41. Van der Donck, A description, 210 (who appended to his account a special section ‘Of the beaver’); Richards, The unending frontier, 467 (part of an excellent chapter on the American fur trade).
42. Brook, Vermeer's Hat, 31; Elliott, Empires, 63, quoting William Bradford. Like ‘Mughals’ (ch. 13 above, n. 1), the names of the Indian Nations used by the Europeans were rarely correct: the Hurons (‘Boar's bristle’ in French) called themselves Wendats, ‘Islanders’; Mohawk was an Algonquin insult meaning ‘Cannibals’; while the Iroquois (the opprobrious Huron term for them, meaning ‘Snakes’) called themselves Haudenosaunee, ‘Builders of the Longhouse’. Algonquin meant simply ‘Allies’.
43. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, XXIV, 295, Isaac Jogues, S. J., ‘from the village of the Iroquois’, 30 June 1643.
44. I thank Kathryn Magee Labelle for sharing with me the conclusions of her thesis ‘Dispersed but not destroyed leadership, women and power in the Wendat diaspora, 1600–1701’ (Ohio State University, 2011).
45. Perrot, The Indian tribes, 102 (the author lived in the region in 1665–84 as hunter, interpreter and official).
46. White, The middle ground, 41 and 48–9, quoting an account of La Salle's voyage down the Mississippi in 1682 These refugees included the ancestors of Tecumseh (page 455 above), who settled in what is now Alabama.
47. Richards, The unending frontier, 502–3.
48. Ibid., 504, 509.
49. Galloway, Choctaw genesis, 347–8.
50. Ibid., xiii; Cook et al., ‘Drought reconstructions’; NOAA reconstructions for the Ozark highlands (by Stahl and Cleaveland: disastrous drought 1639–45); and Arizona, New Mexico and Utah (Cook: severe drought 1666–70). I thank Russell Barsch for alerting me to the oral tradition of the ‘dogless period’.
51. DuVal, The native ground; White, The middle ground.
52. Smulders, António Vieira's Sermon, 164–6.
53. Van den Boogaart, Johan Maurits, 477, on yellow fever; Hemming, Red gold, 293, quoting two letters from São Luis: one by a Dutch official on 7 Apr. 1642, the other by the captain general of Maranhão on 14 Mar. 1645, who accused the Dutch of waging biological warfare because they ‘brought with them Indians with smallpox, which is the plague of that land. They thus killed the majority of the best people in our Indian aldeias and almost all the settlers' slaves.’
54. Israel, Diasporas, 369, quoting Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca.
55. Ibid., 390–1, estimates the Jewish population of Dutch Brazil at 1,500 in 1645 and 650 by 1650, including Menassah ben Israel's brother. Some sailed directly to the Dutch and English colonies in North America, while others returned to the Dutch Republic.
56. Schwartz, ‘Panic’; Álvarez de Toledo, ‘Crisis’, 272–4, quoting Don Juan de Palafox to Philip IV, 10 July 1641.
57. García Acosta, Desastres agrícolas, I, 176–9: data on ‘carestía’, ‘hambre’ and ‘falta de lluvias’, 1639–43.
58. Information and quotations from Crewe, ‘Brave New Spain’, based on the copious Inquisition records and a volume of Don Guillén's confiscated papers. His article includes a portrait of Don Guillén by Van Dijk (p. 61). See ch. 18 below on his later history.
59. AGI Lima 50/289–90, Viceroy Mancera to Philip IV, 8 June 1641, noted reports of the Portuguese revolt just received from Cartagena; AGI Lima 277, n.p., same to same, 22 July 1641, admitted that he had not believed the reports until confirmation came from Buenos Aires; AGI Lima 572 libro 52/234v, same to same, 23 July 1642, reported the Transandean expedition.
60. Schwartz, ‘Panic’, 220–1, quoting Mancera to Philip IV, 20 July 1642. It seems highly unlikely that the unfortunate Africans in the capital would ‘love’ the brutal slave drivers who had dragged them across the Andes.
