A Concise History of the World
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Thus for the study of human beings, “new world” might best be understood in terms of time rather than space. Although interregional interaction had increased with the expansion of the Mongol Empire and the Indian Ocean trading network, the scale of the contacts between peoples was much greater after 1492 than it had been before. Many historians see this as the beginning of a new era in world history, the “early modern.” Like “New World,” “early modern” has been criticized as hopelessly Eurocentric, implying there is only one path to modernity, that taken by Europe. And it has been criticized for emphasizing change, when throughout the period 80–90 percent of the world's population remained peasants, who continued to be exploited by their landlords and the state. But for world history “early modern” is useful, as there were parallel and interwoven processes of dramatic change going on in many places.
This chapter surveys some of these developments, beginning with the spread of disease, the transfers of plants and animals that were part of the Columbian Exchange, and the establishment of colonial empires through exploration and war. Trade brought in new types of foods, drinks, and addictive substances, many of which were produced on plantations worked by slave labor. These products were often consumed in new urban social settings and cultural institutions, where men—and a few women—shared ideas as well as commodities. Religious reforms and reinvigorations heightened spiritual zeal and created new arenas of conflict, as well as sharpening those created by rivalries over territory or resources. The early modern world was a new one of global connections, in which goods, ideas, and people—including peasants and slaves—moved and mixed, changing social and economic patterns and creating novel cultural forms.
The spread of disease
Prime among the disastrous effects of the Columbian Exchange was the spread of disease, which began with Columbus’ second voyage in 1493. This expedition was huge, with about 1,500 men, including adventurers, soldiers, artisans, and farmers who brought with them seeds for European crops and farm animals. This voyage set a pattern that would be followed in many other places. The ships landed on the large island of Hispaniola, which had a population between 400,000 and 600,000 engaged in farming cultivated plots. The Spanish were mostly interested in gold, and they captured, tortured, and killed the indigenous Taino in their search for precious metals. Many went back to Spain disappointed after a few weeks, and many more died of starvation, intestinal diseases from drinking the local water, or diseases they had brought from Europe with them, which most likely included malaria, typhus, influenza, and perhaps smallpox. Taino died even more readily from these, and from other Old World diseases against which they had no resistance, such as measles, mumps, diphtheria, bubonic and pneumonic plague, and scarlet fever. After a particularly virulent outbreak of smallpox throughout the Caribbean in 1518, very few Taino were left on Hispaniola, and the number of indigenous people on other islands had fallen dramatically.
Once Europeans reached the mainland of Central and South America in the early 1500s, diseases often spread ahead of actual groups of soldiers, when just a few native people came into contact with a Spanish force and then returned to their home village. People became sick and died quickly, so that when European troops got to the area later, they no longer found places “more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa” that Vespucci had reported in 1503. Spanish troops led by Hernando Cortés (1485–1547) carried smallpox into Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, when they were briefly allowed into the city in 1519, and this invisible ally—combined with their very visible allies, the Tlaxcalan and other native peoples who opposed the Aztecs—allowed the Spanish to defeat the weakened Aztecs. Smallpox also killed the powerful Inca ruler Huayna Capac in the mid 1520s, setting off a civil war between his sons that allowed Spanish forces to conquer the Inca Empire.
Explorers, conquerors, and settlers who moved into the Americas traveled under a Spanish flag, and then those of other European nations, but they included people from a variety of places, including free and enslaved Africans, and by the end of the sixteenth century Asians brought by Spanish galleons that took American silver to the Spanish colony of the Philippines and returned with silk and other Asian products. Thus Old World diseases mixed in a deadly stew. Although it is impossible to determine the total population of the Americas in 1492, the best estimates put it between 40 and 70 million; estimates of the total decline within the first century after European contact is about 90 percent. Mexico and Peru, whose combined population was greater than the rest of the Americas all together, suffered the greatest drop. War, famine, labor exploitation, forced migrations, and enslavement were responsible for some of this, but Old World diseases were the primary killer. In 1650 the majority of people in the New World were still indigenous, but disease and other killers, combined with increasing migration, changed that.
4.1 Aztec people die of smallpox, in an illustration from the General History of the Things of New Spain, a 2,400-page book documenting Aztec society, culture, and history written and illustrated in the last half of the sixteenth century by indigenous men under the direction of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The information in the book came from village and city elders, recorded in Aztec pictorial writing and then expanded in Nahuatl using Latin letters.
