FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO WITH BENJAMIN SACKS
Global history, strictly understood, is the history of what happens worldwide – across the planet as a whole, as if viewed from a cosmic crow’s nest, with the advantages of immense distance and panoptic range. Sometimes global events arise beyond the reach of human agency. Climatic lurches or microbial mutations or seismic convulsions or the dispersion or extinction of some nonhuman species can affect all the world’s peoples more or less simultaneously. Usually, however, cultures change because of their own internal dynamic or because of what, for purposes of this chapter, I shall call “connections”: transmutative contacts with other cultures. Historians sometimes use the word to mean something else: similarities or commonalities arising not from genuine connections but from parallel experiences or related environmental influences or supposed evolutionary effects. Examples include the independent development of agriculture, the state, and the city in various unlinked places, “connected,” if at all, only by involvement in supposedly universal processes, such as progress or Providence or “development” or increasing complexity or “class struggle.” “Connections,” in these usages, do not appear in these pages because the changes they denote, while important in themselves, are most helpfully designated by their own names (Mazlish 1993; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2009).
Connections properly understood – those made, and those severed – are important because they serve to document and calibrate the most pervasive processes detectable in the history of the world: the processes of divergence and convergence, which make cultures at different times more and less like each other. Understanding those processes is worthwhile because, if we can achieve it, we can see how and perhaps why humans differ from other cultural animals: the range of cultural variation is immeasurably greater in homo sapiens than in any other cultural creature we know of – including, most notably, extinct species of the genus homo and the more remotely kindred primates who, among surviving animals, most resemble us in other respects. Broadly speaking, if we accept that our species has a common origin in a small community of culturally uniform human creatures in East Africa, perhaps around 200,000 years ago, it follows that the astonishing, prolific multiplication of human cultures since then has been the result of many episodes of divergence. Some cultural differentiation arose in the course of migrations into new environments, which demanded or imposed adaptations of the migrants’ ways of life. Other instances occurred as a result of cultures’ relative mutual isolation in a patchily inhabited world. Others again, presumably, may have been the result of conscious self-differentiation between neighboring or sometime-neighboring peoples. Other changes, which contributed to divergence, may have been visionary or optative in nature, arising in the minds of the people who espoused or imposed them.1
Convergence has happened alongside divergence and, increasingly, has become the dominant trend, as sundered cultures have reestablished contacts and influenced each other. Whenever we see languages, religions or ideologies, food and foodways, technologies, kinship systems, political and economic institutions, laws, and tricks or habits of thought spread across cultural frontiers, we usually find that specific connections underlie the trends. Culturally effective changes, which historians generally like to call “transmissions,” happen with greatest impact or intensity when human vectors bear them – most commonly, migrants, sojourners, settlers, warriors, envoys, missionaries, merchants, pilgrims, explorers, colonial administrators, wandering scholars, disinterested travelers. Instances of all these demand attention, but first it may be helpful to look at how artifacts can pass from place to place and so can exercise cultural influence beyond the reach of individual human journeys.
Material Culture
That texts can transmit or affect culture, independently of the people who carry them and even, at times, of those who write them or interpret them in their places of origin, is a statement unlikely to provoke dissent or demand exemplification. But all material objects have, potentially, the same capacity. They can travel, by emporium trading, beyond the range of human travelers; they can shape culture by conveying meaning, inspiring imitation or awe, or igniting social, economic, and technological innovations. Ochre, certainly, and fire, salt, and shells, probably, were among the earliest commodities traded over relatively long distances. Communities that received them could imitate those that supplied them. The commodities empowered the individuals through whose hands they passed.2The anthropologist Mary W. Helms has – without much acknowledgment from historians – done the most important work on the subject of how material objects exercise cultural influence over distances untraversed by human agents. In Ulysses’ Sail and other work she has documented receptivity to the exotic on a global scale. “Not only exotic materials,” she points out, “but also intangible knowledge of distant realms and regions can be politically valuable ‘goods,’ both for those who have endured the perils of travel and for those sedentary homebodies who are able to acquire such knowledge by indirect means and use it for political advantage” (1993b: 4). InCraft and the Kingly Ideal she showed how “the symbolism or meanings associated with things obtained from distant places by acts of long-distance trade are comparable to the symbolic associations that accompany things created by acts of skilled crafting” (1993a: 91). Objects from afar arrive at their destinations touched, at least, with rarity value and often by sacrality: an association with the divine horizon. (See also Helms 1975; 1983.) Sanctity accumulates with travel. The power of “cargo cults” in the recent history of some Pacific island peoples demonstrates this dramatically. Objects acted independently in transmitting some of the greatest, long-range, transmutative influences of modern history, bringing oriental models and materials to the makers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The role of objects in forging cultures has become a commonplace of historical, anthropological, and sociological literature.3
The Stranger-Effect
For objects, it seems, cultural frontiers are easily permeable. Individuals often find alien cultures harder to penetrate. Hostility or suspicion in the face of strangers and unwillingness to recognize them as fellow beings are widespread, readily comprehensible, self-protective habits. Like artifacts, however, in some cultures humans can acquire numinous connotations in proportion to their unfamiliarity, and can, in consequence, have transformative impacts; a phenomenon best called the “stranger-effect” or, as I have written elsewhere,
the experience of welcome, which may include deference of various kinds, accorded in some societies to newcomers who are not easily classifiable in the terms of the approached community, except as strangers, outsiders, foreigners or by some roughly equivalent term … One would expect strangers to be massacred, and they often are. More interesting, however, are the frequency of the exemptions and the depth of collaboration between strangers and host-communities, such as often ensues. (Fernández-Armesto 2000: 80–81)
Without the force of the stranger-effect, it is hard to imagine the reception of the bearers of Christianity to the New World or of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa or around the Indian Ocean, or of Buddhism in China, Tibet, Japan, and southeast and central Asia.4 Most preindustrial empires could not have functioned as arenas of long-range cultural exchange without the willing acceptance of stranger-colonists and of strangers as traders, arbitrators, sexual partners, and rulers, since empires of that period were essentially weak, limited by geography, and without adequate technology to enforce obedience or even – on the very large scale of the global seaborne empires that grew from the sixteenth century onward – the means of making their commands known rapidly or effectively (see Caldwell and Henley 2008).