61. Rosales, Historia general, 192–3, on earthquakes; Prieto, ‘The Paraná river floods’, on ‘Ciudad Vieja’; García Acosta, Desastres agrícolas, I, 178, quoting the Historia de Nuevo León; Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María (Mexico, 1648); and Luis Laso de la Vega, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (‘The Great Happening’: Mexico, 1649). By 1730, the ‘milagrosa imagen’ had been taken on procession 24 times to intercede for rain, and one-third of these events occurred between 1641 and 1668.
62. Pérez de Ribas, History, 42; Treib, Sanctuaries, 268–95, with splendid photos of the surviving Salinas ruins.
63. Reff, ‘Contact shock’, 270. The revolt by the remaining Pueblo populations in 1680 destroyed (among other things) the archives that would have shed light on their earlier decline.
64. McNeill, Mosquito empires, 64. García Acosta, Desastres agrícolas, I, 181, quoting López Cogolludo, Historia de Yucatán. See also Cook, Born to die, 180 (part of an excellent overview of the epidemics that afflicted Latin America at pp. 167–82); and Kiple and Higgins, ‘Yellow fever’.
65. Schiebinger, Plants and empire, 1, quoting the commentary to plate 45 of Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium – thus a book about caterpillars! Schiebinger presents more contemporary reports of slave abortion and infanticide at pp. 144–9.
66. Van Deusen, Between the sacred and the worldly, 11–12 (quote) and 176–7 (population). On European nuns, see ch. 4 above.
67. Lorandi, Spanish king of the Incas. See pp. 143–4 and 166 on his guns.
68. Guibovich and Domínguez, ‘Para la biografía’, describe the riots.
69. Glave, Trajinantes, 198–205, reviews the ‘unease, disturbances and revolts’ of the 1660s but finds no hard evidence of coordination (quotation at p. 199 n. 31, from a letter of 1671). AGI Escribanía de Cámara 561–565 contain testimony and evaluations concerning the ‘revolt of Laicacota’.
70. McLeod, Spanish Central America, 217–23 and 307–9.
71. Van Deusen, Between the sacred and the worldly, 40, 241 n. 59 (quoting the history of the Casa de Niñas Expósitas); Mazet, ‘Population et société’, 61; and Mannarelli, Pecados públicos, 168–72, 251–2 (note, however, that Mannarelli's tables, from two parishes, represent only a quinquennial sampling of data. ibid., p. 169 n. 21).
72. Suárez, ‘La “crisis”’, 317.
73. Figures and details from Suárez, ‘La “crisis”’ and idem, Desafíos transatlánticos; and from Andrien, Crisis and decline, 34, 188–9 and 205.
74. Thom, Journal, I, 292–3 (10 Feb. 1655). See also Elphick, Kraal and castle, 110–16. ‘Khoe’ is the Nama word for ‘person’, and ‘Khoekhoen’ (Khoikhoi in some earlier sources) is the Nama word for ‘people’.
75. Thom, Journal, III, 195–7 (5–6 Apr. 1660). Van Riebeeck concluded the meeting by telling the Khoekhoen leaders that, if they did not like his offer, they could try to ‘drive us off. In such a case they would … become the owners of the fort and everything and would remain the owners for as long as they could retain it. If this alternative suited them, we would see what our course of action was to be’ (ibid., 196).
76. Diaz and Markgraf, El Niño, 144; Mikhail, Nature and empire, 216–17; and Ibrahim, Al-Azmat, Appendix 11 on the Nile. See also ch. 7 above.
77. Webster, Chronology, 1. See a similar lament concerning West Africa in Harms, River of wealth, 8–9.
78. Webster, Chronology, chs 2 and 9, on Interlacustrine Africa; and Hathaway, Beshir Agha, 18–19, on the slave exodus from East Africa.