Geochemists and earth systems scientists have recently suggested that deaths in the Americas may have also changed the earth's climate. Wooded areas that had been cleared for agriculture or modified by fire to make hunting better became reforested when no one was left to engage in these tasks. The trees then pulled carbon dioxide from the air—which is traceable in ice cores from Antarctica—reducing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling the climate, the opposite of what is happening today. Other factors, including reduced sunspot and increased volcanic activity, and changes in the Pacific climatic phenomenon known as El Niño, contributed to the cooling climate as well, and together these created what climatologists have termed the “Little Ice Age,” from about 1500 (or perhaps beginning as early as 1300) to about 1850, with several particularly cold periods within this. Evidence for fluctuations in weather and climate comes from the natural world, such as tree rings, volcanic deposits in the polar ice caps, and layers of pollen in bogs and marshes, and from human records, including chronicles, letters, government and business documents, inscriptions, and recorded weather data. Complaining about the weather seems to be a universal human trait, but together these natural and human sources point to a period of unstable climate especially in the seventeenth century, with more extreme cold in the northern hemisphere and more extreme droughts in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia.
Climate extremes contributed to crop failures, which led in turn to increased mortality from hunger and the various illnesses to which malnourished people are more vulnerable. Because grain or other staples were bulky and heavy, it was generally impossible to transport them to a famine-stricken area at a price that people could afford. It was easier for people—even weakened people—to move than for food to do so, so hunger led families and individuals to migrate. Whatever the scale of the famine, governments generally could do little to alleviate them, and often made them worse by prohibiting the export of food or refusing to lower taxes, which peasants paid as a certain amount of their harvest every year. In many parts of Eurasia throughout the early modern period, peasant families paid as much as half of their harvest to their landlords and the state, even in famine years. Famine was thus a social phenomenon as much as it was a natural one.
Famine also led to reduced fertility, as ill-nourished women are less likely to become pregnant, carry a fetus to term, or be able to breast-feed successfully. Nursing mothers need far more calories per day than do other people, and both they and their infants die at a disproportionate rate during times of scarcity. These dismal realities are reflected in death and burial records and in human remains themselves, which can provide information about cause of death, nutrition levels, chronic illnesses,
dietary practices, and many other aspects of life and death. Just as archeologists who study the earliest periods of human history are increasingly relying on high-tech methods invented to help solve crimes or make medical diagnoses in contemporary society, such as the analysis of trace elements or DNA, so are historians of the early modern (and modern) period. This frees them from having to rely on written sources alone and allows for comparisons and calculations on a wide scale.
The impact of diseases that went west across the Atlantic is clear, and a few may have traveled in the other direction; historical epidemiologists used to think that one of these was syphilis, which emerged first in Italy in 1493 in an especially virulent form, but now they are less certain about its origins. However syphilis got to Europe, this was an era in which dynastic ambitions and religion combined to provoke nearly constant warfare, which assured it would be spread. Italy was a battleground for the aspirations of many rulers, and decades of war followed a French invasion of the peninsula in 1494. Soldiers fighting in Italy took syphilis with them when they returned home, which the French labeled the “Italian disease” and most of the rest of Europe the “French pox.” Armies carried other diseases around Europe as well, including plague, smallpox and influenza, as did migrants and refugees.
Variations in vulnerability to disease also shaped society in China, though this was less dramatic than in the Americas. In the seventeenth century, the leaders of the Jurchens, one of the steppe peoples who lived to the north of China, changed their name to Manchu and began a campaign of conquest. In 1644, after a rebellion had toppled the ruling Ming dynasty, the Manchus captured Beijing, and established a new dynasty, the Qing. Over the next several decades they fought to establish their authority throughout China against Ming loyalists and rebels. Their ability to do so was affected by smallpox, which was endemic in China but to which the Manchus had no resistance. They made efforts to isolate important people from the disease by moving them whenever there was an outbreak, but the second Qing emperor himself died of smallpox in 1661, and his successor was chosen in part because he had already survived the disease. That emperor, the Kangxi emperor, would go on to rule for sixty-one years. Among many innovations, he adopted the use of variolation (from variola, the Latin term for smallpox) to inoculate the children of the imperial family against smallpox. In variolation, material taken from the sores of a smallpox sufferer was breathed into the nostrils or scratched into the skin of a healthy person to induce what was hoped would be a mild case of the disease that would provide lifelong immunity. This procedure was used in the sixteenth century in China (and perhaps earlier), and also in West Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In 1721, variolation was brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose husband was the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and who herself had been scarred by smallpox, but it was greeted with suspicion and never became widespread.
Despite the possibility of preventive measures, however, smallpox outbreaks continued in China and the surrounding areas as well as elsewhere. In the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, the Qianlong Emperor (ruled 1735–96) carried out successful campaigns to incorporate Central Asia into China. One of these, against the Zunghar khanate, was made much easier because a smallpox epidemic had recently wiped out hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps 40 percent of the Zunghar population. The rest either fled or were taken into areas ruled by others, or they were killed by Qing armies, sometimes in an intentional extermination campaign ordered by the Qianlong emperor, who wanted to destroy the Zunghars as a people as well as a state. Zunghar women were given to Manchu soldiers or their allies as bonded servants or concubines.