Sometimes an entire culture can exercise influence analogous to the stranger-effect by commanding admiration and imitation beyond its own boundaries. China’s influence is the most striking example, shaping contiguous and neighboring cultures and transmitting models and patterns, especially in technology, even further afield to Europe and Africa. In Central Asia, steppe-based dynasties borrowed Chinese courtly models, rituals, and political ideas: when they invaded China, as they often did, it was, in some measure, always an act that arose from admiration. As early as the third century BCE, Chinese visitors had reached Malaya, Indonesia, Kampuchea, and Formosa. In Japan, during the Yayoi period (ca. 250 BCE–250 CE), the magnetism of China brought the idea of coinage, the pottery wheel, bronze materials, and, most importantly, the rice crop that became critical to the Japanese diet. By the beginning of the eighth century, in Japan and Korea, T’ang dynastic law, calligraphy, literature, poetry and architecture were widely accepted and reshaped to suit local needs and tastes. Even the Chinese moniker for the Japanese islands was adopted: Je-pen, “land of the rising sun,” was translated into Japanese as Nippon. Music too, did not escape the influence of China. With the spread of Buddhism and Chinese commerce, Han drums and strings filtered into Japanese and Korean folk life and state ceremony.
To a lesser extent, the diffusion of the influence of classical Greek culture, primarily via the media of Roman and Christian imitators and assimilators, has had a comparable effect in the West. “Greek revival” architecture in the nineteenth-century United States owed nothing to the travels of individual Greeks, but was a distant reflection of the adulation – sometimes amounting to thralldom – that ancient Greek models of life and thought had attracted in Europe at intervals from the time of the Roman Empire onwards. That Western philosophy can be, with only some exaggeration, routinely characterized as “footnotes to Plato” exemplifies this fascination. So does the medieval tradition of exalting Aristotle as “the” philosopher. So does the scientific tradition of coining technical terms by transliteration from approximate Greek cognates. So does the dependence of Western political discourse on adaptations of Greek terms such as “democracy” and “tyranny.” European and North American influence, in its turn, has helped to transmit Greek models worldwide. When eighteenth-century Britons became rulers in Bengal, they built the Hindu College of Calcutta in what they took to be the style of the Lyceum or Academy in ancient Athens. Similarly, nineteenth-century New Englanders constructed public rotundas, supported with Corinthian columns, to debate abolitionism, temperance, religion, women’s rights, and human evolution. Postmodern architecture – which includes the latest “Renaissance” in the history of the world – has helped spread pedimented buildings as far afield as Tokyo (Tzonis and Giannisi 2004; Malacrino 2010).
In recent times, the only close parallel to the magnetism of ancient Greece in the West or China in East and Southeast Asia is that of the United States, which has exerted transforming magnetism, by way of example, on cultures it has barely touched in other ways. The twentieth century is widely known as “the American century” because of the way other countries have aped and bought US popular culture – especially in music and film – as well as US economic and political values, exemplified by the worldwide triumphs of capitalism and representative democracy toward the century’s end. At the very inception of the history of the US, the Declaration of Independence evoked global resonance. Even before “the American century,” American social values, folk tales, literature on liberty, democracy, and government and dreams had long chaperoned cotton from the Carolinas, textiles from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, furniture from New York and Pennsylvania, and coal and tobacco from Virginia to European and Asian ports (see Armitage 2008). Near-instantaneous communication followed the merchant ships; in 1866 the transatlantic telegraph cable was completed, enabling for the first time rapid cultural exchange between New York and London. Nineteenth-century European visitors to the US, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and James Bryce, journeyed consciously in search of the future – of models for the Old World to follow. In Tocqueville’s and Bryce’s cases, especially, they succeeded in getting Old World elites to adjust first their ideas and then their countries’ respective constitutions to reflect American influence.5
In politics, the United States launched, nurtured, or revised some ideas of enormous and growing influence in the world – including, notably, democracy and socialism – but it is hard to find a movement of any significance in the arts, literature, science, or philosophy that started in the United States before the 1890s. Then, however, the flood began, as European composers discovered the wonders of American ragtime. The projection of the US as the principal model for global admiration and imitation is often said to have begun with World War I, when 3 million US troops “over there” acted as highly effective vectors of culture, alerting the world to the superpower status of their homeland. But the phenomenon really began a couple of decades earlier, with the Chicago and St. Louis World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904, respectively. Skyscrapers, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, ragtime and jazz all began to change the world towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth.