79. Based on the lucid analysis of Curtin, Economic change, 15–18.
80. Hair, Barbot, 76 and 83–4; Curtin, Economic change, Supplementary evidence, 3.
81. On the Niger Bend, see Curtin, Economic change, Supplementary evidence, 5; on Lake Chad, see Nicholson, ‘Methodology’; and Martinson, Natural climate variability, 32–5 (by Nicholson).
82. Ritchie, ‘Deux textes’, 339, from Chambonneau's Histoire de Tourbenan (1678).
83. Ritchie, ‘Deux textes’, 352.
84. Details from Webb, Desert frontier, 24–35, and 68–87; and Alden and Miller, ‘Unwanted cargoes’, 47–8 and 78.
85. Hair, Barbot, 434; Thornton, Warfare, 15–16.
86. Harms, River,
33; Georg Oldendorp, quoted by Thornton, ‘Warfare’, 129 (see also Hair, ‘The enslavement’).
87. Hard copies of material from the database www.slavevoyages.org (which is regularly updated) are available in Eltis and Richardson, Atlas. Data in this paragraph from the maps on p. 14–15 and tables on pp. 23 and 89.
88. Climate data from Miller, ‘The significance’, 43–6; Thornton, ‘Demography’; and Alden and Miller, ‘Unwanted cargoes’, 48, 78. In some years in the mid-seventeenth century, all slaves deported came from West Central Africa: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces
89. Boxer, ‘Portuguese and Dutch colonial rivalry’, 35 n. 78, Teixeira to John IV, Luanda, 10 Apr. 1653. Note that expeditionary forces from Brazil, not Europe, changed the allegiance of Angola in both 1641 and 1648.
90. Birmingham, The Portuguese, and Thornton, Kingdom, narrate these events; Miller, ‘The significance’, 25–8, links them to climate change.
91. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, 192 and 194, ‘Linguistic identifications of liberated Africans who embarked in Cameroon’ and ‘in the Sierra Leone region’ in the early nineteenth century; and 163 (‘Gender and age of slaves carried from African regions to the Caribbean, 1545–1700), and passim (quotations from ships’ logs). The authors note one important exception: ‘In West Central Africa other kinds of evidence suggest that slaves traveled much longer distances prior to embarkation.’
92. Grove, ‘Revolutionary weather’, 128. Heinrich, ‘Interdecadal modulation’, 63, noted the absence of suitable trees.
93. Martinson, Natural climate variability, 27; Mikami, Proceedings, 15; Cook, ‘Warm season temperatures’, 84, fig. 7A. Although on the previous page Cook and his co-authors declare that ‘There is little indication for a “Little Ice Age” period of unusual cold’, their graph shows a clear dip in ‘warm-season temperature reconstruction’ during the mid-seventeenth century. The same phenomenon appears in Pollack, ‘Five centuries’, 705, fig. 4A, while fig. 4B shows an even sharper dip in tree-rings from New Zealand.
94. Diaz and Markgraf, El Niño, 161–5.
95. Cane, ‘Australian aboriginal subsistence’, 395–6; Connor, Australian frontier wars, 2. Parenti, Tropic of chaos, correlates the rise in violence in Africa with times of climatic adversity.
96. Cane, ‘Australian aboriginal subsistence’, 391 and 431 (quotations). The previous paragraphs are closely based on Cane's research.
97. See the bark painting of Namarrkon, the ‘Lightning spirit’, from northern Australia in Sherratt, A change in the weather, 30.
Chapter 16 Getting it Right
1. I thank Hayami Akira for guiding my steps through Japanese demographic, economic and social history ever since my first visit to Japan in 1983; Mary Elizabeth Berry for a trenchant critique of earlier drafts of this chapter; William S. Atwell, Reinier Hesselink; Kishimoto Mio and Ronald P. Toby for valuable bibliographical advice; Matthew Keith and Taguchi Kojiro for assistance in researching, translating and interpreting Japanese materials; and the scholars who attended two seminars on this book organized by Professor Hayami at International House of Japan, Tokyo, in July 2010.
