A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  An increase in rents, government measures to impose new or higher taxes, and the billeting of troops also sparked riots and full-fledged revolts. In southern China, for example, a series of crop failures in the 1560s and again in the 1640s led to attacks on landlords, refusal to pay taxes and rents, an increase in what officials called “roving bandits” who roamed the streets and waterways, and a series of peasant rebellions. These culminated in the capture of Beijing by a coalition of rebel forces led by Li Zicheng and the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644, although the rebels themselves were defeated by Manchu forces several months later and the new Qing dynasty was installed. Government orders requiring troops to be housed and fed by villagers led in 1640 to revolts in Catalonia in northern Iberia and Ulster in northern Ireland. Colonial Mexico experienced hundreds of village riots in the eighteenth century, and changes in Spanish tax policies in the late eighteenth century provoked revolts in northern South America.

  In the last decades of the eighteenth century, a series of revolts in the Atlantic world became full-fledged revolutions that ousted or toppled governments. Their leaders were inspired by Enlightenment ideas about freedom, liberty, and rights that circulated in all directions from the new institutions of the public sphere, and also by social conditions and the existing governments’ inability to handle economic crises. In political terms they represent a distinct break—some would see the Atlantic revolutions as creating the modern political world—but in many ways they fit with existing patterns of social protest.

  In North America, British colonists angry about tax increases and changes in the tea and tobacco trade revolted and declared their independence in 1776, with speeches and documents proclaiming ideals of liberty and equality. They created new ideals of patriotic manliness, telling and retelling stories about freedom-seeking colonists in simple shirts and buckskin jackets shooting from behind trees, while British “redcoats” and German mercenaries stupidly stood in straight lines. (From the British perspective, the colonists were ungrateful vandals and tax-dodgers and the British soldiers models of appropriate military discipline.) France and later Spain and the Netherlands entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists. Fighting took place in the Caribbean and India as well as North America, which limited British ability to hold territory after military victories or to provide needed supplies. British willingness to engage in harsh repression as they had in Ireland and later would elsewhere was limited by the fact that revolutionaries and loyalists came from the same communities—and sometimes the same families—and that neither ethnicity nor religion separated one side from the other. Disease also played a key role: outbreaks of smallpox convinced General George Washington (1732–99) to have new soldiers into his army inoculated using variolation techniques, thus protecting them. British troops remained vulnerable to diseases, especially malaria, which they contracted when they moved into southern colonies, leaving many too weak to fight. In 1781 British troops under General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia to a combined American and French army, which was both twice as large and healthier. Two years later Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen British North American colonies that had revolted. Illnesses brought from the Old World as part of the Columbian Exchange shaped conflicts in the New World even when most of those fighting were Old World natives or their descendants.

  In France, the enormous expenses of the American Revolution further endebted the government, forcing King Louis XVI (r. 1774–92) in 1789 to call the national representative body, the Estates General, to try and reform the tax code to prevent bankruptcy. Many middle-class representatives viewed the fact that nobles and clergy held the most power in the way the Estates General voted as outdated, however. They formed a new National Assembly, which the king planned to dissolve by force. But the harvest of 1788 had been meager, so bread prices soared, many people were out of work, and riots broke out in many towns. The most dramatic of these riots was in Paris, where on July 14, 1789 crowds of men and women stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in the center of the city, looking for weapons with which to oppose the king. At the same time, peasants in the countryside ransacked the houses of their noble landlords, burned documents that recorded their taxes and dues, and reoccupied common land that had been enclosed. The National Assembly lifted the dues peasants owed to the nobility, and issued a stirring Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but it could do little to solve the food or financial crises. In October thousands of women armed with pikes and sticks marched from Paris to the royal palace at Versailles, demanding the king and his family return to Paris. The king vacillated and the Revolution grew increasingly radical. Leaders ousted the king and then executed him and his wife, sent armies against Austria and Prussia, and declared the country a republic in which all men over twenty-one could vote. Women had been active in the Revolution, drafting official grievance lists and forming their own political groups as well as engaging in protests, but the politicization of women shocked both conservatives and revolutionaries, and none of the various constitutions drafted during the Revolution allowed women to vote, though they did allow women some civil rights, such as divorce and property ownership. (These were later rescinded when Napoleon came to power.)