The structures within which the stranger-effect is usually exercised overlap and are ultimately inseparable: exploration, peaceful migration, war, empire-building, trade, and religious proselytization. But for the sake of convenience they can be dealt with in turn – necessarily, in each case, by a few conspicuous but not comprehensive examples.
Exploration
Exploration logically comes first, because explorers have been responsible for finding the routes of encounter between formerly sundered cultures. Our knowledge of the process in the ancient world is only fragmentary: evidence, for instance, of Egyptian exploration of the upper Nile in the twenty-third century BCE, which made the pharaonic court aware of the cultures of the forest region, or the slaving missions of the Garamantes across the Sahara, or of Phoenician and Greek voyagers in the worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, or of the maritime heroes of early Buddhist Jatakas, or of Chinese monks in search of Buddhist texts in India. But the scale of the connections explorers reestablished from the late fifteenth century onward eclipsed all of these earlier cases. The New World became a warped simulacrum of Europe thanks to the efforts Columbus and his successors initiated. The modern “world system” of global economic specialization in production and interconnection by trade developed in these explorers’ wakes (see Fernández-Armesto 2006; Cunliffe 2001; Frank et al. 1993).
Peaceful Migration
Peaceful migrations have been, by some measure, even more effective in forging connections. It is hard to imagine philhellenism ever getting underway in the West if Greek colonization had not preceded it along and across the Mediterranean, or Christianity taking root in Rome if that city had not already housed one of the many Jewish communities that peaceful migrations had scattered across the Roman world. As far as we can tell, in the present state of knowledge, largely peaceful migrations of Bantu-speaking peoples out of West Africa were partly responsible for spreading agriculture across the continent. The most prolific peaceful colonists in the history of the world have been Chinese. In the mid-1200s, indigenous inhabitants of present-day Guangxi, Hainan, and Guangdong provinces introduced Han migrants to the process of irrigating, cleaning, and weaving cotton. The Han, in turn, shared this knowledge with the invading Mongols, who established cotton as a key Chinese industry. Even after the death of the expansionist, flag-waving Yongle emperor in 1424, Chinese merchants and farmers transformed bazaars and communities from Zanzibar to Persia and Java, sending remittances – and the beliefs and customs of the lands they visited – back to their families. In the nineteenth century, Chinese migration became a genuinely global phenomenon. Early modern Batavia and Manila were, in demographic terms, overwhelmingly Chinese colonies that happened to be under European leadership. From 1834, when the British Empire abolished slavery, until the eve of World War I in 1914, 4 million workers, mainly from India and China, kept the empire supplied with cheap labor. They and their counterparts left an indelible cultural imprint in the continental New World, select European cities, and East Africa. Nineteenth-century Chinese migrants sought work in the United States, constructing railroads and telegraph networks, working in factories and mills; they developed key socioeconomic centers at Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and fashioned “Chinatowns” in many of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. By 1890, over 100,000 Chinese were working in the United States alone.6
Massive migration of free labor was the final factor that helped to reshape the world’s labor force. Population increase – so great as to overspill from some areas – combined with improved, cheap, long-range communications to make unprecedented migration rates possible. Russian and Chinese migration into northern Asia illustrates this well. Russia’s population exceeded 167 million in 1900 – an increase of nearly 20 million in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Siberia relied on convict labor until the 1870s, but by the end of the century, almost all the migrants living there were free. Nearly a million settlers entered Siberia during the 1890s while the Trans-Siberian Railway was under construction (Marks 1991). About 5 million followed in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, when the railway was complete. Much like San Francisco or Denver, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Irkutsk became energetic boom towns. Chinese colonization of Manchuria increased after 1860, when the Qing relaxed the rules restricting it. Although Armenians, Jews, Lebanese, and Roma were of enormous importance in particular destinations and economic niches, China was still the world’s most prolific source of long-range colonists – even if one takes the involuntary colonists enslaved in Africa into account. The age-old Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia gathered pace, rising to a total of almost 14 million in the 1890s and leaping further in the years before World War I.
