African slavery, which existed long before the Europeans arrived, took two forms. First, rulers used enslavement to remove troublemakers from society: those found guilty of (for example) adultery, witchcraft or theft might be fined more than they could pay and, if their kin-group would not help them, the offenders were sold as slaves (the sale price paid their fine). Second, men and women captured during wars or raids also became slaves. ‘The distinction between these two processes was crucial,’ Robert Harms reminds us. ‘Slaves in the former category [criminals], were unlikely to run away because they had no place to go’ and so often remained in the area; whereas a captured slave ‘had quickly to be taken from the point of capture so that he [or she] could not return home’. The demand of both European and Arab traders for cheap labour increased both forms of slavery, but especially the second. According to an eighteenth-century missionary who interviewed slaves in the Caribbean about their background, ‘most of them were captured in open warfare’. The same was no doubt also true earlier.86
The fate of the two million or more men, women and children forcibly deported from Africa to the Americas during the seventeenth century has recently become better known thanks to the remarkable database constructed from almost 35,000 documented slave voyages (roughly 80 per cent of the total) by David Eltis and his colleagues. Almost one-half of the slaves came from West Central Africa (the 500 miles of coast on either side of the Congo estuary); almost one-quarter came from the Bights of Benin and Biafra (the coastal areas on either side of the Niger Delta); and almost one-tenth from Senegambia. Until 1641, ships from Spain and Portugal accounted for 97 per cent of the slave trade organized in Europe, but the separation of the two crowns and the ensuing war between them (see chapter 9 above) opened the way for French, Dutch and British ships to deport slaves to work on their rapidly expanding sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Of 160,000 slaves who disembarked in the Americas during the 1680s, over 141,000 went to the Caribbean (Fig. 46).87
The Little Ice Age played its part in increasing the slave trade, not only via the political, social and economic disruption caused by the southward shift of the ITCZ in the hinterland of Senegambia and the Bights of Benin and Biafra (see above), but also via an increase in droughts, epidemics and wars in West Central Africa. Of an estimated 12,569 slaves deported to the Americas in 1639, all but 285 came from West Central Africa. That year saw the beginnings of a severe drought in the region that lasted until 1645, while the simultaneous Luso-Dutch struggle to control Angola profoundly affected the neighbouring native states, especially Kongo, one of the few large states of Atlantic Africa.88 The kings of Kongo, with perhaps 500,000 subjects, had long maintained an ambiguous relationship with the Portuguese, converting to Catholicism but otherwise striving to remain independent, while the Portuguese constantly sought to impose economic and political as well as spiritual control. The Dutch capture of Angola in 1641 changed this situation. According to Bento Teixeira de Saldanha, a Portuguese resident, the Dutch let the indigenous inhabitants ‘live in their own lands, allowing them to produce in their own way everything they needed to live, without permitting a single white man to disturb them in their homes – as the Portuguese have always done, and still do, molesting them and robbing them’.89
46. Slaves captured and shipped from Africa, 1600–1700.
The Europeans exported twice as many slaves in the second half of the seventeenth century as in the first. Of this total, one-third of them came from West Central Africa, one tenth from Senegambia and Sierra Leone, and over-half from the Gold Coast and the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The table does not include the overland deportation of slaves living in Sub-Saharan Africa to the Ottoman empire.
Teixeira wrote just after an expeditionary force from Portuguese Brazil regained Angola in 1648 and immediately recommenced ‘molesting’ the native population, and just as a new episode of drought, locusts and disease disrupted life in the interior and led to a succession dispute in Kongo. After a few years of restless coexistence, in 1665 a Portuguese force from Luanda invaded and routed the main army of Kongo at Ambuila (Mbwila), killing the king and ending the existence of his realm as a coherent kingdom. Henceforth, regional chiefs maintained themselves by fighting wars to secure slaves, whom they sold to European traders in return for guns and ammunition.90 The decennial total of slaves exported from West Central Africa leaped from almost 60,000 in the 1650s to almost 100,000 in the 1660s and to over 120,000 in the 1670s. Right up to abolition of the slave trade, the region continued to export more slaves than any other part of the continent.
Did this high level of forced migration perhaps mitigate the impact of the Little Ice Age on those humans who remained in sub-Saharan Africa? After all, migration from a community normally reduces its food requirements, and certain areas near to the principal ports of deportation experienced significant out-migration – especially when we include not only the deportees who reached America, but also those who succumbed to disease as their captors took them from drier inland areas to the coast, where they lacked immunity to new disease environments, and those who perished in the overcrowded and unsanitary coastal holding pens or on the voyage. Malnutrition, ill treatment and despair all took their toll: many of the logs kept by the slaving ships record the cause of death of their precious cargo, and they included ‘stubbornness’ and ‘lethargy’ as well as ‘dysentery’, ‘scurvy’ and ‘a violent blow to the head’. Not for nothing did the Portuguese call the ships that carried slaves from Africa to America tumbeiros: ‘coffins’.