In major epidemics and in smaller ones, disease killed more women and children than adult men, which meant that population levels were depressed for decades. Disease and famine also made people themselves depressed, or as they termed it in this era before the invention of psychological terminology, distraught, sad, full of grief, miserable, and mournful. Some wrote of their feelings, and others acted on them, committing suicide, giving up their children to monasteries or foundling homes, and marrying late or not marrying at all—which further reduced population levels—all of which were also noted by contemporary commentators. Clergy in Scotland during a famine in the 1630s wrote that some of their parishioners had “desperately run into the sea and drowned themselves,” while an official in Shandong province in China wrote in 1670 that “the area was so wasted and barren” that “every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam.” Historians used to think that because so many children died at very young ages people became callous or indifferent to their offspring; that was true in some cases, but there is also evidence that mothers and fathers were deeply saddened, sometimes to the point of madness, by the illness or deaths of their children. Even those forced to abandon children for economic reasons could be torn apart by their decision; a note pinned to a child left at a London foundling home in 1709 read, “I humbly beg of you gentlemen whosever hand this unfortunate child shall fall into that you will take care that will become a fellow creature … pray believe that it is extreme necessity that makes me do this.”
Colonization, empires, and trade
Soldiers, traders, workers, and settlers traveled the same routes that diseases did as they forged a new world. In the sixteenth century, Spain built the largest colonial empire in the western hemisphere, although Portugal also established a colony in Brazil. The Spanish and Portuguese set up agricultural plantations, built Christian churches, and mined precious metals in empires with mixed populations of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous people. Gold and silver mined in the Americas, especially from the “silver mountain” of Potosí high in the Andes, where tens of thousands of indigenous people were forced to work deep in tunnels, fueled the expansion of global trading. This created enormous profits for European merchants, and contributed to a long period of rising prices economic historians label the “price revolution.” Spain also established colonial rule in the Philippines, and Portugal set up small colonies along the west and east coast of Africa and at Goa, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Macao, and a few other places in Asia. Overseas conquests gave western Europe new territories and sources of wealth, and also new confidence in its technical and spiritual supremacy.
In eastern Europe and across Asia, conquests in the sixteenth century created large land-based empires, many of which also fostered trade. In 1453 the Ottomans took Constantinople (which they renamed Istanbul) and continued to conquer by land and sea in all directions; by the early seventeenth century they were rulers of about a third of Europe and half the shores of the Mediterranean. They became the official Protectors of the Two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, and challenged Portuguese control of Indian Ocean trade routes, sending trade ventures across the Indian Ocean down the coast of Africa and eastward to Sumatra. The Shi'ite Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia (today's Iran) in 1501, and under Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) built a spectacular new capital at Isfahan, where artisans produced textiles, carpets, and metalwork, and foreign merchants gathered to trade for these. In South Asia, the Mughals, Central Asian rulers who claimed descent from Chingghis Khan (“Mughal” is the Persian word for Mongol), created a huge empire through war and alliances, including alliances by marriage to regional dynasties. India remained the world's largest producer of textiles, and Indian merchant networks stretched from China to Africa. The decline of Mongol power in West and Central Asia allowed the rulers of Moscow to expand their holdings, and they conquered their neighbors to create a vast Russian state under autocratic rulers who called themselves tsars (the Russian word for caesars), a title they adopted to link with earlier Roman emperors. They allied with the high nobles, or boyars, and increasingly imposed serfdom on all peasants, binding them to the land, which also happened in much of eastern Europe. States created in Africa during the sixteenth century, including Songhai, Benin, Buganda, and Kongo, were smaller than these Asian empires, but they also had well-established tradi
ng centers. Those on the coasts attracted Portuguese merchants, who often set up their fortified trading posts nearby.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought the further expansion of empires and new patterns of conquest, colonization, and trade. Under the Manchu Qing dynasty China expanded into Tibet and Central Asia and asserted its influence over Korea, Vietnam, and Burma. In Japan after a long period of civil war military leaders known as shoguns from the Tokugawa family re-established order and limited the presence of Western merchants, though Japanese silver continued to flow throughout East and Southeast Asia, bringing in silk and other luxuries to growing cities. The Russians expanded across northern Asia into Siberia, an imperialist expansion that brought them great natural resources, and took over the eastern rim of the Baltic from Sweden, where they built a new capital, St. Petersburg. In western Africa, trade in slaves handled by Africans and Europeans grew dramatically, with major consequences for local social and political structures.