Meanwhile, the steamship trade, which also facilitated coolie migration, helped to populate underexploited frontiers in the Southern Hemisphere and the North American West, and to provide labor for North American industrialization. Europe, because of its exceptional rise in population, was the main source of free migrants. “New Europes,” areas with similar climates and environments to those the migrants left behind, were the most attractive destinations. There were areas of this kind in North America, the southern cone of South America (particularly popular with Germans and the Welsh), Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and South Africa. Transatlantic routes were the most popular and carried the most traffic, chiefly because of the economic opportunities that North American expansion created.
The United States gained more than 128,000 migrants in the 1820s and over 500,000 in the 1830s. Numbers trebled in the next decade. Until then, most migrants came from Germany, Britain, and Ireland. A further leap in the 1880s brought the total to over 5.25 million, from all over Europe and especially from Scandinavia, Italy, Central Europe, and the Russian Empire. This was the manpower that fueled continental expansion and industrialization (see Dinnerstein 2009; Daniels 1990; Cannato 2009).
War and Empire
War and empire have forged connections and created enormous arenas for the exchange of culture. (See chapters by Morillo and by Sinha, this volume.) Rome is a familiar example in Western history. Rome’s influence can be measured in the uniform archaeology of villas, cities, and monumental engineering, and still resonates in many European languages, as well as in the predominance of Christianity. The Arab conquests from the seventh century onward had a similar effect where they occurred, transmitting Islam and Arabic as well as a great deal of intellectual culture inherited from parts of the Roman Empire that Arabs or their allies overran. On a Eurasian scale, the Mongols remain the most conspicuous empire-builders, facilitating the transmission of Chinese ideas and techniques to southwest Asia and Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In southwest Asia, Sayyid ‘āl Hamadānī’s scholarship profited from extensive contact with Chinese, Indian, and Mongol academics and travelers, the ability to import seeds, spices, and documents from far beyond Persia, and from his period as a minister to Ghazan Khan, a position that permitted experimentation in Tabrīz and Sultāniyya. Under Mongol rule in China, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism flourished; by the fifteenth century Buddhism was exported back to the Mongol heartland around Karakorum, where Tibetan monks successfully blended Buddhism with local shamanism. The revival of empiricism in Europe, and the appearance or proliferation there of such new technologies as gunpowder, paper, the compass, the rudder and the blast furnace are all outcomes of enhanced contact across Eurasia. The revolutionary experiences of the West at the time – the technical progress, the innovations in art, the readjustment of notions of reality through the eyes of a new kind of science – were owed, in part, to influences transmitted along routes the Mongols maintained. The steppe became a highway of fast communication, linking the extremities of the landmass and helping transfer culture across two continents. Without the Mongol peace, it is hard to imagine any of the rest of world history working out as it did, for these were the roads that carried Chinese ideas and technology westward and opened up European minds to the vastness of the world. The importance of the Mongols’ passage through world history does not stop at the frontiers of their empire. It resonated across Eurasia (Fielding 2009; Robinson 2009).
Of later examples, European seaborne empires founded from the sixteenth through twentieth century forged even wider connections, roughly indicated on today’s world map by the reach of imperial languages, especially Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and to a lesser extent Dutch. Most such empires, including that of the United States in continental North America, also acted as vicarious agents for the transmission of culture out of Africa, borne by the people enslaved and forcibly resettled in pursuit of imperial economic strategies (see Carney and Rosomoff 2009). Above all, the empires were spaces in which “ecological exchange” took place, as biota formerly restricted to particular places were carried all over the world: cultural traits associated with the preparation and consumption of foodstuffs or the treatment of diseases accompanied ecological exchange (Newell 2010; Fernández-Armesto 2001: 282–284 (on Polynesia), 384–385 (on ecological imperialism); and also chapters by Simmons and by Pernick, this volume). The role of French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies in spreading values associated with the European Enlightenment was more restricted geographically – affecting only continental Europe and the Ottoman Empire – but left visceral changes in the laws and political traditions of almost every country that formed part of the Napoleonic empire or neighbored it. In recent times, war has played a part in connecting parts of the world with the US. Millions of American soldiers in Europe during the two world wars bore US popular customs with them, permanently altering the European cultural landscape. In the early twenty-first century, US leaders dissatisfied with their influence in some parts of the world – notably Iraq and Afghanistan – followed precedent in attempting to impose that influence by force of arms.