2. Elison, ‘The cross and the sword’, 55, quoting Ōta Gyūichi c. 1610 and Miura Jôshin in 1614; Reade, Sidelights, I, 183, Isaac Wake to Secretary of State Naunton, 15 June 1618; Lancellotti, page 397 above.
3. Figures from Smith, The agrarian origins, 3; Hayami, Economic history, 36–40; and idem, Population and family, 10–11 (suggesting a 1600 population total of 12m ± 2m). Note that rice production per village rose more slowly after 1700 (from an average of 2,340 bushels to only 2,400 bushels in 1830) – a further index of the remarkable strides made in the seventeenth century.
4. Figures and quotation from Hayami, Economic history, 43, 163 and 218.
5. Quotations from Totman, ‘Tokugawa peasants’, 465; statistics from Totman, The green archipelago, 53, 65, 68. See also the discussion of ‘ecological strategies in Tokugawa Japan’ in Richards, Unending frontier, 148–92.
6. Ono, Enomoto Yazaemon, 137–8; Nagakura, ‘Kan'ei no kikin’, 78–80, gives prices. The Kan'ei era began in 1624 and ended in 1643. Endō, Kinsei seikatsushi nempyō, 49–70, lists the natural disasters of this period while Yamamoto, Kan'ei jidai, 197–9, discusses many of them. Further data on the Kan'ei famine in Atwell, ‘Some observations’, 224–7; Atwell, ‘A seventeenth-century “General Crisis”’, 239–40; and ch. 1 above.
7. Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factories, VI, 87: entry for 15 July 1642, reporting news from the Japanese translators (‘de tolcken’) attached to the Dutch factory at Nagasaki.
8. Geerts, ‘The Arima rebellion’, 57–61 and 96–8, Koekebacker to van Diemen, Hirado, 18 Jan. and 25 Mar. 1638 (translated directly from the Dutch text, since Geerts's English translation is sometimes unreliable); contemporary Christian circulars quoted in Elison, Deus destroyed, 220–1. The ‘messiah's original name was Masuda Shirō but, since he later took the name of the island of his birth, the sources call him Amakusa Shirō.
9. Bix, Peasant protest, xxii, on revolts; Fukuda, ‘Political process’, 55–8, on feuds.
10. Hayami, Population and family, 6–8; and idem, Population, family and society, 42–51 and 64–72. Hayami invented the now popular phrase ‘Industrious Revolution’ in a 1977 article.
11. Hayami, Population and family, 26–7. Hayami defined as ‘rich’ those who harvested 50 bushels or more of rice annually, and as ‘poor’ those who harvested only 5 bushels less.
12. Kazuki Gyûzan, Fujin jusô, discussed by Hanley and Nakamura, Economic and demographic change, 233–4. The Japanese, like the Chinese, seem to have considered infanticide as a sort of late-term abortion, and applied the term mabiki indiscriminately to both.
13. Cooper, They came to Japan, 58, quoting a letter from Cocks, English Factor in Hirado, 10 Dec. 1614. Cornell, ‘Infanticide’, argued that infanticide happened rarely – but ignored both contemporary testimony like that of Richard Cocks and demographic reconstructions like that of Smith, Nakahara. I thank Richard Smethurst for information on the ‘abortion plaques’ he observed in Zōjōji temple in Tokyo, founded in 1605. A typical message reads ‘We'll meet in the next world and I'll apologize in person.’
14. Smith, The agrarian origins, 3, notes that surviving land registers compiled in early modern Japan ‘reveal a remarkably uniform pattern of landholding’. The rest of this paragraph relies heavily on Smith's magisterial overview. Compare Fig. 10 above: the structure of a ‘typical’ European village.