  The working poor in Paris, known as the sans-culottes (“without knee-breeches”) because the men among them wore long pants rather than the knee-breeches of the wealthy, demanded radical action that would guarantee food. As in the American War of Independence, the revolutionaries were seen in contradictory ways: as hard-working people seeking food for their children, or as bloodthirsty fiends shouting “Long live the guillotine!” The government fixed the price of bread in Paris at a point people could afford, and mobilized human and material resources to fight France's enemies by building up a sense of patriotic mission and revolutionary virtue. It also imprisoned and killed its enemies in a Reign of Terror, which in 1794 provoked a reaction; the new middle-class leaders rejected the radicalism of the sans-culottes, restricted local political organizations, brought in the army to quell protests, and limited male voting rights. The king was gone, but hunger remained.

  In Latin America and the Caribbean, repression of indigenous people and slaves along with social inequality and the spread of new ideals of liberty also led to revolts. By the eighteenth century most of the population of the Caribbean were African slaves, and there were frequent slave revolts. One of these, the Haitian Revolution of 1791 led by a freed slave Toussaint l'Ouverture (1746–1803), ended slavery and established an independent nation, although Toussaint was captured in the course of this and died in a French prison. Haiti became the second independent nation in the Americas, but the first independent nation—the United States—refused to recognize it diplomatically, as its president, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, feared slave rebellion would spread.

  Spanish colonial rule was punctuated by a series of revolts. In the Andean region, 90 percent of the population was indigenous in the eighteenth century, required to labor on European-owned farms and in mines, or taxed heavily. After a major increase in taxes by the Spanish government, Tupac Amaru II (1740–81), a wealthy and well-educated man who claimed descent from the last Inca king, and his wife led a revolt by a coalition of groups that briefly held several provinces of Peru. They were both gruesomely executed by Spanish troops and the rebels defeated. Because the insurrection had identified with the Incas, Inca clothing, language, and other cultural traditions were banned, but revolts continued and became part of a widespread movement for independence from Spain that stretched from Mexico to Patagonia. This was led by locally born men of European background, called creoles, including Simon Bolivar (1783–1830) and José de San Martin (1778–1850), who were successful in ousting the Spanish in the early nineteenth century, but were not able to form representative governments or to incorporate indigenous peoples into the institutions they created.

  The early modern and the truly modern

  Historians of var
ious world regions begin their accounts of the centuries covered in this chapter at slightly different points—the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Shi'ite Safavid dynasty's rise to power in Persia in 1501, Luther's first public critique of the Catholic Church in 1517, Mughal expansion into India in the 1520s, the beginning of the reign of Ivan IV (called “the Terrible”) in Russia in 1533, the creation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603. In global terms, however, 1492 has few contenders as a sharp dividing line. Although the full impact of the voyages of Columbus would not be felt for centuries, diseases, plants, and animals began to cross the Atlantic immediately, transforming the natural and human worlds on both sides.

  In much of the central and southern parts of the New World, mixed populations of Africans, Europeans, and indigenous people mined precious metals and raised crops for export, while in the northern part of the Americas smaller numbers of less mixed people farmed, hunted, trapped, and fished, supplying products for far-flung consumer markets. Most of the millions of people who crossed the Atlantic in these centuries came from Africa, where the slave trade destabilized states and societies, but the ships that carried them along with the products they and others made were owned by Europeans, some of whom made enormous profits from trade. Ships also carried Christian missionaries and officials, and Christianity became a global religion, though it splintered in Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation and everywhere incorporated local traditions and practices. Ideas also crossed the Atlantic in all directions, exchanged in new urban social settings and cultural institutions, including scientific societies, printed journals and newspapers, clubs, and salons.