Religion
Religious proselytization and communication has made three religions, which are universal in their aspirations, genuinely or nearly global in their reach. (See Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, this volume.) Buddhism was able to forge cross-cultural connections in its early centuries, spreading from India to China, Japan, Tibet, and Central and Southeast Asia. But it shrank in its heartlands and stagnated elsewhere until, at Altan Khan’s invitation, the Dalai Lama visited Mongolia in 1576 and 1586. He guided reform of Mongol customs. Human sacrifices were forbidden, and blood sacrifices of all sorts stopped. The ongons – the felt images in which spirits resided, except when the rites of shamans liberated them – were to be burned and replaced by Buddhist statues. The new religion was at first limited to the aristocracy. But over the next century, Buddhism spread through society and outward across the Mongol dominions. Expanding Manchu political power, after they conquered China in 1644, reinforced the Buddhist mission. The Manchu emperors perceived Buddhist missionaries as pacifiers and potential agents of imperial policy. They appointed Tibetan lamas to instruct the Mongols, presumably in part to reconcile the Mongols to Chinese rule. Like Catholic missions in the New World, Buddhist missions in northern Asia were shadowed and disfigured by political conquests and violence. The leading missionary Neyici Toyin burned before his tent a bonfire of ongons 10 tent frames high in the 1630s. In practice, the old gods reemerged as Buddhist deities, just as in Christian America the Native American gods survived as saints and representations of the Virgin Mary. In both Mongolia and the Americas, the old gods continued to mediate between humans and nature.7
Islam displayed even more remarkable cultural elasticity in appealing beyond its heartlands to congregations in Africa and in and around the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The means of conversion were fourfold: commerce, deliberate missionary effort, holy war, and dynastic links. Merchants and missionaries spread Islam together. Trade shunted pious Muslims from city to city and installed them as port supervisors, customs officials, and agents to local rulers. Missionaries followed: scholars in search of patronage, discharging along the way the Muslim’s obligation to convert unbelievers; spiritual athletes in search of exercise, anxious to challenge native shamans in contests of conspicuous austerity and supernatural power. In some areas, Sufis made crucial contributions. In Southeast Asia, Sufis congregated in Melaka, and after the city fell to the Portuguese in 1511, they fanned out from there through Java and Sumatra. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sultanate of Aceh in northwest Sumatra in modern Indonesia was a nursery of Sufi missionaries of sometimes dubious Islamic orthodoxy, such as Shams al-Din, who saw himself as a prophet of the end of the world and whose books were burned after his death in 1630. Even peaceful Muslim missionaries tended to see themselves as warriors of a sort, waging a “jihad of words.” During the seventeenth century, perhaps under the goad of competition from Christianity, the “jihad of the sword” grew in importance, and the extension of the frontier of the Islamic world depended increasingly on the aggression of sultans, especially from central Java (Hodgson1974; Fregosi 1998; Lewis 2008; Sonn 2010; Ruthven 2004).
In West Africa, merchant clans or classes, like the Saharan Arabs known as Kunta, who made a habit of marrying the daughters of holy men, were the advanced guard of Islam. The black wandering scholars known as the Torokawa incited revivalism and jihad in Hausaland in modern Nigeria from the 1690s. Schools with a wide curriculum played a vital part in diffusing Islam among the Hausa, scattering pupils who in turn attracted students of their own. A sheikh who died in 1655 was able, at school in Katsina, near the present border of Niger and Nigeria, to “taste to the full the Law, the interpretation of the Quran, prophetic tradition, grammar, syntax, philology, logic, study of grammatical particles, and of the name of God, Quranic recitation, and the science of meter and rhyme” (Fernández-Armesto 1996: 270). Paid by donations according to pupils’ wealth, the master of such a school sat on a pile of rugs and sheepskins before his niche of books, equipped with his tray of sand for tracing letters with his finger. He might have had his brazier filled with burning charcoal to warm him in winter, and his spittoon for the husks of kola nuts that were eaten for their caffeine content. Students’ manuscripts survive, smothered in annotations from the teacher’s commentary, which was often in a native language instead of Arabic, the language of the Quran. At the end of this course, the student acquired a certificate, emblazoned with a long pedigree of named teachers going back to Malik ibn Anas, the eighth-century codifier of Islamic law.
Christianity has, so far, been the most culturally adaptive or elastic of the great world religions. The Reformation helped stimulate Catholics to intensified activity in the wider world and, in the long run, aroused Protestant missionary societies to emulate the Catholic religious in mission fields. Christian missionaries acted as both envoys and scholars, at once representing the whims of church and state (which were often the same), and adapting their teachings for local consumption. The result was the establishment of a global religion – but with countless local interpretations and expressions. In Latin America, “Andean religion” is recognizably a form of Catholicism, albeit distinguished by aberrations and continuities with pre-Christian religious sensibilities (MacCormack 1990; 1991). Today, on the Yucatan Peninsula, Christians venerate both Jesus Christ and Mayan idols. Other cults, such as that of Maximon are local constructs (Pédron-Colombani 2004). Indeed, Maximon seems equally at home nestled next to the Virgin Mary, or with a cigar in his mouth, or adorned with Guatemalan shawls and European hats. Other New World religions sometimes called “syncretic,” such as Candomblé and Voodoo, combine transmissions from Africa with Christian influence, or in the case of Pentecostalism, match Christian faith with sensibilities often characterized as originating in African tradition.8 The success of Christianity beyond its Middle Eastern and Western heartlands has not depended on imperial contexts. The success of Catholicism in early modern China and Japan, though interrupted by the hostility of states, demonstrates that, as does the flourishing of Christianity in postcolonial Africa and in some places that never experienced Western imperialism, notably Korea.9
Trade: Land Routes
In the long run, sea routes were more important for making the connections of global history than land routes. They carried a greater variety of goods faster, more economically, and in greater amounts. Nevertheless, in the early stages, most Eurasian long-range trade was small scale – in goods of high value and limited bulk. Goods moved through a series of markets and middlemen. (See Levi, this volume.) In the first millennium BCE, the land routes that linked Eurasia were as important as the sea routes in establishing cultural contacts: bringing people from different cultures together, facilitating the flow of the ideas of the axial-age sages, transmitting the works of art that changed taste and the goods that influenced lifestyles.