If we include all forced migrations from East, Southeast and West Africa, seventeenth-century European and Arab traders between them apparently deported some 30,000 slaves annually from a continent with perhaps 100 million inhabitants – which at first sight makes the overall impact seem marginal (except, of course, for the victims). But the slaves did not come from all parts of the continent: on the contrary, most of them seem to have lived within 150 miles of coast – and, within that restricted area, often in specific regions. Although we currently lack data on the exact origin of seventeenth-century slaves, those from the eighteenth century show ‘a remarkable degree of geographic concentration’. For example, the ‘profile of slaves’ that embarked on vessels leaving the Bight of Biafra reveals that ‘most captives originated in the small Cameroon Highlands area’. In addition, over half the slaves deported to the Caribbean from the Bight of Biafra in the seventeenth century were female and one-tenth were children; while almost one-fifth of those deported from West Central Africa were children and over one-third were female. Deporting women and children intensified the impact of emigration by removing (in effect) the next generation.91
Yet even with all these exacerbating factors, it seems unlikely that even the areas of Africa most involved in the slave trade lost more than 10 per cent of their population through forced migration – whereas a drought, and drought-induced epidemic, could wipe out three times as many people. So, to return to the earlier question – did forced migration mitigate the disruptive impact of the Little Ice Age on those humans who remained in sub-Saharan Africa? The answer may well be affirmative. If we add famine and disease mortality to the high level of forced migration in coastal regions, the synergy of human and natural agency in sub-Saharan Africa may have removed one-third of the total population, as it did in much of Asia and Europe, and these disasters may have assisted those who remained to survive even prolonged climatic adversity.
Australia
Australia, the driest inhabited continent, covers 5 per cent of the planet's land mass and yet it has (and has probably always had) one of the lowest population densities in the world. The reason for this disparity lies in a combination of climate and isolation. Only the southeastern and southwestern corners of Australia boast both a temperate climate and fertile soils; but since they lie furthest away from the other continents, until the late eighteenth century they remained almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, both demographically and economically. D
eserts and semi-arid lands, known as ‘the outback’, cover more than two-thirds of Australia, and the annual rainfall in some locations there can vary from under 4 inches to over 36 inches. As in sub-Saharan Africa, the critical variable is not the average annual rainfall but its seasonable reliability. Even in the temperate zone, drought and the threat of drought are constant concerns.
Two factors preclude precision about the experience of Australia's population in the seventeenth century: the paucity of the ‘natural archive’, especially the rarity of tree species that produce distinct annual growth rings; and the complete absence of a ‘human archive’. Although several groups of Europeans visited after 1606, none of them described climatic conditions; while although the indigenous inhabitants probably referred to catastrophes in their rich oral traditions, attempts to date these events have so far failed. Nevertheless, some generalizations can be offered. Australia, in the words of the pioneering historian of climate Richard Grove, has ‘above all other places a claim on the epithet, “the el Niño continent”’.92 This means that the same droughts that afflict China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and India in El Niño years also afflict Australia – and therefore that the doubled frequency of El Niño events in the mid-seventeenth century would have struck Australia with unusual force. In particular, the continent presumably experienced the same major drought registered in nearby Indonesia between 1643 and 1671, with particularly intense episodes between 1659 and 1664 (see chapter 13 above.) Reconstructed tree-ring sequences from the island of Tasmania in the south appear to confirm this surmise, showing a succession of poor growing seasons in the mid- and late seventeenth century, a period that saw the ‘most prolonged cool period in the past 700 years’.93
How much would these climatic events have affected the population of Australia in the seventeenth century? To survive the extreme climate even in ‘normal’ times, native Australians needed adaptive strategies in much the same way as many of the unique flora and fauna of the continent. Many Australian plants survive because they have developed deeper roots and an enhanced resistance to fire, while some Banksia species produce cones that release seeds only after experiencing both a bushfire and the subsequent onset of rains – precisely the environment most favourable to germination and seedling survival. Likewise the red kangaroo has evolved uniquely efficient mechanisms to cope with the unpredictable extremes of rainfall: it eats vegetation high in moisture, and so can go for long periods without drinking; it hops, which enables higher speeds of travel with no increase in energy expended; and its reproductive cycle, known as embryonic diapause, supports three babies at different stages of development at the same time, which allows a rapid increase in population as soon as a drought ends.94
The annual life cycle of the aboriginal population of Australia's Western Desert in the mid-twentieth century suggests that its human population also adopted unique strategies in order to survive in some of the harshest environments on earth. The annual cycle began with the ‘wet season’ between December and February, when huge thunderstorms unleash torrential rains, which provide abundant water but do not immediately produce food. Family groups therefore moved around, foraging in areas neglected since the last wet season until seeds, root crops and fruit began to appear in March; then they settled down, living for two months or so by waterholes on the plains and harvesting crops (albeit often amid periodic drizzle and temperatures that fall to 6°C at night). This ‘cold time’ ended in August as temperatures rose rapidly and the landscape gradually dried out. Men now set fire to vegetation on the plains, both to trap game and to improve the yield of seeds and tubers the following year, while women prepared and stored the vegetables that would sustain the group through the rest of the year. Eventually in the ‘hot time’ or ‘hungry time’, as temperatures rose to 50°C, the waterholes on the plains dried up, forcing people to retreat to rock holes for the rest of the year. There they reduced their daily activities and tried to make their food and water last as long as possible, but since drought and heat stress limited foraging to areas near the rocks, the average calorific daily intake might fall as low as 800 per person – roughly half of what is necessary to sustain even someone of small stature. Sometimes the weak drank blood drained from the stronger members of the group in order to get through the last few weeks until the torrential rains returned and allowed them to leave their rock holes and spread out on the plains once more.
