Suggested Reading
Benjamin, Thomas, Timothy Hall, and David Rutherford. The Atlantic World in the Age of Empire. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. A set of readings from major historians on the making of an Atlantic world.
Crosby, Alfred W. Germs, Seeds, and Animals. Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). A collection of writings on the Columbian exchange by its most well-known historian.
Gunn, Geoffrey. First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500-1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Focuses on the cultural rather than economic exchange between Europe and Asia in the early modern era.
Parry, J. H. The Establishment of European Hegemony: 1415-1715. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. An older and classic account of the roots of European expansion.
Ringrose, David. Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200-1700. New York: Longman, 2001. Places European expansion in the context of other expanding societies.
Schlesinger, Roger. In the Wake of Columbus. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1996. Explores the impact of the Americas on Europe in the centuries after Columbus.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A well-regarded study that views Africans as participants in as well as victims of the Atlantic slave trade.
Waley-Cohen, Joanna. The Sextants of Beijing. New York: Norton, 2000. Explores China’s relationships with the wider world, including the West. Chapter 2 is a fascinating case study of the encounter between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese society.
Notes
1. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (London: Vintage Books, 1998).
2. This paragraph is based on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), chap. 1. The quote is from p. 51.
3. D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dell, 1966), 6.
4. Miguel Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 123.
5. Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears, 137-38.
6. Bartolome de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 38-52.
7. Alfred W. Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 88-93.
8. Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears, 149.
9. Quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 160. See also John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
10. For a recent summary of the debate over the numbers involved in the slave trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 1-10.
11. Quoted in Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2010), 95.
12. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137-39.
13. Quoted in Basil Davidson, The African Past (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964).
14. Philip Curtin et al., African History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 248.
15. Henry Farnsworth MacNair, Modern Chinese History: Selected Readings (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1923), 2-9.
16. Bernard H. M. Vlekke, Nusantara: A History of the East India Archipelago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 139.
17. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 217.
18. Fernand Bra
udel, The Perspective of the World, (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 220.
19. Alfred W. Crosby, “The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians,” in Islamic and European Expansion, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 154.
20. Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals, 148-63.
21. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topic, The World That Trade Created (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 79.
22. Quoted in Crosby, “The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians,” 151-52.
23. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (New York: Norton, 2003).
Breaking Out and the
First Modern Societies
1750-1900
Why Europe? A Historian’s’ Debate
Was Europe Unique?
A Favorable Environment?
The Advantage of Backwardness?
The Absence of Unity?
Science and Engineering?
Society and Religion?
Critics of Eurocentrism
“Surprising Similarities”
Competition from Afar
“The Decline of the East”
The Advantages of Empire
Gold and Silver
Markets and Profits
Resources
An Industrial Model
The Industrial Revolution