From around the mid-first millennium BCE, Chinese silks appeared here and there across Europe – in Athens, and at present-day Budapest in Hungary, and in a series of south German and Rhineland burials. By the end of the millennium, we can trace the flow of Chinese manufactured goods from the southern Caspian to the northern Black Sea, and into what were then gold-rich kingdoms in the southwest stretches of the Eurasian steppe. Meanwhile, roads that kings built and maintained crossed what is now Turkey and Iran, penetrated Egypt and Mesopotamia, reached the Persian Gulf, and, at their easternmost ends, touched the Pamir Mountains in Afghanistan and crossed the Indus River. The silk roads were by no means safe. Bandits hid in the dangerous terrain, preying on wearied, heat-exhausted merchants. An eighth-century Mongol painting depicted one such robbery in progress. Robbers wielding long, blood-tipped swords blocked the path of the caravans, demanding fees and goods from their victims.10
The silk roads were, nonetheless, the most convenient means of transport between Europe and China, active as early as the third-century BCE. From this avenue of trade, culture flowed across Eurasia. To function, an avenue of communications needs people at either end of it who want to be in touch. The Eurasian steppe was like a dumbbell, with densely populated zones and productive economies at either end. For people in Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa, access to the products of South, Southeast, and East Asia was highly desirable. For the suppliers of spices, drugs, fine textiles, and luxury products in the east, it was good to have customers who paid in silver.11
In the Americas, there was no chance to reproduce such relationships. The North American prairie is aligned on a north–south axis, across climatic zones, whereas the Eurasian steppe stretches from east to west. Plants and animals can cross the steppe without encountering impenetrable environments. Seeds can survive the journey without perishing and without finding, at the end of the road, an environment too sunless or cold to thrive in. In North America, it took centuries longer to achieve comparable exchanges. Transmissions of culture across latitudes are much harder to effect than those that occur within latitudes, which have relatively narrow boundaries and where climate and conditions are familiar. Elsewhere in the Americas, the concentrations of wealth and population were in two regions – Mesoamerica and the Andes – that neither grasslands nor any other easily traveled routes linked. Though societies in other parts of the hemisphere drew lessons, models of life, technologies, and types of food from those areas, the results were hard to sustain because communications between these areas and outlying regions were difficult to keep up. Without the horse – extinct in the Americas for 10,000 years – the chances of an imperial people arising in the prairie or the pampas to do the sort of job the Mongols did in Europe were virtually zero.12 (See chapters by Yoffee, by Liu, and by Sinha, this volume.)
In Africa, the constraints were different. The Sahel might have played a role similar to that of the steppes in Eurasian history. There was a viable corridor of communication between the Nile and Niger valleys. In theory, an imperial people might have been able to open communications across the continent between the civilizations of East Africa, which were in touch with the world of the Indian Ocean, and those of West Africa, which the trade routes of the Sahara linked to the Mediterranean. But it never happened. For long-range empire building, the Sahel was, paradoxically, too rich compared with the Eurasian steppe. The environment of the Sahel was more diverse. Agrarian or partly agrarian states had more opportunity to develop, obstructing the formation of a Sahel-wide empire. Although pastoral peoples of the western Sahel often built up powerful empires, invaders from the desert always challenged and sometimes crushed them. While they lasted, moreover, the empires of the Sahel never reached east of the region of Lake Chad. Here states grew up, strong enough to resist conquest from outside, but not strong enough to expand to imperial dimensions themselves: states like Kanem and Bornu – which were sometimes separate, sometimes united.
Despite the lack of east–west connectivity across Africa, the “gold routes” across the Sahara linked the cultures of the Mediterranean with those of the Niger valley, from the mid-first millennium BCE. Medieval sources are copious enough for us to be able to reconstruct something of the nature of the connections made or reinforced in that period. The location of West Africa’s gold mines was a closely guarded commercial secret, but it was probably in Bure, around the upper reaches of the Niger River and the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal rivers. Muslims – presumably traders – had their own large quarter in or near the Ghanaian capital Kumbi Saleh, but were kept apart from the royal quarter of the town. The Soninke fought off Almoravid armies until 1076. In that year, Kumbi fell, and its defenders were massacred. The northerners’ political hold south of the Sahara did not last, but Islam was firmly implanted in West Africa.