Although the environment of the Western Desert is harsh, its human inhabitants found and used 120 plants to satisfy their needs. Of these, 70 yield edible parts and over 40 produce seeds, which the women of the group would laboriously husk, winnow, grind and turn into a paste to be either baked in the campfire or eaten raw. Tubers and bulbs were far easier to turn into food – they were simply pulled up and roasted – while large game (such as kangaroo), once caught, would be gutted and grilled, and small game (birds, lizards and snakes) would be baked.
Since both the seasons and the availability of each resource followed the same pattern each year, the aboriginal populations of the Western Desert survived through their intimate environmental expertise, combined with knowledge of when each source of nutrition would become available as the seasons changed, and the use of fire to trap game and stimulate future crops. The one unpredictable variable was the precise duration of the ‘hungry time’, which determined whether or not there would be sufficient water and food to sustain the group from one annual cycle to the next, and thus who would die (either from thirst or starvation) and who would be born (because famine amenorrhoea would prevent conception).
Scott Cane, whose research on aboriginal subsistence strategies in the Western Desert is summarized above, noted one other feature of life in the ‘hungry time’: ‘If the rains fail to come, tensions run high and fights are common’. All Aboriginal groups carried weapons – some of them offensive: spears, often used with spear-throwers which produced a velocity of 100 miles per hour and accuracy up to 164 feet; boomerangs; and clubs, sometimes with sharp shells attached to the head. Clearly these weapons were used against people, as well as game, because warfare features in many Aboriginal oral traditions, while when the British arrived in Sydney in 1788, they ‘found Aborigines with wounds that could only have [been] caused by fighting with other Aborigines’.95 It seems probable that wars between rival groups – like fights between group members – became more common in years when the ‘hungry time’ dragged on and reduced essential resources. It therefore also seems probable that a fatal synergy between natural and human factors prevailed in Australia, and that its population shrank in the seventeenth century until the reduced resources available sufficed to satisfy its minimum demands.
Scott Cane believed that his study of the Aborigines of the Western Desert presented ‘the last reliable data on hunter-gatherer subsistence economies from arid environments anywhere in the world’ because the way of life he described ended in the 1950s when the hunter-gatherers ‘moved from the [Western] Desert onto cattle stations, missions and government settlements, scattered around the desert fringe’.96 Nevertheless, a modern aboriginal bark painting shows a keen awareness of the destructive power of the weather. It depicts Namarrkon, the ‘Lightning Spirit’, holding in his hands conduits of power that run from his large testes, while his knees contain stone axes: both serve to remind viewers of how bolts of lightning destroy trees and start wildfires – and thus of the need to complete all activities, both farming and social, before the season of powerful storms begins.97
In the seventeenth century, hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of ‘hunter-gatherers’ populated the various ‘arid environments’ of the planet. In large parts of Africa and the Americas, in Central Asia and in the far north of Europe, human populations must have evolved coping strategies similar to those of the aboriginal population of Australia, allowing them to survive; and, as in Australia, those strategies no doubt proved only partially adequate whenever the annual ‘hungry time’ grew longer. Although the absence of a ‘hu
man archive’ for these various groups precludes certainty, it is possible that in arid environments, too, ‘one-third of the world died’ in the seventeenth century. If so, it means that the only large area to register rapid and sustained population growth in this period, apart from New France and New England, was Japan.
16
Getting it Right: Early Tokugawa Japan1
The Pax Tokugawa
EARLY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE FOREMOST JAPANESE CHRONICLER of his day rejoiced that ‘In this age, there are none even among peasants and rustics, no matter how humble, who have not handled gold and silver aplenty. Our empire enjoys peace and prosperity; on the roads not one beggar or outcast is to be seen.’ A few years later one of his colleagues went even further: ‘What a marvellous age! Even peasants like me enjoy tranquillity and happiness… They dwell in the land of bliss. If this is not a [Buddhist Paradise], then how is it that I and other men could meet with such great fortune?’ Admittedly, a few of their contemporaries elsewhere also expressed confidence in the immediate future: an English ambassador who gloated in 1618 that everywhere ‘the gates of Janus’ had shut, which ‘promised Halcyonian days’ to ‘the greatest part of Christendom’; the Italian preacher Secondo Lancellotti (scourage of ‘whiners’) five years later. But whereas Europe suffered wars, revolution and economic collapse for the rest of the seventeenth century, Japan experienced the Pax Tokugawa: rapid demographic, agricultural and urban growth – and no wars.2
Tokugawa Japan: The First Century
* * *
Year Population size (in millions) Urban population (in millions) Arable land (in million acres) Harvest yield (in million bushels)
* * *
1600 12 0.75 5 100
1650 17 2.5 6 115
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