15. Cooper, This island of Japan, 75–6 (by João Rodrigues, S. J.). Berry, Japan, 33 and 261, and Farris, Japan's medieval population, 191–208, argue that the last campaigns of the civil wars, although fewer, did extensive damage because of the increased size of the armies.
16. Cooper, They came to Japan, 57, Cocks to the earl of Salisbury, 10 Dec. 1614, about the innovations just introduced by Tokugawa Ieyasu.
17. Tsunoda et al., The sources of Japanese tradition, 328–31, prints Hideyoshi's ‘Sword collection edict’ (1588) and ‘Restrictions on change of status and residence’ (1591). Berry, Hideyoshi, 102–10, expertly discusses these edicts, noting that both were ‘absolutely without precedent in Japan’.
18. Yamamura, ‘From coins to rice’, 359, from Hideyoshi's instructions to his surveyors, 1594. For more on the remarkable Taikō kenchi, see Berry, Hideyoshi, 111–18; Berry, Japan, 82–8; Brown, ‘Practical constraints’; and idem, ‘The mismeasurement’. Hideyoshi introduced the kokudaka system to his own estates c. 1580: Wakita, ‘The kokudaka system’. Note the contrast between Hideyoshi's survey and the disastrous miscalculation of the resources of Catalonia and Castile by the count-duke of Olivares: ch. 9 above.
19. Yonemoto, Mapping, 9–16, and Berry, Japan, 40–3, 88–90 and 98, describe this map (which omitted Hokkaido), commissioned in 1605, completed around 1639 and revised in 1653. Harley and Woodward, History of cartography, II, book 2, plate 26, is a full-colour reproduction; Ber
ry, Japan, reproduces one detail in black and white (p. 40) and one of the original provincial maps (p. 89).
20. Details from Vaporis, Breaking barriers, 19–20. Government messengers and officials, and nobles travelling to and from Edo on official business, used the system free and took precedence; merchants and other private individuals could pay to use the system.
21. ‘The warning of Ōsaka and Edo’, in Rekishi, Senki Shiryô, 377–8. I thank Matthew Keith for allowing me to use his translation of this striking document. Likewise, as soon as food rioters confronted the governor of Ōsaka in 1642 he ‘sent a fast messenger to inform the central government of what had happened’: Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factories, VI, 87: entry for 15 July 1642.
22. For English versions of the legislation, see Hall, Feudal laws, 276–83 (for the emperor and court nobles) and 288–92 (the Buke Sho-hatto for the daimyō). Both Ieyasu and Hidetada abdicated early in favour of their sons, but continued to exercise power: thus Iemitsu officially became shogun in 1623 but Hidetada exercised effective power until his death nine years later.
23. Keith, ‘The logistics of power’ provides an excellent translation and discussion of the 10-article edict, dated 18 May 1638. See also Vlastos, Peasant protests, 35–7, on Iemitsu's similar treatment of the fief of Shiraiwa, also in 1638, punishing not only the rebels but also the daimyō who had caused the rebellion.
24. CHJ, IV, 196 (from Bolitho's chapter ‘The Han’). While massive land redistribution also occurred in other states – after the Bohemian revolt in the 1620s (ch. 8), and in Ireland in the 1650s (ch. 12) – it only occurred in exceptional (often unique) circumstances and never became established government practice.
25. In fact sankin could mean either ‘reporting for audience’ or ‘reporting for service’, depending on the character used for kin: the Tokugawa scribes normally used the former, but meant the latter. Hall, Feudal laws, 293–7, prints the full text of the 1635 Buke Sho-hatto which codified these measures.
26. The best guide to the sankin kotai system remains Tsukahira, Feudal control: on the different residence schedules (and the tardy daimyō of Morioka), see pp. 44–6; on exemptions and special arrangements, see pp. 52–6; on estimates of the cost to daimyō, see pp. 88–9 and 96–102. See also Vaporis, ‘To Edo and back’, on entourage size; and Yasaki, Social change, 193–7 and 209, on competitive spending among the daimyō.
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