By the middle of the next century, Arab writers regarded Ghana as a model Islamic state, whose king revered the true caliph in Baghdad and dispensed justice with exemplary openness. They admired his palace, with its objects of art and windows of glass; the huge natural ingot of gold that was the symbol of his authority; the gold ring by which he tethered his horse; his silk clothes; his elephants and giraffes. This magnificence did not last. After a long period of stagnation or decline, pagan invaders overran the Soninke state and destroyed Kumbi. But Islam had spread so widely by then among the warriors and traders of the Sahel that it retained its foothold south of the Sahara for the rest of the Middle Ages. The merchants of Mali handled the gold trade but never controlled its production. The mansa took nuggets for tribute – hence the image on Cresques Abraham’s famous map. The gold bought salt. Mali was so rich in gold and so short of salt that the price of salt reputedly tripled or quadrupled in the kingdom’s markets (Rosander and Westerlund 1997; Clarke 1982; Hunwick 1999).
Trade: Sea Routes
What Indian mapmakers in antiquity called the Seas of Milk and Butter were, to Greek merchants, “the Erythraean Sea,” from which traders brought back aromatics – especially frankincense and myrrh – and an Arabian cinnamon substitute called cassia. Important ports for long-range trade lined Arabia’s shores. At Gerrha, for instance, merchants unloaded Indian manufactures. Nearby, Thaj also served as a good place to warehouse imports. Egyptian merchants endowed Egyptian temples with incense in the third century BCE. The reason for the long seafaring, sea-daring tradition of the Indian Ocean lies in the regularity of the monsoonal wind system. Above the equator, northeasterlies prevail in winter; but when winter ends, the direction of the winds reverses. For most of the rest of the year, the winds blow steadily from the south and west, sucked toward the Asian landmass as air warms and rises over the continent. By timing voyages to take advantage of the predictable changes in the direction of the wind, navigators could be confident of a fair wind out and a fair wind home.
It is a fact not often appreciated that, overwhelmingly, the history of maritime exploration has been made into the wind, presumably because it was at least as important to get home as to get to anywhere new. This was how the Phoenicians and Greeks opened the Mediterranean to long-range commerce and colonization. The same strategy enabled South Sea Island navigators of this period to explore and colonize islands of the Pacific. (See Salesa, this volume.) The monsoonal wind system in the Indian Ocean freed navigators from such constraints. One must try to imagine what it would be like, feeling the wind, year after year, alternately in one’s face and at one’s back. Gradually, would-be seafarers realized how the changes of wind made outward ventures viable. They knew the wind would change and so could risk an outward voyage without fearing that they might be cut off from returning home. Maps 20.1, 20.2, and 20.3 show the wind patterns of the world’s major oceans, which shaped all of these key maritime routes.
Map 20.1 The Indian Ocean: wind and weather patterns, with trade routes.
Source: Based on maps in Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
Map 20.2 The Pacific: wind patterns and population movements.
Source: Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders (as Map 20.1).
Map 20.3 The Atlantic: wind patterns and trade routes.
Source: Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders (as Map 20.1).
Fixed-wind systems have proved harder for navigators to negotiate. The Mediterranean Sea was, nonetheless, a vital site of cultural exchange. In antiquity, a large trade existed between the Roman and Greek empires, the Arab civilizations that hugged the Mediterranean’s eastern shores, Egypt, and North Africa. Kenneth Clark noted that “if you had gone into the square of any Mediterranean town in the first-century you would hardly have known where you were, any more than you would in an airport today” (1969: 3). The Mediterranean remained a “corrupting sea” even after the fall of the Roman Empire ended the political unity that spanned its shores. A similar zone of navigation, with a measure of cultural unity, developed along Europe’s Atlantic face in antiquity. Gradually, with increasing intensity from the twelfth century onward, regular navigation connected the two zones. The Atlantic espace created by European navigation, imperialism, slaving and trade in the early modern period was, in a sense, an outgrowth of this process. Highlights in the process of connecting up the oceans of the world were the late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century decoding of the Atlantic wind-system and the discovery that the westerlies of the South Atlantic provided a link to the Indian Ocean; the long struggle of Spanish navigators in the sixteenth century to find practical routes back and forth across the Pacific; and the development, especially by Dutch explorers, of routes linking all three oceans in a world-girdling network in the seventeenth century. A globalizing, universally interconnected world became possible. (See Horden and Purcell 2000; Braudel 2002; Fernández-Armesto 1987; 2006: ch. 10.)