  Away from the Atlantic, people and products were also on the move: Han Chinese settled in Central Asia with the expansion of the Qing Empire, planting potatoes and sweet potatoes; Russian fur traders moved into Siberia, hunting and trapping sable and mink; Comanche, Cheyenne, and Lakota spread out across the plains of western and southwestern North America, hunting buffalo from horseback; the Ottomans expanded into Europe and around the Mediterranean and the Mughals into South Asia, spreading Islam and creating new institutions of governance; Dutch and British traders moved into the Indian Ocean basin, gradually taking over more trade. Chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar were increasingly available in cities and larger towns far from any coast, at prices that even servants could sometimes afford. They might be paid for with Mexican silver pesos, which circulated globally, and were especially popular in China, where people thought the hefty rulers portrayed on their faces looked like the Buddha.

  In every migration, whether willing or coerced, people carried their customs, languages, religious beliefs, foodways, and other aspects of their culture with them, which blended into new hybrid forms in many places. Groups themselves blended through intermarriage and other sorts of heterosexual relationships, though conquering and colonizing authorities often tried to prevent this. Those authorities created systems of defining and regulating difference, in which a hierarchical system based on “race” became increasingly dominant.

  Some aspects of life changed little in these centuries, however. While people and goods moved regularly around the world by water, land transport of bulky goods remained difficult, and local and more widespread famines continued, contributing to infant and child mortality that remained high. War was also a constant, now fought with gunpowder weapons in many places, but continuing to carry disease, hunger, and brutality with it. Cultural traditions and religious ideas were still taught primarily through the spoken word. Wealth created by commerce allowed some individuals and some families to increase their social stature, but did not upset a hierarchy in which being born into the landholding elite was the best assurance of power and prosperity. Hierarchies of wealth and inherited status continued to intersect with hierarchies of gender, for whether one was born male or female shaped every life experience and every stage of life.

  Where to set the end of the early modern period—and thus the beginning of what we might call the “truly modern”—for world history is not as clear as where to set its start. The conventional date is 1789, but this privileges the political history of western Europe. Perhaps it should be 1787, when the first fleet of convicts set sail from Britain to Australia, carrying about a thousand people to a new colony on what was not yet designated a continent (that would come about a hundred years later). Or 1791, the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history. Or 1792, the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first explicit call for political rights to be extended to the female half of the population. But 1789 was also the date that the English inventor Edmund Cartwright patented his second power loom. Although the loom had serious mechanical problems and creditors repossessed his cotton mill, other inventors quickly improved on Cartwright's design, and mills filled with mechanical power looms soon opened in several parts of Britain. The industrialization that began with those mills created the modern world, so 1789 might be the best date after all.

  Further reading

  Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary edition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) is a good place to start, as is Crosby's later book, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) is an excellent recent survey of the long-term implications of the transfer of food crops and other products, written for a general audience by a skilled science journalist. On disease, see Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). A broader study of the environment in this period is John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History, Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, discusses many of the issues covered in this chapter.

  David R. Ringrose, Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–1700 (New York: Longman, 2001) and Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, eds., The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 3rd edn. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2012) are excellent introductions, designed for students. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) and John R. Chávez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) offer comparative studies of Atlantic colonialism. On legal aspects, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  For both social protests and warfare, Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) is comprehensive, and Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) presents a comparative study of revolution. Marshall Hodgson's notion of “gunpowder empires” was first published in his The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); for a more recent discussion of these empires, see Douglas E. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (New York: Westview Press, 2010). On Chinese expansion, see Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005).

  There are many fine studies of the Reformation, among them Peter Matheson, ed., Reformation Christianity, Volume V of A People's History of Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), which includes essays on the religious life of ordinary men and women. R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Cathol
ic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. 2005) and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London: Routledge, 2nd edn. 2010) cover both European and colonial Catholicism. On mixing and creolization more generally, see Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2002), James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and John Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  On the fur trade in North America and its social impact, two classic studies are William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). More recent studies of colonial development are Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Mark Kulansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (London: Penguin, 1998) is a lively book for general readers.