Globalization
Cultural exchange got faster and more complicated than ever. In part, this was because people – who in every age have been the most effective agents of cultural change – could travel farther, faster, and more frequently than before. The world’s first travel agent, Thomas Cook & Company, founded in Britain in 1841, began by organizing a local trip for a temperance society in England. By 1900, Cook was selling 3 million travel packages a year. Cultural exchange, however, was not one-way Westernization. What Europeans considered exotic became fashionable in the West. The Japanese-inspired style that Western designers called “Japonisme” was the most striking case. Monet portrayed his wife in a kimono. Puccini borrowed from what little he knew of Japanese, Chinese, and even Native American music and put it in his operas. These exchanges took in wider influences, too. European painters and sculptors began to discover the wonders of what they called primitive art from Africa and the South Seas. Some exchanges bypassed the West altogether. In the 1890s, Chief Mataka of the Yao – deep in the East African interior – made his people don Arab dress, launched Arab-style ships on Lake Nyasa, planted coconut groves and mangoes, and rebuilt his palace in the mixed Arab-African Swahili style that had long dominated the East African coast.13
Not only were cultures becoming more intermingled; so too were economies. Globalization meant the increasing economic interdependence of a world of growing trade. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in line with the worldwide withdrawal of the state from economic regulation, businesses were able to drive an expanding global economy by operating internationally with greater freedom than ever before – and to imperil global prosperity by irresponsible risk-taking, as a series of colossal failures among credit institutions in Europe and the US in 2008–2009 showed.
More trade and increased intercommunication promoted peace, increased prosperity, and stimulated cultural exchange. The benefits of globalization, however, were unevenly distributed. A relatively few vast business corporations, most of them centered in the United States, handled a disproportionate amount of the world’s economic activity. Shunting their assets around the world, those businesses evaded regulation by individual governments. Powerful countries – the United States above all – were able to demand free trade where and when it suited them, but retain protective tariffs or subsidies for businesses they favored. To some extent, globalization perpetuated the old colonial pattern of the world economy – peasants and sweatshop labor in impoverished countries supplied rich ones with cheap goods, twisting the poverty gap into a poverty spiral.
Information traveled globally even more freely than trade. In 1971, the world’s first microprocessor appeared, enabling the transmission of billions of units of information along a fiber-optic cable every second. Radio transmission made virtually every item of information from every part of the world universally accessible. By the end of the century, the world had over 2.5 billion telephones and over 500 million computers. The way people handled information changed. Miniaturization redefined individualism, enabling the like-minded from all over the world to form cyberspace communities. The trend was unstoppable. China, for instance, tried to control internet access, especially after demonstrators coordinated their activities by computer in what almost turned into a revolution in 1989. But China nonetheless had 30 million internet users by 2000. Worldwide censorship became difficult – for a while. But in the early twenty-first century, major servers began to impose filters, at first to black out pornography. Of course, the success of American culture as a global model has depended on the multiplication of the means of cultural transmission, with increasing pace, in recent times: efficient locomotion, broadcasting, cinema, and, in the late twentieth century, information microtechnology have made cultural transmission easy, and instantly communicable across the globe. (See chapters by Bright and Geyer, and by Northrop, this volume.)
The internet promoted globalization in the strongest sense of the world: the global spread of uniform culture. In reality, in a plural world, this was not a threat to cultural diversity, though people often perceived it as such. If there ever were to be a global culture, it would probably not replace diversity, but would rather supplement it.
Notes
1 Goudsblom et al. (1996) is important for early long-range exchanges, as are Goudsblom (2004) and Erlichman (2010).
2 On ochre see Wreschner (1976; 1980; 1981). On fire, see Goudsblom (1992) and Wrangham (2009).
3 Jardine (1996); Morena (2009); Impey (1977). On material culture generally see Porter and Brewer 1994); Douglas (1996); Trentmann (2008; 2009; 2010).
4 Smith (2010) focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century transmutations and “culture clashes.”
5 Evans (1998; 2004); Chafe (2009). On Tocqueville see Brogan (2007); Elster (2009). On Bryce, see Seaman (2006). See also Fernández-Armesto (1999).
6 Gerne (1996: 195–205); Fernández-Armesto (2006: 113–116; 1996: 315–323). See Blussé (1986; 2000; 2008). The classics in the field are Needham et al. (1956–) and Lach (1965–1999).
7 For bibliographical data see Fernández-Armesto (2009).
8 On the problems of syncretism in general, see Leopold and Jensen (2004). On religions of blacks see Métraux (1972); Naro et al. (2007); Bastide (2007).
9 Brockey (2008); Massarella (1990; 2008). On Korea, see Kane and Park (2009).
10 “Eighth-century bandits holding up merchants on the Silk Road,” ink on paper, Hispanic Society of America, New York; see Fernández-Armesto (2006: 75).
11 Wood (2002) is an excellent guide for students and researchers; Whitfield (2001).
12 For example, Jared Diamond calculated that food production spread much more rapidly from the Philippines to Polynesia and from Southwest Asia toward Europe and North Africa than from Mexico to central and western North America. See Diamond (1999: 177–179, fig. 10.1). He attributed this, in large part, to the north–south orientation of the Americas, versus the east–west orientation of Eurasia and, by geographical extension, North Africa.
13 On Chief Mataka see Helms (1993a). On tourism, see Brendon (1991); Douglas-Hamilton (2005); Hyde (1975).
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© 2012 Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Mr Benjamin Sacks. All other uses of this chapter shall include the following acknowledgment: “Reproduced by permission of Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Mr Benjamin Sacks.” Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.